ChatGPT maker OpenAI says more than 400 million people a week are now actively using its artificial intelligence tools, a jump from the 300 million it reported this past December.
OpenAI touted the figure this week, also telling media outlets that it’s doubled its number of paid enterprise users to 2 million since September, and that its developer traffic has also doubled in the last six months.
The news may surprise people who expected the rise of China’s DeepSeek AI model to disrupt the growth of more-established companies working on generative AI. DeepSeek made waves last month with high-profile assertions of more-efficient model design and free-to-use tiers.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has become wildly popular as a top tool for generative AI and is used by individuals and businesses for a wide variety of tasks. But it’s one of several Gen AI tools in an increasingly competitive space that includes offerings such as Apple Intelligence, Meta AI, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot (Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI), Anthropic’s Claude and others.
The debut of DeepSeek raised the possibility that there may be other up-and-coming challengers for the AI throne that aren’t as costly and are more efficient than the more-established AI models. But DeepSeek has also had issues with cyberattacks and outages.
