Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI is seeing soaring demand for its services even as competition in the emerging artificial intelligence chatbot space is heating up. “We’re just trying to keep up with the demand,” Oliver Jay, managing director of international strategy at OpenAI, told audiences at CNBC’s CONVERGE LIVE event in Singapore on Thursday.
It comes in the wake of the launch of rival models in China, including DeepSeek and Alibaba’s (BABA) QwQ-32B, which it says “rivals” cutting-edge reasoning models.
ChatGPT Races to 400M Users
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot launched in 2022, has exceeded 400 million weekly active users, he explained, up from 300 million in December, and doubling since hitting 200 million last August. Adoption rates are way beyond other technology shifts, according to Jay, who said, “We’re seeing AI being adopted everywhere all at once.”
Growth momentum was there from the beginning at OpenAI, which was co-founded by Sam Altman (pictured above) and Elon Musk. ChatGPT was estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January 2023, only two months after launch. According to UBS, this made it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. “In 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app,” UBS analysts wrote at the time.
Meanwhile, its business application ChatGPT Enterprise now counts about 600,000 users —up from just 150,000 in January.
ChatGPT Tops Leaderboard
According to Chatbot Arena, a platform hosted by researchers at University of California, Berkeley, OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-4.5, is still the pick of the bunch. It currently sits top of the Arena’s leaderboard, which ranks best large language models and AI chatbots, alongside X’s Grok 3 Beta, with DeepSeek R1 in sixth place.
While Microsoft has led funding for the San Francisco-based startup, it was reported in February that Japanese tech investor SoftBank (SFTBF) was nearing a $40 billion primary investment in OpenAI at a $260 billion valuation. It’s thought some of the investment will be funnelled to Stargate, the joint venture between SoftBank, OpenAI and Oracle (ORCL).
OpenAI had previously been valued at $157 billion by private investors in October. Generative AI is predicted to be a $1.3 trillion market by 2032, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
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