Brad Lightcap from Openai.
Courtesy: Openai
Openai appears to be growing rapidly despite increasing competition.
The San Francisco-based tech company had 400 million active users per week as of February, up 33% from 300 million in December, according to Brad, the company’s chief operating officer. Lightcap told CNBC. These numbers have not been reported previously.
LightCap pointed to the “natural progression” of ChatGpt, making it more useful and familiar to the wider group.
“People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the usefulness of it. They see the friends who use it,” Lightcap said in an interview, finding use cases where individuals resonate with each other. He added that it will take time. “It has the overall effect of people who really want these tools and we think these tools are really valuable.”
Openai sees its leak in its growing enterprise business. The company currently has 2 million paid enterprise users, and has been about twice as many as September, LightCap suggests that employees personally use ChatGpt and implement the tool. It points out that there are many.
“We’ve got a lot of benefits and there’s a tail from adoption of organic consumers where people are already familiar with the product,” he said. “There’s really healthy growth on different curves.”
According to LightCap, developer traffic has also doubled over the past six months, Quintupling the company’s “inference” model O3. Developers use OpenAI to integrate technology into their own applications. Openai Count Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna and T-Mobile Among its biggest corporate customers.
LightCap compared this usage to a cloud service Amazon Web services were pioneered 20 years ago. The consumer business may grow faster because people can freely adopt it, but enterprises are in the “building process,” he said.
“There’s a buying cycle there and the learning process that involves scaling an enterprise business,” LightCap said. “AI will be like a cloud service. It will ultimately be something that cannot run a business that is not actually running under these very powerful models underneath the surface.”
deepseek effect
Openai’s growth came amid a new competition with Chinese competitor Deepseek. This shook the tech market in January as investors feared they would hamper the future profitability of American artificial intelligence companies and their advantages. Megacap’s tech companies were particularly hit hard. Nvidia lost 17% on Monday for Deepseek.
Later that week, Openai accused Deepseek of improperly harvesting the model with a technique known as distillation. LightCap said the new competition hasn’t changed the way Openai thinks about open source, product roadmap or huge spending plans.
“Deepseek is proof that AI has entered mainstream public opinion, and that would have been immeasurable two years ago,” he said. “It’s a moment that shows just how powerful these models are and how people really care about them.”
In addition to the emergence of Deepseek, Openai deals with tense times in legal terms.
Billionaire Elon Musk, a co-founder of the company, sued Openai for breach of contract to convert it into commercial purposes. Microsoft has poured billions into the company, but SoftBank is hoping to secure a $40 billion investment that could potentially cherish the company for nearly $300 billion, according to sources familiar with the deal. It’s approaching.
Musk and the investor group ordered the nonprofit’s assets to be purchased for $97.4 billion earlier this month. In a letter to Musk’s attorney, Openai’s attorney said the company’s board of directors determined that Musk’s “many published “bids” are not actually bids at all.” Openai Chairman Bret Taylor said in a statement that the company was “not for sale.”
“The numbers tell a story,” Lightcap said. “We’re trying to be very transparent about where we stand in all of this. (Musk) is a competitor. He’s competing. It’s an unorthodox way of competition.”
