Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap told CNBC in an interview Thursday (Feb. 20) that the startup’s monthly active user figure climbed 33% from the 300 million it logged in December.
The uptick is due to the “natural progression” of OpenAI’s ChatGPT as artificial intelligence becomes more useful and familiar to a wider range of users, he said, per the report.
“People hear about it through word of mouth,” he said in the report. “They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it.”
Meanwhile, the company’s enterprise business now has 2 million paying users, around double the number it had in September, according to the report. Lightcap said employees will often use ChatGPT personally before recommending it to their companies.
“We get a lot of benefits and a tailwind from the organic consumer adoption where people already have familiarity with the product,” he said, per the report. “There’s really healthy growth on a different curve.”
Also doubling in the last six months is developer traffic, Lightcap said in the report, adding that OpenAI’s “reasoning” model o3 saw five-fold growth among developers.
OpenAI’s growth is happening as it faces new competition from DeepSeek, the Chinese AI company with an open-source AI model whose emergence last month rocked the tech world with claims that its model could perform as well as OpenAI’s at a fraction of the cost.
“DeepSeek challenges the narrative that innovation must come at an unsustainable cost,” Gokul Naidu, a consultant for SAP, told PYMNTS in January. “For businesses, this means AI could soon be accessible to small and medium enterprises, not just tech giants with deep pockets.”
Some tech world figures have disputed DeepSeek’s cost claims, and OpenAI has accused the company of improperly harvesting its models.
Lightcap told CNBC the new competition hasn’t changed the way OpenAI thinks about open source or its plans for spending or launching products.
“DeepSeek is a testament to how much AI [has] entered the public consciousness in the mainstream,” he said, per the report. “It would have been unfathomable two years ago. It’s a moment that shows how powerful these models are and how much people really care.”
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