OpenAI, the developer behind ChatGPT, announced a major milestone on Thursday, revealing that its weekly active user count has surpassed 400 million in February—a significant jump from the 300 million recorded in December.
A company spokesperson told Reuters that this remarkable growth underscores the accelerating global adoption of artificial intelligence tools. In addition to the surge in user numbers, OpenAI’s paying business users have more than doubled since September, now exceeding 2 million.
The growth extends beyond its user base. Over the last six months, developer traffic for OpenAI’s reasoning models has doubled, while its o3 model, launched in late January, has experienced a fivefold increase in developer interest. These metrics highlight OpenAI’s robust standing within the AI ecosystem, as it continues to attract developers and businesses eager for advanced AI solutions.
This rapid expansion comes at a time of fierce competition in the AI sector. Recently, China’s DeepSeek launched an AI model claiming to match or even outperform Western rivals at a fraction of the cost. However, DeepSeek has faced challenges such as service outages due to high demand and concerns over how it acquired Nvidia’s H800 chips, despite export bans imposed by Washington.
The competitive landscape has grown even more intense with Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, introducing Grok-3—its latest chatbot iteration designed to rival models from DeepSeek, OpenAI, and Google. Grok-3 is being rolled out immediately to Premium+ subscribers on X (formerly Twitter), while xAI is launching a new subscription tier called SuperGrok for users accessing the chatbot via its mobile app and website. Analysts suggest that Grok-3’s performance on several benchmarks has positioned xAI as a serious contender in the open-source large language model space.
As the race in generative AI heats up, these developments underscore the rapidly evolving nature of the industry and the increasing global demand for cutting-edge AI technologies.
