Despite rising competition, OpenAI is experiencing rapid growth. The company’s COO, Brad Lightcap, revealed that weekly active users hit 400 million in February, a 33% jump from 300 million in December.
Lightcap attributes this growth to the natural progression of ChatGPT as it gains wider appeal and utility.
“People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it,” Lightcap explained, adding that users need time to discover relevant applications. “There’s an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable.”
This popularity is benefiting OpenAI’s enterprise business, which has doubled to 2 million paying users since September. Lightcap notes that employees often use ChatGPT personally and then advocate for its adoption within their companies.
“We get a lot of benefits, and a tail wind from the organic consumer adoption where people already have familiarity with the product,” he said. “There’s really healthy growth, on a different curve.”
Developer traffic has also surged, with fivefold growth for the company’s “reasoning” model o3. Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna, and T-Mobile are among OpenAI’s major enterprise clients.
Lightcap likens the adoption of AI to the rise of cloud services. While consumer adoption is faster, enterprise growth is a “process of building up.”
“There’s a buying cycle there, and a learning process that goes into scaling an enterprise business,” Lightcap stated. “AI is going to be like cloud services. It’s going to be something that you can’t run a business that ultimately is not really running on these very powerful models underneath the surface.”