Since December, when it had only 300 million users, OpenAI has grown a lot. As of February, it had over 400 million weekly active users, which is a 33 percent rise. This information comes from COO Brad Lightcap, who said that the rise shows that ChatGPT is becoming more useful and well-known among its users.

According to Lightcap, the main reason for the rise in user usage is word of mouth, as more people find useful ways to use the technology. He talked about how much people want and think these kinds of tools are worth, which has led to a strong growth in OpenAI’s business sector. The number of paying enterprise users has now hit 2 million, more than doubling since September. This is mostly because employees have been pushing for companies to use it.

There has also been a big rise in developer involvement. In the past six months, traffic to OpenAI’s platforms has doubled, and its reasoning model, o3, has been used five times as much. Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna, and T-Mobile are some of OpenAI’s most important clients. Lightcap told CNBC that this growth is like the early days of cloud services and that it shows a slow but steady rise in business engagement.

Even with these wins, OpenAI still has problems, especially with its Chinese rival DeepSeek. This has made people worry about how profitable U.S. AI companies will be in the future. After DeepSeek came out, OpenAI said they were using its models in a bad way. Lightcap, on the other hand, said that this competition hasn’t changed OpenAI’s goals or commitment to open-source practices.

OpenAI is also facing legal problems, such as a lawsuit from co-founder Elon Musk, who doesn’t like how the company has changed to a for-profit plan. Microsoft has put a lot of money into OpenAI, but SoftBank is almost done with a deal that could put the company’s value at almost $300 billion. OpenAI’s leaders say the company is not for sale and are still focused on its growth path, even though Musk is taking steps to compete.

Not long ago, Musk and his partners put in a $97.4 billion investment plan that OpenAI turned down. The people who made ChatGPT are keen to keep full control of the business and see any offers to buy it as inappropriate for their current operations.