由 jpichiban Thu, 20 Feb 2025 13:00:01 GMT
Brad Lightcap of OpenAI.Courtesy: OpenAIOpenAI appears to be growing quickly despite increasing competition. The San Francisco-based tech company had 400 million weekly active users as of February, up 33% from 300 million in December, the company’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, told CNBC. These numbers have not been previously reported.Lightcap pointed to the “natural progression” of ChatGPT as it becomes more useful and familiar to a broader group of people.”People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it,” Lightcap said in an interview, adding that it takes time for individuals to find use cases that resonate. “There’s an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable.”OpenAI is seeing that spill over to its growing enterprise business. The company now has 2 million paying enterprise users, roughly doubling from September, said Lightcap, pointing out that often employees will use ChatGPT personally and suggest to their companies that they implement the tool. “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 doubled in the past six months, quintupling for the company’s “reasoning” model o3, according to Lightcap. Developers use OpenAI to integrate the technology into their own applications. OpenAI counts Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna and T-Mobile among some of its largest enterprise customers.Lightcap likened this usage to cloud services, which Amazon Web Services pioneered two decades ago. While the consumer business may grow faster since people can adopt it at will, enterprise is in the “process of building up,” he said. “There’s a buying cycle there, and a learning process that goes into scaling an enterprise business,” Lightcap said. “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.”The DeepSeek effectOpenAI’s growth comes amid new competition from Chinese competitor DeepSeek, which roiled tech markets in January as investors feared it would hamper future profitability of U.S. artificial intelligence companies and their dominance. Megacap tech companies were hit especially hard. Nvidia lost 17% on the Monday DeepSeek made waves, wiping off almost $600 billion in market value.Later that week, OpenAI accused DeepSeek of improperly harvesting its models in a technique known as distillation. Lightcap said the new competition hasn’t changed the way OpenAI thinks about open source, their product road map or mega-spending plans.”DeepSeek is a testament to how much AI is like entered the public consciousness in the mainstream — it would have been unfathomable two years ago,” he said. “It’s a moment that shows how powerful these models are and how much people really care.”Besides DeepSeek’s emergence, OpenAI has also been dealing with a tense time on the legal front. Billionaire Elon Musk, a company co-founder, has sued OpenAI for breach of contract as it attempts to convert into a for-profit. Microsoft has poured billions into the company while SoftBank is close to finalizing a $40 billion investment that could value the company at close to $300 billion, according to sources familiar with the deal.Musk and a group of investors bid to buy the nonprofit’s assets for $97.4 billion earlier this month. In a letter to Musk’s attorney, OpenAI’s lawyer said the company’s board determined that Musk’s “much-publicized ‘bid’ is in fact not a bid at all.” OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor said in a statement that the company “is not for sale.””The numbers tell the story,” Lightcap said. “We try to be very transparent about where we stand on all of this. (Musk) is a competitor. He’s competing. It’s an unorthodox way of co 不要错过CNBC PRO的这些深度分析：富国银行称，今年标普500指数不太可能再涨20%。贝莱德的里克·里德认为债券市场这一角落过于便宜，不容忽视。图表分析师指出，停滞的股市“时钟正在滴答作响”，要么突破，要么崩溃。分析师猜测，巴菲特抛售可能是近期美国银行疲软的原因。摩根大通经理表示，其390亿美元的ETF可以在2025年从波动中获利——且收益率达7%。观看：红点创投的Logan Bartlett表示，DeepSeek正引发对OpenAI和Anthropic的重新评估。立即观看视频5:0405:04，红点创投的Logan Bartlett在《街声》节目中谈DeepSeek对OpenAI和Anthropic的影响。
原文链接：https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/20/openai-tops-400-million-users-despite-deepseeks-emergence.html