OpenAI's flagship AI chatbot ChatGPT continues its remarkable growth trajectory, reaching 800 million weekly active users in May 2025, doubling from 400 million in February, according to comments made by CEO Sam Altman at TED 2025.
The rapid user expansion follows the release of several advanced models and features. GPT-4o, launched in May 2024, introduced seamless multimodal capabilities that allow users to interact with the system through text, images, and audio in real-time. This omni-modal approach has significantly enhanced the platform's accessibility and utility across various applications.
OpenAI's financial outlook appears equally impressive, with the company projecting revenue to triple to $12.7 billion in 2025, up from approximately $3.7 billion in 2024. This growth is primarily driven by its expanding enterprise business, which now includes 2 million paying corporate customers, and its premium subscription services like ChatGPT Plus, which has attracted over 10 million subscribers despite its $20 monthly fee.
However, OpenAI faces mounting pressure from Chinese competitors, particularly DeepSeek, whose models have demonstrated comparable or superior performance at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek's V3 model, released in December 2024, matches GPT-4o across multiple benchmarks while charging significantly less—$0.14 per million input tokens compared to GPT-4o's $2.50. DeepSeek's R1 model, launched in January 2025, even surpassed OpenAI's o1 model on several key benchmarks.
The emergence of these cost-effective, high-performing Chinese models represents a potential shift in the global AI landscape. Despite U.S. export controls on advanced chips to China, companies like DeepSeek have innovated around these constraints, developing more efficient architectures like Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) that activate only relevant parts of the model for specific tasks.
As competition intensifies, OpenAI continues to invest heavily in infrastructure, including Project Stargate, a $300 billion joint venture with SoftBank and Oracle aimed at building massive AI computing capacity in the U.S. The company is also reportedly finalizing a $40 billion funding round that would value it at approximately $300 billion, signaling investors' continued confidence despite the increasingly competitive environment.