According to CNBC, on Monday this week, the artificial intelligence giant OpenAI announced that the weekly active users of ChatGPT, a standard chat robot under the flag, would go over 700 million times this week, an increase of over 400 per cent over the same period, covering all ChatGPT product lines, including free, Plus Pro, Enterprise, Team and Education.
According to data published by OpenAI, the number of ChatGPT-day users has exceeded 3 billion. The number of users in fee-paying enterprises reached 5 million (3 million in June), reflecting the accelerated integration of AI tools by enterprises and educational institutions. However, despite the rapid growth of users, ChatGPT still has a gap in the size of users compared to Google ‘ s AI products.
Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai of Google parent company Alphabet revealed at the Corporate Press Conference that GoogleAI Overview (AI Overviews) currently has about 2 billion active users in over 200 countries around the world and Google Gemini chat robots have more than 450 million active users.
The milestone growth of OpenAI users follows its recently completed large-scale financing. Last week, OpenAI announced $8.3 billion from top investment agency consortiums, including Dragoneer Investments Group, Andressen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Coatue Management and Altimeter Capital.
According to sources, this round of financing is part of a $40 billion plan for soft money. The round was completed earlier and oversubscribed five times. OpenAI ‘ s current annual recurrent income amounts to $13 billion ($10 billion in June) and the company is expected to reach $20 billion by the end of the year.
Even with a $300 billion valuation and a $20 billion annual income scale, OpenAI still needs huge capital to support its global expansion plans, especially in infrastructure. OpenAI ‘ s joint venture with soft silver, Oracle and UAE technology holding company MGX is planning to invest up to $500 billion in construction of AI infrastructure over the next four years.
OpenAI and Oracle have signed agreements for many years, with a rent of up to $3 billion, to lease 4.5 gigawatt (GW) United States data centre capacity. A five-year $11.9 billion agreement was also concluded with CoreWeave. The Interstellar Gate programme has recently been extended to Europe through the establishment of a data centre in Norway. In addition, OpenAI is working with Emirates Science and Technology Group G42 to build a large data centre in Abu Dhabi.
However, Openai’s competitors are in a similar situation. According to Connect, Anthropic CEOio Amodei changed his position not to accept Middle East funds. He wrote that without the use of the Gulf Sovereign Wealth Fund, “it would be extremely difficult to keep at the forefront of AI”. This marked the abandonment by Anthropic of its position of rejecting Saudi funds last year. And, following the completion of $3.5 billion in financing (valued at $61.5 billion) earlier this year, Anthropic is negotiating new funding of up to $5 billion from the $170 billion valuation.
The skyrocketing number of ChatGPT users, the rapid adoption of commercial clients, the record scale of financing and unprecedented infrastructure inputs collectively depict the accelerated lead by OpenAI in the AI competition. In the future, global AI will be more competitive and capital-intensive, and it will become more difficult for OpenAI to continuously translate its user size and capital advantages into technological leadership and business success.
