Some have questioned OpenAI’s recent weekly user numbers:[1]
Feb ’23: 100M[2]
Sep ’24: 200M[3] of which 11.5M paid, Enterprise: 1M[4]
Feb ’25: 400M[5] of which 15M paid, 15.5M[6] / Enterprise: 2M
One can see:
Surprisingly, increasingly faster user growth
While OpenAI converted 11.5M out of the first 200M users, they only got 3.5M users out of the most recent 200M to pay for ChatGPT
Where did that growth come from? It’s not from apps: the ChatGPT iOS app only has ~353M downloads total[7] and Apple’s Siri integration only launched in December.[8] Users come from developing countries.[9] For instance, India is now OpenAI’s second largest market, by number of users, which have tripled in the past year.[10]
Many complain about increasingly aggressive message rate limits for free ChatGPT accounts, notionally due to high compute costs. But maybe this is a feature and not a bug: especially in poor countries, people create multiple accounts to get around the message and image generation limits.[11],[12] OpenAI incentivizes this: they no longer ask for phone numbers during sign up.
Many new users might also use ChatGPT via WhatsApp[13] (a collaboration with Meta) perhaps using flip phones. OpenAI no longer asks for an email address during sign up.[14]
You can also use ChatGPT search without signing up at all now.[15]
What counts as a user? True, ChatGPT grew faster than the fastest growing company ever, but social media has a much stronger network effect ‘lock in’ consumers longterm, whereas users will presumably switch AI chatbots much faster if a cheaper product becomes available. Many use ChatGPT merely as a writing assistant.[16] While consumer markets for social media can be winner-take-all, enterprise customers, while having doubled recently, will be less loyal and will switch if competitors offer a cheaper product.[17]
So maybe there’s some very liberal counting of user numbers going on. Valuation goes up. Meanwhile hundreds of OpenAI’s current and ex-employees are cashing out.[18]
Also, competition has caught up and so, Microsoft, which owns half of OpenAI, wants others to invest.[19] Yet, OpenAI CFO just said $11B in revenue is ‘definitely in the realm of possibility’ in 2025 (they’re at ~$4B year-on-year currently) to get $40B from Softbank investment at a ~$300B valuation.[20] More recently this dropped to $30B and they scrambling to find others to co-invest in Stargate.
This is the standard playbook- recent examples include Roblox, which also inflated user numbers,[21] and Coinbase, which used to be lax with their KYC for obvious reasons and had inflated user numbers (it’s also literally a plot point in Succession).
Also cf:
The market expects AI software to create trillions of dollars of value by 2027
AI stocks could crash
[1] The Generative AI Con
[2] ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base—analyst note | Reuters
[3] OpenAI says ChatGPT’s weekly users have grown to 200 million | Reuters
[4] OpenAI hits more than 1 million paid business users | Reuters
[5] OpenAI tops 400 million users despite DeepSeek’s emergence
[15] ChatGPT drops its sign-in requirement for search | The Verge
[16] [2502.09747] The Widespread Adoption of Large Language Model-Assisted Writing Across Society
[17] Satya Nadella – Microsoft’s AGI Plan & Quantum Breakthrough.
[18] Hundreds of OpenAI’s current and ex-employees are about to get a huge payday by cashing out up to $10 million each in a private stock sale | Fortune
[19] Microsoft Outsources OpenAI’s Ambitions to SoftBank
[20] OpenAI CFO talks possibility of going public, says Musk bid isn’t a distraction
[21] Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids – Hindenburg Research
Sep ’24: 200M[3] of which 11.5M paid, Enterprise: 1M[4]
Feb ’25: 400M[5] of which 15M paid, 15.5M[6] / Enterprise: 2M
One can see:
Surprisingly, increasingly faster user growth
While OpenAI converted 11.5M out of the first 200M users, they only got 3.5M users out of the most recent 200M to pay for ChatGPT
This user growth seems neither surprising nor ‘increasingly faster’ to me. Isn’t it just doubling every year?
That said, I agree based on your second bullet point that probably they’ve got some headwinds incoming and will by default have slower growth in the future. I imagine competition is also part of the story here.
taking the dates literally, the first doubling took 19 months and the second doubling took 5 months, which does seem both surprising and increasingly fast.
Is OpenAI gaming user numbers?
Gdoc here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1os0WNmJ-O1eEGeKr543nkemnXbTmYkE2sC-t51c9OE4/edit?tab=t.0
Some have questioned OpenAI’s recent weekly user numbers:[1]
Feb ’23: 100M[2]
Sep ’24: 200M[3] of which 11.5M paid, Enterprise: 1M[4]
Feb ’25: 400M[5] of which 15M paid, 15.5M[6] / Enterprise: 2M
One can see:
Surprisingly, increasingly faster user growth
While OpenAI converted 11.5M out of the first 200M users, they only got 3.5M users out of the most recent 200M to pay for ChatGPT
Where did that growth come from? It’s not from apps: the ChatGPT iOS app only has ~353M downloads total[7] and Apple’s Siri integration only launched in December.[8] Users come from developing countries.[9] For instance, India is now OpenAI’s second largest market, by number of users, which have tripled in the past year.[10]
Many complain about increasingly aggressive message rate limits for free ChatGPT accounts, notionally due to high compute costs. But maybe this is a feature and not a bug: especially in poor countries, people create multiple accounts to get around the message and image generation limits.[11],[12] OpenAI incentivizes this: they no longer ask for phone numbers during sign up.
Many new users might also use ChatGPT via WhatsApp[13] (a collaboration with Meta) perhaps using flip phones. OpenAI no longer asks for an email address during sign up.[14]
You can also use ChatGPT search without signing up at all now.[15]
What counts as a user? True, ChatGPT grew faster than the fastest growing company ever, but social media has a much stronger network effect ‘lock in’ consumers longterm, whereas users will presumably switch AI chatbots much faster if a cheaper product becomes available. Many use ChatGPT merely as a writing assistant.[16] While consumer markets for social media can be winner-take-all, enterprise customers, while having doubled recently, will be less loyal and will switch if competitors offer a cheaper product.[17]
So maybe there’s some very liberal counting of user numbers going on. Valuation goes up. Meanwhile hundreds of OpenAI’s current and ex-employees are cashing out.[18]
Also, competition has caught up and so, Microsoft, which owns half of OpenAI, wants others to invest.[19] Yet, OpenAI CFO just said $11B in revenue is ‘definitely in the realm of possibility’ in 2025 (they’re at ~$4B year-on-year currently) to get $40B from Softbank investment at a ~$300B valuation.[20] More recently this dropped to $30B and they scrambling to find others to co-invest in Stargate.
This is the standard playbook- recent examples include Roblox, which also inflated user numbers,[21] and Coinbase, which used to be lax with their KYC for obvious reasons and had inflated user numbers (it’s also literally a plot point in Succession).
Also cf:
The market expects AI software to create trillions of dollars of value by 2027 AI stocks could crash [1] The Generative AI Con
[2] ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base—analyst note | Reuters
[3] OpenAI says ChatGPT’s weekly users have grown to 200 million | Reuters
[4] OpenAI hits more than 1 million paid business users | Reuters
[5] OpenAI tops 400 million users despite DeepSeek’s emergence
[6] https://archive.ph/wff26
[7] ChatGPT’s mobile users are 85% male, report says | TechCrunch
[8] Apple launches its ChatGPT integration with Siri.
[9] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today 5-y&q=chatgpt&hl=en
[10] India now OpenAI’s second largest market, Altman says | Reuters
[11] Anyone else have multiple accounts so they don’t have to wait to use gpt 4o and also so each one can have a separate memory : r/ChatGPT
[12] https://incogniton.com/blog/how-to-bypass-chatgpt-limitations
[13] ChatGPT is now available on WhatsApp, calls: How to access—Times of India
[14] OpenAI tests phone number-only ChatGPT signups | TechCrunch
[15] ChatGPT drops its sign-in requirement for search | The Verge
[16] [2502.09747] The Widespread Adoption of Large Language Model-Assisted Writing Across Society
[17] Satya Nadella – Microsoft’s AGI Plan & Quantum Breakthrough.
[18] Hundreds of OpenAI’s current and ex-employees are about to get a huge payday by cashing out up to $10 million each in a private stock sale | Fortune
[19] Microsoft Outsources OpenAI’s Ambitions to SoftBank
[20] OpenAI CFO talks possibility of going public, says Musk bid isn’t a distraction
[21] Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids – Hindenburg Research
This user growth seems neither surprising nor ‘increasingly faster’ to me. Isn’t it just doubling every year?
That said, I agree based on your second bullet point that probably they’ve got some headwinds incoming and will by default have slower growth in the future. I imagine competition is also part of the story here.
taking the dates literally, the first doubling took 19 months and the second doubling took 5 months, which does seem both surprising and increasingly fast.
Oh yeah my bad, I didn’t notice that the second date was Sep instead of Feb