ChatGPT adoption is rising amongst customers. In response to Similarweb, it’s now on the verge of surpassing X within the world rating of the highest 5 most-visited web sites, based mostly on each desktop and cellular site visitors. Furthermore, a report by Appfigures revealed that ChatGPT overtook social media giants Instagram and TikTok to turn into probably the most downloaded app worldwide in March.
OpenAI chief Sam Altman wrote in a publish on X, “OpenAI utilization has gone nuts over the previous month.” “However a surprisingly cool factor is, you possibly can ask the web, ‘Hey, can we please get tons of of 1000’s extra GPUs shortly?’ and the web will ship,” he even joked.
He went on to stress how a lot he enjoys dedicating extra time to analysis and product. “That is probably the most enjoyable I’ve had for the reason that early days when OpenAI was only a quiet little analysis lab,” he quipped.
Addressing a current TED speak, Altman revealed that ChatGPT has at the moment reached 500 million weekly lively customers, together with each free and paid. Compared, WhatsApp reached 500 million month-to-month lively customers in April 2014, greater than 4 years after its launch in November 2009.
He added that the corporate’s imaginative and prescient is to create the absolute best product—one the place individuals work together with extremely smart fashions. He additionally highlighted ChatGPT’s reminiscence characteristic, which permits the mannequin to recollect previous conversations for higher context and continuity. Wanting forward, he believes individuals will finally speak with ChatGPT all through their day.
“You’ll speak to ChatGPT over the course of your life, and sometime—possibly, if you’d like—it’ll be listening to you all through the day, type of observing what you’re doing. It’ll get to know you, and it’ll turn into this extension of your self.”
Nevertheless, solely a tiny share of subscribers are literally paying for the service. ChatGPT Plus, which is priced at $20 per thirty days, makes up many of the paid customers. In response to a current report from The Data, ChatGPT has hit 20 million paid subscribers.
In a dialog with AIM, Deedy Das from Menlo Ventures, who’s invested in Anthropic, a competitor of OpenAI, stated that income isn’t OpenAI’s main focus proper now. “They’re centered on development. Finally, they may optimise the best way to drive subscriptions and create an advert community.”
“If you will get to 2 billion customers and $50 common income per consumer (not removed from what Google and Fb have achieved) that’s a $100 billion income firm or a $1 trillion valuation,” Das added.
ChatGPT’s month-to-month income has climbed to over $415 million, placing it on monitor for $5 billion yearly—up 30% from $333 million per thirty days on the finish of final 12 months.
Das famous that OpenAI isn’t underneath important stress to be worthwhile, not even from buyers. For now, the main focus is on scale, which follows the startup playbook the place revenue comes solely after development.
Whereas ChatGPT’s numbers proceed to surge, its rival Google Gemini recorded 284.1 million complete visits in February this 12 months—considerably decrease than OpenAI’s weekly lively consumer rely. Of Gemini’s visits, 193.3 million got here from desktop, and 90.83 million from cellular.
In 2024, ChatGPT dominated the market with 40 billion visits, a rise of 15.1 billion from the earlier 12 months, capturing 39.56% of all AI site visitors—23 instances greater than Gemini, based on a report from aitools.xyz.
Das defined that OpenAI’s technique has been to win customers. The corporate has managed to maneuver quick and take extra dangers than its rivals. Notably, India represents the second-largest consumer base of ChatGPT. To additional develop its attain within the nation, the corporate is planning to cut back the chatbot’s price by way of a partnership with Reliance Jio.
What’s Cooking at OpenAI?
OpenAI is gearing up for its new releases. Altman introduced that OpenAI is probably going going to launch o3 and o4-mini in a few weeks, adopted by the GPT-5 in a number of months.
“We’re going to have the ability to make GPT-5 a lot better than we initially thought,” Altman stated, including that they discovered it tougher than anticipated to easily combine all the things. The corporate additionally plans to launch an open-source reasoning mannequin.
OpenAI can also be set to launch a brand new AI mannequin, GPT-4.1, together with nano and mini variants, as early as subsequent week, The Verge reported. Furthermore, OpenAI has confirmed in a current changelog that it’ll section out the GPT-4 mannequin, efficient April 30.
Wanting forward, Altman flagged a a lot larger concern than merely upgrading fashions—security. He acknowledged that as future AI fashions turn into extra agentic—taking actions on behalf of customers and navigating techniques autonomously—the protection challenges will turn into considerably extra advanced.
“That is, I believe, probably the most attention-grabbing and consequential security problem we have now but confronted,” he stated, referring to AI fashions that acquire entry to customers’ techniques, private data, and even the flexibility to work together with their gadgets. “When the AI makes a mistake, the stakes are a lot larger.”
Don’t Underestimate Google
On the identical time, Google has additionally upped its sport by providing capabilities much like what ChatGPT gives. The search large not too long ago introduced that Deep Analysis is now accessible to Gemini Superior subscribers, powered by Gemini 2.5 Professional, for $19.99. It has obtained optimistic suggestions from most customers.
As well as, it comes bundled with substantial non-AI advantages, together with 2 TB of Google Drive storage and different Google One perks like household sharing and {hardware} reductions. However, ChatGPT Plus focuses solely on delivering AI capabilities.
Google additionally integrates Gemini capabilities into its Google Workspace choices for companies, the place entry is included in sure higher-tier subscriptions or accessible as optionally available add-ons. This has in flip impacted ChatGPT Professional subscriptions.
“I cancelled ChatGPT Professional as a result of Gemini 2.5 deep analysis is simply 100x higher than OpenAI’s. It’s best to positively strive it! Then Claude’s code capabilities are additionally 10x these of OpenAI’s. So I don’t see some extent in conserving ChatGPT round!” Paras Chopra, founding father of Lossfunk, wrote on X.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Professional in December 2024 at a better value level of $200 per thirty days. This tier unlocks probably the most superior options and highest utilization limits, together with entry to instruments just like the Sora video technology mannequin and experimental options like Operator previews.
Equally, quite a lot of different customers on X praised Google’s Deep Analysis capabilities. “This was really very spectacular. An task in my class is to find out the value and TAM (complete addressable market) of a product that can provide the calorie rely of meals utilizing a brand new type of spectroscopy, with $75 COGS (price of products offered). The brand new Gemini 2.5 Deep Analysis received all of that and far more. It used to take hours,” stated Ethan Mollick, professor at The Wharton Faculty.
“Gemini 2.5 Professional Deep Analysis generated an enormous 46-page report, method longer than 2.0 and corresponding to OpenAI’s DR! That is sensible!” stated Kol Tregaskes, information coordinator at Clarke Telecom, in a publish on X. He added that the mannequin cited 138 hyperlinks and famous that 179 web sites had been being researched at one level in the course of the run.
In the meantime, Gemini 2.5 Professional has proven nice energy in coding, and builders are loving it. On the Aider Polyglot leaderboard, which evaluates LLMs’ capabilities in writing and modifying code, Gemini 2.5 Professional Experimental scored 72.9%. It carried out higher than Claude 3.7 Sonnet (64.9%), OpenAI’s o1 (61.7%), and the o3-mini-high at 60.4%.
“Google has by no means been good at advertising and marketing its merchandise, however boy is it good at know-how. Very bullish on Gemini, the Gemma line of open fashions, and the JAX/Keras/TPU stack,” stated François Chollet, creator of Keras.
“Immediately, two and a half years after the ChatGPT debacle, Google DeepMind is profitable. They’re profitable so laborious proper now that they’re screaming, ‘Please, please, we are able to’t take it anymore, it’s an excessive amount of profitable!’,” stated Alberto Romero, writer of The Algorithmic Bridge, in his e-newsletter.
CEO Sundar Pichai not too long ago informed staff that he believes the corporate’s Gemini AI has outpaced rivals and desires the chatbot constructed on it to achieve 500 million customers by the top of 2025.
Not everyone seems to be satisfied. Das believes Google has robust fashions, however argues the corporate continues to be lagging with regards to product innovation. In his view, Gemini stays behind.
As each corporations chart their subsequent strikes, the actual winners would possibly in the end be the customers.
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