Latest news with #SoftBank-led
UPI
5 days ago
- Business
- UPI
ChatGPT announces it will pass 700 million weekly users this week
ChatGPT announced Monday that it's set to surpass 700 million weekly active users this week. File Photo by Wu Hao/EPA Aug. 4 (UPI) -- ChatGPT is on track to have 700 million weekly active users this week, the company said. At the end of March, the app had reached 500 million weekly active users, said Nick Turley, OpenAI VP and head of ChatGPT, on X. He said the app has grown fourfold since last year. "Every day, people and teams are learning, creating, and solving harder problems. Big week ahead. Grateful to the team for making ChatGPT more useful and delivering on our mission so everyone can benefit from AI," he posted. The figure includes all ChatGPT AI products, including free, professional, school and others. It also passed 3 billion daily messages, and there are now 5 million paying business users. ChatGPT's popularity increased in March after OpenAI launched an upgraded image generation feature, powered by the GPT-4 model. In April, COO Brad Lightcap said on X that more than 130 million users had created over 700 million images in just a few days after the launch. In a recent report, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower noted that users are using ChatGPT for more than 12 days a month on average, only behind Google and X. The report said that in the first half of 2025, users spent an average of 16 minutes per day on the app. Last week, Open AI announced that the company secured $8.3 billion from a group of top investors. The investment is part of a SoftBank-led $40 billion fundraising round, according to a person familiar with the deal, CNBC reported. The raise was finished ahead of schedule and was five times oversubscribed. Open AI's annual recurring revenue is at $13 billion, and the company is on track to pass $20 billion by the year's end.
CNBC
5 days ago
- Business
- CNBC
OpenAI's ChatGPT to hit 700 million weekly users, up 4x from last year
OpenAI is set to hit 700 million weekly active users for ChatGPT this week, up from 500 million in March, marking a more than fourfold year-over-year surge in growth, the company said Monday. The figure spans all ChatGPT artificial intelligence products — free, Plus Pro, Enterprise, Team, and Edu — and comes as daily user messages surpassed 3 billion, according to the company. The growth rate is also accelerating, compared with 2.5 times year-over-year growth at this time last year. "Every day, people and teams are learning, creating, and solving harder problems," said Nick Turley, VP of product for ChatGPT, in announcing the benchmark. OpenAI now has 5 million paying business users on ChatGPT, up from 3 million in June, as enterprises and educators increasingly integrate AI tools. The milestone follows news last week that OpenAI has secured $8.3 billion from a syndicate of top investors — including Dragoneer Investment Group, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Coatue Management, Altimeter Capital, D1 Capital Partners, Tiger Global Management, Thrive Capital, Blackstone, TPG, T. Rowe Price, and Fidelity. The investment is part of a SoftBank-led $40 billion fundraising round, according to a person familiar with the deal, who asked not to be named in order to discuss financial information. The raise was completed ahead of schedule and was five times oversubscribed. OpenAI's annual recurring revenue is now at $13 billion, up from $10 billion in June, with the company on track to surpass $20 billion by year-end. The fresh capital and usage growth underscore surging investor appetite for AI platforms as competition heats up. Rival Anthropic is also in talks to raise up to $5 billion at a $170 billion valuation, following a $3.5 billion round earlier this year that valued the company at $61.5 billion.
CNBC
22-05-2025
- Business
- CNBC
Sam Altman's $6.4 billion bet on Jony Ive has Zuckerberg-like qualities
Sam Altman's $6.4 billion bet on Jony Ive is a callback to strategy employed by another Silicon Valley tech billionaire: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. OpenAI on Wednesday said it's buying Ive's nascent devices startup io in what is by far the largest acquisition in the artificial intelligence company's 10-year history. It's a decidedly big bet on a secretive hardware company co-founded by Ive, who famously designed Apple's iconic iPhone, iPod and iPad. In a post on X alongside a nine-minute video with Ive, Altman called his new colleague "the greatest designer in the world." The all-stock deal represents a staggering sum, particularly at a time when venture firms have been thirsty for exits due to a yearslong dearth of IPOs and big acquisitions. For OpenAI, the purchase represents just over 2% of its paper worth after the company was valued at $300 billion in a SoftBank-led round in March. As CEO of the most high-valued tech startup in the U.S. and perhaps the most high-profile private company on the planet, Altman's position in the industry is reminiscent of where Zuckerberg sat 13 years ago, as he was preparing to guide Facebook through what at the time was the largest tech initial public offering ever. A month before its debut, Facebook announced the acquisition of a 13-person photo-sharing startup with no revenue called Instagram in an effort to gain traction in the fast-growing mobile apps market. The biggest concern investors had about Facebook was its reliance on the web and that wasn't generating "any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products," according to its IPO prospectus. With the Instagram purchase, Zuckerberg said that Facebook wanted to "learn from Instagram's experience to build similar features into our other products." "This is an important milestone for Facebook because it's the first time we've ever acquired a product and company with so many users," Zuckerberg wrote. "We don't plan on doing many more of these, if any at all." Less than two years later and with a public stock ticker to his company's name, Zuckerberg went even bigger, spending $19 billion on messaging app WhatsApp, which recorded about $15 million in revenue for the first half of 2014, while losing more than $200 million during that period. But WhatsApp had over 450 million monthly users and was growing at a rate that potentially threatened Facebook. "If I'm talking a year from now and they have a billion users, I think this is going to be a home run deal," equity analyst Youssef Squali told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" after the purchase was announced. "That to me is the clear part about this." WhatsApp reached 2 billion monthly active users in 2020, and that number has since reached 3 billion, Zuckerberg said on the company's first-quarter earnings call in April. In the quarter, Meta's Family of Apps segment, which includes Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and other services, generated $41.9 billion in revenue, the vast majority of total company sales. Instagram and WhatsApp have become so integral to the overall business that the Federal Trade Commission claimed in its antitrust suit against Meta that the acquisitions should never have been allowed and have helped the company keep its dominance "to the detriment of competition and users." Meta disputed the FTC's argument and said the market remains competitive. The trial kicked off in April. A much smaller piece of Meta's business comes from another big wager Zuckerberg made in acquiring Oculus VR for $2 billion in 2014, before the virtual reality headset maker had launched a consumer product. Oculus is now Meta Quest, the hardware centerpiece of the company's Reality Labs unit and its pivot to the metaverse. While Instagram and WhatsApp are generally lauded as big wins for Zuckerberg, Oculus remains a question mark. Reality Labs is losing billions of dollars a quarter on minimal revenue. Zuckerberg said on the latest earnings call that "AI glasses have really taken off" and the company sees opportunities to invest in ramping up distribution, indicating that it's still a bet on the future. Similarly, investors will likely have to wait years before evaluating OpenAI's acquisition of io. Other than bringing in Ive, it's not exactly clear what Altman is getting. That's because Ive's so-called creative collective called LoveFrom, which generates revenue from its design work for clients like Airbnb and Ferrari, will stay independent, working on projects with OpenAI and other companies. Altman and Ive wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that io was started a year ago and has "focused on developing products that inspire, power and enable." In joining OpenAI, io will "work more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco," the post said. Zuckerberg has defied financial logic and skeptics in riding acquisitions to a $1.6 trillion market cap for Meta, a fifteen-fold increase over Facebook's IPO price. Altman has already defied tradition, taking what was a nonprofit AI lab a decade ago and turning it into a $300 billion private market behemoth. He now has the iPhone designer on his side to try and figure out what comes next. "Excited to try to create a new generation of AI-powered computers," Altman wrote on X.
