The number of weekly users of ChatGPT reached more than 250 million people

No wonder investors were scrambling to invest in OpenAI. Alongside the announcement that it had raised $6.6 billion in funding, the company revealed that “every week, more than 250 million people around the world use the ChatGPT service to enhance their work, creativity and learning.” That’s a significant increase from late August, when OpenAI said the chatbot had 200 million weekly users.

Apparently, the ChatGPT service has managed to attract around 50 million more users in just 2 months. As of June, 350 million people used the ChatGPT service monthly, according to internal documents obtained by The New York Times. However, it is not clear how many of these 350 million people use the paid subscription and how many use the free subscription of this service.

It is also not clear why the number of users has increased so dramatically in just a few months. However, the new academic year has started and students may use ChatGPT service for academic and research purposes. OpenAI can probably expect ChatGPT’s user count to get another big boost in the coming months due to its presence in the Apple Intelligence service.

Now that OpenAI is becoming a for-profit company, it’s making a nice profit in the process. The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI has raised $6.6 billion in new funding from investors, nearly doubling its value to $157 billion. The new funding also makes it the largest venture capital deal in history.

But this is not the only success of OpenAI in recent months; Investors jumped in after the artificial intelligence startup announced it was changing from a nonprofit charity to a for-profit, product-focused company. According to Axios, investors have the right to withdraw their funding if OpenAI fails to turn a profit.

Big investors who invested in OpenAI

Venture capital firm Thrive Capital, founded by the son of a real estate investor, led a new round of funding of $1.25 billion. Other investors include SoftBank, Nvidia, Fidelity Management and OpenAI’s previous largest investor, Microsoft.

One name that was notably absent from the list of investors is Apple. The tech giant was in talks with OpenAI for a financial deal, but apparently didn’t reach an agreement.