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Brad Lightcap of OpenAI.
Courtesy: OpenAI
OpenAI appears to be growing quickly despite increasing competition.
The San Francisco-based tech company had 400 million weekly active users as of February, up 33% from 300 million in December, the company’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, told CNBC. These numbers have not been previously reported.
Lightcap pointed to the “natural progression” of ChatGPT as it becomes more useful and familiar to a broader group of people.
“People hear about it through word of mouth. They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it,” Lightcap said in an interview, adding that it takes time for individuals to find use cases that resonate. “There’s an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable.”
OpenAI is seeing that spill over to its growing enterprise business. The company now has 2 million paying enterprise users, roughly doubling from September, said Lightcap, pointing out that often employees will use ChatGPT personally and suggest to their companies that they implement the tool.
“We get a lot of benefits, and a tail wind from the organic consumer adoption where people already have familiarity with the product,” he said. “There’s really healthy growth, on a different curve.”
Developer traffic has also doubled in the past six months, quintupling for the company’s “reasoning” model o3, according to Lightcap. Developers use OpenAI to integrate the technology into their own applications. OpenAI counts Uber, Morgan Stanley, Moderna and T-Mobile among some of its largest enterprise customers.
Lightcap likened this usage to cloud services, which Amazon Web Services pioneered two decades ago. While the consumer business may grow faster since people can adopt it at will, enterprise is in the “process of building up,” he said.
“There’s a buying cycle there, and a learning process that goes into scaling an enterprise business,” Lightcap said. “AI is going to be like cloud services. It’s going to be something that you can’t run a business that ultimately is not really running on these very powerful models underneath the surface.”
The DeepSeek effect
OpenAI’s growth comes amid new competition from Chinese competitor DeepSeek, which roiled tech markets in January as investors feared it would hamper future profitability of U.S. artificial intelligence companies and their dominance. Megacap tech companies were hit especially hard. Nvidia lost 17% on the Monday DeepSeek made waves, wiping off almost $600 billion in market value.
Later that week, OpenAI accused DeepSeek of improperly harvesting its models in a technique known as distillation. Lightcap said the new competition hasn’t changed the way OpenAI thinks about open source, their product road map or mega-spending plans.
“DeepSeek is a testament to how much AI is like entered the public consciousness in the mainstream — it would have been unfathomable two years ago,” he said. “It’s a moment that shows how powerful these models are and how much people really care.”
Besides DeepSeek’s emergence, OpenAI has also been dealing with a tense time on the legal front.
Billionaire Elon Musk, a company co-founder, has sued OpenAI for breach of contract as it attempts to convert into a for-profit. Microsoft has poured billions into the company while SoftBank is close to finalizing a $40 billion investment that could value the company at close to $300 billion, according to sources familiar with the deal.
Musk and a group of investors bid to buy the nonprofit’s assets for $97.4 billion earlier this month. In a letter to Musk’s attorney, OpenAI’s lawyer said the company’s board determined that Musk’s “much-publicized ‘bid’ is in fact not a bid at all.” OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor said in a statement that the company “is not for sale.”
“The numbers tell the story,” Lightcap said. “We try to be very transparent about where we stand on all of this. (Musk) is a competitor. He’s competing. It’s an unorthodox way of competing.”
Oppo’s new Find N5 folding smartphone on display at a press briefing in London.
Ryan Browne | CNBC
Chinese smartphone firm Oppo has unveiled its new flagship folding phone Thursday, touting a slimmer body and artificial intelligence-focused features in a bid to compete with high-end foldable devices from the likes of Samsung and Huawei.
The company’s Find N5 phone that can fold in half, will retail at a starting price of 2,499 Singapore dollars ($1,867.70).
When it’s folded shut, the Find N5 looks like a normal bar-shaped phone with a 6.62-inch display. The device can then be folded outward to show a larger, 8.12-inch tablet.
Most notably, the phone has an ultra-thin design. When closed, it measures 8.93 millimeters thick, while when opened out in tablet form, the Find N5 has a depth of 4.21 millimeters.
That’s slimmer than Samsung’s Galaxy Fold 6, which the South Korean tech giant released last year.
Inside the device is a razer-thin 5,600 milliampere-hour (mAh) battery that’s no bigger than a credit card. Oppo said the battery incorporates a silicon-carbon material, which enables high battery capacity despite its small size.
Oppo is hoping it can win business from the likes of Samsung and Chinese tech giant Huawei, both major smartphone players seeking to shake the market out of an innovation slowdown with flashy new models that can bend.
AI assistant features
Like many other smartphone makers, Oppo is investing more into artificial intelligence-focused features on the device.
The Oppo Find N5 has a triple-camera setup that includes a telephoto lens that can zoom in up to 30x thanks to assistance from an AI-powered image enhancement feature, dubbed AI Telescope Zoom.
It also comes with a personal AI assistant that can interpret and summarize documents, generate summaries of phone calls and translate video calls and other content displayed on the screen.
Addressing concerns around privacy, Oppo said that some data is processed directly on the device while other information is stored in the cloud. In international markets, Oppo is using Google as its AI and cloud computing technology partner.
An Oppo spokesman told CNBC the company “strictly abides by local laws, regulations and privacy security protection requirements.”
Samsung recently launched additional AI capabilities on its new flagship Galaxy S25 series, including the ability to carry out tasks across multiple apps when prompted and integration of Google’s Gemini AI assistant.
Controlling a Mac with an Android phone
Oppo also talked up a new feature that enables users to connect their phone to a Mac computer. Using an app called O+ Connect, users can link the Find N5 to any Mac desktop machine and instantly transfer photos and other files between devices — so long as they’re connected to the same Wi-Fi network.
Users can also choose to remotely control a Mac from the Find N5. The Mac’s display can shut off and then reappear on the Find N5’s screen. The remote control feature only requires mobile internet or Wi-Fi to sync up a Mac device’s data with the Find N5 in real-time.
The feature uses public macOS application programming interfaces, which enable two different apps to communicate with each other. Oppo said O+ Connect “fully complies with macOS platform and software regulations.”
Ben Wood, chief analyst at market research firm CCS Insight, told CNBC the Find N5 “shows the art of the possible when engineering a product with flexible display technology.”
Wood added that, while Huawei’s triple-screened Mate XT led to some fanfare, “commercially I think the smart money is still on the book-like form factor already offered by Samsung, Honor, Google and now Oppo.”
Samsung teased a trifold smartphone prototype at its January Unpacked event for the launch of the Galaxy S25. It’s not clear yet if the phone is a product Samsung will launch commercially anytime soon.
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