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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

STOCKHOLM — Europe is at risk of becoming a “museum” if it doesn’t soften strict curbs on artificial intelligence technologies and deregulate, Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said Thursday.

“I think we really need to step up in Europe … the American economy, Chinese economy have been growing far faster compared to the European economies over the last 20 years,” the premier told attendees of the Techarena event in Stockholm.

“If we don’t change that, Europe will actually become some kind of a museum compared to other parts of the world,” he added.

Kristersson’s voice joins a chorus of European leaders who spoke at the Paris AI Action Summit last week, stressing the need for the region become a more competitive player in the global AI race.

French President Emmanuel Macron announced a 109-billion-euro ($113.7 billion) investment in AI, which includes commitments from both foreign investors like the United Arab Emirates and U.S. American and Canadian investment funds, as well as domestic firms like Iliad, Orange and Thales.

Macron at the time compared the scale of the investment commitment to the $500 billion Stargate private AI investment venture announced by President Donald Trump last month.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also said that the EU would mobilize a total of 200 billion euros ($208.6 billion) for AI investments in Europe.

Against this backdrop, U.S. Vice President JD Vance took aim at Europe, arguing officials in the continent have become too heavily focused on regulating AI instead of embracing its growth potential.

Touting America as “the leader” in the technology, Vance said that the U.S. wants its European allies to foster a more favorable attitude to the technology than it has done to date.

“To create that kind of trust, we need international regulatory regimes that fosters the creation of AI technology rather than strangles it, and we need our European friends in particular to look to this new frontier with optimism rather than trepidation,” Vance told attendees at the Paris summit.

Tech executives have previously criticized the EU for taking too strict a regulatory approach to AI. The bloc’s landmark AI Act, which became enforceable this year, is the first comprehensive set of rules aimed at safeguarding against risks posed AI.

“To be able to compete in the new geopolitical context, Europe needs to become a place where business and innovation can thrive,” Kristersson said Thursday. “That means less regulation. That means more access to capital and talent.”

He added, “As it stands now, we’ve got companies having troubles using the latest technology due to uncertainties with the European legislation, companies founded in Europe relocating to the U.S. due to the lack of access to capital. That is simply not good enough.”