Igeekphone news on April 3, according to The Information, ChatGPT, a star product in the field of artificial intelligence, has passed a heavy news, and the number of paying users has successfully exceeded the 20 million mark.
Compared to 15.5 million at the end of last year, this is an increase of nearly 30% in just a few months, which intuitively shows the high level of user recognition and strong demand for ChatGPT services. The reason why users are willing to pay for this is that ChatGPT is extremely powerful, writing code, creating articles, providing health advice, making financial planning and other tasks for it to easily perform, which is a useful “digital assistant” for users’ work and life.
From the perspective of revenue data, ChatGPT’s profitability can not be underestimated. Based on subscription estimates, it is currently bringing in at least $415 million a month and generating $5 billion in annualized revenue. Compared with the monthly revenue of 333 million and the annualized revenue of 4 billion at the end of last year, the growth rate is nearly 30%.
And ChatGPT’s actual income may be even greater. In addition to the basic $20 per month ChatGPT Plus subscription plan, many enterprise users will choose Pro plans priced as high as $200 per month to inject more momentum into revenue growth.
It is worth noting that OpenAI’s revenue mix does not rely solely on ChatGPT’s subscription revenue. The large number of developers and platforms that invoke the OpenAI model through apis is also an important source of revenue.
Previously, OpenAI has estimated that the API business is expected to bring about $2 billion in revenue this year, which will undoubtedly further increase its revenue scale. If OpenAI can maintain its current growth rate, the full year 2025 revenue hit of $12.7 billion is not out of reach, which would be significantly higher than the $4 billion in 2024.
However, in the seemingly good development trend, there are also hidden worries. While ChatGPT’s user base continues to expand, with total users growing even faster than revenue, payment rates are declining.
OpenAI revealed on Monday that it now has 500 million weekly active users, up 43 percent from 350 million at the end of last year. But due to the rapid growth in the number of free users, the proportion of paying users has fallen from 5% three months ago to 4% today. This change may mean that while expanding the user base, how to enhance the willingness of users to pay and optimize the payment transformation path has become an important issue to be solved by OpenAI.
In addition, OpenAI announced on Monday that it is preparing to raise $40 billion at a pre-investment valuation of $260 billion. At present, OpenAI is still losing money because it needs to invest huge amounts of money to buy computing power to keep the model running and serve the huge number of free users.
Back in October, OpenAI predicted that it would take at least five years for the company to become truly profitable, meaning that it would not be able to turn a profit until 2029. Under the dual pressure of continuous investment and profit expectations, this financing plan will have a far-reaching impact on OpenAI’s subsequent technology research and development, business expansion and operational strategy adjustment, and has also attracted attention from inside and outside the industry.