More than 200 million users use ChatGPT each week, according to new figures released by OpenAI This is double the number of weekly active users reported by the AI Lab last November, after the implementation of features and “secret upgrades” that are now available to non-paying users

OpenAI is facing increasing competition in the AI chatbot space by companies adding new and unique features, making them cheaper, and launching models as good as GPT-4o despite challenges from Meta, Anthropic, Google, and others, ChatGPT still seems to dominate

Figures shared by OpenAI with Tom's Guide also show a significant increase in API and enterprise users, with 92% of Fortune 500 companies using OpenAI products and API usage doubling since July This follows the release of the very inexpensive GPT-4o mini model [However, OpenAI faces challenges from Apple, with Apple Intelligence offering some of the same core functionality for free, Google putting Gemini in all its products, and MetaAI pushing Meta to beat ChatGPT's reach this year There is no room for complacency, as the company is now in the midst of a major expansion of its business

ChatGPT was not the first AI chatbot on the market, but it was one of the first to target a broad audience to gain mainstream attention launched experimentally in November 2022, ChatGPT quickly gained 100 million weekly active users, now it has doubled that number and is growing rapidly

In recent months, OpenAI has launched its native multimodal model GPT-4o, which is accessible for free on ChatGPT In addition, image generation, image analysis, and access to GPT in DALL-E were made free of charge, helping to increase the number of users

There are rumors that Project Strawberry will be launched later this year to bring more human-like reasoning to ChatGPT; after OpenAI and Anthropic agree to validate the model, it may first need to be reviewed by the US government

The models will be made available to the US AI Safety Institute, which will work with its counterpart in the UK to provide feedback on safety improvements before new models are released