Jaden Schaefer

And then once they raise the money from the investors and they make a big public announcement.

In this particular case, ChatGP has now reached 900 million weekly active users.

They're closing in on a billion, not monthly, but weekly active users.

This is up from 800 million in October.

So they've been able to grow another million since October.

And I think they're, I mean, they're getting really close to this billion dollar mark.

OpenAI also reported that they have 50 million paying subscribers.

They said subscriber momentum accelerated meaningfully to start the year.

This is all in a blog post that they did.

They said that January and February were on track to be the largest months for new subscribers in their history.

They said right now their usage is scaling a lot, but they also need to make a lot of improvements on speed, reliability, safety and consistency.

And these are becoming a lot more important to users, according to them.

So at the same time as all of these kind of financial announcements, this raising money and getting new users, they've also been experimenting with more monetization beyond just the subscriptions.

We know last month they confirmed plans to introduce ads into the free and go tier.

They actually rolled out earlier this month to users.

Some people were criticizing them.

Anthropic put out, you know, Super Bowl ads criticizing them and said, you know, we'll never have ads inside of Anthropic, but they don't have the cheaper tier.

Speaking at the AI Summit in India.

OpenAI's COO Brad Lightcap was basically describing the ad rollout as iterative and kind of emphasized that it's really important for them to get users trust and privacy.

He said that the ads, if they could do them thoughtfully, could actually enhance instead of distract from the user experience.