OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, has seen its weekly active users reach 400 million over the past six months. According to a report on Thursday by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the milestone was attributed to initial consumer demand and the launch of GPT-4o.
While ChatGPT took nine months to grow from 100 million weekly active users in November 2023 to 200 million in August 2024, the figures have now doubled in the last six months ending mid-February 2025.
Shortly after its November 2022 release as a research preview, ChatGPT set the record as the fastest app ever to reach 100 million monthly active users, hitting the milestone in only two months. A year later, the chatbot achieved another milestone of 100 million weekly active users which grew to 300 million by the end of 2024 and now 400 million as of last month.
According to the report, the growth was driven by customer novelty as users were interested in trying the app but weren’t certain how it would fit into their daily activities.
Also, the launch of GPT-4o early last year with added multimodal capabilities and functionalities pushed ChatGPT’s active users’ figures. Shortly after that model’s launch, the chatbot usage increased from April through May 2024.
“The biggest spikes align with product milestones. The April-May 2024 surge? That was GPT-4o, introducing multimodal capabilities. Users could talk to ChatGPT in real-time, show it images, and get instant, intelligent responses — from snapping a photo of a tricky math problem to having an AI-powered brainstorming session,” the report added.
With the launch of Advanced Voice Mode, usage grew again from July to August 2024 while the o1 model series was attributed to the increased usage from September to October 2024.
ChatGPT’s mobile data tells a more consistent growth story. Since its launch in May 2023, monthly active users have steadily increased by 5 to 15 per cent monthly over the past year, as web users also adopted the app. Out of app’s 400 million weekly active users, 175 million now use the mobile app.
Validating the weekly user boost is OpenAI’s January claim that the company was on the losing end of its $200 ChatGPT Pro monthly plan due to its overuse where subscribers are using it more than the tech firm expected.
Following its launch late last year, ChatGPT Pro grants access to an upgraded version of OpenAI’s o1 “reasoning” AI model, o1 pro mode. It also lifts rate limits on the company’s other tools, including its Sora video generator.
DeepSeek’s impact on ChatGPT
The report likewise examined the impact ChatGPT rivals like DeepSeek have had on the market. The Chinese-owned chatbot surged to No. 2 globally in just 10 days and reached No. 2 on mobile in February, capturing 15 per cent of ChatGPT’s mobile user base.
21 per cent of DeepSeek’s usage in January 2025 came from China, where ChatGPT is banned. Other top countries for DeepSeek include the U.S., with 9 per cent of traffic, and India with 8 per cent. The app has been banned or restricted in some countries, including South Korea, Australia, and Taiwan, as well as on government devices in several U.S. states.
DeepSeek’s launch substantially outpaced most other general assistant LLMs as the company reported 1 million users in 14 days, slower than ChatGPT’s 5-day mark. However, It surged past 10 million users in just 20 days by beating ChatGPT’s 40-day milestone.
According to data from mobile intelligence provider Sensor Tower, DeepSeek users are slightly more engaged than Perplexity and Claude users on mobile. Meanwhile, it still lags behind ChatGPT on this front.
On the fine front, ChatGPT comes in at No. 1 by unique monthly visits on the web and monthly active users on mobile, the report noted.
The report comes amid the launch of GPT-4.5, the latest ChatGPT model trained with more computing power and data than previous editions. OpenAI noted that the model was designed with an increased rate of computing power and data during a “pre-training” phase called unsupervised learning.
Compared to GPT-4.o, which required $2.50 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, OpenAI charges developers $75 for every million input tokens (about 750k words) and $150 for every million output tokens.
Read More: OpenAI launches Chat GPT-4.5, a latest model that understands human intentions.
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