The Information: ChatGPT’s paid users exceed 20 million, revenue surges 30%

Recently, according to The Information, ChatGPT, a star product in the field of artificial intelligence, has once again released important news that the number of its paying users has successfully exceeded 20 million.

Compared with 15.5 million at the end of last year, it has increased by nearly 30% in just a few months. This data directly shows the high recognition and strong demand of users for ChatGPT services. The reason why users are willing to pay for it is that ChatGPT is extremely powerful. It can easily handle tasks such as writing code, creating articles, providing health advice, and making financial plans. It can be called a powerful "digital assistant" for users' work and life.

Judging from the revenue data, ChatGPT's profitability is also not to be underestimated. According to the subscription situation, it currently earns at least $415 million per month, with an annualized revenue of up to $5 billion. Compared with the monthly revenue of 333 million and annualized revenue of 4 billion at the end of last year, the growth rate is nearly 30%.

Moreover, ChatGPT's actual revenue may be even more impressive. In addition to the basic $20 per month ChatGPT Plus subscription package, many enterprise-level users will also choose the Pro package priced at up to $200 per month, injecting more momentum into revenue growth.

It is worth noting that OpenAI's revenue structure does not rely solely on ChatGPT's subscription revenue. A large number of developers and platforms that call OpenAI models through APIs are also important sources of income.

OpenAI previously estimated that its API business is expected to generate about $2 billion in revenue this year, which will undoubtedly further increase its revenue scale. If OpenAI can maintain its current growth rate, then it is not far-fetched to hit $12.7 billion in full-year revenue in 2025, which will significantly exceed the $4 billion in 2024.

However, despite the seemingly positive development trend, there are also concerns. Although ChatGPT's user base continues to expand, with the total number of users growing even faster than its revenue, its payment rate has shown a downward trend.

OpenAI revealed on Monday that its current weekly active users have reached 500 million, a 43% increase from 350 million at the end of last year. However, due to the rapid growth in the number of free users, the proportion of paying users has dropped from 5% three months ago to the current 4%. This change may mean that while expanding the user base, how to increase users' willingness to pay and optimize the payment conversion path has become an important issue that OpenAI needs to solve urgently.

In addition, OpenAI announced on Monday that it will prepare to raise $40 billion at a pre-investment valuation of $260 billion. Currently, OpenAI is still in a loss-making state because it needs to invest huge amounts of money to purchase computing power to maintain model operation and serve a large number of free users.

As early as October last year, OpenAI had predicted that it would take at least five years for the company to achieve true profitability, that is, it would not be until 2029 that it was expected to turn losses into profits. Under the dual pressure of continued 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 adjustments, and has also attracted much attention from both inside and outside the industry.