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> Even if you think that OpenAI’s growth is impressive — it went from 700 million to 800 million weekly active users in the last two months — that is not the ki

> Even if you think that OpenAI’s growth is impressive — it went from 700 million to 800 million weekly active users in the last two months — that is not the kind of growth that says “build capacity assuming that literally every single human being on Earth uses this all the time.” I’d argue the other way around: 100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time, and it’s just a matter of enabling them to. Beware the sigmoidal curve, though. Growth is exponential till it’s not.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
baobabKoodaa 1y ago
OpenAI's bottleneck first shifted from GPUs to energy. Next it will shift from energy to meatbags. I'm sure they will figure out some way to produce more of us to keep the growthrate going.
- scarmig 1y ago
  Eventually, we can replace human consumers with LLM agent consumers, and things can scale indefinitely.
  - sellmesoap 1y ago
    You too can qualify as an "ugly bag of mostly water" just give us your CC number!
    - sysguest 1y ago
      hmm I bag to differ
- stock_toaster 1y ago
  Not just meatbags, but meatbags with _money_.
slg 1y ago
>100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time In what way does it suggest that? What level of growth is evidence that a product is universally useful?
- alemanek 1y ago
  About 10% of the total world population is using it on a weekly basis. Take out those too old or young or illiterate technically or otherwise. Now subtract out the people without reliable internet and computer/phone. That 10% gets a whole lot bigger. That seems like pretty strong evidence that it is generally, if not universally, useful to everyone given the opportunity.
  - bdbdkdksk 1y ago
    My work is apparently paying for seats in multiple AI tools for everybody. There's a corporate mandate that you "have to use AI for your job". People seem to mostly be using it to for (a) slide decks with cringe images (b) making their PRs look more impressive by generating a bunch of ineffective boilerplate unit tests.
  - emp17344 1y ago
    Only if you believe popularity is the same as usefulness.
    - sysguest 1y ago
      idk even that "usefulness" won't help on the core question: "does the numbers add up?" this article is about NUMBERS regarding return-on-investment / etc "useful" is so vague so it's too 'useless' to the discussion here... I'm not sure why everyone here is parrotting that like gpt hallucination
  - kamranjon 1y ago
    It’s interesting with the whole quote: “OpenAI has 800 million weekly active users, and putting aside the fact that OpenAI’s own research (see page 10, footnote 20) says it double-counts users who are logged out if they’re use different devices” The number may not actually be too accurate - but I imagine it’s also paired with what another commentator has said - OpenAI is basically giving their product to companies and the companies are making the employees log in and use it in some way - it’s not natural growth in any sense of the word.
bee_rider 1y ago
I finally used it for a couple little things, but mostly as a fuzzier replacement for search, where it does do pretty well. Of course nowadays classic search is in shambolic so it is kind like a mediocre prime-aged boxer fighting an 70 year old champion or something. Anyway, I bet it will be really useful for cool stuff if it can ever run on my laptop!
- sysguest 1y ago
  idk "it will be really useful" is a bit too fuzzy and vague -- how do I infer about numbers related to return-in-investment? of course, it's better than "this is so crap no one would buy it" -- but for investors, they want to know: "if I put X dollars now, would I get 10*X dollars or 1/10 X dollars?" it's weird that all these comments on "usefulness" doesn't even attempt to explain whether the numbers add up ok or not
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    I don’t care about investors making their money back. ChatGPT did a good enough proof of concept. They can go out of business now, that would be fine. Now, Mistral or DeepSeek or somebody can put out open weights models. The existing frameworks are good enough to act as very nice autocompletes, coding buddies, or writing style nitpickers. Or probably they could make more interesting video game NPCs.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > nowadays classic search is in shambolic Not sure how much one should expect or deserve switching from a free search engine to a free chatbot. If you care about search, use Kagi [1]. [1] https://kagi.com https://kagi.com
mattskr 1y ago
Reality check. UNICEF and the WHO say there are 2 billion people without access to clean drinking water. They have slightly more pressuring issues than trying to log into chatgpt. Only slightly. The blockchain/bitcoin bros tried the same marketing spin. "Bitcoin will end poverty once we get it into everyone's hands." When that started slipping, NFTs will save us all. Yeah. Sure. Been there. Done that. Just needs "more investment"... and then more... then more... all because of self reported "growth".
- adventured 1y ago
  Nearly six billion people are using mobile phones, most of those are smartphones now. There's no reason to think extending that small cost utility device to the next billion adults isn't a good idea (so long as the cost isn't coming from their pocket, ie it should be subsidized). These are not at all mutually exclusive goals. The latest LLMs are extraordinarily useful life agents as is. Most people would benefit from using them. It'd be like pretending it's either water or education (pick one). The answer is both and you don't have to pick one or the other in reality at all. The entities trying to solve each aspect are typically different organization anyway.
  - sysguest 1y ago
    "Most people would benefit from using them" hmm maybe that "would benefit" is a bit too vague?
  - mattskr 1y ago
    Spare me the rehash of marketing hype rhetoric. It's either a white collar tool to avoid doing boring work or great to identify targets on a battlefield. That's it and both are still questionable. This techno-fetishism of "New technology good, ugga-ooga-booga." 99% of the blind evangelists just spew that same slop just because of fomo of making a few extra shekels by proving "I'm a true believer, and so should you by buying my AI course." Someone who doesn't have access to clean water and stable food will not benefit from this, nor will powers at be that "make it available" will actually improve their lives. It's already apparent, the tech nerds of the late 90s and early 2000s were NOT the good guys. Being good at computers does not make you a good person. The business model for AI makes zero sense when you have real world experience. Without massive, complete social and economic absolute changes, it won't work out. And for those championing that change, what makes you think you'll be the special comrade brought up the ranks to benefit as the truest of believers? Sorry, but this shit is really starting to rub me the wrong way, especially with the massive bubble investment that's growing around all of it. This wont be good. The housing collapsed sucked. The same pattern is emerging and I'm getting a bad, bad feeling this will make the housing collapse look like nothing due to long term ramifications.
throwmeaway222 1y ago
I don't really think people understand there are all sorts of non-chatgpt users that pay OpenAI thousands of dollars PER DAY - (>100k customers like this). They're not going to publish the data, but agentic flows make ChatGPT look like a cereal box.
- bdbdkdksk 1y ago
  Individuals who personally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year running agents? I would love to see one example.
  - throwmeaway222 1y ago
    orgs
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    I have 3 separate accounts on max plans. One of my co-workers has 8. yesterday
teaearlgraycold 1y ago
I find myself using it less over time. It’s still useful but once you’ve been using it for a while you get to know best when not to use it.
lawlessone 1y ago
>100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time I'm not sure i understand the reasoning. lots of people use a thing, so everyone should?
helsinkiandrew 1y ago
> 100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time, and it’s just a matter of enabling them to. For OpenAI I think the problem is that if eventually browsers, operating systems, phones, word processors [some other system people already use and/or pay for] integrate some form of generative AI that is good enough - and an integrated AI can be a lot less capable than the cutting edge to win, what will be the market for a stand alone AI for the general public. There will always be a market for professional products, cutting edge research and coding tools, but I don’t think that makes a trillion dollar company.
emp17344 1y ago
> 100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time, and it’s just a matter of enabling them to. This doesn’t make any sense. Popular is not the same as useful. You’d have a more compelling argument if you included data showing that all this increased LLM usage has had some kind of impact on productivity metrics. Instead, some studies have shown that LLMs are making professionals less productive: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
- cenamus 1y ago
  Exactly, for how many people is Instagram/TikTok and friends actually useful? Sure, they're popular and also used by billions, but would every human on earth benefit from using those services?
  - codyb 1y ago
    I certainly benefited from deleting them!
    - Nevermark 1y ago
      You have inspired me to install them and do that!
- famouswaffles 1y ago
  >This doesn’t make any sense. Popular is not the same as useful. If you are using a service weekly for a long period, you find it useful. >You’d have a more compelling argument if you included data showing that all this increased LLM usage has had some kind of impact on productivity metrics. Why would you need to do that? Why is a vague (in this instance) notion of 'productivity' the only measure of usefulness? ChatGPT (not the API, just the app) processes over 2.6 B messages every single day. Most of these (1.9B) are for Non work purposes. So what 'productivity' would you even be measuring here ? Do you think everything that doesn't have to do with work is useless ? I hope not, because you'd be wrong. If something makes you laugh consistently, it's useful. If it makes you happy, it's useful. 'Productivity' is not even close to being the be-all and end-all of usefulness. [0] https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f142e/economic-research-chatgpt-usage-paper.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f1...
raw_anon_1111 1y ago
The number of users is irrelevant. Revenue is only slightly relevant. The only thing that matters is profit. It would even be a decent thing if they could show marginal profit per user.
- matharmin 1y ago
  That is completely wrong for this stage of a company. The ability to make profit in the future is important. Making profit while growing is not.
  - raw_anon_1111 1y ago
    So exactly how are they going to make a profit if each user causes a marginal lost? Any idiot can sell a dollar’s worth of value for 90 cents.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
mrtksn 1y ago
I just stopped paying for ChatGPT this month, once I found out that they made the projects available to free users too. The free version is just as good and I can shuffle between Grok, Mistral, Deepseek and Gemini when I run out of free quota. So maybe giving away more and more free stuff is good for growth? The product is excellent, ChatGPT is still my favorite but the competition isn't that behind. If fact, I started liking Grok better for most tasks
lm28469 1y ago
> 100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time, and it’s just a matter of enabling them to. Only about 5% see enough value to drop $20 a month... It's like VR and AR, if people get a headset for free they'll use them every now and then, but virtually nobody wants to drop money on these. LLMs have already been commodified
- kbelder 1y ago
  >Only about 5% see enough value to drop $20 a month... Is that a real number? I'm shocked it's that high. I figured paying customers would be well under 1%.
  - crowbahr 1y ago
    It's about a 5% conversion rate but here are some things to remember: 1. They're haemorrhaging money even on paying customers, even at the $200/mo subscription level 2. 5% conversion rates are pretty dismal for what AI is purported to be - IE if you're a free user and it's able to replace everything you do for free why pay for it? If it's not able to, why pay for it? If it's truly amazingly transformative you'd similarly expect huge buy-in from people swarming to use this amazing new tool.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

baobabKoodaa 1y ago

OpenAI's bottleneck first shifted from GPUs to energy. Next it will shift from energy to meatbags. I'm sure they will figure out some way to produce more of us to keep the growthrate going.

scarmig 1y ago
Eventually, we can replace human consumers with LLM agent consumers, and things can scale indefinitely.
- sellmesoap 1y ago
  You too can qualify as an "ugly bag of mostly water" just give us your CC number!
  - sysguest 1y ago
    hmm I bag to differ
stock_toaster 1y ago
Not just meatbags, but meatbags with _money_.

slg 1y ago

>100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time In what way does it suggest that? What level of growth is evidence that a product is universally useful?

alemanek 1y ago
About 10% of the total world population is using it on a weekly basis. Take out those too old or young or illiterate technically or otherwise. Now subtract out the people without reliable internet and computer/phone. That 10% gets a whole lot bigger. That seems like pretty strong evidence that it is generally, if not universally, useful to everyone given the opportunity.
- bdbdkdksk 1y ago
  My work is apparently paying for seats in multiple AI tools for everybody. There's a corporate mandate that you "have to use AI for your job". People seem to mostly be using it to for (a) slide decks with cringe images (b) making their PRs look more impressive by generating a bunch of ineffective boilerplate unit tests.
- emp17344 1y ago
  Only if you believe popularity is the same as usefulness.
  - sysguest 1y ago
    idk even that "usefulness" won't help on the core question: "does the numbers add up?" this article is about NUMBERS regarding return-on-investment / etc "useful" is so vague so it's too 'useless' to the discussion here... I'm not sure why everyone here is parrotting that like gpt hallucination
- kamranjon 1y ago
  It’s interesting with the whole quote: “OpenAI has 800 million weekly active users, and putting aside the fact that OpenAI’s own research (see page 10, footnote 20) says it double-counts users who are logged out if they’re use different devices” The number may not actually be too accurate - but I imagine it’s also paired with what another commentator has said - OpenAI is basically giving their product to companies and the companies are making the employees log in and use it in some way - it’s not natural growth in any sense of the word.

bee_rider 1y ago

I finally used it for a couple little things, but mostly as a fuzzier replacement for search, where it does do pretty well. Of course nowadays classic search is in shambolic so it is kind like a mediocre prime-aged boxer fighting an 70 year old champion or something. Anyway, I bet it will be really useful for cool stuff if it can ever run on my laptop!

sysguest 1y ago
idk "it will be really useful" is a bit too fuzzy and vague -- how do I infer about numbers related to return-in-investment? of course, it's better than "this is so crap no one would buy it" -- but for investors, they want to know: "if I put X dollars now, would I get 10*X dollars or 1/10 X dollars?" it's weird that all these comments on "usefulness" doesn't even attempt to explain whether the numbers add up ok or not
- bee_rider 1y ago
  I don’t care about investors making their money back. ChatGPT did a good enough proof of concept. They can go out of business now, that would be fine. Now, Mistral or DeepSeek or somebody can put out open weights models. The existing frameworks are good enough to act as very nice autocompletes, coding buddies, or writing style nitpickers. Or probably they could make more interesting video game NPCs.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> nowadays classic search is in shambolic Not sure how much one should expect or deserve switching from a free search engine to a free chatbot. If you care about search, use Kagi [1]. [1] https://kagi.com https://kagi.com

mattskr 1y ago

Reality check. UNICEF and the WHO say there are 2 billion people without access to clean drinking water. They have slightly more pressuring issues than trying to log into chatgpt. Only slightly. The blockchain/bitcoin bros tried the same marketing spin. "Bitcoin will end poverty once we get it into everyone's hands." When that started slipping, NFTs will save us all. Yeah. Sure. Been there. Done that. Just needs "more investment"... and then more... then more... all because of self reported "growth".

adventured 1y ago
Nearly six billion people are using mobile phones, most of those are smartphones now. There's no reason to think extending that small cost utility device to the next billion adults isn't a good idea (so long as the cost isn't coming from their pocket, ie it should be subsidized). These are not at all mutually exclusive goals. The latest LLMs are extraordinarily useful life agents as is. Most people would benefit from using them. It'd be like pretending it's either water or education (pick one). The answer is both and you don't have to pick one or the other in reality at all. The entities trying to solve each aspect are typically different organization anyway.
- sysguest 1y ago
  "Most people would benefit from using them" hmm maybe that "would benefit" is a bit too vague?
- mattskr 1y ago
  Spare me the rehash of marketing hype rhetoric. It's either a white collar tool to avoid doing boring work or great to identify targets on a battlefield. That's it and both are still questionable. This techno-fetishism of "New technology good, ugga-ooga-booga." 99% of the blind evangelists just spew that same slop just because of fomo of making a few extra shekels by proving "I'm a true believer, and so should you by buying my AI course." Someone who doesn't have access to clean water and stable food will not benefit from this, nor will powers at be that "make it available" will actually improve their lives. It's already apparent, the tech nerds of the late 90s and early 2000s were NOT the good guys. Being good at computers does not make you a good person. The business model for AI makes zero sense when you have real world experience. Without massive, complete social and economic absolute changes, it won't work out. And for those championing that change, what makes you think you'll be the special comrade brought up the ranks to benefit as the truest of believers? Sorry, but this shit is really starting to rub me the wrong way, especially with the massive bubble investment that's growing around all of it. This wont be good. The housing collapsed sucked. The same pattern is emerging and I'm getting a bad, bad feeling this will make the housing collapse look like nothing due to long term ramifications.

throwmeaway222 1y ago

I don't really think people understand there are all sorts of non-chatgpt users that pay OpenAI thousands of dollars PER DAY - (>100k customers like this). They're not going to publish the data, but agentic flows make ChatGPT look like a cereal box.

bdbdkdksk 1y ago
Individuals who personally spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year running agents? I would love to see one example.
- throwmeaway222 1y ago
  orgs
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- bdangubic 1y ago
  I have 3 separate accounts on max plans. One of my co-workers has 8. yesterday

teaearlgraycold 1y ago

I find myself using it less over time. It’s still useful but once you’ve been using it for a while you get to know best when not to use it.

lawlessone 1y ago

>100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time I'm not sure i understand the reasoning. lots of people use a thing, so everyone should?

helsinkiandrew 1y ago

> 100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time, and it’s just a matter of enabling them to. For OpenAI I think the problem is that if eventually browsers, operating systems, phones, word processors [some other system people already use and/or pay for] integrate some form of generative AI that is good enough - and an integrated AI can be a lot less capable than the cutting edge to win, what will be the market for a stand alone AI for the general public. There will always be a market for professional products, cutting edge research and coding tools, but I don’t think that makes a trillion dollar company.

emp17344 1y ago

> 100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time, and it’s just a matter of enabling them to. This doesn’t make any sense. Popular is not the same as useful. You’d have a more compelling argument if you included data showing that all this increased LLM usage has had some kind of impact on productivity metrics. Instead, some studies have shown that LLMs are making professionals less productive: https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

cenamus 1y ago
Exactly, for how many people is Instagram/TikTok and friends actually useful? Sure, they're popular and also used by billions, but would every human on earth benefit from using those services?
- codyb 1y ago
  I certainly benefited from deleting them!
  - Nevermark 1y ago
    You have inspired me to install them and do that!
famouswaffles 1y ago
>This doesn’t make any sense. Popular is not the same as useful. If you are using a service weekly for a long period, you find it useful. >You’d have a more compelling argument if you included data showing that all this increased LLM usage has had some kind of impact on productivity metrics. Why would you need to do that? Why is a vague (in this instance) notion of 'productivity' the only measure of usefulness? ChatGPT (not the API, just the app) processes over 2.6 B messages every single day. Most of these (1.9B) are for Non work purposes. So what 'productivity' would you even be measuring here ? Do you think everything that doesn't have to do with work is useless ? I hope not, because you'd be wrong. If something makes you laugh consistently, it's useful. If it makes you happy, it's useful. 'Productivity' is not even close to being the be-all and end-all of usefulness. [0] https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f142e/economic-research-chatgpt-usage-paper.pdf https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/a253471f-8260-40c6-a2cc-aa93fe9f1...

raw_anon_1111 1y ago

The number of users is irrelevant. Revenue is only slightly relevant. The only thing that matters is profit. It would even be a decent thing if they could show marginal profit per user.

matharmin 1y ago
That is completely wrong for this stage of a company. The ability to make profit in the future is important. Making profit while growing is not.
- raw_anon_1111 1y ago
  So exactly how are they going to make a profit if each user causes a marginal lost? Any idiot can sell a dollar’s worth of value for 90 cents.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

mrtksn 1y ago

I just stopped paying for ChatGPT this month, once I found out that they made the projects available to free users too. The free version is just as good and I can shuffle between Grok, Mistral, Deepseek and Gemini when I run out of free quota. So maybe giving away more and more free stuff is good for growth? The product is excellent, ChatGPT is still my favorite but the competition isn't that behind. If fact, I started liking Grok better for most tasks

lm28469 1y ago

> 100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time, and it’s just a matter of enabling them to. Only about 5% see enough value to drop $20 a month... It's like VR and AR, if people get a headset for free they'll use them every now and then, but virtually nobody wants to drop money on these. LLMs have already been commodified

kbelder 1y ago
>Only about 5% see enough value to drop $20 a month... Is that a real number? I'm shocked it's that high. I figured paying customers would be well under 1%.
- crowbahr 1y ago
  It's about a 5% conversion rate but here are some things to remember: 1. They're haemorrhaging money even on paying customers, even at the $200/mo subscription level 2. 5% conversion rates are pretty dismal for what AI is purported to be - IE if you're a free user and it's able to replace everything you do for free why pay for it? If it's not able to, why pay for it? If it's truly amazingly transformative you'd similarly expect huge buy-in from people swarming to use this amazing new tool.