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Despite dealing with its new Chinese-made competitor, DeepSeek, ChatGPT creator OpenAI has announced that its weekly user count has surpassed 400 million.
The company told the media that in February, its weekly active users exceeded 400 million and that it now has over 2 million paying business users.
Growth appears to be exponential for the AI giant, only announcing the 300 million weekly user count in December 2024 and 200 million in August of the same year. Similarly, it only reached its 1 million paid user milestone in September 2024.
The company’s success comes despite DeepSeek, the new Chinese-made AI disrupting the market, developing its R1 model that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in many ways.
The Chinese firm’s success has come as a shock to US AI and technology firms, largely related to the way in which the AI was developed.
For context, the administration of former US president Joe Biden introduced a number of bans to restrict the export of advanced chips to China, which are used to train these AI models, in an effort to limit AI training in China and keep the US ahead of the race.
As a result, previous attempts at advanced generative AI models from China, such as the first Chinese LLM from Chinese search engine Baidu, were underwhelming and unable to compete with the US market.
However, DeepSeek said its V3 model was trained using NVIDIA H800 GPUs, an older, less powerful chip that is used by OpenAI.
The H800 is a modified NVIDIA H100, the chip typically used by US AI developers for its superior power. The H800 has a lower chip-to-chip transfer rate, among other changes, and has been modified for export to China, allowing NVIDIA to keep the market without giving China the power to compete.
Not only has DeepSeek managed to train its AI model on the inferior chip, it’s also been able to do it for cheap. The company claims that V3 was trained on 2,788 thousand H800 GPU hours. At a rate of US$2 per GPU hour, the total comes out to only US$5.58 million.
Admittedly, the costs are only for V3’s final training run, but they still represent a “win” over US technology giants.
The Chinese company has begun to change the narrative on how much AI investment is needed for the development of new AI models, a stark contrast to last year when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman asked for US$7 trillion to fund the AI GPU revolution.
Arguably, DeepSeek’s biggest win over OpenAI is the fact that its AI model is open source, allowing companies to develop their own AI models more easily and cheaply.
In fact, DeepSeek’s new model has already caused a major shake-up of the existing market. NVIDIA’s stock price fell almost 18 per cent last month, resulting in a US$600 billion (roughly A$1 trillion) market cap drop, the largest in Wall Street history.
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