ChatGPT Nears 1B Active Users, Nvidia-Backed Reflection AI Looks to Become Open-Source Champ

**Akash Pasricha** (0:13)
Welcome everyone to The Information's TITV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Wednesday, July 29th. Today on the show, we have a scoop on ChatGPT's latest user data. We're also going to unpack an in-depth profile my colleague wrote on Reflection AI and up-and-coming AI lab. We're going to close out the show with Jeetu Patel, the president of Cisco. The company has joined forces with dozens of others on the OpenSecureAI Alliance. We'll talk about his views on AI safety and open source AI altogether. It's going to be a great show, so let's get right on into it.
The Information has exclusive reporting on ChatGPT's latest user data.
I want to bring on Stephanie Palazzolo, author of Our AI Agenda Newsletter, to walk us through what she found. Stephanie, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here.

**Stephanie Palazzolo** (1:05)
Great to be on.

**Akash Pasricha** (1:06)
How many active users does ChatGPT currently have?

**Stephanie Palazzolo** (1:11)
As my colleague Aaron and I reported last night, ChatGPT is right on the verge of hitting 1 billion weekly active users. Again, this is the number of users that are using the popular chatbot at least once a week.
The reason why it's a little bit hazy is because typically, whenever companies are keeping track of these numbers, they do have to do some last-minute counting for bot accounts and things like that. But it does seem if they haven't hit it already, it's on track to hit that number in the next couple days.

**Akash Pasricha** (1:45)
When were they expecting to hit that initially?

**Stephanie Palazzolo** (1:49)
Obviously, that's the important point here. 1 billion is a super impressive number. That's a huge proportion of the world's population that is logging into ChatGPT and using it at least once a week. But the important thing is that the company originally was hoping to hit this milestone at the end of last year, or by the end of last year.
It does come around seven months after the company was originally hoping to hit that usage number.

**Akash Pasricha** (2:17)
What's been the issue? Do we know?

**Stephanie Palazzolo** (2:20)
I think there's a couple of things that are coming into play here. I think first, as Sam Altman told staff at the end of 2025, at this point, Google was really starting to do well, Gemini was really catching on with developers. Sam told staff, we're going to expect rough vibes.

**Akash Pasricha** (2:41)
Yeah, code red. You broke that story. Code red, things are not looking great for ChatGPT, and then what?

**Stephanie Palazzolo** (2:49)
Exactly. Lots of worries about Google. Then since then, Google maybe hasn't been as much of a threat, although definitely is obviously a very big competitor. People are using its AI tools more than ever through Google Search AI mode. But since then, Anthropic has really caught on.
Its coding tools like Claude Code are doing incredibly well.
Lots of people are using Anthropic's Claude Chatbot and its other AI tools.
I think both of those, just basically rising competition as well as a slowdown that we previously written about that happened after OpenAI's GPT-5 launch last year. These are all contributing factors to why it's been maybe harder than expected for OpenAI to pass out last 100 million or so in users, and why it took them much longer than expected too.

**Akash Pasricha** (3:43)
What about paying users? In nearly a billion in weekly active users, we know that you can log on for free and use it. What proportion of that are people that are paying for the platform right now, and how does that compare to the proportion of paying users for all these other platforms as well?

**Stephanie Palazzolo** (4:00)
It's a little hard to say because obviously a lot of this data is kept very much under wraps by all these startups, but the last figure that we've written about is that ChatGPT. There's more than 50 million people that are paying to use the chat bot. So, you know, relatively like a small proportion of people are paying, which is maybe not great for OpenAI. I'm sure they'd love to increase that proportion. However, it's also important to point out that they have other ways to monetize non-paying users like ads, for instance, which is something that they have been trying to push more into in recent months.
It does seem like, you know, from our reporting that this does seem to be kind of a higher proportion of paid users than some other AI tools, though.

**Akash Pasricha** (4:47)
Yeah. So, I mean, look, ChatGPT is certainly one business vertical that the company has.
We also know that Codex has been gaining steam. And so I wonder if you've heard of the company really shifting its priorities at all in terms of prioritizing growth in other areas where ChatGPT growth might end up... And I don't want to say stalling. I mean, look, it's still growing fast. And look, any platform to have one-eighth of the world's population, I don't know how many people they can expect. But have there been growth in other areas of the business to compensate?