800 million weekly users and rising: ChatGPT is clearly the world’s go-to AI companion

ChatGPT

OpenAI’s ChatGPT has crossed 800 million weekly active users, CEO Sam Altman revealed during his keynote at Dev Day 2025. The figure marks a steep climb from 700 million in August and 500 million just six months earlier, underscoring the AI assistant’s mainstream adoption across consumers, developers, businesses, and even governments.

“Today, 4 million developers have built with OpenAI,” Altman said. “More than 800 million people use ChatGPT every week, and we process over 6 billion tokens per minute on the API. AI has gone from something people play with to something people build with every day.”

The milestone comes amid OpenAI’s broader infrastructure sprint — the company is racing to secure AI chips and expand data centres globally to keep pace with demand. At Dev Day, OpenAI also unveiled tools that let developers build interactive applications directly inside ChatGPT, part of a push to make the assistant more adaptive and personalised.

The rise and rise of OpenAI

Since its November 2022 launch, ChatGPT has grown into the defining consumer AI product of the decade, while also spawning an entire ecosystem of AI-driven services. OpenAI recently introduced Pulse, a proactive assistant that sends customised daily briefs to users, and continues to experiment with AI “agent” platforms that can perform autonomous tasks.

Despite criticism over model bias and misleading outputs — including a recent case where ChatGPT wrongly convinced a user he’d made a mathematical breakthrough — OpenAI’s valuation keeps climbing. A private share sale last week valued the company at $500 billion, making it the world’s most valuable privately held firm.

The announcement capped off a month of frenetic activity for OpenAI, which also launched a new version of its video generator Sora and unveiled an agentic commerce platform in partnership with Stripe.