OpenAI Decoded for 2025
Preparing for global domination. 🌍
Good Morning,
Today’s guest post is a deep dive into OpenAI. First, a bit of introduction to catch you up on things.
A lot of the Generative AI hype cycle rests on the success of OpenAI and that of ChatGPT, as well as the success of and demand for, Nvidia’s GPUs (its AI chips). As of March 2025, ChatGPT boasts an impressive user base, reportedly having over 400 million weekly active users with DAUs of around 122.58 million. Make no mistake, this is far and away the main Generative AI web service and app most people are still using even 2.5 years later.
The reports by a16z on Gen AI consumer apps (B2C) are illustrative of this point.
Recently Google has released Gemini 2.5. (Pro & Thinking), and it could challenge the status quo. While we can debate if DeepSeek upstaged OpenAI in early 2025, or how good Claude is going to get now with web-search and incredible coding capabilities, the Enterprise AI race is heating up in 2025, just like we anticipated.
of Generative Value Newsletter recently did a series on OpenAI that I found fairly illuminating. He’s already written my best guides on the Semiconductor landscape and AI datacenters, here are links to his OpenAI Series:Series on OpenAI
OpenAI, Part III: The (Probabilistic) Future of OpenAI
We can also debate Sam Altman’s political affiliations or exit-plan, or how he might not be the best person to run the day to day operations of what OpenAI has become. This week it came out that Brad Lightcap, is set to take on an expanded role overseeing global growth and corporate partnerships, while Altman intends to concentrate more on the innovation and technical strategies within the company.
While OpenAI will still lose a lot of money in 2026, ChatGPT is expected to achieve annual revenues potentially reaching $11 billion in 2025. OpenAI earned approximately $3.7 billion from ChatGPT in 2024. Obviously this is massive growth.
With its unique partnership with Softbank, OpenAI as of March 2025, OpenAI is reportedly finalizing a funding round that could value the company at approximately the range of $300 to $340 billion. OpenAI is potentially too big to fail given its lead over non-existent U.S. competitors in the B2C spectrum. It also has many levers yet to pull to increase revenue generation and growth, some of which we will discuss in this article.
As a mobile app, ChatGPT’s lead over the rest of the world is even more dominant:
While Google announced Gemini 2.5. Pro Experimental, OpenAI was busy too. ChatGPT is quickly becoming the Amazon Prime of chatbots, with so many value-added features, it’s hard to compete against or to leave as a user.
The Amazon Prime of Generative AI
Scaling the OpenAI Academy: A new hub for AI literacy and community learning
Introducing 4o Image Generation
Understanding complex trends with deep research
OpenAI released mini-03, it’s latest reasoning model
OpenAI might be able to becoming profitable by 2028 or 2029 but their path is still going to be difficult.
OpenAI used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView, to create a test for measuring the persuasive abilities of its AI reasoning models.
Sam Altman has an 8.7% stake in Reddit, and the ChatGPT-maker has a content-licensing deal with Reddit that allows OpenAI to train on posts from Reddit users
ChatGPT’s mobile users are 85% male, report says
Men use Generative AI a lot more than women, so the term “AI Bro” is technically correct. The majority of ChatGPT users appear to be young men!
A new report from app analytics firm Appfigures found that over half of ChatGPT’s mobile users are under age 25, with users between ages 50 and 64 making up the second largest age demographic. The gender gap among ChatGPT users is even more significant. Appfigures estimates that across age groups, men make up 84.5% of all users.
OpenAI has lucrative contracts with the DoD and National Defense Sector
OpenAI launches ChatGPT plan for US government agencies
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Gov designed to provide U.S. government agencies an additional way to access the tech. ChatGPT Gov includes many of the capabilities found in OpenAI’s corporate-focused tier, ChatGPT Enterprise.
In 2024, ChatGPT Enterprise reached $1 Billion in revenue alone.
Generative AI’s Generational companies?
After 2.5 years of the Generative AI movement going mainstream since the launch of ChatGPT, these four companies have set themselves apart from the field.
Generative Value is an incredible Newsletter. Companies like Databricks are set to benefit from this trend too, among many others.
Best of Generative Value Reloaded
Data Industry Primer
OpenAI’s Moat is an absurd ChatGPT Global Virality
OpenAI’s leadership reorg of the Spring of 2025, reflects also Sam Altman’s unique skill-set, where day to day Ops is not his personal strength. The Stargate AI Infrastructure partnership and ties to the MAGA movement position Sam Altman’s company towards a more sustainable path to offset their growth at all costs mindset.
It’s difficult for the likes of Elon Musk’s xAI or Google to compete with the first-mover popularity of ChatGPT and all the features they are able to cram inside of it, sometimes at the expense of the interface. Since DeepSeek is based on Open-source models and Anthorpic is more B2B and AI Enterprise orientated, they avoid competing directly with ChatGPT. Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon don’t have that luxury.
OpenAI earned approximately $3.7 billion from ChatGPT in 2024.
In 2025, this revenue amount just from ChatGPT, is expected to triple.
Along with lucrative Government contracts, OpenAI also anticipates an increasing share from its API services across different industries. They don’t need to be producing the best models any longer, and many would argue in 2025, they don’t. OpenAI has shifted from a frontier model company to an AI product company. Some forget OpenAI was founded in December, 2015 so for them to do this nearly a decade later is not surprising. They are no longer the frontier research lab they once were.
OpenAI’s pace of adding features and product rich experiences is remarkable. Though the majority of their revenue is still directly tied to ChatGPT.
OpenAI is well positioned to lead in agentic AI
With OpenAI Operator, Deep Research and other industry specific agents for Enterprise that are more costly, OpenAI might also be able to scale revenue much faster in 2026. This is also contingent on how o3 is integrated into new Agents and how successful GPT-5 is seen as. For ChatGPT Enterprise customers, upselling them to agents that cost $200 to $2000 a month, should not be too difficult. This is before ChatGPT even ventures seriously into advertising.
How dominant is ChatGPT in 2025?
ChatGPT’s marketshare is decreasing however: In January 2025, ChatGPT had a 59.5% share of the Gen AI chatbot market, down from around 76% in January 2024
How much of a thorn in their side DeepSeek will be is still somewhat uncertain, as of March, 2025. There’s every indication however that DeepSeek will be a generational company too and a far cheaper alternative.
DeepSeek is gaining significant traction and influence in China's AI landscape, with its models being embraced by both government bodies and major tech companies, suggesting a growing dominance in the domestic AI market. Because DeepSeek is open-source, adoption globally is also expected to grow quickly.
OpenAI’s unusual partnership with Softbank is also potentially a cause for concern, not just with the Stargate project. Their third party debt financing schemes are a little fringe and possibly high-risk.
State of ChatGPT in 2025: Still Room to Grow!
It only took ChatGPT six months to double from August 2024 at 200 million WAUs to 400 million WAUs in February, 2025. Typically, growth becomes more challenging at scale, but for OpenAI this was not the case. (WAU is weekly active users).
This suggests ChatGPT has yet to hit anything resembling a ceiling to its stunning growth and global adoption.
OpenAI won at product innovation: for example in April, May of 2024 there was a major spike that coincided with GPT-4o, that introduced multimodal capabilities into ChatGPT. These frequent feature additions also appear to have reduced churn.
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Selling the Experience: Advanced Voice Mode (2024)
The feature that appears to have brought in the most new app users was the HER (2013 movie) like Advanced Voice Mode, bringing near-human fluency to AI conversations. It only took Silicon Valley eleven years to manifest the dream that engineers had from watching that movie back in 2013.
AVM visibly increased app adoption in the summer of 2024.
Many of OpenAI’s features upon launch are best-in-class, at least at first. In 2025 that may actually no longer be the case for the first time.
OpenAI’s Premium Plan
In late 2024, OpenAI launched a premium ChatGPT Pro plan that costs $200 a month. By being funded by Microsoft, they got a lot of Microsoft’s subscription experience in the process. Microsoft is among the world’s most diversified Tech company when it comes to consumer and Enterprise subscriptions.
OpenAI has been able to convert web users to mobile rather successfully. a16z’s report states:
(Since the app launched in) May 2023, monthly active users have steadily increased by 5 to 15% every month over the past year, as web users also adopted the app. According to Sensor Tower estimates, out of ChatGPT’s 400 million weekly active users, 175 million now use the mobile app.
Not only does ChatGPT have a first mover advantage in terms of feature depth but a huge lead in terms of its app users. This allows them to make ChatGPT even more sticky in the lives of their young users.
DeepSeek while impressive, has yet to earn the same virality as ChatGPT or that level of engagement as an app:
Let’s now get into the incredible deep dive on OpenAI by
that is a huge compilation worthy of our attention.Read about OpenAI’s history, business model and get access to many of his infographics, research and walkthroughs all in one place.
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Part 1: The History of OpenAI
From the beginning, the goal of Generative Value has been to study the world’s most important companies and industries.
It doesn’t take much imagination to put OpenAI in that category.
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