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Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks in a conversation with SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son at an event titled “Business Transformation through Artificial Intelligence” in Tokyo on February 3, 2025.
Tomohiro Ohsumi | Getty Images
As OpenAI faces increasing pressure from improved coding tools from rival Anthropic, CEO Sam Altman Tell employees and investors that his company is seeing momentum.
Altman told OpenAI employees on Friday that the company’s popular ChatGPT AI According to internal Slack sources seen by CNBC, chatbots are “growing more than 10% every month.” Altman said OpenAI is also preparing to launch an “updated chat model” this week.
More than 800 million people use ChatGPT every week, but Google and Anthropic selection Progress has been made. OpenAI announced “code red” Improved ChatGPT in December and put several projects on hold to focus on this work.
OpenAI’s coding product Codex is up about 50% from a week ago, Altman said in Friday’s message. Codex competes directly with Anthropic’s Claude Code, which sparked a wave of adoption last year.
OpenAI launches new Codex ModelGPT-5.3-Codex, last week, and Standalone application For users with apple computer. According to internal sources, Altman said Codex’s growth has been “insane.”
“It’s been a great week,” Altman wrote.
It’s also been a controversial week.
Altman and other executives took action social media In response to a swipe from Anthropic, the run super bowl ad Making fun of OpenAI’s decision Serve ads in ChatGPT. In X’s post, Ultraman explain The ads were “deceptive” and OpenAI would “clearly never serve ads in the way Anthropic describes.”
On Monday, OpenAI will officially begin testing ads within ChatGPT, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named for confidentiality reasons. Last month, the company said the ads would be clearly labeled, appear at the bottom of the chatbot’s answers, and would not affect ChatGPT’s responses.
OpenAI expects advertising to account for less than half of its revenue in the long term, this person said. The digital advertising market has long been dominated by Google and Yuanand Amazon has become a bigger player in recent years.
Information to investors
SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended an enterprise artificial intelligence promotion event held in Tokyo, Japan on February 3, 2025.
Kim Kyung-hun | Reuters
Sources told CNBC that Altman and Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar have been selling OpenAI’s growth story to investors as the company hopes to close a funding round that could reach $100 billion.
In private meetings, executives emphasized OpenAI’s advantages among consumers, growing enterprise business and computing power, said a person who spoke on condition of anonymity. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were private.
OpenAI has been distributing diagrams as part of the discussion. A chart shows that Codex, based on internal data, is eating into Claude Code’s market share, according to screenshots seen by CNBC.
OpenAI expects fundraising talks to heat up in the next two weeks, one person said. OpenAI completed $41 billion in financing in March, of which SoftBank contributed $30 billion and other investors contributed $11 billion.
As CNBC previously reported, this funding round will likely be completed in two parts. The first one will include from Microsoft and NVIDIA also Amazonare negotiating to invest the most $50 billion in the company. Other contributions from participants, e.g. SoftbankProjects that have been discussed for another $30 billion will follow.
Details of the round have yet to be determined and are still subject to change.
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