OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed at the TED2025 conference on 11 April 2025 that ChatGPT has reached 800 million weekly active users, representing approximately 10% of the world's population. The company's image generation feature launched on 25 March has driven extraordinary growth, with the platform gaining one million new users per hour on the day the Studio Ghibli-inspired mode was introduced. Altman stated that the company's infrastructure is under significant strain due to increased demand, while the firm recently closed a $40 billion funding round valuing the company at $300 billion.
During the 47-minute TED interview, Altman elaborated on OpenAI's latest innovation, the "Operator" autonomous AI agent tool that can perform tasks on the internet on behalf of users. The CEO described this technology as the company's "most consequential safety challenge," raising serious concerns about safety and accountability. According to Forbes' 12 April 2025 report, the company is also working on a system that would trigger automatic payments to artists whose styles are emulated by AI, but currently only has guardrails in place preventing the model from generating copyright-protected works.
OpenAI has significantly loosened previous content moderation restrictions, particularly regarding image generation models, which Altman justified by saying part of model alignment is following what the user of a model wants it to do within the very broad bounds of what society decides. The CEO strongly argued that the hundreds of millions of users—rather than "small elite summits"—should determine appropriate guardrails. Altman acknowledged that there is no consensus within the company on the definition of artificial general intelligence (AGI), illustrating this with the joke that if you've got 10 OpenAI researchers in a room and asked to define AGI, you'd get 14 definitions.
Sources:
1.
Michael Nuñez
2.
Nandini Yadav
3.
Martine Paris
