First, some notes on Gemini as I posted them to my Slack group:

Last week Google released Gemini 2.5. Free on their AI studio website if you don’t mind them training on your chats. In the API, Gemini has a context window of 2,000,000 tokens, about 1,500,000 words. Compare this to Sonnet, at 200,000 tokens which is higher than most OpenAI models. But, in previous Google models using anywhere near that number of tokens decreased performance.

ChatGPT put their 4o image creator out which is the best I’ve seen bar none. It can also make iterative improvements on images without completely losing context. It does text well too.

Here are three images I asked 4o to make, each building on each other (Top Guns is the name of my peer group)

This kind of continuity between images was previously unheard of. Expect to see it in their video gen soon

I don’t remember if I linked to LMArena before, the de facto leaderboard for AI. Gemini 2.5 has a substantial lead there.

https://lmarena.ai/?leaderboard

Current Leaderboard (2025-04-01)

If look closely, you’ll see that ChatGPT is second place with an update to an existing model that they didn’t make a big deal of.

DeepSeek takes both 5 and 7.

But, Google also released Gemma3, open source models based on their Gemini work. In limited testing, Gemma3 performs strong on my Mac at 27b parameters. Compare, R1 has 671b.

I don’t see Gemma3 on LMArena at all yet.

Second, reporting from The Information on OpenAI financials:

ChatGPT has hit 20 million paid subscribers, according to a spokesperson… 

The strong growth rate suggests ChatGPT is currently generating at least $415 million in revenue per month (a pace of $5 billion a year), up 30% from at least $333 million per month ($4 billion annually) at the end of last year.

The actual figure could be somewhat higher, given that corporate ChatGPT plans are more expensive and the company has had early success selling $200-a-month Proplans, which are 10 times more expensive than basic ChatGPT Plus plans…

ChatGPT revenue is separate from [API sales]…

If OpenAI keeps up this growth rate or anything like it, its overall revenue projection of $12.7 billion in 2025, up from about $4 billion in 2024, seems well within reach.