• OpenAI’s user base is expanding rapidly, with CEO Sam Altman suggesting that one in 10 people globally now use its systems. The company has seen a significant boost from its new image-generation feature that went viral for its ability to simulate the artwork of Hayao Miyazaki.

OpenAI’s user base is rapidly on the rise, according to CEO Sam Altman. In an interview with TED late last week, Altman said ChatGPT’s user base was “growing very rapidly” and suggested that the company’s user base had doubled in a mere few weeks.

In February, OpenAI’s weekly active users surged past 400 million while its paying business users also crossed 2 million, according to a company spokesperson. The startup had 300 million weekly active users in December, highlighting how rapidly the company has been growing in the last few months.

Now, Altman says that “something like 10% of the world uses our systems a lot” — putting the number of users at approximately 800 million.

The fresh disclosure about OpenAI’s user base appeared to be inadvertently revealed by Altman. When TED’s Chris Anderson stated that the OpenAI CEO had told him backstage that the company’s user base had doubled in mere weeks, Altman claimed that the statement had been made “privately.”

Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation from Fortune, made outside of normal working hours.

OpenAI’s record-breaking growth

ChatGPT made history after its initial launch as the chatbot became the fastest-growing app in the history of web applications, reaching 100 million monthly active users just two months after it was released.

A flurry of new releases from OpenAI appears to have catapulted the company ahead of some of its rivals. For example, Google Gemini recorded 284.1 million total visits in February 2025, according to a recent analysis of web traffic.

The company saw a significant boost from its new image-generation feature that went viral for its ability to simulate the artwork of Hayao Miyazaki.

Altman said signups for ChatGPT hit 1 million in an hour following the launch of the new feature. Signups for the chatbot were coming so fast and furious that at one point, the system was having trouble keeping up with what Altman called “biblical demand.”

Altman was quizzed on AI ethics

Altman was pressed on AI safety, transparency, and corporate accountability during a pointed and occasionally tense conversation with TED’s Anderson.

The CEO was asked about copyright issues around training modules on artistic work, something that has plagued OpenAI since before the company launched ChatGPT. Many artists have taken issue with AI image generators, arguing that vast datasets used to train models contain copyrighted works without explicit permission from creators. OpenAI is in the middle of fighting several copyright lawsuits on the issue.

During the interview, Altman appeared to float the idea of revenue-sharing with living artists for the first time.

“I think it would be cool to figure out a new model where if you say I want to do it in the name of this artist and they opt-in, there’s a revenue model there that’s okay,” he said.

The accusations of IP theft by major AI companies have been reignited by the viral Ghibli-style images being generated on ChatGPT. Studio Ghibli’s co-founder, Miyazaki, is still a working artist and one who has taken issue with AI in the past, famously calling the tech an “insult to life itself” in a 2016 documentary.

OpenAI said in its system card for 4o image generation it had “added a refusal which triggers when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist,” but users are still able to imitate the studio’s style via the paid-for version of that chatbot.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When President Donald Trump announced that he had tapped 29-year-old Bo Hines for a prized role advising his ambitious crypto agenda, the blockchain industry was thrown off guard. Hines, a two-time Republican congressional candidate, had never held a formal business role in the tight-knit crypto sector. 

But he did have strong ties to the Trump orbit, and a seven-figure show of support for the Trump campaign, according to public records, financial filings, and an interview with Hines. 

Just one week before the 2024 presidential election, the growth investment firm Hines cofounded, Nxum Group, donated $1 million in pro-Trump campaign billboard advertisements to the $400 million Super PAC Make America Great Again Inc., according to Federal Election Commission filings. Hines, who confirmed he oversaw all of Nxum’s work in the political space, declined to provide more details about the donations and advertisements, saying only that his company helped on the “marketing side.” 

Trump appointed Hines to lead his presidential council on digital assets in December, with Hines taking on a top role advancing blockchain policy below David Sacks, the venture capital heavyweight that Trump tapped as his crypto and AI czar. Though Sacks has the senior position, a spokesperson for the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where the roles are housed, said that Hines and Sacks “work side by side and very closely.” 

Hines has been instrumental in helping Trump carry out his sweeping effort to reform the government’s approach to the blockchain industry, moving away from the confrontational relationship that developed during the Biden administration. In his role, Hines serves as a liaison between the White House, the crypto industry, and lawmakers and regulatory agencies. At the White House crypto summit in March, Hines sat at the main table along with Trump, Sacks, and other administration bigwigs.

From congressional candidate to crypto liaison

Hines’ path to becoming the U.S. government’s crypto emissary is an interesting one. Four years after he graduated from Yale, Hines ran for the House in a North Carolina district in the Raleigh area with an endorsement from Trump, making it to the general election before he lost in 2022. Two years later, in 2024, he lost in the primary in a different district. Hines says he translated his experience running for office into his work at Charlotte-based Nxum. The firm, which Hines cofounded with his father and another partner, does data, tech, and marketing, including political consulting, for companies it backs. Hines says he oversaw all of its political work.

“I jumped into the political arena at a young age,” he said. “I think that we were just a little bit frustrated with some of the archaic ways in which people advertise in that space.”

One of the companies in the firm’s portfolio is Today is America, a self-described “anti-woke” media organization targeted at Gen Z, where Hines says he served as head of operations to “get that off the ground,” then in 2023, after Nxum took an ownership stake in the company, Hines became the organization’s CEO. Today is America ran the social media accounts and partnered on get-out-the-vote efforts for a conservative student advocacy group called Students for Trump.

In October, Students for Trump announced a partnership with a memecoin project called Restore the Republic. The proceeds of any sales were pledged to the Trump campaign (Donald Trump’s son, Eric Trump, had disavowed any Trump-family connection to the token in August, causing its price to plummet 95%, before Hines became involved.) “With this partnership, we aim to make a meaningful impact on voter turnout, especially among young Americans,” Hines said in a press release announcing a partnership where the student group would hold events and forums to rally support for Trump in swing states. A week prior to that announcement, Hines appeared with Donald Trump’s other son, Donald Trump Jr., on a livestream hosted by Restore the Republic. 

Hines told Fortune that he was not involved with the management or promotion of the memecoin. Today is America’s only work with Restore the Republic was to gin up attention for Trump on social media and get out the vote efforts ahead of the election, he says, saying he has never owned any of the token himself and therefore did not personally gain by promoting it. 

Since taking his White House role, Hines is a non-acting partner at Nxum, and he says that the firm’s political work is now handled by the firm’s other two general partners, one of whom is his father.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Today’s most effective leaders aren’t just strategists or visionaries; they’re simplifiers. These executives can cut through bureaucracy, strip away bloat, and prioritize speed and agility over sprawling hierarchies and tangled workflows.

As companies scale, they inevitably accumulate more processes, meetings, metrics, policies, and platforms, writes Fortune’s Lily Mae Lazarus. Each addition may be well-intentioned, but over time, the layers calcify, slowing decision-making and suffocating innovation. The cost isn’t just cultural; it’s financial. Bain & Company estimates that excessive complexity erodes more than 15% of large companies’ profits each year.

Enter the simplifier-in-chief. These leaders are clear-eyed about the hidden toll of complexity and are unafraid to challenge entrenched ways of working. They focus on prioritizing what matters, eliminating friction, and empowering their teams to move faster and smarter. They also know that in today’s market, velocity is a competitive advantage—and that too much process often creates the illusion of control while actually stalling progress.

Several CEOs appear to agree.

—Amazon’s Andy Jassy has stressed the need to eliminate internal drag that slows innovation. 
—GM’s Mary Barra has long championed cutting red tape to accelerate product cycles.
—Bayer’s Bill Anderson is slashing 99% of corporate rules and flattening management through his “dynamic shared ownership” model. 
—JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon put it bluntly: “Bureaucracy and BS kill companies.”

The shift toward simplification isn’t just about efficiency, though. It’s about resilience, writes Lazarus. When the environment shifts—as it inevitably does—simplified organizations can adapt faster and cultivate cultures that are more responsive, creative, and aligned around shared goals.

Ruth Umoh
ruth.umoh@fortune.com

Today’s newsletter was curated by Lily Mae Lazarus.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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