ChatGPT has reached 100 million weekly users
OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, disclosed during the company's inaugural developer conference that ChatGPT is now being used by a staggering 100 million people on a weekly basis. Since OpenAI introduced its ChatGPT and Whisper models through an API in March, the platform has also garnered over two million developers, with participation from more than 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
These figures were shared by OpenAI as they unveiled a variety of new features, one of which is a platform designed for constructing customized versions of ChatGPT to tackle specific tasks. Additionally, they introduced GPT-4 Turbo, a novel model equipped with knowledge of global events up to April 2023, capable of accommodating the equivalent of over 300 pages of text within a single prompt.
Notably, ChatGPT's rapid ascent since its launch almost a year ago is striking. It quickly gained a reputation as one of the fastest-growing consumer internet apps in history by accumulating around 100 million monthly users in a mere two months. To put this in perspective, Facebook took approximately four and a half years to reach 100 million users after its 2004 launch, Twitter took over five years, and Instagram achieved it in just over two years.
Microsoft's Bing search engine, which integrated generative AI features powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 earlier in the year, reached the milestone of 100 million daily active users in March, more than a decade after its 2009 launch. While Meta's Threads managed to surpass ChatGPT's record by amassing 100 million users in less than a week following its launch in July, it appears that Threads' usage has waned in the months since, with just under 100 million monthly active users as of October.
Regardless of how you analyze the statistics, ChatGPT remains exceptionally popular and has yet to mark its first year as a publicly available service.
It's worth noting that this isn't the first time we've seen impressive user numbers associated with OpenAI's chatbot. In February, Similarweb estimated that the tool had already reached the milestone of attracting 100 million unique visitors in a single month and 25 million daily visitors. However, today's announcement stands out as an official data point from OpenAI itself, as opposed to a third-party estimate.
The release of these figures appears to be a response to recent media reports suggesting that ChatGPT's popularity is beginning to wane since its launch in November of the previous year.
