OpenAI says ChatGPT has 100 million weekly users

One hundred million people are using ChatGPT on a weekly basis, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced at its first-ever developer conference on Monday. Since releasing its ChatGPT and Whisper models via API in March, the company also now boasts over two million developers, including over 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

OpenAI announced the figures as it detailed a range of new features, including a platform for building custom versions of ChatGPT to help with specific tasks and GPT-4 Turbo, a new model that has knowledge of world events up to April 2023 and which can fit the equivalent of over 300 pages of text in a single prompt.

ChatGPT was widely seen as the fastest growing consumer internet app of all time after its launch nearly a year ago, notching an estimated 100 million monthly users in just two months. Facebook, for example, took around four and a half years to hit 100 million users after its launch in 2004, Twitter took over five years, and Instagram took a little over two years.

Microsoft said its Bing search engine, which added generative AI features powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 earlier this year, passed the 100 million daily active user milestone in March, over a decade after its launch in 2009. ChatGPT’s record was surpassed by Meta’s Threads, which amassed 100 million users in less than a week after its launch in July, but Threads’ usage appears to have dropped in the months since, with just under 100 million monthly active users as of October.

Whichever way you slice the numbers, ChatGPT is still enormously popular and hasn’t even celebrated its first birthday as a public service yet.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen large user numbers associated with OpenAI’s chatbot. Back 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 visitors a day. But today’s announcement is notable for being an official data point from OpenAI itself rather than a third-party estimate.

The release of the figures appears to be an attempt to push back against recent media reports claiming that the popularity of ChatGPT is starting to slip since its release in November last year.