ChatGPT – the popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot is reported to have reached 100 million users, just two months after its launch. According to a report by SimilarWeb, the chatbot clocked 13 million users per day in January. The platform has surpassed other social media apps including Instagram and TikTok which took 2.5 years and 9 months, respectively to cross 100 million users. Unprecedented take-up may make AI chatbot the fastest-growing consumer internet app ever.
ChatGPT was introduced in December last year. The AI chatbot has been developed by Elon Musk-backed OpenAI. The conversational bot is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response. To start using the chatbot, users can simply feed in their query.
According to Similarweb estimates, the chat.openai.com website attracted about 25 million daily visitors over the past week. For the past month, traffic to the site has grown by an average of 3.4% per day, it adds. It further states that on the peak traffic day of January 31, the site attracted 28 million visits from 15.7 million unique visitors.
The growth rate has become a concern for the existing internet giants, including Google. During the earnings call, the Google CEO hinted at the development as he often mentioned the capabilities of AI and how the world is eager to use it, referring to the response for ChatGPT. “AI is the most profound technology we are working on today,” Pichai said. China’s Baidu has also announced to develop its own ChatGPT-rival soon.
“In 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app. By comparison, TikTok took nine months to reach 100 million monthly users, and Instagram about 2.5 years,” a UBS research based in part on Similarweb data noted.
ChatGPT can generate articles, essays, jokes, poetry and job applications in response to text prompts. OpenAI, a private company backed by Microsoft, made it available to the public for free in late November.
OpenAI also developed the AI-powered image generator Dall-E and is at the forefront of generative AI, or technology trained on vast amounts of text and images that can create content from a simple text prompt.
OpenAI announced a $20 monthly subscription, initially for users in the United States only. It would provide a more stable and faster service as well as the opportunity to try new features first, the company said.
Microsoft had in January announced the completion of a multiyear multibillion-dollar investment that would see ChatGPT be integrated into the tech giants’ features as it plots its way to a supercomputer. Microsoft plans to increase investments in the development and deployment of specialized supercomputing systems to accelerate OpenAI’s groundbreaking independent AI research.
Last month, Microsoft announced another multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI in the form of cash and provision of cloud computing. On Wednesday Microsoft launched a premium version of its Teams product backed by ChatGPT, offering AI-powered extras such as automatically generated meeting notes. The tool also divides recaps of meetings into sections, based on the meeting transcript.
Analysts believe the viral launch of ChatGPT will give OpenAI a first-mover advantage against other AI companies. The growing usage, while imposing substantial computing cost on OpenAI, has also provided valuable feedback to help train the chatbot’s responses.
OpenAI which made it available to the public for free in late November recently announced a premium feature that is available for a fee. The company officially rolled out the paid version called ChatGPT Plus towards the end of January. It is available for a subscription fee of $20 per month. ChatGPT Plus is available only in the US as of now.