OpenAI’s ChatGPT has achieved a significant milestone, with 100 million weekly users, according to an announcement made by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during the company’s first developer conference.
This achievement underscores ChatGPT’s remarkable growth since its API release in March, as well as its popularity among a diverse user base that now includes over two million developers and over 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
OpenAI’s announcement coincided with the unveiling of new features and models, including a platform designed for creating customized versions of ChatGPT tailored to specific tasks.
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“Anyone can easily build their own GPT—no coding is required,” the company wrote in a release. “You can make them for yourself, just for your company’s internal use, or for everyone. Creating one is as easy as starting a conversation, giving it instructions and extra knowledge, and picking what it can do, like searching the web, making images or analyzing data.”
Additionally, OpenAI introduced GPT-4 Turbo, a model with knowledge of world events up to April 2023, capable of processing a substantial amount of text within a single prompt, equivalent to over 300 pages.
“We are just as annoyed as all of you, probably more, that GPT’s knowledge about the world ended in 2021,” Altman said in a speech Monday.
The enhanced capabilities of the GPT-4 Turbo extend its input capacity significantly. In contrast to previous iterations, which were constrained to around 3,000 words, the GPT-4 Turbo now accommodates inputs that can span up to 300 pages, enabling you to request comprehensive book summaries.
Furthermore, GPT-4 introduces support for DALL-E 3-generated AI images and text-to-speech functionality. Additionally, it boasts a selection of six predefined voices, offering you the flexibility to select from a diverse range of voices for receiving responses to your queries.
ChatGPT has earned a reputation as one of the fastest-growing consumer internet applications, garnering an estimated 100 million monthly users in just two months after its initial release nearly a year ago. Comparatively, social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram took significantly longer to reach 100 million users after their respective launches.
In March, Microsoft’s Bing search engine integrated generative AI features powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, surpassing 100 million daily active users, marking a significant milestone more than a decade after its 2009 launch. While ChatGPT’s rapid growth was outpaced by Meta’s Threads, which reached 100 million users within a week of its July launch, Threads’ user base appeared to decrease in the months that followed, with just under 100 million monthly active users as of October.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT continues to maintain its popularity and growth, despite being less than a year old as a public service. While earlier estimates hinted at its widespread usage, today’s announcement from OpenAI provides an official data point to support ChatGPT’s ongoing success.
This announcement also serves as a response to recent media reports suggesting that ChatGPT’s popularity might be waning since its launch in November of the previous year. OpenAI aims to reinforce the platform’s continued strong performance and user engagement with these official statistics.