ChatGPT now has one billion weekly users.
The news came out through a tweet by investor Steve Jurvetson who was attending the TED Conference in Canada yesterday, with my emphasis added.
Sam Altman: “Last we disclosed, we have 500 million weekly active users, growing fast.”
Chris Anderson: “But backstage, you told me that it doubled in just a few weeks.”
So, one billion weekly users is the private number, and likely the real one. In his on-stage discussion with Chris, Sam also alluded to 10% of humanity (call that 800m) using ChatGPT.
Both of these are substantially up from the 400m weekly number OpenAI’s Brad Lightcap spoke about three weeks ago. At a minimum, it is that doubling in just a few weeks—unprecedented at this scale.
Let’s get this straight: that is an enormous number of users. These are weekly active users, a key measure of retention and habituation.
This isn’t the peak.
Weekly users become daily users. Daily users realize what AI can do for them. Personal usage skyrockets as you shift Google searches to AI, as you test all your ideas and thinking—from sales emails to shopping lists—against an AI, as you call on coding assistants to build mockups or working apps.
Each of those applications demands more AI, more tokens, and more compute. The hockey stick goes exponential.
As a new dad, Sam also reflected that his “kids will never be smarter than AI.”
My takeaways:
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This is a psychological tipping point. A billion of anything is a lot.
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Competition will heat up. Google (as I’ll write tomorrow) has better models across the board. OpenAI has better products. Both firms, and their big competitors, will figure out how to go even faster.
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Prepare for a greater surge in usage.
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The way we interact with technology is going to change over a period measured in 2-3 years rather than five or more.
Cheers,
Azeem
P.S.
’s full tweet is reproduced below.
