According to a new study by the analytics firm UBS (via Reuters and CBS), the ChatGPT chatbot developed by OpenAI has surpassed 100 million active users within a month. The chatbot, which was made available to the public on November 30 of last year, gained 57 million users within its first month, reaching a daily user count of 13 million by January.
For comparison, it took TikTok nine months to reach the 100 million monthly user mark despite its popularity, especially among young people. UBS analyst Lloyd Walmsley also noted that Meta’s Instagram took two and a half years to achieve the same milestone. However, it remains to be seen if ChatGPT can sustain this level of interest in the coming months. “The next question, obviously, is how resilient these numbers will be. There may be a segment of people who visited just out of curiosity,” added Walmsley.
ChatGPT provides users with natural, human-like responses to queries, which has raised concerns among educators that students could use it to cheat. Despite still facing significant issues with accuracy—“Programs like ChatGPT are notoriously prone to generating biased, harmful, and factually incorrect content,” notes an MIT Tech Review article—no other publicly available chatbot currently offers comparable capabilities. This reportedly alarmed Google executives to the point of declaring a “code red,” speeding up the development of the company’s own AI. The tech giant is working on several potential competitors to ChatGPT, including a chatbot for search, and plans to showcase 20 AI products this year.
At present, ChatGPT remains free to use, and OpenAI does not appear to plan on fully restricting access or making it paid-only. However, the developer does intend to monetize the service and has already begun testing a $20-per-month paid plan called ChatGPT Plus, which offers faster response times and priority access to new features.