ChatGPT reportedly hit 100 million users in January

Chat­G­PT is grow­ing at a much, much faster pace than Tik­Tok and oth­er pop­u­lar apps and ser­vices. The chat­bot, devel­oped by Ope­nAI, was on track to sur­pass 100 mil­lion month­ly active users in Jan­u­ary, accord­ing to new research from ana­lyt­ics firm UBS (via Reuters and CBS). 

The chat­bot only opened to the pub­lic on Novem­ber 30th of last year, but its fame seems to be sky­rock­et­ing. One month after its release, it has already acquired 57 mil­lion month­ly active users. By Jan­u­ary, it was already see­ing about 13 mil­lion indi­vid­ual users per day.

In con­trast, Tik­Tok has reached 100 mil­lion month­ly users nine months after its glob­al debut, despite being par­tic­u­lar­ly pop­u­lar with the younger gen­er­a­tion. UBS ana­lyst Lloyd Walm­s­ley also notes that it took Meta’s Insta­gram two and a half years to get to that point. 

How­ev­er, it remains to be seen if the chat­bot will be able to main­tain this lev­el of inter­est in the months to come. “The next ques­tion is obvi­ous­ly what the stay­ing pow­er will be. There may be an ele­ment of just com­ing to see it,” Walm­s­ley added.

Because Chat­G­PT responds to queries with nat­ur­al, human-like pro­nun­ci­a­tion, edu­ca­tors are con­cerned that stu­dents will use it to cheat. Mod­els like Chat­G­PT are noto­ri­ous­ly prone to spew­ing out biased, harm­ful, and mis­lead­ing con­tent,” MIT’s Tech Review wrote in an arti­cle, but there are no oth­er pub­lic chat­bots with com­pa­ra­ble functionality. 

There is no. The issue has report­ed­ly got­ten so bad that Google exec­u­tives declared “code red” and decid­ed to accel­er­ate the com­pa­ny’s AI devel­op­ment. The tech giant is work­ing on sev­er­al poten­tial Chat­G­PT com­peti­tors, includ­ing chat­bots for search, and aims to launch 20 AI prod­ucts this year.