ChatGPT weekly active users grow to 200 million, double from last year

An OpenAI spokesperson has confirmed to Axios that the number of active ChatGPT users per week has doubled since November last year, from 100 million to 200 million. This is some notable (and not very surprising, I might add) growth for the generative AI service.

The company also said that 92% of Fortune 500 companies (the top 500 US companies based on revenue) are using OpenAI’s products.

On top of that, the use of the ChatGPT API has doubled since the launch of GPT-40 Mini in July of this year. This model is significantly cheaper than the previous GPT-3.5, and it’s also more capable and advanced.

CEO Sam Altman stated that people use OpenAI’s tools as part of their daily lives and that the generative AI model helps with routine tasks, solving hard problems, and unlocking creativity.

These numbers are indeed impressive. But they’re also bound to grow even more by the end of the year, and that’s also partly thanks to Apple. As announced during Apple’s annual developer conference, the WWDC in 2024, iOS 18 will integrate ChatGPT into Siri. This basically means that if Apple Intelligence (which is Apple’s own generative AI efforts) fails to answer a question, Siri will prompt the user to ask ChatGPT. And yep, this kinda sounds like “calling the supervisor”, at least to me, I can’t escape this analogy now.

The integration is expected to be introduced with a future release of the yet-unreleased iOS 18, probably later this year. The two companies aren’t paying each other for this deal, and Apple is planning to invest in OpenAI as part of the partnership between the two companies.

ChatGPT growing so much in such a short time makes a lot of sense to me. The tool is useful. Fun story: I caught it basically ‘cheating’ by making up song lyrics for a song I asked it to translate. I didn’t provide the lyrics, just asked it to find the song itself (I gave the artist and title) on the internet and then translate it… well, it made some nice poetry that had little in common with the actual song. But apart from that, the tool is very useful. Just don’t trust it for critical things.