🚨 ChatGPT hit another milestone: A billion weekly users
Hi all,
ChatGPT has one billion weekly users. I published a short commentary about this milestone in Exponential View on Saturday. I'm sharing it here in full.
Enjoy
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ChatGPT's 1 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.
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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:
Cheers, Azeem
P.S. Steve Jurvetson 's full tweet is reproduced below.
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If this is true, this is definitively a concern and I'm shocked you didn't mention the ongoing hallucinations and other errors from OpenAI and all LLMs tools. This is on top of overt IP theft of human data, etc. Nobody should trust "agents" built on harvested data. There is no trust where Chat bots of any manifestation don't disclose that the tools are in fact not alive or sentient. This anthropomorphism by design is in fact deception by design. It's not that hard. Above the fold, the first time someone uses one of these tools, the designers make it explicit: "These are tools that may use the 'I' pronoun to make conversation easier if you speak English. But the responses and the tools themselves are not alive or sentient." That's it. First time disclosure. Education. Plus maybe, "here's how much water and energy your prompt is using." And, "many shareholders aren't making money they'd hoped with these tools." And so on. The point being, a billion users is definitely a concern.
From here onwards … children born will likely never know a world where they are smarter than machines 🤔 Something we probably all need to adjust to soon … Now that really makes you think ✨
A huge number...