But two months after its debut, ChatGPT has more than 30 million users and receives about five million hits a day, two people with knowledge of the figures said. That makes it one of the fastest growing software products in memory. (Instagram, by contrast, took almost a year to get your first 10 million users).
Growth has brought challenges. ChatGPT has seen frequent outages due to running out of processing power, and users have found ways around some of the bot’s security features. The hype surrounding ChatGPT has also angered some rivals to the biggest tech companies, who have he pointed that its underlying technology is not, strictly speaking, all that new.
ChatGPT is also, for now, a money pit. There are no ads, and the average conversation costs the company”single digit cents” in processing power, according to a Twitter post by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, likely running into the millions of dollars a week. To offset costs, the company announced this week that it would start selling a $20 monthly subscription, known as ChatGPT Plus.
Despite its limitations, the success of ChatGPT has catapulted OpenAI into the ranks of Silicon Valley power players. The company recently reached a $10 billion deal with Microsoft, which plans to incorporate the startup’s technology into its Bing search engine and other products. Google declared a “code red” in response to ChatGPT, revving up many of its own AI products in an attempt to catch up.
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Mr. Altman has said that his goal at OpenAI is to create what is known as “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, an artificial intelligence that matches human intellect. He has been an outspoken advocate of AI, saying in a recent interview that its benefits to humanity could be “so unbelievably good that it’s hard for me to even imagine.” (He has also said that in the worst case, the AI could kill us all.)
As ChatGPT captured the world’s imagination, Mr. Altman found himself in the rare position of trying to downplay a successful product. He worries that too much publicity for ChatGPT could provoke a regulatory backlash or create inflated expectations for future releases, two people familiar with his views said. On Twitter, he has tried to suppress the excitement, calling ChatGPT “incredibly limited” and warns users that “it’s a mistake to trust it for anything important right now.”
It has also discouraged employees from bragging about the success of ChatGPT. In December, days after the company announced that more than a million people had signed up for the service, Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, tweeted that it had reached two million users. Altman asked her to delete the tweet and told her announcing such rapid growth was unwise, two people who saw the exchange said.
