ChatGPT is an AI chatbot launched by Open AI on November 30, 2022. Since its launch, it has:
- Been dubbed “the best AI chatbot ever released” by the New York Times
- Scared Google into declaring a “code-red” and creating its own Bard AI
- Crossed 1 million users in 5 days of launch and set the record for the fastest-growing platform by gaining 100 million users by January.
Updates:
OpenAI has launched GPT-4, a successor to ChatGPT, that understands both images and text input and beats it at every task. Read our coverage of GPT-4 statistics, abilities, and limitations.
ChatGPT plugins launched, enabling ChatGPT to talk to other apps like search engines, code interpreters, food apps, etc. This effectively connects GPT-4 to the internet and the world!
Here, I’ve added the most up-to-date ChatGPT statistics and facts with sources.
- ChatGPT vs Bing vs Bard
- ChatGPT User Stats
- Company Background and Investments
- Cost to Run and Revenue Model
- Model Training
- Real-World Impact
- Apps Based On ChatGPT
- Alternatives & Competitors of ChatGPT
At a Glance
| ChatGPT Stats Overview | |
|---|---|
| Created By | Open AI |
| Number of Users | 100 million in January 2023 (Crossed 1 million users in first 5 days of launch) |
| Daily Visitors | 25 million |
| Total Website Visits | 619 million in January. Jumped to 1 Billion in February 2023 (Source: Similarweb) |
| Training Method | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) |
| Model | Fine-tuned GPT-3.5 (text-DaVinci-003) |
| Knowledgebase | Up to 2021 |
| Dataset Size | 300 bn words, 570 GB (crawled web, books, Wikipedia) |
| Queries Per Day | 10 Million (estimate) |
| Infrastructure | Microsoft Azure |
| Monthly Cost to Run | 3 Million USD (estimate) |
| Cost to Users | Free during research preview, $20 for ChatGPT Plus |
| Predicted Revenue | USD 200 million by end of 2023, USD 1 billion by end of 2024 |
ChatGPT vs Bing vs Bard
Read Bing Statistics for 2023 – learn how Bing is dominating AI search since the arrival of Bing Chat.
If you’re interested in cool applications of AI, you might also like my experiments with AI voice generators and AI story assistants.
ChatGPT User Stats
| Platform | Time to first 1 million users |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 5 days |
| 10 months | |
| 2 months | |
| Spotify | 5 months |
| Netflix | 3.5 years |
- ChatGPT crossed 1 million users in just 5 days of its launch. (Greg Brockman, Open AI Co-Founder).
- ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing app in the world by recording 100 million users in 2 months of launch.
- ChatGPT website had 590 million monthly visits in January 2023 and its total user count reached 100 million in January. (Guardian)
- According to Similarweb, the ChatGPT website has been visited a total of nearly 2 billion times so far and gets 25 million daily visits.
- In February alone, ChatGPT received 1 billion visitors and had 100 million plus users.
| Month | Total Visits |
| February 2023 | 1 Billion |
| January 2023 | 616 million |
| December 2023 | 266 million |
- OpenAI’s monthly page views jumped from 18.3 million in November 2022 to 304 million in December 2022, a 1561% increase after the launch of ChatGPT.
- OpenAI ranked 44th in January 2023 based on traffic globally after announcing ChatGPT.
Company Background and Investments
- Open AI created ChatGPT. Open Al also created Dall-E, an image-generation AI.
- Open AI was co-founded by Elon Musk and is based out of San Francisco (HQ: Pioneer Building in Mission District, San Francisco).
- After the launch of ChatGPT, Open AI was valued at $29 billion dollars.
- Microsoft has already invested $1 Billion and confirmed an additional investment of $10 billion in Open AI.
Cost to Run and Revenue Model
- The average cost of a single chat with ChatGPT is likely in single-digit cents. (Sam Altman’s Twitter, Sam Altman is CEO of OpenAI)
- Tom Goldstein, an AI ML Professor at Maryland University, has estimated the daily cost of running ChatGPT to be approximately $100,000 and the monthly cost to be $3,000,000 (3 Million USD). His estimates are based on Azure Cloud costs (server infrastructure on which ChatGPT runs).
- He estimates the ChatGPT model has 175 Billion parameters and receives 10 Million queries per day. (Tom Goldstein’s Twitter)
- ChatGPT is completely Free to use during its research preview.
- ChatGPT Plus has been recently launched at a pilot subscription price of $20.
- Open AI has added “Turbo” mode for ChatGPT plus users. It gives faster responses.
- ChatGPT once monetized is predicted to earn a revenue of $200 million by end of 2023 and $1 billion dollars by the end of 2024. (Reuters)
Model Training
- ChatGPT is a fine-tuned model based on GPT-3.5 (text-DaVinci-003).
- Text-DaVinci-003 builds on an earlier open AI model called InstructGPT which is better at understanding and answering human requests than GPT 3.
- An improved version of the ChatGPT model is powering Bing AI. It’s called Prometheus.
What was the dataset size for training ChatGPT?
- ChatGPT was trained on a dataset of 300 billion words. The dataset was 570 GB in size and consisted of crawled web data, books, Wikipedia, etc. (Analytics India Magazine)
How was ChatGPT trained?
- ChatGPT is a Large Language Model (LLM) trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
- RLHF means that during initial model training, human AI trainers rated ChatGPT’s responses as “correct” or “wrong”, helping it improve its responses.
Limitations of ChatGPT
While ChatGPT can help you do fun things like writing movie scripts, launching your own online course, or writing AI-generated stories, it does have its limitations.
- ChatGPT Cannot Access the Internet.
Can ChatGPT read links? No, as an AI language model, ChatGPT cannot access the internet or external links. It can only provide information and answer questions based on the text it was trained on.
Source: ChatGPT
- ChatGPT’s knowledge is limited to its training data which has the cutoff year of 2021.
- ChatGPT can give wrong information. It has a tendency to sound confident despite being incorrect in some cases. Users are advised to fact-check.
- All LLM models are prone to such inaccuracies. This is one of the reasons Google has been hesitant in releasing its own ChatGPT-like conversational AI called Lamda to the general public.
Real-World Impact
ChatGPT has passed the US Med licensing exam, law school exams, and Wharton’s MBA exam. Unfortunately, it is also being used for some nefarious purposes like generating hacking scripts, phishing emails, etc.
CyberSecurity Threat
- ChatGPT is being used to write convincing phishing messages and create malicious code (even without prior programming knowledge by the prompter). (Source: TechCrunch)
- For example, ChatGPT can be asked to write a medical advice article in the “style of a doctor” or craft legal documents that look “legit” (but aren’t actually written by a lawyer).
- ChatGPT can also “imitate” the writing style of famous personalities.
- It can also generate working code for adversarial attacks, ransomware attacks, and other exploits when given a simple English prompt. This will arm potential hackers who earlier were limited by their programming knowledge.
- 51% of IT professionals predict that we will witness a successful cyberattack done with the help of ChatGPT by the end of this year. (Blackberry Research)
- ChatGPT has already been used to create an info stealer, an encryption tool, and for dark web malware scripts.
Threat to Higher Education
- ChatGPT can be used to create convincing essays and research papers. While tools to detect AI content exist but they are not very reliable.
- Thus, the potential for misuse in academia is a lot: students can cheat by submitting assignments written by AI and pass without acquiring any real knowledge.
- In the near future, Open AI has said that it plans to “watermark” content generated by ChatGPT to prevent academic fraud and spam.
- Springer (a research publisher) has asked researchers
- not to credit ChatGPT as an author (as a bot cannot be held accountable)
- to Document the use of chatGPT in the acknowledgments or methods section.
Other Reactions
- Stack Overflow (a popular coding question and answer platform) banned the use of ChatGPT because it can be used to give legit-looking but actually useless/wrong answers. This makes it harder to find relevant answers that actually work.
- Amazon has warned employees not to share sensitive information with ChatGPT. (Source)
- Artificial Intelligence tokens like DeepBrain Chain and Numeraire witnessed a sharp rise in prices after debuting of ChatGPT. According to CoinGecko, prices of AI tokens increased by up to 77%. (Coingecko)
Apps Based On ChatGPT
- Recently announced Bing AI uses a more powerful version of ChatGPT called Prometheus.
- The Indian government is planning to integrate ChatGPT into an educational tool to help students.
- Lexi is India’s first AI-based e-commerce chatbot app that uses ChatGPT.
- Microsoft plans to add ChatGPT-like AI to office apps later this year.
- A business owner on Reddit posted a video of an internal tool they had created based on ChatGPT. It gave responses like ChatGPT but based on company information.
- TweetGPT is a chrome extension that writes tweets for you using ChatGPT.
- Promptheus is a chrome extension that takes voice input and sends it as text prompt to CHatGPT, returning with a response.
- YouTube Summary With ChatGPT summarizes Youtube videos from transcriptions.
- Merlin is a ChatGPT based toolto create replies, shorten the text, provide summarised content and more.
- ShareGPT is an app to share chatGPT prompts with other users.
- ChatGPT writer is an extenstion to create AI replies to emails using ChatGPT.
- ChatGPT for Google collects answers to your search query from across Bing, Google, and DuckDuckGo (again uses Bing).
- Engage AI can read any Linkedin post and generate a comment on your behalf based on the content contained in the post. It is based on ChatGPT.
Alternatives & Competitors of ChatGPT
Google Vs ChatGPT
Google will soon launch an AI search assistant called Bard AI. Sundar Pichai, CEO Google, shared a short clip of Bard AI in action.
Bard AI’s demo response was found incorrect and led to Google losing over $100 billion in market cap!
Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system, or exoplanets. This is inaccurate.
The first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.
Reuters
Background: AI and Search
- ChatGPT since its launch has shown the ability to give direct responses to most user queries with the chance to ask specific follow-up questions. This is an area Google falls behind.
- Google issues a code red on the release of ChatGPT.
- Google Lamda: First demoed in 2020, LAMDA is a cutting-edge language model at the forefront of Google’s AI research.
- It could converse with the user on a variety of topics, make jokes, write poems, etc much like ChatGPT today.
- However, Google had been hesitant to push LAMDA to users or make it part of its core search service as AI models are prone to inaccuracies (ChatGPT, now Bard and Bing are all guilty of sounding confident while being incorrect).
- Google PaLM: PaLM is another language model already demoed by Google. It has been trained on 540 billion parameters (in comparison to only 175 Billion parameters of ChatGPT).
Microsoft and ChatGPT
Microsoft has been a step ahead of Google in launching an AI search assistant. Several users have already been able to preview Bing AI “the co-pilot for the web”. See examples of Bing AI’s responses.
Which model is behind Bing AI?
…A new, next-generation OpenAI large language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search. It takes key learnings and advancements from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 – and it is even faster, more accurate and more capable.
Techcrunch
Youchat
- Like ChatGPT, Youchat can hold conversations with its users. Unlike ChatGPT, Youchat is connected to the internet.
Wordtune
- One of the problems with ChatGPT is its tendency to give statistics and definitions without sources and citations. Wordtune is a conversational model that fixes this by providing citations.
ChatGPT Infographics
General Facts
Wrap Up
ChatGPT has taken the world by storm and has ushered in a new era of AI-driven assistants.
People around the world are using ChatGPT in fascinating ways to make money, create courses, write movie scripts, be more productive, boost their creativity, etc.
P.S. If you notice any incorrect information, please send me an email (with the source) and it will be rectified asap.
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