107 Up-to-Date ChatGPT Statistics & User Numbers [April 2024]

ChatGPT userbase grew by an explosive 9,900% to reach 100M users in just 60 days of launch and the hype doesn’t seem to be fading.

This is a complete list of latest ChatGPT statistics based on authoritative sources like OpenAI and Reuters. Let’s dive in.

Similar reports: Google Gemini vs GPT-4, Baidu’s ERNIE 4.0 vs ChatGPT, Deep dive into GPT-4

ChatGPT User Growth

ChatGPT User Numbers

• ChatGPT currently has 180.5 million users out of which 100 million users are active weekly.
• The total number of ChatGPT users grew from 100 million in January 2023 to 180.5 million by August 2023, representing an 80.5% increase over the eight-month period.

• ChatGPT was launched on November 30, 2022 and crossed 1 million users in just 5 days of launch and gained 100 million active users by January 2023.
• ChatGPT set the record for the fastest-growing platform in history. Later, this record was broken by Instagram’s Thread app.

• The highest percentage of ChatGPT users belong to USA (46.75%), followed by India (5.47%), China (3.73%), Canada (3.7%), and United Kingdom (3.65%).

• 65.68% of ChatGPT users are male, while 34.32% are female.

• The majority of ChatGPT’s users are young – 62.52% are between 18 and 34 years old.

Website Visits & Monthly Traffic

• The ChatGPT website has hit10 billion all-time visits on November 30, 2023, and crossed 2 billion monthly visits in Jan 2024.
• ChatGPT received over 10 million queries per day during launch week. The number of queries is increasing every month due to its popularity.
• ChatGPT got 60 million website visits every day and saw 1.43 billion monthly visits in August 2023.
• 9 out of 10 users find ChatGPT directly via its official URL. Over 60% of ChatGPT’s social media traffic comes from YouTube.
• Each user spends an average of 8 minutes and 32 seconds on the website and the bounce rate is 38.67%.

Sources: Reuters, Similarweb

Number of ChatGPT Plus Subscribers

• ChatGPT has more than 180.5 million active users. The number of ChatGPT Plus subscribers is estimated between 230,000-250,000 as of October 2023 (based on app revenue reported by TechCrunch).
• Each user has to pay $20/month to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus resulting in a revenue of $4.58 million per month from mobile Plus subscribers alone.

ChatGPT Mobile App

• ChatGPT mobile app is available on iOS and Android.
• The iOS app achieved 5M downloads within 3 weeks of launch.
• The US leads in ChatGPT app downloads with 1.5M downloads in the first month of launch.
• ChatGPT mobile app allows users to upload images, generate AI images, and use voice control.

Revenue & Cost

Is ChatGPT Profitable?

• According to Forbes and Financial Times, Open AI is earning $167 million from ChatGPT per month as of February 2024.
• Open AI’s annual run rate is estimated at $2billion (monthly revenue x 12).
• In October 2023, Open AI made $4.58 million from its ChatGPT Plus mobile app alone.
• Revenue sources:
  • ChatGPT has a completely free version (which uses GPT 3.5) as well as a paid option (with GPT-4).
  • The paid version is called ChatGPT Plus and has a subscription price of $20. Open AI earns an estimated $4 million per month from Plus subscribers.
  • Open AI also provides ChatGPT Enterprise which is a specialized offering of ChatGPT for businesses. This makes the bulk of their revenues.

Cost of Running ChatGPT Per Day

• OpenAI spends $700,000 every day to run ChatGPT as of August 2023.
• According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the average cost of a single chat with ChatGPT is in single-digit cents.
• In January 2023, Tom Goldstein, an AI ML Professor at Maryland University, had 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 were based on Azure Cloud costs (server infrastructure on which ChatGPT runs) and 10 million queries per day.
• By August 2023, daily queries to ChatGPT increased to over 60 million, leading to increase in costs.

Model Training

What Model is Used in ChatGPT?

• ChatGPT uses a fine-tuned model based on GPT-3.5 (text-DaVinci-003). ChatGPT Plus uses GPT-4 which is more accurate and can understand both text and images.
• GPT-4 has a context memory of 25,000 words, has 40% better accuracy and 82% less likely to respond to inappropriate requests.
• GPT 4 also beat GPT 3.5 at performance tests – scoring in 90th percentile of several hard human examinations like US BAR exam, International Biology and Math Olympiads.
• GPT 3.5 (Text-DaVinci-003) being used in the ChatGPT free version builds on an earlier open AI model called InstructGPT.
• InstructGPT was better at understanding and answering human requests than GPT 3.

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.

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.
• Open AI also uses the conversations its users with ChatGPT have to improve the model.

How to Turn Off Chat History?

• OpenAI uses user chats for model improvement, but users can opt out.
• To disable chat history and model training, go to Settings > Data Controls > toggle off Chat History & Training.
• This prevents new chats from being used for training and they won’t show in history.

Abilities

• ChatGPT can understand user questions and answer them in natural language like a human.
• GPT 4, the successor to GPT 3.5, was released on March 14, 2023.
• GPT 4 has higher accuracy in logic and reasoning tasks than GPT 3.5. It is also multimodal i.e it can understand both text and images. GPT-4 API comes in several variants GPT-4 turbo 128k context and GPT-4 32k context.
• ChatGPT Plus subscribers can access GPT 4 as well as enable other beta features like Plugins, Dall-E, and image-based prompting.
• ChatGPT Plus allows users to create AI generated images using Dall-E 3 and to upload pictures and ask questions about the content inside the image.
• Users can also interact with ChatGPT 4 using voice on the mobile app.
• ChatGPT plus comes with plugins to browse links, perform data analysis, run python code, and even draw diagrams. Some of the popular plugins include: Zapier, Wolfram Alpha, Linkreader.
• CharGPT allows users to upload many types of documents including PDFs.
• Before you had to select Data Analysis, DALL-E, or Browsing. Now ChatGPT auto selects them based on context.
• Users create their own GPTs fed on their custom instructions and knowledge and sell them on Open AI GPT store.

Limitations

• ChatGPT knowledge cut off has been updated to April 2023.
• ChatGPT free cannot access the internet. But, with help of browsing plugin, ChatGPT Plus can search the web for information.
• ChatGPT can give wrong information. It has a tendency to sound confident despite being incorrect in some cases. Users are advised to fact-check.

About OpenAI

Who Created ChatGPT?

• Open AI is the research company that created ChatGPT.
• Open Al also created Dall-E, an image-generation AI and whisper, an AI transcription service.
• Open was co-founded by Elon Musk and is based out of San Francisco (HQ: Pioneer Building in Mission District, San Francisco).

Open AI Valuation and Funding

• OpenAI closed a $300 million funding round at a valuation between $27 billion and $29 billion in April 2023.
• Microsoft invested $1 Billion followed by an additional investment of $10 billion in Open AI.
• Now, Open AI is seeking a new valuation between $80 billion and $90 billion according to the Wall Street Journal. This move comes after the tremendous reception of ChatGPT by the public and the startup sector.

Real World Impact & News

ChatGPT has passed the US Med licensing exam, law school exams, and Wharton’s MBA exam. Many companies like Khan Academy and Duolingo have used GPT to help students learn better.

Unfortunately, it is also being used for some nefarious purposes like cheating in academia, generating hacking scripts, phishing emails, etc.

Firing/Re-hiring of Sam Altman

• On Friday, November 18, 2023, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was fired by the board of directors.
• The firing of Altman was followed by the resignation of Greg Brockman, the company’s longtime president and co-founder, as well as three senior OpenAI researchers.
• Microsoft, who was surprised by the move, offered to hire Sam and key OpenAI employees.
• On Sunday, November 20, 2023, reports emerged that OpenAI may be looking to bring back Sam Altman, following which he was reinstated.

Reaction of AI Experts

• Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Ng, and Yann LeCun, known as godfathers of AI, are divided on the existential risks of AI. Hinton and Bengio see significant dangers, with Hinton declaring AI safety more important than climate change concerns.
• Bengio has called for a temporary halt in AI advancement to create better safety measures.
• Andrew Ng and LeCun believe the existential risks are overstated; Ng is concerned that excessive fear might lead to restrictive laws that could hinder open-source AI progress.

Apps Based on ChatGPT

• 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.
• 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.
• GPT-4 is being used in Khan Academy, Duolingo, Stripe, BeMyEyes and many more such apps.

Job & Labor Market Impacts

• GPT-4 improves upon creative and cognitive capabilities of ChatGPT and it is predicted that over 300 million jobs will be impacted by GPT models.

• In just the first half of 2023, over $14 billion was invested across 86 deals in generative AI startups.
• 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%.

CyberSecurity Threats

• 51% of IT professionals predict that we will witness a successful cyberattack done with the help of ChatGPT by the end of this year.
• According to TechCrunch, ChatGPT is being used to write convincing phishing messages and create malicious code (even without prior programming knowledge by the prompter)
• 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.
• ChatGPT has already been used to create an info stealer, an encryption tool, and for dark web malware scripts.
• Amazon has warned employees not to share sensitive information with ChatGPT.

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.
• 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.

Use of AI to Write Fake Reviews

• According to Originality.AI, there has been a 400% increase in AI generated review since the launch of chatGPT.
• 10% to 30% of reviews on Capterra, G2, and TrustRadius since the launch of ChatGPT are likely to be AI-generated. 

Related News

• Amazon has warned employees not to share sensitive information with ChatGPT.
• 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%. (
• Italy had banned ChatGPT citing concerns back in Jan. On April 29, 2023 Italy unbanned ChatGPT and it is now accessible again.

Alternatives & Competitors

Google Gemini

• Google Gemini is a powerful new large language model (LLM) that Google launched on December 6, 2023. It beats GPT-4 in several key benchmarks like MMLU and MATH.

Grok AI by Elon’s xAI

• GrokAI is an AI chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s startup xAI.
• It aims to “understand the true nature of the universe.”
• GrokAI was launched on November 4, 2023, and will be available to a select group of subscribers to X’s Premium Plus plan.
• Once it’s out of early beta, it will be available to all Premium+ subscribers.
• GrokAI has real-time access to information via the X platform, which is a significant advantage over other models.
• It can fetch up-to-date information from the web about specific topics.
• GrokAI also possesses internet browsing capabilities, allowing it to provide users with comprehensive and timely information.
• However, GrokAI’s responses have limitations, and certain sensitive queries, such as instructions on illegal activities, will be refused by the AI.
• Elon Musk has hinted at GrokAI’s potential humorous side, suggesting that its responses are based on sarcasm.

ChatGPT vs Bing vs Bard

• Microsoft Bing was the first search engine to introduce an AI chatbot in search. Bard is still struggling to catch up to Bing AI’s popularity.

Google Vs ChatGPT

• Google has launched an AI search assistant called Bard in response to ChatGPT and AI powered Bing co-pilot.
• Unlike ChatGPT, Bard is connected to the internet and based on Google’s Palm V2 model with 540 billion parameters.
• Despite the larger size of Bard’s model, it can still hallucinate and give wrong answers.
• During Bard’s launch demo, its response was found incorrect and led to Google losing over $100 billion in market cap as per a report by Reuters.

Bing vs ChatGPT

• Microsoft has invested in OpenAI as well as integrated a finetuned GPT 4 model (called Prometheus) into their Bing search engine.
• Bing AI co-pilot is available for free, connected to Dall-E 3 via Bing Image creator, and comes pre-loaded in Edge browser.
• Unlike ChatGPT free version, Bing chat is connected to the internet, offers suggested replies, and has 3 reply modes to control AI creativity and accuracy.

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.

Others

• Amazon is working on ALexTM 20B model.
• Baidu, a chinese company is also developing an AI chatbot like ChatGPT but their demo was lackluster with pre-recorded presentation.
• Chinese researches also released ChatGLM – a general language model like ChatGPT optimized for Chinese question-answering.
• Anthropic’s Claude is another ChatGPT competitor (bought by Google now).
• AUTOGPT is an autonomous GPT AI which takes an input goal from the user and then autonomously plans and executes the tasks required to achieve it.

Open-Source ChatGPT Alternatives

In this list, only Open Assistant has Apache 2.0 license (that allows commerical usage). Other alternatives used ChatGPT in training and cannot be used for purposes other than personal use or research.

Open Assistant

• Open Assistant is a free ChatGPT alternative with open-source/Apache 2.0/commercial usage license.
• It understands tasks, can interact with third-party systems, and retrieve information dynamically to do so.
• The project aims to build the assistant of the future, able to not only write email and cover letters but do meaningful work, use APIs, dynamically research information, and much more, with the ability to be personalized and extended by anyone.

Stanford Alpaca

• Alpaca is a seven-billion parameter variant of Meta’s LLaMA. It was fine-tuned using 52,000 instructions generated by GPT-3.5 (ChatGPT). (Much like the way, human testers were used to fine-tune ChatGPT, Stanford used the model behind ChatGPT to train their Alpaca AI.)
• In tests, Alpaca performed comparably to OpenAI’s model but produced more hallucinations.
• Alpaca is significant because it proved that building and training new AI models can be insanely cheap. (Alpaca was trained using just $600)

Vicuna

• Vicuna-13B, an open-source chatbot trained by fine-tuning LLaMA.
• It was evaluated by using GPT-4 as a judge: Vicuna-13B achieves more than 90% quality of OpenAI ChatGPT and Google Bard while outperforming other models like LLaMA and Stanford Alpaca in more than 90% of cases.
• The cost of training Vicuna-13B is around $300.
• The Vicuna code is at available on Github for non-commercial use.

Dolly 2

• Databricks released a completely open source model Dolly 2 which has been trained by their own employees.

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.

If you’re interested in cool applications of AI, you might also like my experiments with AI voice generators and AI story assistants.

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Nerdynav

I'm Nav, a computer engineer, writer, and solopreneur. Here to help you and your business thrive through tech and self-growth. Cited in Forbes and TechCrunch.

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