Something game-changing happened in December 2023.
Hype was unleashed as OpenAI launched their ChatGPT service.
In short, it is a chatbot version of their GPT-3 large language model (LLM).
And suddenly, the otherwise more geeky and very advanced technology was open to the world and easy to use due to its interface and free access.
In just 5 days (so less than a week), more than 1 million users did try the platform.
For comparison, it took two months for a less technical and more widely popular platform like Instagram to reach the 1 million users mark.
In this statistic, we will try to elaborate a bit on the current user numbers.
ChatGPT Statistics & Facts
ChatGPT is a conversational language generation model developed by OpenAI.
- More than 1 million users in only 5 days
- 100 million monthly users in January 2023 according to UBS analyst estimates
- There were +266 million visits to the ChatGPT website in December 2023 according to Similarweb estimate
- In August 2023 the number of visits had reached 1.43 billion.
- The highest percentage of ChatGPT users belong to USA (15.22%), followed by India (6.32%), Japan (4.01%) and Canada (2.75%).
- Each user spends an average of 8 minutes and 32 seconds on the website.
ChatGPT General Facts
- It is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) architecture, which uses a transformer neural network to generate natural language text.
- ChatGPT was trained on a 40GB of conversational text data dataset.
- ChatGPT's transformer has 175 billion parameters.
- The model is capable of completing text on a variety of conversational topics and generating human-like text based on the context provided
- It supports more than 95 languages (see the full list we tested)
- ChatGPT has been trained using data - both text and code - that existed prior to Q4 2021, meaning it is not aware of any events that have taken place after that date.
- ChatGPT has already got banned from some schools and universities
- ChatGPT answered the Medical Licensing Exams similar to the level of a third-year medical student, with an accuracy of around 60% for the most difficult set of questions.
- OpenAI was founded in December 2015
- The latest and most advanced version of its LLM - GPT4 - was released on Marts 14th 2023
- OpenAI filed a trademark application for GPT-5 in August 2023 and it includes software to convert audio files into text, voice and speech recognition, developing, running and analyzing algorithms - and more.
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, 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).
- The professor estimates the ChatGPT model has 175 Billion parameters and receives 10 Million queries per day assuming 1 million users make an average of 10 queries/user. (Tom Goldstein’s Twitter)
- ChatGPT is completely Free to use during its research preview.
- ChatGPT is available in a paid version named ChatGPT Plus. Cost $20 USD/month.
- Open AI has added “Turbo” mode for ChatGPT plus users. It gives faster responses.
- OpenAI is reportedly earning $80 million a month and is therefore expected to reach its goal of generating a billion dollars in 2024, according to Fortune.com
When was ChatGPT launched?
ChatGPT was launched on November 30th, 2023.
Investors in OpenAI
Microsoft has made a 1 billion USD investment in OpenAI and confirmed an additional investment of $10 billion in Open AI. Bing got a 15% Daily Traffic Bump from ChatGPT Integration.
Various investors further have supported the company with investments, including some of the most well-known names in technology and venture capital.
- Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla
- Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator
- Ilya Sutskever, Research Scientist at Google Brain
- Greg Brockman, Founder of Cloudera
- Wojciech Zaremba, Research Scientist at Google Brain
- Peter Thiel, Co-Founder of PayPal
- Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn
- Jessica Livingston, Founding Partner of Y Combinator
- William Tunstall-Pedoe, Founder of Evi Technologies (acquired by Amazon)
- Adam D'Angelo, Founder of Quora
Monthly Number of Active ChatGPT users
No official figures are available, as OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, is not a publicly traded company, so we cannot expect to receive regular updates on user numbers, such as those provided by Google and Facebook in quarterly financial statements.
But we can collect some of the data and quotes from the team behind OpenAI.
There have been no public statements about users since then. But with wide media coverage and social media frenzy, it's safe to assume the numbers have continued upwards. Much upwards!
If we look at other data sources, a site like Similarweb, estimate that:
there were +266 million visits to the ChatGPT website in December 2023
By examining Google Trends , we can see some of the hype peaked at around December 12, 2023, before taking a dip during the holiday season and then increasing again in the early months of 2023.
If we turn to the keyword tracker Ahref, they estimate that OpenAI gets around 1.1 million users from organic search results. However, these numbers do not seem to include subdomains like chat.openai.com, so this will essentially without ChatGPT numbers included in users.
This also explains the missing peak in the graph.
How Many People Are on ChatGPT?
No exact numbers can be obtained since OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT is not a publicly traded company.
We know for a fact that the service got 1 million users in merely 5 days.
We estimate that we currently have at least 100 million users based on the broad coverage and hype around ChatGPT.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a powerful language model developed by OpenAI.
It is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) architecture and is trained on a large dataset of conversational text. It uses natural language processing.
This allows it to generate human-like text responding to a prompt or question.
It can be fine-tuned for various language tasks, such as text completion, question answering, and machine translation.
It can also generate creative and engaging text, such as story-telling, poetry, and dialogue generation.
As a marketer is possible to use it in many different ways. We have covered how it can be used for SEO.
10 facts and numbers about OpenAI
- OpenAI is a private AI research organization that was founded in December 2015.
- The company's mission is to ensure that artificial intelligence (AI) is developed in a way that is safe and beneficial for humanity.
- OpenAI's founders include Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and Wojciech Zaremba (source).
- OpenAI has developed several AI models, including GPT-3, one of the world's largest language models.
- In 2020, OpenAI released an API for GPT-3 called OpenAI GPT-3 so developers can easily integrate GPT-3 into their applications.
- GPT-4 is expected to be launched in 2023. It has 100 times the training data of GPT-3
- OpenAI has collaborations with companies such as Microsoft and IBM.
- OpenAI is supported by several high-profile investors, including Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Jessica Livingston.
- OpenAI has a focus on safety, transparency, and collaboration to build responsible AI that benefits humanity
- OpenAI has made significant contributions to the field of machine learning, and is an active player in OpenAI open-source community, regularly publishing new results and models to the community
The engine behind ChatGPT and its training data
ChatGPT was developed from a GPT-3.5 model that completed its training in early 2022. This was done using an Azure AI supercomputer system.
- GPT-1 was trained using 7000 unpublished books, and its model had 117 million parameters.
- GPT-2 was then trained on 40 gigabytes of text data from over 8 million documents, and its model had 1.5 billion parameters - around 10 times more than its predecessor.
- GPT-3 was trained on 45 terabytes of text data from multiple sources, including Wikipedia and books, and its model had 175 billion parameters - approximately 100 times more than GPT-2.
- GPT-4 is expected to have 100 trillion parameters (Andrew Feldman, the head of Cerebras, which is collaborating with OpenAI on the GPT model training, is quoted for saying that is the amount for the upcoming model)
Answers and ChatGPT statistics we are still missing
We are still lacking data on these types of questions until OpenAI disclose them;
- How many daily active users does ChatGPT have?
- How many Americans use ChatGPT?
- How many use it globally?
- How many have tried ChatGPT?
- What is the average number of messages created per user?
- What is the average time a user spends on chat.openai.com / ChatGPT?
- What is the monthly active user count of ChatGPT?
- What is the retention rate of users who have tried ChatGPT?
- How does the usage of ChatGPT vary between different time zones and regions?
- What is the most common use case for ChatGPT among developers and companies?
- How does the performance of ChatGPT compare to other language models in terms of accuracy and fluency?
- What is the average response time for ChatGPT when processing user inputs?
- What percentage of users return to use ChatGPT after their first session?
- What is the average number of concurrent sessions for ChatGPT?
- How does the performance of ChatGPT change over time?
- What are the most common errors or issues users encounter when using ChatGPT?
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