ChatGPT is already the fastest-growing product of all time, but it’s looking to supercharge its growth even more.
OpenAI is running ads on Instagram to garner Indian users. These ads are in Hindi, and seem to focus on ChatGPT’s image generation capabilities.
“ChatGPT ke saath apni manchahi tasveer muft me banayein (Make whatever images you want for free with ChatGPT),” the ads which appeared in Instagram’s stories feed said. The ads showed two images that had been transformed using ChatGPT to a cartoon style. The link in the ads led users to ChatGPT’s website. The ad was being run by OpenAI’s instagram account, which has 2.3 million followers.
OpenAI has previously talked about the incredible growth it had seen in India since releasing its image generation features last month. This feature had gone viral, with millions of Indian users taking to the service to turn their pictures into the Studio Ghibli style images. At that point, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had said that India was outpacing the world in AI adoption. He’d also reposted several Indian accounts on X which had made Studio Ghilbli-style images, including an official MyGov account and the India post account. He’d also shared a cartoon of himself playing cricket in an Indian jersey. A few days later, OpenAI had said that India was the company’s fastest-growing ChatGPT market. “The range of visual creativity has been extremely inspiring we appreciate your patience as we try to serve everyone, team continues to work around the clock,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap had posted on X.
It appears that the initial excitement — when ChatGPT was having to scramble resources and engineers to cater to the Indian demand — has now faded. But the company seems keen on maintaining the momentum, and is now running ads in native languages in India to draw in more users. These ads serve a dual purpose — not only can image generation be a great initiation for new users to ChatGPT, which can lead them to learn what all else the service can do, the focus on ChatGPT’s image generation capabilities also counters hundreds of smaller startups that could be using ChatGPT’s and other companies’ APIs to create images. But letting users know that these images can be generated for free on ChatGPT itself, ChatGPT positions itself strongly as a customer product that’s front and center of user’s minds. And this distribution heft — ChatGPT is already the sixth most visited website in the world — can keep the company in good stead once models become largely commoditized and its lead over other AI companies in model capabilities diminishes.