ChatGPT might have been the most viral product of all time when it had been released — it had been the fastest product ever to get to 100 million users — but it seems to have broken its own record.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that ChatGPT is adding 1 million new users per hour after introducing its new image generation feature. He said this was much faster than even the adoption of ChatGPT, which had similarly gone viral after being launched in November 2022.
“The chatgpt launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments I’d ever seen, and we added one million users in five days. We added one million users in the last hour,” he posted on X.
Less than a week ago, ChatGPT had introduced native image generation to its app. During the demo, Altman and two other engineers had taken a selfie of themselves, and then immediately turned it into a cartoon using ChatGPT. As soon as the demo was released, people began turning their own pictures into Japan’s Studio Ghibli-inspired cartoons. This set off a viral internet trend, which saw everyone from celebrities to political parties to sportspersons sharing their own Studio Ghibli pictures.
Such was the popularity of these images that Altman said that OpenAI’s servers were “melting” trying to keep up with the demand. Yesterday, he actually asked people to “chill” on generating images, saying that his team needed to sleep as well.
It appears that people have paid no heed to Sam Altman’s words, and are still furiously generating Ghibli inspired images. All this has meant a huge rush of traffic to ChatGPT, as people are creating accounts on the service to make their own AI pictures. This episode shows how powerful AI can be — the right product with the right use-case can often feel like magic, and get the whole world to try it out. And with ChatGPT getting 1 million new users every hour, it’ll only serve to popularize AI even more among the broader population.