India’s internet had been full of Ghibli images all week, and ChatGPT now has the numbers to show for it.
India has become ChatGPT’s fastest-growing market, OpenAI says. “India is now our fastest growing ChatGPT market,” posted OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap on X. “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,” he added.
Lightcap also shared some context on just how viral its native image generation launch was. “Very crazy first week for images in ChatGPT – over 130M users have generated 700M+ (!) images since last Tuesday,” he said.
There had been indications that India was taking to ChatGPT in a big way. “What’s happening with AI adoption in india right now is amazing to watch. We love to see the explosion of creativity–India is outpacing the world,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had said yesterday. Altman had also reposted the MyGov account which had shared Ghibli-inspired pictures of PM Modi, and an India Post account which had posted pictures of Indian postmen in the Ghibli style. Today Altman appeared to engage with Indian users further, replying to cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar who’d posted Ghibli-inspired images of his own, and creating his own image as an Indian cricket player.
But even outside India, ChatGPT’s numbers seem pretty stunning. At one point, ChatGPT was adding 1 million users per hour. It’s now seen 130 million users create images in the last week alone. And 700 million images is seriously impressive — it’s one image for every 11th person on the planet.
ChatGPT seems to have perfected the art of making its AI products go viral. In November 2022, it had released ChatGPT, which had become the fastest-growing product of all time. Around this time, Google and Anthropic had similar chatbots, but never released them. Meta had released a chatbot two weeks before OpenAI that was geared towards scientific papers, but took it down following criticism. OpenAI not only chose to release ChatGPT, but productized it in such a way that it went viral. Similarly, AI generated images had been around for a while, but OpenAI demonstrated a step-function in their abilities when it released them last week, and very cleverly showed off a Ghibli-style cartoon in their demo. There might be other labs that are competing with OpenAI in technical specifications, but the company’s ability to create viral AI products and launches at the moment seems second to none.