ChatGPT is already the fastest-growing product in the world with a pride of place among the top 10 most-visited websites globally, and one of its power users seems to be none other than CEO Sam Altman.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that he’s forgotten how to work without ChatGPT. “ChatGPT went down yesterday, first time in a while, and I had to work without it for four hours,” he said after an outage which had caused ChatGPT to stop working for users globally. “And I had kind of forgotten how to do that. And it really did make me think, like, man, we’re going to be relying on these systems more and more. And was a crazy cascading thing, because at the time we most needed tools to like help us solve a problem, I didn’t have it. The thing was just broken,” he added.
Altman said that ChatGPT was becoming a critical part of people’s workday. “It’s like the ultimate critical infrastructure utility. The world is just getting warmed up on it now,” he said.
It’s likely that Altman is biased, given how his company makes ChatGPT, but ChatGPT’s growth has been something to behold over the last few years. ChatGPT had become the fastest product in history to touch 100 million users, reaching the landmark two months after being launched. It had beaten viral products like Instagram, TikTok and other social media giants to the landmark by a large margin. ChatGPT has maintained its initial traction, and is now the 8th most visited website in the world behind names like Google, YouTube and Facebook. And people are paying to use the service as well — OpenAI had reported a revenue of $3.7 billion, of which 70 percent came from over 10 million paying customers. It might not be certain whether ChatGPT is yet “critical infrastructure”, but with millions of users and a slow seeping into the cultural lexicon, it sure seems to be on the path to getting there.