ChatGPT Passes One Million Users

Five days after it went online, OpenAI says a million people have tried ChatGPT. For comparison, Instagram took about two and a half months to reach that number, and Netflix took three and a half years.

OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, announced this morning that ChatGPT crossed one million users — five days after it went online last Wednesday. The number comes from a short post on Twitter, not a formal report, but there's no reason to doubt it: the website has been slow or unavailable for stretches of the past several days, and OpenAI has taken to showing a “ChatGPT is at capacity right now” message when too many people are trying at once.

A million is a number worth pausing on. Instagram took about two and a half months to reach a million users. Spotify took five months. Netflix, the streaming service, took three and a half years. Those are all products companies spent heavily to promote; ChatGPT has had no advertising at all. People are finding it because other people are showing them.

What the number doesn't tell you is how many of those million will come back. A lot of the early use, judging by what people are sharing, is play: asking it to write a sonnet about a cat, or to explain quantum physics in the voice of a pirate. That's fun for an afternoon. Whether it becomes something people open every day, the way they open a search engine, is the question that matters, and it's too early to answer.

There's also the question of what it costs. Altman said in the same exchange that each conversation costs OpenAI “single-digit cents” in computing power, and that the company “will have to monetize it somehow at some point.” At a million users, cents add up quickly. For now, ChatGPT is free, and OpenAI is paying to find out what people do with it.