ChatGPT Reached an Estimated 100 Million Users in Two Months, Faster Than Any App Before It

Analysts at the bank UBS estimate that 100 million people used the chatbot in January. TikTok took about nine months to reach that number; Instagram took two and a half years.

Two months after it went online, ChatGPT is being used by an estimated 100 million people a month, according to an analysis published by the bank UBS and reported by Reuters this morning. The figure comes from web-traffic measurements rather than from OpenAI, which has not released its own numbers, but it is in line with what the company has said about strain on its servers. About 13 million different people used it on an average day in January.

For comparison: TikTok, the previous record holder, took about nine months after its global launch to reach 100 million monthly users. Instagram took two and a half years. The UBS analysts wrote that in twenty years of following the internet, they could not recall a faster ramp for a consumer application.

Two things make the number more striking. ChatGPT has had no advertising — people found it because other people showed it to them. And it has been, for stretches of most days, too busy to use; the "at capacity" message has become a running joke. OpenAI began offering a paid version yesterday, at $20 a month, that promises access even during peak times. That is a sentence nobody expected to write about a research demonstration in December.

What the number does not say is how many of those 100 million are doing anything more than trying it once. That is the question for the next two months.