ChatGPT May Be the Fastest Growing App in History

It’s no secret that ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence with big language patterns from OpenAI, has taken the internet by storm. Everyone is talking about it, everywhere on the internet, including Gizmodo. The AI ​​chatbot can almost instantly generate human-like paragraphs of text in response to any prompt you might receive (just don’t rely on it to do your math homework correctly, or offer a replacement correct for researched writing) .

And the extent of ChatGPT’s stickiness is perhaps even more surprising than you think. Chatbot has become the fastest-growing consumer-facing app in history, according to a new analysis from Swiss investment bank UBS, as reported by multiple financial outlets. In January, just two months after the program’s public launch, ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users (MAUs), UBS noted, based on data compiled by Similarweb. By the end of last month, the bot was being visited by about 13 million unique visitors every day.

Those numbers are about double what they were just a month ago in December, when the app had about 57 million MAUs and about six million daily views, according to UBS, per Markets Insider. By comparison, TikTok took about nine months from its launch worldwide to reach 100 million users, according to a report by Reuters. Instagram didn’t reach that benchmark for two and a half years, the media outlet added.

Previously, it was clear that ChatGPT became popular quickly. Often, accessing it is a game of constantly refreshing the page and waiting in line, as the site often states that it is at capacity. And an influx of one million users in five days completely crashed the application in early December 2022.

But these new statistics from UBS are beyond mere emblematic popularity, they’re potentially record breaking. “We cannot recall an app scaling at this rate,” the UBS analysis said according to Markets Insider. “In 20 years into the web space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer web application,” the UBS authors added.

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Gizmodo reached out to OpenAI with questions, including how it is managing the number of users on its platform, but the company did not immediately respond. UBS also did not respond to an email from Gizmodo seeking the bank’s original analysis.

OpenAI has not only attracted individual users to ChatGPT – it has also attracted billions in new investment from Microsoft. Plus, the startup has fueled an unprecedented competitive push from established tech giants like Google.

Although there are many things worth criticizing about the app—including its tendency toward inaccuracy, the potential for plagiarism, and ethical concerns—it would be foolish to pretend that ChatGPT isn’t incredibly impressive. The program has experienced a meteoric rise to the top of the Internet for a reason. That said, it’s not impressive enough to justify shelling out $20 a month for Priority Access and the other minimal upgrades offered in the new paid, premium subscription version. But surely, it’s only a matter of time before OpenAI manages to monetize all of its millions of users.