But two months after its debut, ChatGPT has more than 30 million users and receives about five million visits a day, two people with knowledge of the numbers said. This makes it one of the fastest growing software products in the storage space. (In contrast, Instagram took almost one year to get the first 10 million users.)
Growth has brought challenges. ChatGPT has had frequent outages as it runs out of processing power, and users have found ways to bypass some of the bot’s security features. The hype surrounding ChatGPT has also angered some competitors from larger tech companies who have done so pointed out that, strictly speaking, the underlying technology is not that new.
ChatGPT is also a money pit for now. There is no advertising, and the average conversation costs the company”single digit cents‘ in computing power, likely to the tune of millions of dollars a week, according to a post on Twitter by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman. To offset the cost, the company announced this week that it would start selling a $20 monthly subscription known as ChatGPT Plus.
Despite its limitations, ChatGPT’s success has catapulted OpenAI into the ranks of Silicon Valley’s power players. The company recently inked a $10 billion deal with Microsoft, which plans to integrate the startup’s technology into its Bing search engine and other products. Google declared “code red”. in response to ChatGPT, it has been quick to track many of its own AI products to catch up.
Mr. Altman said his goal with OpenAI is to create what he calls “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, an artificial intelligence equivalent to human intellect. He was an outspoken advocate for AI, saying in a recent interview that the benefits to humanity “could be so incredible that I can hardly imagine it.” (He also said that at worst the AI could kill us all.)
With ChatGPT capturing the world’s imagination, Mr. Altman has found himself in the rare position of downplaying a successful product. He’s concerned that too much hype about ChatGPT could provoke a regulatory backlash or raise inflated expectations for future releases, two people familiar with his views said. On Twitter he tried to dampen the excitement, Calling ChatGPT “incredibly limited” and warns users that “relying on it for anything important right now is a mistake.”
He has also discouraged employees from boasting about ChatGPT’s success. In December, days after the company announced that more than a million people had signed up for the service, OpenAI President Greg Brockman tweeted that he had reached two million users. Mr. Altman asked him to delete the tweet, telling him that promoting such rapid growth was unwise, said two people who saw the exchange.
