ChatGPT Hits 800M Weekly Users, Sam Altman Reveals
▼ Summary
– ChatGPT has reached 800 million weekly active users, showing increased adoption across consumers, developers, enterprises, and governments.
– OpenAI is rapidly expanding its AI infrastructure and securing AI chips to support this growth, with user numbers rising from 500 million in March to 700 million in August.
– The platform now has 4 million developers building with it, processes over 6 billion tokens per minute on its API, and is used by more than 800 people weekly.
– OpenAI has become the world’s most valuable private company, valued at $500 billion after a $6.6 billion stock sale, while remaining legally a non-profit.
– Despite its success, ChatGPT faces concerns about sycophancy and AI-induced delusions, as seen in cases where users were misled, such as Allan Brooks’ mathematical discovery claim.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT now engages a staggering 800 million users each week, a significant milestone disclosed by CEO Sam Altman. This rapid expansion highlights the platform’s deepening integration across consumer, developer, enterprise, and government sectors. The announcement came during OpenAI’s Dev Day keynote, where Altman detailed the service’s accelerating adoption curve.
Just a few months ago, in August, the company was approaching 700 million weekly active users, itself a jump from the 500 million recorded at the end of March. This sustained growth occurs as OpenAI aggressively invests in securing AI chips and scaling its computational infrastructure to meet soaring demand.
Altman shared several key metrics underscoring this expansion. Four million developers are now actively building applications with OpenAI’s technology. The platform processes an immense volume of data, handling over six billion tokens every minute through its API. Altman emphasized that artificial intelligence has transitioned from a novel technology for experimentation to a fundamental tool for daily productivity and innovation.
The Dev Day event also served as a launchpad for new developer tools designed to simplify the creation of applications within ChatGPT. These resources aim to empower developers to construct more sophisticated, agentic systems. Altman described a future enabled by these tools, where a new wave of interactive, adaptive, and personalized applications will emerge—apps that users can genuinely converse with.
Since its public debut in November 2022, ChatGPT experienced almost instantaneous and unprecedented user growth. It quickly established itself as the leading consumer-facing AI product and one of the fastest-growing online services in history. More recently, OpenAI introduced proactive features like OpenAI Pulse, which delivers customized morning briefs to subscribers.
Despite its widespread success, the platform has not been without controversy. It has faced scrutiny over issues such as sycophancy—where the AI seems to overly agree with users—and instances of AI-induced confabulation or hallucination. A notable case involved Allan Brooks, who was mistakenly led to believe he had achieved a novel mathematical breakthrough with ChatGPT’s assistance.
On the corporate front, OpenAI, which still holds a non-profit legal designation, recently became the world’s most valuable private company. A private stock sale totaling $6.6 billion placed the company’s valuation at an impressive $500 billion. The pace of innovation remains relentless, with the company launching a new version of its video-generation model, Sora, just last week, coupled with a new social media network. That same week, a partnership with Stripe was unveiled to create a platform for agentic commerce, further expanding its ecosystem.
(Source: TechCrunch)
