OpenAI’s ChatGPT has continued its remarkable growth with the addition of another one million users over the last 24 hours. This follows a previous impressive result which saw its weekly active users reach 400 million over the past six months.
While expressing the latest development Monday via an X post, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, expressed that the launch of the chatbot in 2022 has been one of the unexplainable experiences he has ever witnessed.
“The chatgpt launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments i’d ever seen, and we added one million users in five days. We added one million users in the last hour,” he said.
The AI chatbot saw a huge shift in its numbers where its paid subscribers nearly tripled to 15.5 million in 2024 from 5.8 million the previous year.
See Also: Ghibli-style images: ChatGPT to introduce 3 generations per day limit after system overload.
Following its launch in November 2022, the AI chatbot took off in a record-breaking fashion by reaching 1 million users in 5 days. By an extended comparison, it took Instagram approximately 2.5 months to reach 1 million downloads. And Netflix had to wait around 3.5 years to reach 1 million users.
However, the record was surpassed by Threads almost a year later, after the social media platform reached 1 million users within an hour. It was also estimated that ChatGPT hit 100 million monthly active users in January 2023 (after only 3 months), making it the fastest-growing application in history until Threads took that crown in July 2023. The milestone took TikTok 9 months to reach, and Instagram took 2.5 years.
According to data analysis website Semrush, ChatGPT recorded over 5 billion visits in February 2025 to rank 8th in the world’s most visited websites. In the same month, it recorded 4 million weekly visits up from 300 million in December 2025 and 100 million in November 2023. OpenAI noted that it plans to hit 1 billion users by the end of 2025, according to the report.
Although ChatGPT is free to use, it has 10 million paying subscribers (Plus, Team, and Pro) and an additional 1 million commercial plan users. From its paid subscriptions, the company makes $2.7 billion per year, which is forecasted to reach $4 billion by the end of 2025.
What’s driving ChatGPT’s numbers?
For ChatGPT, the latest milestone has been attributed to recent updates in its version and additional features. ChatGPT has been a generic name for several large language models from OpenAI, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4o, and GPT-4.5.
According to a March report by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the recent growth was driven by customer novelty as users were interested in trying the app but weren’t certain how it would fit into their daily activities.
The launch of GPT-4o early last year with added multimodal capabilities and functionalities pushed ChatGPT’s active user figures. Shortly after that model’s launch, usage of the chatbot increased from April through May 2024.
With the launch of Advanced Voice Mode, usage grew again from July to August 2024, while the o1 model series was attributed to the increased usage from September to October 2024.
ChatGPT’s mobile data tells a more consistent growth story. Since its launch in May 2023, monthly active users have steadily increased by 5 to 15 per cent monthly over the past year, as web users also adopted the app. Out of the app’s 400 million weekly active users, 175 million now use the mobile app.
Validating the weekly user boost is OpenAI’s January claim that the company was on the losing end of its $200 ChatGPT Pro monthly plan due to its overuse, where subscribers are using it more than the tech firm expected.
Following its launch late last year, ChatGPT Pro grants access to an upgraded version of OpenAI’s o1 “reasoning” AI model, o1 pro mode. It also lifts rate limits on the company’s other tools, including its Sora video generator.
In a latest update on Saturday, OpenAI’s Sam Altman said that it will introduce limits on the ChatGPT image-generation Ghibli-style feature it introduced earlier last week after its widespread usage was overworking the company’s servers.
“It’s super fun seeing people love images in ChatGPT. But our GPUs are melting. We are going to temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. Hopefully, won’t be long!” the CEO expressed.
The new feature was the first major upgrade to ChatGPT’s image-generation capabilities in over a year. To power the new image feature, OpenAI said it trained GPT-4o on “publicly available data,” as well as proprietary data from its partnerships with companies like Shutterstock.
On future projections, ChatGPT might be looking to break additional records. Reports highlighted that OpenAI is working on GPT-5, which is due to be released in 2025 where users on the free Chatbot subscription will get unlimited access to GPT-5 when it’s available.
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