Number of ChatGPT Users and Key Stats (April 2024)

ChatGPT has over 180.5 million users. It took ChatGPT just 5 days to add 1 million to its user base after launching. The ChatGPT website currently gets 1.6 billion visitors a month.

For some perspective, it took Facebook 10 months to reach 1 million users. Netflix took the longest of all, taking around 3.5 years to get to 1 million users.

Here are the exact numbers for how long it took different companies to reach the 1 million user mark.

*1 million backers **1 million nights booked ***1 million downloads

Source: Statista

A ChatGPT prompt is the input and instruction you provide to tell ChatGPT what you want it to do. It could involve a question, a series of instructions, or providing it with content and background details to help it better understand your intent.

Popular prompt techniques include giving detailed, step-by-step instructions, “few shot” prompts where ChatGPT is shown examples of what it should do, and role-playing, where you give ChatGPT a role, providing it with extra context to understand the question better. You can also use a content prompt generator to help write them.

OpenAI, the AI research and development company, owns and operates ChatGPT. OpenAI has its headquarters in San Francisco, California, and was founded by Sam Altman (CEO), Elon Musk (Co-founder OpenAI), Carlos Virella, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba.

Microsoft doesn’t own it, though its partnership with and $13 billion investment into OpenAI gives it considerable influence. Other investors include Khosla Ventures, Infosys, Thrive Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz.

ChatGPT uses a model that was trained on 570GB of data (300 billion words), mostly on data crawled from the internet, Wikipedia, and books.

GPT-3.5 has 175 billion parameters, which pales in comparison to the 1.7 trillion parameters GPT-4 has.

Parameters are settings that give fine-grained control over the content in AI responses, including the tone, style, and creativity.

GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. They belong to a group of large language models (LLMs) that can create convincingly human-like text responses. The user first provides a single prompt or a series of them, and ChatGPT responds based on what it learned through being trained on large, publicly available datasets.

Let’s explore that more by breaking down each part in GPT.

• Generative is the ability of AI to create different types of content, including text, images, audio, and data. In the case of ChatGPT, it focuses on generating text, for now.

• Pre-trained means that the AI uses a model that is the result of being trained on a large volume of data. Generally speaking, the more data it's trained on, the better the quality of responses, though it takes longer and costs more.

• A transformer is a type of neural network that can understand relationships between the data it has access to by breaking it down into smaller pieces that it can analyze. In the case of ChatGPT, this allows you to carry on a conversation with it and have it carry out tasks for you.

ChatGPT can reach capacity when there’s a heavy load on its servers, caused by many users prompting it at the same time. If you’re getting the “at capacity” message, give ChatGPT a cool-down period by waiting a few minutes before trying again.

Sometimes, you might have to wait a half hour or more. You also have the option to subscribe to ChatGPT Plus if you want your requests to have priority, even during peak times.

On average, you can ask ChatGPT 60 questions in an hour. This is assuming that it takes 30 seconds to ask a question and you get the response back within 30 seconds.

Here are a few different factors that affect how many questions you can ask:

• Prompt Quality: If your question is unclear or vague, you’ll spend extra time clarifying to ChatGPT what you’re asking it to do.

• Question Type: A factual, straightforward question is easier for ChatGPT to answer, while an open-ended question that needs a longer response will take longer.

• Length and Difficulty: If your question requires a series of follow-up questions or requires complex research, ChatGPT might take longer to respond.

GPT-4 Turbo has the highest limit at 96,000 words. GPT-3.5 is limited to 3,000 words and ChatGPT-4 can handle up to 25,000 words.

Since ChatGPT can remember your chat history, you may be able to get around limits by splitting it into a series of questions and responses. For example, if you're asking it to write an article for you, ChatGPT could deliver it to you one section at a time.

When first released, ChatGPT always saved the responses and history of its users as a conversation thread. This makes it capable of carrying on complex conversations, completing a series of tasks, and lets you fine-tune its responses.

Recently though, OpenAI rolled out a new feature that lets you disable your chat history by changing a setting. This gives you control over what conversations OpenAI can use to train its models and more privacy.

GTPs are custom trained versions of ChatGPT that have special abilities, extra knowledge, and unique combinations of skills. No coding is required, and they can be created by having conversations with GTP Builder.

Some examples include a GTP that's an expert at explaining board and card games, one that can create any kind of sticker art, or one that's a creative writing coach.

OpenAI is planning on launching a GTP store where users can share their creations and eventually be able to earn money.

According to a working paper released by OpenAI earlier this year, certain types of jobs are more “exposed” to ChatGPT than others. They analyzed the labor market and predict that jobs like cooks, athletes, and stonemasons have the least exposure, while jobs like tax preparers, translators, and proofreaders have high exposure.

Specifically, they looked at what percentage of a job and its tasks could benefit from and have the potential to be automated partially or completely by ChatGPT.

Keep in mind that when new technology like ChatGPT reshapes industries, it has the capacity to create new jobs, either directly or indirectly.

In fact, prompt engineers are already becoming a sought-after commodity and earn up to six-figure salaries. They specialize in knowing how to communicate with and get the most out of AIs.