According to a report by Axios, OpenAI announced Thursday that ChatGPT has attracted over 200 million weekly active users, doubling the AI assistant's user base since November 2023. The company also announced that 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies now use its products, underscoring the growing adoption of generative AI tools in the corporate world.
The rapid growth of ChatGPT's user numbers (which is not a new phenomenon for OpenAI) indicates growing interest in, and perhaps trust in, the AI-powered tool, despite the frequent skepticism of some tech industry critics.
“Generative AI is a product without mass market utility – at least not on the scale of truly revolutionary movements like the original cloud computing and smartphone boom,” PR consultant and vocal OpenAI critic Ed Zitron blogged in July. “And it's a product that is horrendous in cost to develop and operate.”
Despite this skepticism (which raises legitimate questions about OpenAI's long-term viability), OpenAI claims that users of ChatGPT and OpenAI's services are in record numbers. One reason for the apparent dissonance is that ChatGPT users may not readily admit to using it due to organizational bans against generative AI.
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, who frequently explores new applications of generative AI on social media, tweeted about the topic on Thursday. “Big problem in organizations: They have created elaborate rules for using AI that focus on negative use cases,” he wrote. “As a result, employees are too afraid to talk about how they use AI or to commit to an LL.M. in the company. They just become secret cyborgs who use their own AI and don't share their knowledge.”
The new era of prohibition
It's difficult to get concrete numbers indicating the number of companies with AI bans, but a Cisco study published in January claimed that 27 percent of the companies surveyed had banned the use of generative AI. In August last year, ZDNet reported on a BlackBerry study that found 75 percent of companies worldwide were “implementing or considering” plans to ban ChatGPT and other AI apps.
For example, Condé Nast, the parent company of Ars Technica, has an anti-AI policy related to the creation of publicly available content using generative AI tools.
Bans are not the only problem that makes public admission of generative AI use difficult. Social stigmas have developed around generative AI technology based on fear of job loss, potential environmental impacts, privacy issues, IP and ethical problems, security concerns, fear of a repeat of scams in the cryptocurrency sector, and a general skepticism toward Big Tech that has, according to some reports, been steadily increasing in recent years.
Whether the current stigmas surrounding the use of generative AI will disappear over time remains to be seen, but for now, OpenAI's management is taking a victory lap. “People are now using our tools as part of their daily lives and making a real difference in areas like health and education,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement to Axios, “whether it's helping with routine tasks, solving difficult problems, or unleashing creativity.”
Not the only game in town
OpenAI also told Axios that usage of its automated API has doubled since the release of GPT-4 in July, suggesting that software developers are increasingly incorporating OpenAI's Large Language Model (LLM) technology into their apps.
And OpenAI is not alone in this space. Companies like Microsoft (with Copilot, based on OpenAI's technology), Google (with Gemini), Meta (with Llama), and Anthropic (Claude) are all vying for market share and regularly updating their APIs and consumer-facing AI assistants to attract new users.
If generative AI is a market bubble about to burst, as some claim, then it is a very large and expensive bubble that appears to be getting larger by the day.