ChatGPT’s monthly active user numbers have surged past 100mln, beating the time it took TikTok, Instagram and perhaps any other consumer app in history to reach the milestone.
The OpenAI artificial intelligence (AI) platform broke the mark in January, according to data supplied by UBS, after only being available to the public for two months.
“We cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app,” said UBS, who noted that it took TikTok nice months after its global launch to add 100mln incremental users, while it took Instagram around two and a half years.
As well as prompting a multi-billion-dollar investment from Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) in OpenAI, the success of the new iteration of the GPT platform has also “woken the sleeping giant” Google, which is now racing even faster to get its own DeepMind-based chatbot, called Sparrow, for a 'private beta' test sometime this year.
UBS noted that the search behemoth is now cutting “internal red tape” to accelerate product releases, liberalising the level of
risk it’s now willing to take in this field and taking steps to speed up the product.
ChatGPT might be garnering the headlines latest, but there’s a lot in common between Google’s BERT language model and GPT-3 than there are differences, a blog from a Google product manager and DeepMind bosses revealed.
Analysts at UBS said it was also striking for “how far Alphabet’s tentacles are into AI, how much bureaucracy there is at Google, slowing it down, the heavy weight of external scrutiny also slowing the company down, and yet the magnitudes they are investing”.