ChatGPT Stats: Key Data Including Users and Revenue (Latest)

Updated March 17, 2023

ChatGPT Key Stats

User base: Within 6 days of ChatGPT’s release, the number of users surpassed 1 million. As of January 31, 2023, the number of monthly active users has reached 100 million, making it the fastest consumer-level application to reach 100 million in history, surpassing TikTok which took 9 months to reach the same number.

Pricing: The basic version of ChatGPT is free, while ChatGPT Plus is priced at $20 per month.
Valuation: After the release of ChatGPT, its parent company, OpenAI, saw its valuation rapidly increase to $29 billion, doubling its value compared to 2021.
Funding amount: Since its establishment in 2015, OpenAI has raised more than $12 billion in funding, with the following major funding events:

On January 23, 2023, Microsoft announced an investment of $10 billion in OpenAI.
In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion and the initial investment in 2015.
In 2015, Sam, Greg, Elon, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys, and YC Research donated to support OpenAI, committing a total of $1 billion.
Revenue: In 2022, OpenAI’s revenue was around $35 million, primarily generated through API charges to developers. OpenAI expects its revenue to reach $200 million in 2023 and $1 billion in 2024.

(Source of data: Bloomberg.com and official announcements from OpenAI)

About ChatGPT

Release Date	November 30, 2022
Features	Chatbot
Users	100 million
Pricing	Free or $20/month
Developer	OpenAI
Headquarters	San Francisco
Website	chat.openai.com
CEO	Sam Altman

The information regarding ChatGPT’s features, accounts, and usage can be found at: The Most Powerful AI Chatbot Assistant-ChatGPT

ChatGPT Paid User Statistics

On February 1, 2023, OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT paid version, ChatGPT Plus. Currently, the specific number of users has not been publicly disclosed.

Statistics of OpenAI users after ChatGPT was released

Since the launch of chatGPT, the number of users has increased rapidly, and by February 2023, the number of users has tripled from December 2022.

Distribution of ChatGPT users by region

The ChatGPT users get so much user traffic, where are the most places to visit them? The country with the largest number of users visiting ChatGPT is the United States (15.8%), which ranks the first place, with a year-on-year growth of 63.33%. The third and fourth countries are Japan and China (3.16% and 3.16% respectively), with a quarter-on-quarter growth of 400.1% and 455.1%.

Gender and age distribution of ChatGPT users

The gender ratio of ChatGPT users was 65.13% male and 34.87% female, among which the users aged between 25 and 34 were the most.

ChatGPT Revenue

ChatGPT started offering its paid version on February 1, 2023 and specific revenue information has not been publicly disclosed yet. One can refer to the revenue data of its parent company, OpenAI, which earned approximately 35 million dollars in 2022, mainly through API charges to developers. OpenAI is estimated to earn 200 million dollars in 2023 and 1 billion dollars in 2024.

ChatGPT History

ChatGPT is developed based on the GPT-3 large language model. It has been continuously researched and developed for 5 years since the release of the GPT model by OpenAI. If counting from the establishment of OpenAI in 2015, it has already been 8 years.

On June 11, 2018, OpenAI released a paper entitled “Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training”, in which they introduced the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), which at this time can be considered as the origin of the GPT model
February 14 2019， Open AI first announces GPT-2
November 2019 ，OpenAI publishes the full version of the GPT-2 language model
May 2020 OpenAI, a San Francisco-based AI research lab, releases GPT-3, the successor to GPT-2
July 2020 GPT-3 goes into Beta testing
November 30 2022 Initial ChatGPT Released
December 5 2022 ，ChatGPT crossed 1 million users
December 2022 Valuation of its parent company Open AI reaches $29 billion
January 31，2023, ChatGPT achieved 100 million users, becoming the fastest consumer-oriented application to reach this milestone.
On February 1st, 2023, ChatGPT Plus was released with a pricing of $20 per month.
On March 14, 2023, GPT-4 was released

Open AI Key Data Stats:

Founding Time	2015
Founders	Sam Altman (CEO), Elon Musk (Co-founder; resigned in 2018)
Headquarters	San Francisco
Business Direction	AI
Number of Employees	375 (as of January 2023)
Products	ChatGPT, Dell-E，GPT-3，Whisper
Number of Users	Over 100 million
Annual Revenue	$35 million (2022)
Amount of Funding	Over $120 billion
Valuation	$29 billion
Investment Institutions	Microsoft, Khosla Ventures and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Website	openai.com

Additional Information:

OpenAI was founded on December 11, 2015 and was originally positioned as a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. The company was co-founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infosys and YC Research, with Sam Altman and Elon Musk serving as Co-chairs. The funders have collectively committed $1 billion to support OpenAI.
On January 30, 2017, the OpenAI team had reached 45 people.
In 2018, Elon Musk resigned from the board due to potential conflicts of interest with his role as CEO of Tesla, which is developing AI for self-driving cars. However, he remained a donor.
On June 11, 2018, OpenAI released a paper titled “Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training,” in which they introduced the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT).
On March 12, 2019, OpenAI announced that it was restructuring as a “capped-profit” company, which limits returns from investments beyond a certain point.
On July 22, 2019, OpenAI announced that Microsoft had invested $1 billion to support the development of Beneficial AGI.
On February 14, 2019, OpenAI first announced GPT-2.
On May 28, 2020, OpenAI first mentioned GPT-3 in a paper.
On June 11, 2020, OpenAI began offering the GPT-3 API to the public.
On January 5, 2021, OpenAI first announced DALL-E, a model that creates images based on textual descriptions.
On April 6, 2022, OpenAI released DALL-E 2.
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released the Initial ChatGPT.
On January 23, 2023, OpenAI announced a new round of financing from Microsoft, reportedly worth $10 billion.
On January 31, 2023, OpenAI launched a classifier trained to distinguish between AI-written and human-written text.
On February 1, 2023, ChatGPT Plus was released with a pricing at $20/mo.

References:

OpenAI – Wikipedia
“Microsoft Adds $10 Billion to Investment in ChatGPT Maker OpenAI”. Bloomberg.com
Introducing OpenAI-OpenAI Announcements
Team Update-OpenAI Announcements
OpenAI LP-OpenAI Announcements
Microsoft Invests In and Partners with OpenAI to Support Us Building Beneficial AGI– OpenAI Announcements
OpenAI API-OpenAI Announcements
Reducing Bias and Improving Safety in DALL·E 2-OpenAI Announcements
ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue-OpenAI Announcements
Introducing ChatGPT Plus-OpenAI Announcements
Language Models are Few-Shot Learners-Cornell University CS

ChatGPT Technical information Statistics

ChatGPT’s technology is based on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model and uses the same methods as InstructGPT, with slight differences in the data collection setup. The training process of the model can be referred to the following diagram.

(Source from OpenAI official website)

GPT-3 Model Training Data

GPT-3 uses an autoregressive language model with 1750 billion parameters, 10 times more than any non-sparse language model previously, and achieved strong performance on many NLP datasets, including translation, Q&A, and cloze tasks, as well as tasks requiring real-time inference or domain adaptation. The OpenAI research team also identified datasets where GPT-3 still struggles with few-shot learning, as well as datasets highlighting theoretical issues related to training large network language models. (Source:Language Models are Few-Shot Learners)

Investment in the Development of ChatGPT

According to analysis, ChatGPT is hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud server, and based on current rates, Microsoft charges $3 per hour for a single A100 GPU. Each word generated on ChatGPT is charged at $0.0003. The average response from ChatGPT is approximately 30 words per request, which equates to 1 cent per request, consistent with Sam Altman’s statement that ChatGPT costs “probably single-digits cents” per use. Calculations show that the cost of running ChatGPT is at least $100,000 per day, or $3 million per month, just for the technology and excluding employee salaries.

(Source：Here’s What To Know About OpenAI’s ChatGPT—What It’s Disrupting And How To Use It)

ChatGPT Challengers

Apprentice Bard

Apprentice Bard is an AI chatbot developed by Google based on LaMDA conversation technology with a main function of real-time online Q&A chat. It is set to be released at some point in 2023. Apprentice Bard is known as a “red code” project within Google and will be pitted as a potential contender against ChatGPT in a robot battle. The Google LaMDA team has been prioritized to handle the competition with ChatGPT in the short term.

（Source：Google is asking employees to test potential ChatGPT competitors, including a chatbot called ‘Apprentice Bard’ – CNBC)

Claude

Claude is an AI assistant trained by Anthropic using natural language models, with training methodologies similar to OpenAI’s GPT-3. According to some individuals who participated in early tests, Claude has similar capabilities to ChatGPT and provides more accurate answers in many cases.
Anthropic AI is a small research company focused on building reliable, interpretable, and controllable AI systems, founded by former OpenAI employees. Dario Amodei is the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic.
Claude has not yet been publicly released. According to a report by the New York Times on January 27, 2023, Anthropic is in talks for a new $300 million funding round, which would value the company at $5 billion.
On February 4, 2023, Anthropic posted a waitlist application link on Twitter.

Authoritative Information on ChatGPT

“Microsoft Adds $10 Billion to Investment in ChatGPT Maker OpenAI”. Bloomberg.com， January 23, 2023.
“Microsoft reportedly plans to invest $10 billion in creator of buzzy A.I. tool ChatGPT”. CNBC. January 27, 2023.
“WSJ News Exclusive | ChatGPT Creator in Investor Talks at $29 Billion Valuation”. WSJ. January 6, 2023.
“The Brilliance and Weirdness of ChatGPT”. The New York Times. January 5, 2023.