A record number of people used OpenAI's chatbot last week due to the frenzy to use ChatGPT's image-generation facility to make Ghibli-style AI art.
Social media was inundated with images of the hand-drawn style of the renowned Japanese animation studio, Studio Ghibli, which was founded by renowned director Hayao Miyazaki and is known for films like Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro. This fad went global.
According to data from market research firm Similarweb, the average weekly active user count surpassed 150 million for the first time this year, reports Reuters.
"We added one million users in the last hour," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in an X post on Monday, comparing it with the addition of one million users in five days following ChatGPT's red-hot launch more than two years ago.
Active users, in-app subscription revenue and app downloads reached an all-time high last week, according to SensorTower data, after the AI company launched updates to its GPT-4o model, enabling advanced image generation capabilities.
The market intelligence firm said global app downloads and weekly active users on the ChatGPT app grew 11% and 5%, respectively, from the prior week, while in-app purchase revenue increased 6%.
However, the chatbot has been hit with glitches and low-scale outages over the past week as it deals with a spike in traffic due to the popularity of its image-generating tool.
"We are getting things under control, but you should expect new releases from OpenAI to be delayed, stuff to break, and for service to sometimes be slow as we deal with capacity challenges," the OpenAI co-founder said on Tuesday.
