ChatGPT Reaches 100 Million Users in Just Two Months — the Fastest Consumer App in History
OpenAI's conversational AI chatbot surpassed every previous consumer technology adoption record, prompting a $10 billion investment from Microsoft and accelerating a global race between technology companies to deploy large language models.
An AI interface visualisation. Photo: Unsplash / Steve Johnson
- ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022 and reached 1 million users in five days
- It reached 100 million monthly active users in January 2023 — two months after launch
- For comparison, Instagram took 2.5 years and TikTok nine months to reach 100 million users
- Microsoft invested an estimated $10 billion in OpenAI in January 2023
- Google declared an internal "code red" emergency in response to ChatGPT's rise
When OpenAI quietly released ChatGPT on 30 November 2022, the company described it as a "research preview" — a cautious framing that belied what happened next. Within five days, the chatbot had attracted one million registered users. Within two months, a UBS analysis found it had reached 100 million monthly active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application ever recorded. By comparison, the previous record-holder, TikTok, had taken nine months to reach the same milestone after its international launch.
The speed of adoption reflected something the technology industry had been anticipating but struggling to predict: the moment when artificial intelligence crossed from a specialist tool used by researchers and developers into something that ordinary people could pick up and find immediately useful. ChatGPT could write essays, summarise documents, explain code, draft emails, translate languages and hold extended, coherent conversations — capabilities that had been technically possible in various forms for years but had never been packaged in a way that was both accessible and reliably impressive.
"In my 30 years in the industry, I've never seen anything like this. The adoption curve is unlike anything we've observed before." — Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, January 2023
Microsoft's $10 billion bet
The figures were not lost on Microsoft, which had made an initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019. In January 2023, the company announced a new multi-year partnership with OpenAI worth an estimated $10 billion, confirming what had been widely reported since the previous month. The deal gave Microsoft access to OpenAI's models to integrate across its product suite — most visibly in the Bing search engine, which received a ChatGPT-powered upgrade in February 2023, and in the Microsoft 365 Copilot suite announced in March.
For Microsoft, the investment was a long-term strategic move to challenge Google's dominance of search and enterprise productivity software. For OpenAI, it provided the capital and computing infrastructure — Microsoft's Azure cloud — needed to scale its models and withstand the commercial competition that was now inevitable.
Google's response and the AI arms race
The internal response at Google was reported to have been severe. According to multiple accounts, CEO Sundar Pichai declared a "code red" situation and accelerated the development of the company's own large language model capabilities. Google launched Bard, its ChatGPT competitor, in February 2023 — albeit with a stumbling debut in which the chatbot made a factual error in a promotional video, briefly wiping $100 billion from Alphabet's market capitalisation.
The episode illustrated the risks of the new technology race: AI systems that could generate fluent, plausible-sounding text could also generate fluent, plausible-sounding errors. The challenge of "hallucination" — AI systems confabulating facts with apparent confidence — became one of the central debates of 2023, alongside concerns about job displacement, academic plagiarism, misinformation and the long-term risks of increasingly capable AI systems.
The UK's position
Britain watched the developments with a mixture of enthusiasm and regulatory anxiety. The government convened an AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in November 2023, bringing together governments, technology companies and researchers to discuss the risks posed by frontier AI systems — an event that reflected both the UK's ambition to lead on AI governance and the genuine difficulty of reaching consensus on how to regulate a technology evolving faster than any regulatory framework could follow.
For most users, the policy debates were secondary to the practical reality: within months of ChatGPT's launch, AI-generated text had become commonplace in offices, universities, newsrooms and homes. The question was no longer whether artificial intelligence would reshape how people worked and communicated, but how quickly — and at whose expense.