Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman might have said too much at TED 2025, when he told TED curator Chris Anderson backstage that ChatGPT users had doubled in just a few weeks.
About nine minutes into their conversation on stage about the future of AI, Anderson said, you gave me a shocking number backstage about your growth.
“How many users do you have?” he prodded.
“I think the last time we said was 500 million weekly actives, and it is growing very rapidly,” replied Altman.
“You told me that it like doubled in just a few weeks,” Anderson continued.
“I said that privately, but I guess…,” said Altman throwing his hands up.
Anderson offered to edit his remarks out of the livestream, to which Altman said with a smile, “That’s alright, that’s alright, that’s ok, no problem. It’s growing very fast.”
Watch the unedited exchange here.
“Something like 10% of the world uses our systems now a lot,” Altman added. Later he referenced hundreds of millions of users, with no mention of the one billion weekly actives alluded to earlier.
Since late 2024, ChatGPT’s user base has been growing at an astonishing rate with the release of several products that have gone viral, including its March 25 introduction of a new image generation feature which creates images and videos in various notable styles including that of Studio Ghibli, the legendary Japanese studio that created film classics like My Neighbor Totoro.
Days later, on March 31, Altman posted on X that ChatGPT had just added a million users in one hour, a feat that took five days during its viral launch in late 2022.
Anderson suggested ways to compensate artists for creating works in their style. Altman agreed, saying in time there might be a way for certain prompts to trigger automatic payments for creators who opt in, and assured that for now, guardrails are in place to prevent the model from generating copyright-protected works.
But Altman also said the company was working on making ChatGPT less restrictive, with less guardrails around prior concerns like speech harms, so that it can be more responsive to users wanting less censorship.
He talked about the new memory feature rolling out that now lets the model remember all query history so it can get to know users better over the course of their lifetime and become an extension of themselves and companion that can proactively push things to help them become the best and do the best they can.
Having raised the largest private round in history at a $300 billion valuation, the company has been developing AI agents to transact autonomously on behalf of users.
With a shudder, Anderson asked about the potential for AI to replace humans.
“There’s sort of two views you can take,” Altman said. “You can say, oh, man, it’s doing everything I do, what’s going to happen to me? Or you can say, like, through every other technological revolution in history, okay, now there’s this new tool. I can do a lot more. What am I going to be able to do? It is true that the expectation of what we’ll have for someone in a particular job increases, but the capabilities will increase so dramatically that I think it’ll be easy to rise to the occasion.”
