ChatGPT Statistics (2023) — The Key Facts and Figures

In this ChatGPT statistics overview, you’ll find all the key figures about the chatbot that is currently taking the world by storm. From userbase size and running costs to investors and projected revenue, you’ll find a host of interesting ChatGPT statistics and facts below…

What is ChatGPT?

• ChatGPT is a chatbot (or, in technical terms, a ‘large language model’) created by US-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI. When you ask ChatGPT a question, it draws on a huge body of textual data — large chunks of content found on the Internet, many books, all of Wikipedia — to provide you with a human-like answer to it. You can also ask ChatGPT to create content for you — it can write poems, create computer code, translate languages, provide article structures and do much else besides. (Source: OpenAI.)

Who owns ChatGPT?

• ChatGPT is owned by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research laboratory based in San Francisco. The company consists of two parts: OpenAI Incorporated (non-profit) and OpenAI Limited Partnership (for-profit). This combination of a ‘non-profit’ and ‘for-profit’ company structure is reportedly in place to allow OpenAI to be able to legally attract investment from vulture funds while giving company employees equity in the company. (Source: Wikipedia and Wired.)

How many people use ChatGPT?

• ChatGPT currently has more than 100 million users, a milestone reached a little over two months after it was first launched. This makes it the fastest-growing consumer software application ever. (Source: Reuters.)
• To put ChatGPT’s phenomenal user acquisition rate into perspective, it took TikTok nine months to achieve a similar number of users. Other mega-successful apps took much much longer to do so — Facebook took almost 5 years; Canva took 9 years; and Instagram needed 2.5 years to reach 100 million users. This was a feat achieved by ChatGPT in a mere 60 days or so. (Sources: Reuters and Canva.)
• ChatGPT obtained 1 million users within 5 days of its initial launch in November 2022. The app that came closest to acquiring one million users this quickly is Instagram, which gained 1 million users after around two and a half months after launch — 70 days, or 1500% more slowly than ChatGPT. (Source: Statista.)
• In January 2023, ChatGPT’s website averaged more than 13 million unique visitors every day. (Source: Similar Web.)

How much traffic does the ChatGPT website get?

• We know that ChatGPT has over 100 million users, but traffic to its website is significantly higher than that. In January 2023, it is estimated that there were some 616 million visits to the ‘chat.open.ai.com’ web page, 350 million more than the previous month. (Source: Similar Web.)

• ChatGPT’s 100+ million users are spread across the globe, but the country with the largest proportion of users is the US, which is estimated to account for over 15% of them. India is thought to have the second largest ChatGPT userbase, accounting for an estimated 7%+ of users. (Source: Similar Web.)
• It is estimated that 61.48% of social media traffic to ChatGPT starts on YouTube, compared to 10.32% on Facebook, 8.64% on WhatsApp, and 4.53% on Twitter and 3.41% on Linkedin. (Source: Similar Web.)

How much does it cost to run ChatGPT?

• Software industry experts have estimated that running costs for ChatGPT are at least $100,000 per day, or $3 million per month. This is based on the fact that ChatGPT sits on top of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud infrastructure, which charges $3 per hour for a single A100GPU super computer cluster. (Source: Tom Goldstein.)
• Given that the average ChatGPT answer is around 30 words, the company is estimated by some commentators to pay approximately one cent for every user query — this works out at about $0.03 per word generated by ChatGPT. (Source: Tom Goldstein.)
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is on the record as saying the running costs for ChatGPT are extremely high. In response to a Twitter user, he said: “we will have to monetize it somehow at some point; the compute costs are eye-watering“. (Source: Sam Altman.)
• Of course, server costs and a virtual supercomputer framework form only some of the costs associated with running ChatGPT. Another cost is paying the people who built it. At time of writing, OpenAI employs roughly 375 people. Employment website Glassdoor estimates that employee salaries at OpenAi range from $45K per annum for the position of ‘content editor’ up to $380K for ‘chief technical officer’. However, other AI industry-watchers provide much larger salary estimates for OpenAI. For example, employment website Levels.fyi estimates that a level 5 software technician at OpenAi earns approximately $900K per year, made up of a base salary of $300K and stock options valued at $600K. (Sources: Wikipedia, Glassdoor and Levels.fyi.)

How much does it cost to use ChatGPT?

• ChatGPT is currently free to use. The free version provides a fully functional ‘research preview’ of ChatGPT, which allows OpenAI to assess the system’s strengths and weaknesses as well as gather feedback from early adopters. (Source: OpenAI.)
• OpenAI has also launched a premium version of the tool — ‘ChatGPT Plus.’ Aimed at monetizing ChatGPT, this ivloves a $20 per month fee. Access to ChatGPT Plus is initially by invite-only from the ChatGPT Plus waitlist, which you can access here. (Source: OpenAI.)
• OpenAI has said that it will continue to provide a free version of ChatGPT. It is expected that OpenAI will roll out multiple pricing plans for ChatGPT, including lower cost plans, business plans and data packs. (Source: OpenAI.)
• There is also a ChatGPT API waitlist that will give developers and businesses access to an official ChatGPT API. It is reported that companies will have to pay $0.002 for an input of around 750 words. (Source: OpenAI and Computerworld.)
• Early adopters of ChatGPT’s API service include Snap, Quizlet, Instacart and Shopify. (Source: Techcrunch.)

How long did it take to train ChatGPT?

• Some ChatGPT commentators have estimated that if ChatGPT was to be trained on a single NVIDIA Tesla V100 ‘Graphics Processing Unit’ (GPU) that it would take around 355 years to complete ChatGPT’s training on its training dataset. However, OpenAI reportedly used 1,023 A100 GPUs to train ChatGPT, so it is possible that the training process was completed in as little as 34 days. (Source: Lambda Labs.)
• The costs of training ChatGPT is estimated to be just under $5 million dollars. (Source: Lambda Labs.)

What was the size of the dataset used for training ChatGPT?

• The dataset for training ChatGPT-3 — the latest version of ChatGPT — consisted of 175 billion parameters, equivalent to 800GB worth of stored data. (Source: OpenAI.)

• ChatGPT’s dataset comprises textual data from 5 sources, each with a different proportional weighting. (Source: OpenAI.)
• 60% of ChatGPT’s dataset is based on a filtered version of what is known as ‘common crawl’ data, which consists of web page data, metadata extracts and text extracts from over 8 years of web crawling. (Source: OpenAI.)
• 22% of ChatGPT’s dataset comes from ‘WebText2’, which consists of Reddit posts that have three or more upvotes. (Source: OpenAI.)
• 16% of ChatGPTs’s dataset come from two Internet-based book collections. These books included fiction, non-fiction and also a wide range of academic articles. (Source: OpenAI.)
• 3% of ChatGPT’s dataset comes from the English-language version of Wikipedia. (Source: OpenAI.)
• 93% of ChatGPT’s data set was in English (Source: OpenAI.)

How much of ChatGPT’s training was done by humans?

• OpenAI’s 2020 paper on ChatGPT, ‘Language Models are Few-Shot Learners’ was authored by 21 different people from the OpenAI team. (Source: OpenAI.)
• Additionally, 780 people were recruited to participate in experiments to assess whether or not humans could detect that ChatGPT’s answers were generated by humans or by a computer model. (Source: OpenAI.)
• All in all, it is likely that more than 800 people were involved in the creation of the latest version of ChatGPT and providing human feedback during its development.

What languages does ChatGPT understand?

• ChatGPT is designed to primarily work in English, but it also understands certain inputs in 95 other natural human languages, including Spanish, French, Chinese, German and Irish. (Source: SEO.ai.)
• ChatGPT was primarily written in the Python computer programming language. However, because it was exposed to various other coding languages as part of its training dataset, ChatGPT is also capable of understanding and producing responses in a wide range of computer languages. These include:

(Source: SEO.ai.)

What is ChatGPT’s IQ?

• Opinions on the IQ of ChatGPT vary from a slightly below-average IQ score of 83 to a ninety-nine percentile busting IQ of 147. (Source: Fast Company and David Rozado.)
• Some ChatGPT users have asked the tool to provide different IQ-level answers to questions (with interesting results). When asked for a 200 IQ answer to the question ‘Why does it rain?’, ChatGPT provided a perfectly-structured, well-articulated and information-packed response. But when it was asked to pretend to be a person with an IQ of 50 and to answer the same question, it responded: “it rain because the sky cry, it get sad and the tear fall down on the ground. That how it make everything all wet.” (Source: @halkatov on Twitter.)

How long does it take ChatGPT to answer a question?

The short answer is: it depends on the question / request.

• In response to my question ‘What is artificial intelligence?’, ChatGPT started to answer within 0.5 seconds, and within 13 seconds it had provided me with a complete 67 word answer with a high degree of accuracy.
• I then gave ChatGPT a slightly longer request: “explain to me how the human brain works.’ ChatGPT took longer to get going with this answer (3 seconds), and it took 31 seconds in total to provide a 178 word answer. This answer was also very accurate.
• Lastly, I gave ChatGPT the following request: “write me a short novel in the style of William Faulkner’s ‘The Sound and the Fury’. In this case, it took ChatGPT 7 seconds before commencing its answer. It ultimately took 70 seconds to produce a 354 word answer to this prompt. Unfortunately, its response did not (in my view) accurately respond to my request. Instead of a novel, ChatGPT produced a basic summary of the actual novel ‘The Sound and The Fury’, which was written in plain and correct English — a style very far removed from the literary approach of the novel in question.

How accurate is ChatGPT?

The Internet is filled with reports of ChatGPT failing to provide accurate data in response to user prompts. For example, it was reported that ChatGPT was incapable of providing a correct response to a question about how many times Argentina had won the World Cup. It answered ‘twice’ when the correct answer should have been ‘three times.’ This can be explained by the fact that ChatGPT’s training data only spans until 2021, at which time Argentina had won the World Cup twice. Argentina went on to win the competition for a third time in 2022.

In OpenAI’s 2022 research paper, many ChatGPT limitations are acknowledged by its parent company.

The very first limitation mentioned by OpenAI on the ChatGPT web page is with regard to factual inaccuracy. The company states:

Other limitations of ChatGPT include:

How many applications does ChatGPT have?

Too many to be able to mention them all!

Here are just a few of the ‘natural language processing’ things you can use the ChatGPT model for, though:

Does ChatGPT pass the Turing test?

• The Turing test — named after British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing — is a practical test to determine if a computer can pass as a human in a conversation with a real person. When you ask ChatGPT if it is capable of passing the Turing test, the answer from the chatbot is a definitive ‘No!’ — it responds:

• However, some humans disagree with ChatGPT on this. According to Buzzfeed data scientist Max Woolf, ChatGPT has indeed passed the Turing Test by conveying itself as indistinguishable in terms of its language use and responses from a real person to a panel of judges. (Source: Max Woolf.)

Where is ChatGPT available?

• ChatGPT is available in over 160 countries around the world. (Source: OpenAI.)
• However, users in China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela and Belarus are reportedly unable to access the program. (Source: Video Gamer.)

When was OpenAI founded?

• OpenAi was founded in San Francisco in 2015 by Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Greg Brockman, Vicki Cheung, Reid Hoffman, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, John Schulman, Ilya Sutskever, Peter Thiel, Pamela Vagata and Wojciech Zaremba. The fourteen founders are reported to have collectively pledged $1 billion dollars at the time of the company’s launch. (Source: Wikipedia and Vanity Fair.)

Who are ChatGPT’s investors?

• OpenAI has received investment from 9 different companies over the last seven years. Microsoft is by far its biggest backer, investing $1 billion into the company in 2019 with a $2 billion in 2021 and a further investment of $10 billion in January 2023. (Source: CNBC.)
• It is reported that Microsoft’s investments in OpenAI give it a 49% stake in the company. Microsoft is expected to receive three-quarters of openAI’s profits until it recovers its investment. (Source: CNBC.)
• Other investors in OpenAI such as Khosla Ventures are also reported to own a 49% stake in the company, with the remaining 2% being retained by OpenAi in equity. (Source: CNBC.)
• Even before Microsoft’s latest investment in ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAi was the best-funded machine learning AI platform in the world. Its nearest competitor in terms of funding raised is Scale AI, which has raised $602 million in funding to date. (Source: Statista.)

What is OpenAI’s net worth?

• According to the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is currently thought to be valued at around $29 billion. (Source: Wall Street Journal.)
• OpenAi expects to generate $200 million in revenue by the end of 2023, with its estimate for earnings in 2024 in the region of $1billion. (Source: Reuters.)

How many different sectors work with OpenAI?

• According to Statista, OpenAI software is used by 902 companies across a variety of business sectors including technology, education, business, manufacturing, finance, retail, government and media. 27% of these companies are technology companies; 23% of them are in the educational sector; 10.9% are classified as business companies and just under 10% of them are manufacturing companies. (Source: Statista.)

How big is the artificial intelligence market?

• The overall value of the AI market is projected to hit $150+ billion dollars in 2023, rising to as much as $1.5 trillion by 2030 (Source: Precedence Research.)
• In 2021, global corporate investment in AI was almost $94 billion worldwide. (Source: Statista.)

What are the main competitors to ChatGPT?

• Google is expected to launch its own conversation-based AI application, ‘Bard’, in the coming weeks. Bard will — like ChatGPT — provide searchers with synthesized information in the form of direct answers to their questions and requests. Based on preview images of Bard released on 6 February 2022, it seems that Google search results will still provide links to top ranking articles, albeit directly below Bard’s answers at the top of the Google search interface. (Source: Google.)

• Chinese tech giant Baidu is also expected to release an AI chatbot named ‘Ernie’ — short for ‘Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration’ — once it has completed internal testing in March 2023. Shares in Baidu rose by 13.48% on the back of the news of Ernie’s upcoming release. (Source: CNBC.)
• Microsoft is also getting in on the AI chatbot game. The latest version of the Bing search engine now integrates ChatGPT’s AI technology. The big difference between Bing’s new chatbot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT is that Bing’s version is more up-to-date and can accurately answer user queries that concern current events. (Source: Microsoft.)

Will I lose my job because of ChatGPT?

• In 2013, a university of Oxford study estimated that 47% of the U&S workforce could potentially be replaced by AI over the next few decades. Since the stratospheric rise of ChatGPT over the three months, employees in industries across customer service, education, content creation, search engine optimization (SEO) and many more are wondering if their sector will be hit by job losses due to recent AI advancements.
• Sectors likely to be particularly affected by AI advancements include tech, media, law, market research and finance (Source: Business Insider.)
• Examples of jobs likely to be affected significantly by AI include programmers; journalists; paralegals, legal assistants; market researchers; educators; financial analysts, personal financial advisors; traders; graphic designers; accountants; and customer service agents. (Source: Business Insider.)
• Interestingly, when you ask ChatGPT which industries are most likely to see job losses due to AI, it suggests that the most at-risk jobs are those involving a large amount of repetitive tasks (for example those in manufacturing, customer service, translation, data entry and logistics).

How aware are people of ChatGPT?

• It is estimated that around 45% of adults in the United States have seen, read, or heard about ChatGPT. ChatGPT awareness levels are highest among GenZ adults and Millennials, with 14% and 15% of people in each of these groups reporting that they had encountered ‘a lot’ of information about ChatGPT. Around 55% of survey respondents said they were ‘not at all’ aware of ChatGPT. (Source: Statista.)

Can ChatGPT write a decent haiku?

• Well, I asked ChatGPT to write a haiku on the the topic of writer’s block. It made a pretty good attempt at it. I then pointed out a flaw in the syllable count of the third line of ChatGPT’s haiku attempt. The program then apologised to me (in haiku form!) and produced another haiku on writer’s block that respects the 5-7-5 syllable count of classical haikus.