Viral trend drives ChatGPT to 500 million users

OpenAI’s flagship service ChatGPT remains as popular as ever, with the brand having hit a 500 million active user milestone in recent days amid the Studio Ghibli viral trend that came with the brand introducing its GPT-4o-powered image generation. 

The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, shared on X on Monday that ChatGPT gained “one million users in the last hour.” He compared the user spike to the burgeoning interest in OpenAI during its early days in 2022, when the chatbot gained one million users in five days, VentureBeat noted.  

The twenty-six-month-old brand has evolved quickly since its introduction to the industry. Its most recent developments have left users excited to use the chatbot to create images based on the popular Japanese animation style of Studio Ghibli and share them on social media. The brand recently enabled access to image generation for its free users once more after halting it last week due to the massive demand over working its servers. Altman sarcastically mentioned that the GPUs at OpenAI’s data centers were “melting” due to the fad. This is just one instance of the brand continuing to stand out in the industry. 

OpenAI notably hit a 400 million weekly active user milestone in February, while comparisons to the Chinese AI company DeepSeek were still fresh. Reports at the time indicated that the brand saw a 33% increase in less than three months from 300 million users in December 2024, coming from primarily organic growth. Before that, a December report from the Financial Times indicated that OpenAI had a goal of hitting 1 billion users in 2025 as it aimed to secure financial backing and shift from a private organization to a for-profit company.

Now, OpenAI is on track to meet several of those goals. It is not only midway to 1 billion users, but it has also secured a funding round led by SoftBank, with a $300 million valuation. This is the largest private equity investment to date, according to VentureBeat.

Despite this achievement, the company still has a lot of work to do to meet its goals. If it is to become a for-profit company by the end of this year, OpenAI will likely be running at a substantial loss for many years before it starts to see tangible profits. It is likely the company won’t break even until 2029, the publication noted. 

OpenAI is known for its consumer-facing products, such as ChatGPT and its associated AI models; however, the brand may have to focus more on enterprise projects to earn money moving forward.