OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman might have said more than he intended at TED 2025 on April 11, when he told TED curator Chris Anderson that ChatGPT users had doubled in just a few weeks. 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 half-throwing his hands up.
Anderson offered to edit his remarks for the video, to which Altman said with a smile, “That’s ok, no problem. It’s growing very fast.”
“Something like 10% of the world uses our systems, now a lot,” Altman added. That pegs ChatGPT at less than 800 million users, which he referenced later in the conversation as hundreds of millions of users.
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 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 added a million users in one hour, a feat that took five days during its viral launch in late 2022.
Anderson asked had any consideration been given to compensating artists for creating works in their style. Altman said in time there might be a way for certain prompts to trigger automatic payments for creators who opt in, and explained for now, guardrails are in place to prevent the model from generating copyright-protected works.
But Altman also said they were lightening guardrails around speech harms, making it less restrictive in image generation, to be responsive to users wanting less censorship.
He talked about the new memory feature rolling out that lets the model remember all query history. This will enable it to get to know users better over the course of their lifetime and become an extension of them to help them be the best and do the best they can, he said.
It’s all about agents, having raised the largest private round in history at a $300 billion valuation, to get AI to the point where it can transact autonomously on behalf of users, without the risk of going rogue.
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.”
OpenAI could not be reached for immediate comment.
Watch the conversation here and shared by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson on X.
