ChatGPT hits record growth, OpenAI aims for 700 million users this week as GPT-5 countdown begins

OpenAI has confirmed that ChatGPT is all set to hit 700 million weekly active users for the first time this week. The AI company states that its weekly active users have risen four times from the same time last year and it is a significant improvement over the 500 million mark at the end of March.

“Every day, people and teams are learning, creating, and solving harder problems. Big week ahead. Grateful to the team for making ChatGPT more useful and delivering on our mission so everyone can benefit from AI.” Nick Turley, VP of product for ChatGPT, wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

The 700 million users figure includes all ChatGPT users including free, Plus, Pro, Enterprise and Edu customers. A CNBC report stated OpenAI as saying. Meanwhile, the company states that its growth rate is also rising compared to last year’s 2.5 times year over year growth.

Notably, ChatGPT had reached the 500 million mark in March after OpenAI introduced a new native image generation feature in GPT-4o that soon became viral with users giving it all sorts of personal touches including generating Ghibli style images and real life action figures.

OpenAI to launch GPT5 soon

The AI startup is nearing another big launch as rumors suggest that its latest GPT5 model could be released this week. The new model has seen a lot of hype on social media for over a year and CEO Sam Altman has added more fuel to the fire by teasing the model on social media.

In a recent post on X, Altman stated that he had asked GPT-5 to recommend a show about artificial intelligence and it gave him the choice of Pantheon among other options.

In a podcast last month, Altman had also said that he felt useless relative to the new AI model. He said, “I was testing our new model and I got a question. I got emailed a question that I didn’t quite understand. Uh, and I put it in the model, this GPT-5, and it answered it perfectly and I really kind of sat back in my chair and I was just like a, oh man, here it is moment and I got over it quickly.”

“I felt like useless relative to the AI in this thing that I felt like I should have been able to do and I couldn’t and it was really hard, but the AI just did it like that.” Altman added.