ChatGPT user base grew fourfold in a year: Sam Altman

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has revealed a sharp rise in daily active users on ChatGPT over the past year, stating that the user base has grown more than fourfold.

Sharing the update on X, Altman wrote, “ChatGPT daily active users have increased >4x over the last year. Messages/day by much more than that.” However, he did not disclose the exact number of users.

The OpenAI CEO also praised the technical advancements made behind the scenes, noting, “the engineering team has greatly increased reliability and is now making real progress on speed.“

chatgpt daily active users have increased >4x over the last year. messages/day by much more than that.

at the same time, the engineering team has greatly increased reliability and is now making real progress on speed.

significant scale to be doing this at; great work!

— Sam Altman (@sama) May 20, 2025

Altman went on to commend the effort, adding, “Significant scale to be doing this at; great work! (sic)”

Last month ET reported that ChatGPT had doubled its user base, reportedly surpassing 800 million users. Forbes cited Altman as saying that "something like 10% of the world uses our systems now—a lot," and noted the growth is occurring “really fast.”

Much of this momentum followed the release of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s advanced image-generation model. The launch sparked a viral Studio Ghibli trend on ChatGPT towards the end of March, significantly boosting user engagement.

According to the company, the AI platform saw one million users within just an hour of the release—something Altman described as one of the “craziest viral moments” he had ever witnessed.