OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that ChatGPT experienced a record-breaking surge, gaining one million users in a single hour. This was fueled by the free Ghibli-style image generation feature which is powered by GPT-4o. Altman revealed the “unprecedented” surge on X (formerly Twitter) and got a reply from US President Donald Trump’s Crypto Czar and Elon Musk‘s former PayPal ally, David Sacks.
“the chatgpt launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments i’d ever seen, and we added one million users in five days. we added one million users in the last hour,” Altman said, with Sacks replying to the post with a blog written by Chris Dixon.
‘Next big thing is always dismissed as a toy’, says Dixon
Dixon’s post says that “the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a ‘toy’,” citing one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory. He gave the example of the first telephone’s ‘rejection’ by Western Union.
“Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they ‘undershoot’ user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads – their primary customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve,” the blog read.
Sacks purportedly draws parallels between ChatGPT’s initial success and latest success that Altman talks about in his tweet. However, Altman responded to Sacks reply by saying, “yeah, i just didn’t think it would be this toy :)”
What caused ChatGPT’s surge in last week
ChatGPT’s latest image generation feature, previously paid-only, was rolled out to all users, allowing them to create Studio Ghibli-inspired images. Due to the overwhelming demand, free users are now limited to three image generations daily as it started to ‘melt’ OpenAI’s GPUs.