ChatGPT passes the billion mark, but its top rival is growing ten times faster

One billion monthly users is a threshold that most applications never reach, and that the rare ones that do take five to eight years to cross, from Google Maps to TikTok, including Instagram and YouTube. ChatGPT has just crossed it in barely three years, making it the fastest application in history to reach this level.in barely three years, making it the fastest application in history at this level.It remains to be seen what this record is really worth.

What is this billion really worth?

This billion figure is first and foremost an estimate from a specialist consulting firm, not a figure audited by OpenAI, and it counts only active users of the mobile app, excluding both the web and the developer interface. The record is therefore real, but it comes with an asterisk. The figure also says nothing about usage intensity: someone who opens the app every morning and someone who launched it once during the month are lumped together by the same counter. Another, more telling caveat follows: if ChatGPT grew by 62% over one year, its rival Claude recorded growth of approximately 640%. The first remains a giant, the second a featherweight at 56 million users, but it is the featherweight that is accelerating.

In the United States, ChatGPT users who installed the Claude app in the first quarter spent 5% less time on ChatGPT in the following month. Nothing spectacular, but the kind of detail that reveals an audience beginning to browse elsewhere. The two camps, moreover, are not competing on the same ground: ChatGPT rules among the general public, while Claude has carved out a prime position among developers and businesses. The battle is also being fought over wallets: OpenAI has just launched a ChatGPT Pro plan at €103 to retain its heavy users, while Anthropic, with more than $30 billion in annualized revenue, is attracting investment offers valuing it at around $800 billion.The two companies are preparing to go public, a few weeks apart.

Why did AI take hold so quickly?

Products that defined their generations—the search engine, the social network, online video—took years to become ingrained habits. The conversational assistant, by contrast, went from a curiosity to a mass habit in just a few years, whereas those categories took far longer. Asking an AI rather than a search engine has become an automatic reflex for many people, with all that this implies in terms of dependency and new expectations. Becoming the world’s most widely used app also means taking on responsibility on a massive scale: the slightest error or bias in an assistant consulted by a billion people can no longer be dismissed as anecdotal.

The real race is no longer for the first billion, but for what comes next: turning a mass habit into solid revenue before going public. In this arena, size and growth rate do not tell the same story, and neither side has yet revealed its hand.

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Source: Reuters