ChatGPT Reaches 100 Million Users Amidst Leadership Chaos and Lawsuits
OpenAI's ChatGPT experiences explosive growth to 100 million weekly users while navigating a dramatic CEO firing and a major copyright lawsuit from The New York Times.
ChatGPT achieves a massive milestone by reaching 100 million weekly active users in 2023. To celebrate this growth and support developers, OpenAI hosts its first developer conference and unveils GPT-4 Turbo, a multimodal API, the GPT Store, and the upgraded DALL-E 3 image generator.
The end of the year brings significant turbulence for OpenAI as CEO and co-founder Sam Altman experiences a sudden firing and swift return. This leadership chaos raises widespread concerns about the company's future direction and provides an opening for competitors in the artificial intelligence market.
Legal troubles also emerge as The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for alleged copyright infringement, claiming millions of articles are used without consent to train AI models. Despite these challenges and a brief pause in ChatGPT Plus sign-ups due to high demand, OpenAI re-opens premium subscriptions before the year concludes.