ChatGPT is now being used by 10% of the world's adult population (www.businessinsider.com)

ChatGPT has reached an extraordinary adoption milestone: researchers from OpenAI, Duke and Harvard reported that the service had about 700 million monthly users in July—roughly 10% of the world’s adult population—and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced 800 million weekly users at the company’s DevDay. The same study recorded ChatGPT handling more than 2.5 billion messages per day (~29,000 queries/sec), and OpenAI’s weekly active user base has grown roughly 700% since November 2023. By contrast, other LLM chatbots remain far smaller (xAI’s Grok ~65M monthly, Anthropic’s Claude and Perplexity ~30M each). That pace of diffusion—what researchers called “no precedent” for a new technology—underscores ChatGPT’s dominance in the LLM ecosystem and carries concrete technical and industry implications. Providers must scale massive compute, storage, and latency-optimized serving infrastructure while juggling moderation, privacy, and safety at internet scale. The platform’s reach also amplifies concerns around model update governance, data provenance, monetization strategies, and regulatory scrutiny, and it reshapes competitive dynamics and research priorities across AI/ML, from benchmarking and fine-tuning practices to deployment standards for large-scale conversational agents.