The fastest ever! The number of monthly active users exceeded the 100 million mark in two months. The major search engines are about to enter the "ChatGPT era".

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Today, OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence (AI) company, released ChatGPT Plus, a pilot subscription program for ChatGPT. ChatGPT Plus will be available for $20 a month, and subscribers will get a more stable and faster service than the free version, as well as priority to try new features and optimizations.

ChatGPT is a conversational AI generated by OpenAI's large model GPT-3.5 fine-tuning. It is the most popular product in the AI field since it was launched at the end of November 2022 because of its efficient question and answer and the ability to write many kinds of text.

ChatGPT had an estimated 100m monthly active users in January, making it the fastest-growing consumer app in history, according to a research report released on Wednesday by UBS, the Swiss multinational investment bank. On average, more than 13 million unique visitors used ChatGPT every day in January, more than double the number in December, the report said, citing data analysis firm Similarweb.

By contrast, it took TikTok about nine months and Instagram two and a half years to reach 100m monthly active users.

In just two months, ChatGPT continued to soar in the number of users, giving its company OpenAI a first-mover advantage in the development and commercial use of the new chat robot. The growing usage adds a huge amount of computing costs, but it also provides a lot of valuable feedback, which will accelerate the improvement and optimization of ChatGPT.

Microsoft, the largest investor in OpenAI, also began to use ChatGPT technology to improve the competitiveness of its products. After announcing an additional multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI last month, Microsoft has just announced a premium version of Microsoft Teams Premium for its video conferencing and remote collaboration platform, which allows subscribers to take advantage of OpenAI GPT-3.5-supported large-scale language modeling technology to automatically generate meeting notes with AI.

"the intelligent summary function will quickly generate the most important information for the meeting.

According to previous foreign media reports, Microsoft is preparing to integrate a faster and stronger version of ChatGPT (based on GPT-4) into Microsoft Bing, the world's second largest search engine, in the coming weeks, which will challenge Google's dominant position in the search field.

Google executives clearly feel the threat from ChatGPT. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who have ceased to run Google's day-to-day work since 2019, have also rejoined the strategy because of the urgency, holding several meetings with company executives last month to discuss responses to the new chatbot. According to foreign media, they support the plan to introduce more chat robot functions into the Google search engine.

Chinese search engine giant Baidu is also rumored to plan to launch an AI chat robot similar to ChatGPT in March, the initial version of which will be embedded in its search service.

Generative AI has become a mainstream trend of AI industry in 2023. In addition to AI, such as ChatGPT, which mainly generates text, AI generates images and AI generates videos, which are also becoming the focus of competition between tech giants and startups. In the just-concluded Meta earnings call, Meta CEO Zuckerberg talked about "generative AI" more often than "meta-universe" and said that one of Meta's goals is to "become the leader of generative AI."

ChatGPT Plus is open to customers in the United States. OpenAI will start inviting users from the waiting list in the coming weeks and plans to expand its service to more countries and regions soon. At the same time, OpenAI will continue to support free access to ChatGPT by non-paying users.

OpenAI wrote in his blog that ChatGPT was originally launched as a research preview to learn more about the system's pros and cons and collect user feedback to help improve its limitations. Since then, OpenAI has received feedback from millions, has made several important updates, and has seen users find value in a range of professional use cases, including drafting and editing content, brainstorming ideas, programming help, and learning new topics.

Last month, OpenAI released a professional version of ChatGPT Pro for $42 a month, and there was already a large queue of Krypton users waiting to try it out. With the launch of a lower-priced, faster-response subscription version, ChatGPT is expected to inspire more enthusiasm.

In the future, OpenAI plans to continue to improve and expand the service based on user feedback and needs, and is actively exploring options for low-cost plans, business plans, and packets to improve availability.

(disclaimer: this article only represents the author's point of view, not Sina's position. )