India fuels ChatGPT’s AI surge as users create over 700 million images amid viral Ghibli trend

ChatGPT’s native image generation capabilities were introduced last week, and since then, users haven’t been able to get enough of the service, as a raging Studio Ghibli-style image trend has taken over the internet. OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap has shared some incredible statistics on the usage of ChatGPT’s new image creation feature.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Lightcap noted that over 130 million ChatGPT users have generated over 700 million images since last Tuesday. The OpenAI COO also echoed CEO Sam Altman’s comments a day earlier when he confirmed that India has become the fastest growing market for ChatGPT.

“What’s happening with ai adoption in india right now is amazing to watch. We love to see the explosion of creativity–india is outpacing the world.” Altman had said a day earlier.

Altman had also previously said that OpenAI had one million users in an hour compared to the height of AI hype in late 2022 when ChatGPT debuted for public where it added 1 million users in a month.

ChatGPT already had an image generator, what changed?

ChatGPT already had access to image generation capabilities via OpenAI’s own DALL-E 3 model but last week OpenAI unlocked the image generation capabilities in GPT-4o – the language model running the popular chatbot. The new change allowed ChatGPT to produce images faster and more seamlessly without having to rely on external models.

ChatGPT’s new abilities allowed it to have more control over the images leading to control over more image styles and higher consistency. While ChatGPT’s new abilties allow it to a do a host of tasks like creating PPTs, infographics, comics and even photorealistic images, social media users struck a cord with the chatbot’s ability to create real life images in Studio Ghibli style effect, leading to mass trend.

How did the extra traffic impact OpenAI?

Since the launch of ChatGPT’s new image generation capabilities, the service has suffered at least two outages. The increase in users also put a lot of pressure on the OpenAI team, which wasn’t getting much sleep to keep everything running smoothly, Almtan said in a post.

OpenAI publicly confirmed that it was facing a severe GPU shortage as demand for ChatGPT’s new feature showed no signs of slowing down. Earlier in the week, Altman said that while the Microsoft-backed company was trying to get things under control, new releases from it would be delayed and the service could be slow at times as it tries to deal with “capacity challenges”.