According to information coming from the service itself, AI tool ChatGPT gained one million users just five days after launching in November of last year. The conversational AI bot that can produce human-like text has been put to all kind of uses, from writing short stories, prose, music and term papers to programming basic code, solving math problems and doing translations. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has already warned that AI technology like ChatGPT could be replacing people in white collar jobs. Microsoft yesterday confirmed a multimillion dollar investment in U.S. company OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT.

Other popular online services have generally taken much longer to hit the one million user mark. Instagram is among those which come the closest. The popular social media service achieved one million users in just 2.5 months, albeit measured via downloads of the app. Spotify and Dropbox also achieved the feat quickly – in five and seven months, respectively, being services that like ChatGPT offer an immediate practical use. Apart from Instagram, social media services usually took a bit longer to gain one million users. However, the ones included in the chart were also founded more than 15 years ago, showing another development that can be gleaned from the data: As the internet became more omnipresent over time, online services were also able to attain users faster.

When Netflix was launched as a subscription service in 1999, the one million user mark was still 3.5 years away for the streaming and back then, movie mailorder service.

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