According to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the demand for ChatGPT currently exceeds the company's capacity.
Altman announced on Twitter.com that following the announcements made at the Dev Day developer conference, demand has increased to the point that it is currently exceeding capacity.
As a result, new subscriptions to ChatGPT-Plus are currently unavailable. Only the Plus subscription provides access to OpenAI's new GPT-4 Turbo model.
Immediately after DevDay, OpenAI experienced outages. According to the company, a DDoS attack on the service also played a role.
ChatGPT traffic recovers and approaches record-level
After a decline over the summer, ChatGPT's web traffic has recovered and is now within ten percent of its April 2023 peak worldwide and within four percent in the US.
According to Similarweb, this could be related to the resumption of school in the US, as students are increasingly using ChatGPT to help with homework. Another possible reason could be the improvements that OpenAI has made to the product.
In May 2023, ChatGPT peaked at 1.8 billion visits worldwide before dropping to 1.4 billion in August. In September, the number rose again to around 1.5 billion, and based on the last few weeks, it could reach 1.7 billion in October.
Usage of the Android app is also growing globally every month. The app recently received an update for voice recognition and playback, making it a competitor to Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant.
In the US, ChatGPT's web traffic peaked in April with 187.5 million visits, fell to 137.4 million in June and rose again to 164.3 million in September. Based on the last few weeks, traffic could rise to over 195 million visits in October, setting a new record.
The data shows that ChatGPT is no longer on the steep growth path of the first few months.
However, ChatGPT is by no means in decline, as was sometimes assumed after the brief summer dip. In the medium term, it remains to be seen whether new features such as the GPTs or the new GPT-4 Turbo, which is faster but not necessarily more capable than the original GPT-4 model from March, can generate new growth.
