OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research lab founded by renowned scientists, recently made a big splash with the launch of its first mobile app, ChatGPT. After launching on the U.S. iOS App Store only, the app soared to unprecedented success, garnering over half a million downloads in its first six days. Amazingly, it is second only to the popular app Truth Social, established in February 2022.
Though Bing and Microsoft Edge featured some OpenAI technology, they could not come close to the success that ChatGPT achieved. Bing got only 340K downloads while Edge got 335K in their biggest five-day periods in February, whereas ChatGPT generated 480K in just the first US-only launch window. Plus, the US App Store downloads for May consolidated ChatGPT’s position, putting it in the top five by downloads among all AI chatbot apps.
There’s a highly competitive industry for AI chatbots, with many third-party apps in the App Store taking advantage of consumer-term keyword searches. These apps often fraudulently charge users for access to AI chatbots, creating a risky market for official apps like ChatGPT to gain traction. But the OpenAI app easily overcame this challenge and showed superior performance to the competition.
The only app that surpassed it during its launch month of May was Chat with Ask AI, with 590,000 downloads from April 4th-8th. The next-closest apps were Genie – AI Chatbot and ChatOn – AI Chat Bot Assistant, both with 550,000 downloads. A massive 1.4 million downloads also went to Chat with Ask AI during the month of May.
ChatGPT’s overwhelming success stands out, even with those of other top apps across 2021 and 2022 including the February debut of Truth Social. The success could be attributed to several factors, but no doubt a large portion of this was due to the fuel of consumer appetite for AI chatbot technology.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 by some of the world’s top scientific minds, including Elon Musk and his colleagues from the renowned research lab AI. Led by CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI is focused on creating cutting-edge AI technology, and ChatGPT is an early indication of their success. With the addition of 11 new global markets, OpenAI is sure to achieve even more success in the near future from this unique app.
