ChatGPT and Gemini both just passed 1 billion users
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced Gemini hit 1 billion monthly users, calling it Google's fastest-growing product ever and the 14th Google product to reach that milestone.
- OpenAI spokesperson Lindsay McCallum confirmed ChatGPT crossed 1 billion monthly users "some time ago" and hit 1 billion weekly active users in July, though the company buried the milestone in an August 6th blog post about how people use AI rather than celebrating it.
- ChatGPT growth has visibly decelerated, climbing from 900 million weekly active users in February to 1 billion over five months — a pace the article characterizes as "a significant slowdown" for a product once touted as the fastest-growing software ever.
- Gemini grew from 750 million monthly users in February to 950 million by late July to 1 billion last week, with Google specifying these numbers refer to the Gemini app itself and not Gemini integrations across other Google products.
- Google Gemini chief Josh Woodward posted that Gemini has more than 100 million active users on iOS, implying the vast majority of Gemini users are on Android — a distribution advantage that helps explain OpenAI's hardware ambitions.
- Anthropic's Claude doesn't disclose user data, but third-party estimates put its user count in the tens of millions, placing it far behind the two chatbot leaders despite growing fast.
Why it matters: ChatGPT still leads in raw user count, but its growth from 900M to 1B weekly users over five months is a steep deceleration, while Gemini closed from 750M to 1B monthly users in roughly six months — and Google's Android-installed Gemini means the next billion users may come easier to Google than to OpenAI, shifting who controls the default AI interface on the world's most-used mobile platform.
Ask SkimNews
