This Week in AI: 800 Million People Use ChatGPT Every Week

OpenAI helped spark the artificial intelligence boom when its ChatGPT AI chatbot reached 100 million users just two months after launch, making it the fastest growing consumer product ever.

"In 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp," Reuters reported UBS analysts writing at the time.

This week, OpenAI said ChatGPT had reached 800 million weekly active users, marking the latest datapoint of the startup's popularity and broad usage.

AI of course has become one of the hottest trends in tech, business, manufacturing, politics and pretty much everything else. It has touched everything from entertainment, leading an AI-assisted Beatles song to win a Grammy Award, to medicine, where AI-assisted doctors are detecting cancer and suggesting treatment much faster than before. AI has even revolutionized weather predictions, reducing the computing power necessary for historically complex forecast calculations.

Despite AI's many significant contributions to our daily lives, there are still questions and concerns that the technology is being over-hyped, leading to another tech industry bubble. If so, tech experts worry that the widespread benefits we've seen from AI could start to disappear.

Fortunately, open-source AI technologies guarantee that some form of AI will survive whatever happens to the market. And new devices like Nvidia's upcoming DGX Spark are pushing the limits of what hobbyists can do at home, pushing AI from the cloud to local machines where users could have more control and more flexibility. 

ChatGPT adds an Apps SDK

Alongside announcements of ChatGPT's widespread use, OpenAI also said that it is expanding tools for developers with a new feature called Apps SDK. The tool, announced at a company developer event, helps app developers create experiences inside ChatGPT. For example, OpenAI demonstrated an experience where a video from the learning platform Coursera could be added directly to a relevant chat. Users can even ask follow-up questions from the app, OpenAI said.

The technology is built on the popular Model Context Protocol, championed by competitor Anthropic as a way for AIs to talk to various apps and services. MCP has been used to help AIs control browsers, for example, or more easily find files on a system.

Now, OpenAI says ChatGPT can use MCP to ask Spotify to create a playlist, for example.

"The magic of this new generation of apps in ChatGPT is how they blend familiar interactive elements -- like maps, playlists and presentations -- with new ways of interacting through conversation," OpenAI said when announcing the feature.

The company said it's expecting apps from Uber, Tripadvisor, Alltrails, DoorDash, Khan Academy, OpenTable and Target "later this year."

Celeb-cloning AI is getting out of control

Celebrity deepfakes are in the news again, with the trend supercharged by OpenAI's Sora video maker, which got a big upgrade last week. Apparently, amidst the silly videos of the animated character SpongeBob SquarePants being pulled over for speeding, or new adventures of Rick and Morty , people have also begun using the technology to recreate videos of celebrities.

One of the people whose likeness has been gobbled up by the AI is comedian Robin Williams, who died over a decade ago. His daughter, Zelda Williams, posted on Instagram recently that so many people have been sending her AI-powered likenesses of her father that she now feels the need to speak out.

"If you’ve got any decency, just stop doing this to him and to me, to everyone even, full stop," she wrote, as reported by People Magazine. "Stop believing I wanna see it or that I'll understand, I don't and I won't."

Aside from the emotional toll, Williams said the videos also strike at larger questions about the use of likenesses that Hollywood has been grappling with for years. Just last week, the industry was debating its first supposed "AI actress," Tilly Norwood.

"Living actors deserve a chance to create characters with their choices, to voice cartoons, to put their HUMAN effort and time into the pursuit of performance," Williams added in her post.

Meta tells some staff to use outside AI engineering tools

Competition among AI companies may be fierce, but even they often know who really has the best product for a particular task. Meta is going the next step and actually using it, too.

A new report from Business Insider says some Meta engineers have been told to use AI systems by competitors for specialized tasks, such as coding. The move may not be surprising for people who have used Meta's AI tools, which are well-regarded for some tasks, but not the ones Meta's engineers apparently need for coding.

Meta's internal moves are a reminder of how tough the AI race has been on large tech companies such as Meta, Google, and Apple, all of which are often considered titans of industry. But in each case, these companies have also struggled to meet the seeming competitive edge startups like OpenAI and Anthropic have with their tools.

Some tech giants have opted to spread their bets by partnering with AI startups rather than merely competing against them. Microsoft in particular has positioned its Copilot AI as a sort of hub technology that works with OpenAI, Anthropic and others.

This all serves as a reminder of one of the toughest lessons companies like Microsoft learned more than a decade ago: You can invest eye-watering amounts of money into research and development, and still lose in competition to a seemingly smaller player or less capable company.

That’s not to say that Meta is giving up. The company has continued to stand out by offering AI-powered wearables. Last month, Meta released its $799 Display glasses technology that overlays computer information on the real world. The result is an AI assistant that displays chat messages, directions and other helpful items in your field of view.

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Ian Sherr is a widely published journalist who's covered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Netflix, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and more for CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and CNET.