India becomes fastest growing market for ChatGPT amid viral Ghibli trend

India now stands as ChatGPT’s fastest-growing market, amid the newly launched image-generation feature that has taken the internet by storm. According to Brad Lightcap, COO of OpenAI, more than 130 million users have generated over 700 million images in just one week.

“Very crazy first week for images in ChatGPT – over 130M users have generated 700M+ images since last Tuesday. India is now our fastest-growing ChatGPT market. The range of visual creativity has been extremely inspiring,” read Lightcap’s post. 

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, previously praised India’s rapid AI adoption, stating, “What’s happening with AI adoption in India right now is amazing to watch. We love to see the explosion of creativity—India is outpacing the world.” 

Altman also noted that while ChatGPT took five days to reach one million users during its public debut 3 years ago, the platform was adding one million users every hour last week.

“The ChatGPT launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments i’d ever seen, and we added one million users in five days. We added one million users in the last hour,” read the post. 

The growth in India’s user base coincides with ongoing discussions between OpenAI and Meta Platforms, who have held separate discussions with Reliance Industries regarding partnerships to expand their offerings in India, as reported by The Information. 

One of the partnership opportunities being considered involves Reliance Jio distributing ChatGPT within India, the report stated. It also noted the company has been exploring a plan to reduce ChatGPT’s subscription fee from $20 a month to a few dollars.  

While it’s unclear if this pricing strategy has been discussed with Reliance, such reductions could majorly push adoption in price-sensitive markets like India.