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For the 14th time, a Google product has hit 1 billion users. Google CEO Sundar Pichai posted on X that a billion people are using Gemini every month, and that Gemini is Google’s fastest-growing product ever.
A billion users is a huge milestone, but Google isn’t the first AI app to hit it. OpenAI’s ChatGPT hit the mark a few weeks ago, though the company buried the announcement that “more than 1 billion people are putting ChatGPT to work” in an otherwise anodyne blog post about how people use AI. External data suggested ChatGPT crossed 1 billion users as early as this June, but OpenAI hadn’t announced anything until that post on August 6th. OpenAI spokesperson Lindsay McCallum says ChatGPT crossed 1 billion monthly users some time ago, and hit a billion a week in July.
The metrics, and the growth they represent, are somewhat complicated here. OpenAI said that ChatGPT had 900 million weekly active users in February of this year, and reaching 1 billion five months later represents a significant slowdown in growth for ChatGPT, which was for years touted as the fastest-growing software ever. McCallum declined to say how many monthly users ChatGPT has.
Google, meanwhile, announced in February that Gemini had 750 million monthly users, before reporting 950 million in late July on its earnings call, and Google spokesperson Alex Joseph says it reached 1 billion last week before announcing it today. (Claude appears to be growing fast, but Anthropic doesn’t disclose its user data, and estimates put its user numbers in the tens of millions.) There’s no easy way to compare weekly and monthly users, of course, but the simplest read is that ChatGPT is the larger of the platforms but Gemini may be the faster growing.
These Google numbers, by the way, all appear to refer directly to the Gemini app itself, which would mean all the places Google has shoved Gemini into its other products don’t count. The Gemini that comes preinstalled on Android phones seemingly does, though, which is a huge win for Google — Gemini chief Josh Woodward posted that Gemini has more than 100 million active users on iOS, which would mean by extension that the vast majority of Gemini users are also Android users. You can see why OpenAI is so interested in building its own hardware.
The AI race in general has tightened significantly this year. Anthropic’s Claude Code became a phenomenon and forced OpenAI to catch up with Codex, while Google began integrating Gemini into seemingly every surface of its products. The companies’ models have consistently leapfrogged each other, and they’re all suddenly in a race with models coming out of China. But for a long time, ChatGPT was the de facto brand for AI chatbots, and while it’s still seemingly the most popular and well known of its kind, its once commanding lead appears to have largely evaporated. The race to a billion users is over — now these companies have to race to find things for those users to do, and ways to make money in the process.
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