ChatGPT hits ‘one million users in an hour’ after Ghibli style images spark frenzy; rolls out image gen for free users

  • The release of ChatGPT's image generation feature for free users led to a viral wave of Studio Ghibli inspired images. CEO Sam Altman revealed the platform attracted one million users within an hour, equaling its five-day growth.

Sudeshna Ghoshal, Riya R Alex
Published1 Apr 2025, 06:41 AM IST
ChatGPT hits ‘one million users in an hour’ after Ghibli style images spark frenzy; rolls out image gen for free users
ChatGPT hits ‘one million users in an hour’ after Ghibli style images spark frenzy; rolls out image gen for free users

Netizens could not keep calm after Open AI rolled out ChatGPT's native image generation to free users, and a massive number of Studio Ghibli-style images flooded the internet.

The viral craze was such that ChatGPT recorded one million users in just an hour, adding to the one million that the chatbot recorded in five days, Open AI CEO Sam Altman announced on X.

"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," Sam Altman announced on X.

The CEO further stated that “image generation has now been rolled out to free users.”

Popularity of Ghibli images

On March 26, OpenAI rolled out the native image generation feature to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users worldwide. The latest Japan's Studio Ghibli artwork feature impressed social media users, who began turning their images into the format of popular anime films. However, this feature was launched for free users after some delay.

Meanwhile, OpenAI added certain restrictions over image generation for both paid and free users due to excessive demand which was “melting its GPUs (graphics processing units)," according to Altman.

“It's super fun seeing people love images in ChatGPT. But our GPUs are melting. We are going to temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. hopefully won't be long! ChatGPT free tier will get 3 generations per day soon,” OpenAI CEO wrote in a separate post on X.

Also Read | Who is Miyazaki Hayao? Studio Ghibli co-founder who calls AI images an ‘insult’

Social media users react

With Altman's announcement of growing user numbers, several social media users have responded, where most have highlighted the upcoming struggles for the company.

One of the users said, “I think the biggest struggle still is - how do you move this from a personal thing to a business productivity or impact thing.”

Also Read | Gemini 2.5 Pro vs ChatGPT: Can Google’s AI create free Ghibli-style images?

Another user added, “All nice the fun created stuff, but who is building real business on top of these solutions?”

“If just for fun images, users come and go within days, need more serious day-to-day AI usages,” another social media user said.

When was ChatGPT launched?

OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022. It was introduced as a conversational AI tool that could take prompts and create human-like text-based answers.

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Business NewsTechnologyChatGPT hits ‘one million users in an hour’ after Ghibli style images spark frenzy; rolls out image gen for free users
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First Published:1 Apr 2025, 06:41 AM IST
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