Nothing had a billion users; the Internet didn't at the time.

MySpace and Friendster both spent significant time as the #1 social sites. Facebook unseated them rapidly. The same is possible for OpenAI.

There were ~900M internet users in 2004. Only ~1M of them were on MySpace.

That's 1 in 900.

There's 5.5B internet users in 2024. ~1B of them used ChatGPT monthly.

That's 1 in 5.

Do you see the difference yet?

It's literally orders of magnitude.

MySpace and Friendster both claimed ~115M peak users.

> It's literally orders of magnitude.

Sure, and the speed at which ChatGPT went from zero to a billion is precisely why they need a moat... because otherwise the next one can do it to them.

Your argument is like a railroad company in 1905 scoffing at the idea that airliners will be a thing.

Peek users is not the amount of users they had when Facebook started.

Facebook probably would've never became a thing if MySpace already had ~115M users when it started.

MySpace had ~1M.

That's why DeepSeek (or anyone else) is going to have an incredibly difficult time convincing ~1B to switch from ChatGPT to their tool instead.

Can it happen? For sure.

Will it happen? Less likely.

If anyone unseats ChatGPT - it's much more likely to be a usual suspect like Google, Apple, or Microsoft - then some obscure company no one has ever heard of.

Of course, anything is possible.

It had more than Facebook when Facebook launched so I’m not sure what your point is

Dude, if you seriously believe OpenAI has 1B active users, you should go touch grass. Actual estimates are 100-200 million, about a magnitude lower.