OpenAI called it a research preview. They wanted feedback. What they got was a tidal wave.
- 30 November 2022 — launch day.
- ~5 days later — roughly a million users (Sam Altman, OpenAI's boss, said so publicly).
- ~2 months — around 100 million monthly users, faster than any consumer app before it.
- By March 2023 — about 14% of US adults had already tried it (Pew, via press roundups).
For scale: TikTok took the best part of a year to hit numbers like that, and Instagram took years. Love the tech or hate it, the adoption speed was genuinely historic — the fastest a tool has ever gone from "doesn't exist" to "everyone's heard of it."
That speed is why everything after it happened the way it did. Investors threw billions at it. Regulators jolted awake. And ordinary workers started quietly asking, "is my job safe?" — a fair question, and one we answer properly with real numbers in Lesson 5.
You didn't need to be there in week one. You just need to understand that this is the moment the world stopped being able to go back.
Continue — who else ran into the burning building.