OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shares a hiring call for techies: 'We could desperately use your help'

Sam Altman said on April 11 that ChatGPT has about 800 million users and that the numbers were growing rapidly.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has taken to X to share a hiring call for engineers interested in "very large-scale computing systems" and infrastructure following a massive boom in ChatGPT users after numbers doubled in a week. The AI chatbot and image generator is speculated to have one billion users.

"If you are interested in infrastructure and very large-scale computing systems, the scale of what’s happening at OpenAI right now is insane, and we have very hard/interesting challenges. Please consider joining us! We could desperately use your help," Altman wrote on Sunday night.

While the OpenAI CEO has not publicly declared the number of ChatGPT users, speaking to TED curator Chris Anderson that ChatGPT on April 11, he said that the numbers very growing very rapidly.

“I think the last time we said was 500 million weekly actives, and it is growing very rapidly,” he told Anderson before pegging the number closer to 800 million users, referring to it broadly as hundreds of millions of users. “Something like 10 percent of the world uses our systems, now a lot,” Forbes quoted the 39-year-old as saying.

ChatGPT’s user base has been growing at an exponential rate with the release of several products that have gone viral, including its introduction of a new feature that generates images and videos in various styles, including that of the legendary Japanese studio, Studio Ghibli, which created film classics like My Neighbor Totoro. On March 31, Altman shared on X that ChatGPT had added a million users in just one hour, thanks to Ghibli mode.

Recently, Altman also addressed concerns of IP theft over ChatGPT’s new image generator after critics complained that the AI tool was simply ripping off the original artists. He said that ChatGPT would not create images in the style of living artists, but would be allowed to create images in the style of studios.

He also hinted at the possibility of creating a new model that would enable them to share some of the revenue earned from ChatGPT with the artists. “I also believe that we probably do need to figure out some sort of new model around the economics of creative output," Atman told Anderson. "People have been building on the creativity of others for a long time. People take inspiration for a long time. But as the access to creativity gets incredibly democratised, and people are building off of each other's ideas all the time. I think there are incredible new business models that we and others are excited to explore. Exactly what that's gonna look like, I'm not sure."