Amid Studio Ghibli trend, ChatGPT gains 1 million users in 1 hour

A OpenAI released a new image generator in ChatGPT who impresses with his assertiveness in creating photos in different styles, including those that have the same style as the famous drawings of Studio Ghibli. Amid high demand, the company continues to receive new applications and the ChatGPT gains 1 million users in 1 hour only today (31). Understand success.

The success of the image generator

On March 25, 2025, we had the launch of the image generator DALL E 3, which uses the language model GPT-4o as a basis for creating images. It impresses by not having spelling mistakes or problems in human anatomy, such as, for example, creating a photo of a person with six fingers on one hand.

It didn't take long for the internet, more specifically X users, to start testing the tool and finding a new trend: create photos with Studio Ghibli strokes, a famous Japanese anime studio founded by Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Toshio Suzuki e Yasuyoshi Tokuma in 1985.

And it didn't take long for the trend to Studio Ghibli became a hit on all social networks. Unless you've been living under a rock these days, you've probably seen photos with movie styles like My Totoro Friend, A Viagem de Chihiro e The Boy and the Crane.

Such growth in the number of people creating their photos has also led to an increase in the number of account registrations to use the ChatGPT. And with the larger user base, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam altman, was made public two days after the success of trends to mention that GPUs were melting due to the large number of requests for image creation.

It's super fun to see people love images on chatgpt.

but our GPUs are melting.

We're going to temporarily introduce some rate limits while we work on making it more efficient. Hopefully it won't take too long!

chatgpt free tier will have 3 generations per day soon.

(We are also declining some generations that should be allowed; we are fixing this as quickly as we can.)

Sam Altman on the success of ChatGPT's image generator.

So that the demand could be met and the chatbot not experience even greater instability issues, a limit on image creation was established while the company works until everything is stabilized. Initially, the idea was to allow everyone to create their photos without a defined limit, however, the CEO of OpenAI announced that there will be a limit of creating three images per day “soon”.

At the time of writing, free accounts could create up to three photos per day, requiring a ten-minute wait between creating one image and another. Subscribers to the plan GPT Pro ou GPT Plus have a higher limit to generate images up to the chatbot request time for new images to be styled.

And, six days after the tool was released for public use, Sam altman (who also changed his profile picture to a styled image of Studio Ghibli) announced that the ChatGPT recorded the number of one million users in just one hour. For comparison, he also said that when the ChatGPT was released, it took five days for this feat to be achieved.

chatgpt's launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments i've ever seen, and we added a million users in five days.

We added a million users in the last hour.

Sam Altman in publication in X.

The updates page about the status of ChatGPT and other OpenAI services has been updated with a message stating that new account creation may be experiencing issues amid high demand. See:

After the high demand that overloaded the video cards of the OpenAI due to image generation, Sam altman announced that image generation has been released again for free account users, via X/Twitter.

Image generation in chatgpt is now available for all free account users.

Sam Altman on OpenAI's imaging success.

ChatGPT Records

According to data from Reuters, the success of ChatGPT has been happening since it first appeared: back in January 2023, two months after its launch, the chatbot, which at the time “only” had the ability to write, had already reached the mark of 100 million active users. The most interesting thing about this success of just two months is that TikTok took nine months to reach the same number, while the Instagram It took no less than two and a half years to reach 100 million active users.

Also, it is known that in just five days after its launch, the total of ChatGPT users had reached the number of one million, while by March 2025, the chatbot had around 400 million active users per week. The estimate of OpenAI is that the ChatGPT reach the milestone of 1 billion total users by the end of 2025. Other usage data includes:

• Fifth most visited website in the world;
• Used by 92% of Fortune 500 companies;
• Used by 23% of US adults and 60% of college students;
• Used by software developers (79%) and millennials (34%);
• Used in marketing (77%) and professional services;
• Used to analyze data files that are too large to open in a spreadsheet application;
• Used to reduce research time and improve internal systems.

What comes next?

Data from May 2024, informs that the OpenAI has already started developing a new language model for its flagship AI. Although the most recent release was less than a year ago, (GPT-4.5),  GPT-5 is under development and the latest update is Sam altman, posted in February 2025, is that the new language model would be available in “months/weeks”.

Little is known about the new features that this new language model will have, but the strongest rumors point to Expanded Multimodal Capacity, which would allow the integration of text, audio, image and video processing, making more natural and versatile interactions possible. It is also expected that we will be able to train agents IA so that specific activities can be carried out, which would give us space to focus on more complex activities.

We just have to wait for more news from OpenAI. In the meantime, write to us at Comment: you were part of the people who participated in the trends do Studio Ghibli?

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With information: Exploding Topics l Engadget l Axios l The Verge.

Text review done by Jaime Ninece in 31 / 03 / 2025.