Sundar Pichai announced on Tuesday that the Gemini app had passed a billion monthly users. He called it “our fastest growing product ever” and the 14th Google product to hit the mark, alongside Search, Gmail, Android, Maps, Chrome, Play and YouTube. His post has been seen more than 1.5 million times.
Google published the engagement figures on its own blog the same day. Most coverage framed the milestone as Gemini closing the gap with ChatGPT. Check the metrics and they do not say that.
A monthly billion and a weekly billion are different animals
ChatGPT reached a billion monthly users on 3 June, which we reported as the fastest any app had got there. Gemini reached the same mark on 11 August. That is ten weeks later, on the identical measure.
OpenAI has now said so on the record. Spokesperson Lindsay McCallum told The Verge that ChatGPT “crossed 1 billion monthly users some time ago, and hit a billion a week in July”. She declined to say how many monthly users it has today.
