OpenAI's user base is exploding thanks to playful features

Welcome back, Superhuman. A picture is worth a thousand words. But in OpenAI’s case, it may be worth a few hundred million users. The ChatGPT maker is experiencing a new wave of growth and user adoption thanks to its new image generation capabilities. But there’s more to the story than meets the eye.

Today’s Insights

• Microsoft Recall, ByteDance’s upcoming model, and SSI’s mega round

• ChatGPT’s user base is exploding — here’s why

• Tutorial: How to build and prototype an app with Firebase Studio

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• News, memes, what’s trending on socials, and more

TODAY IN AI

1. Microsoft is rolling out its much-awaited Recall feature: The controversial tool, which records your screen to create a searchable history of your digital activity, is being rolled out to Copilot Plus PCs after months of delays. Initially criticized by cybersecurity experts as a Black Mirror-esque "disaster", Microsoft made several tweaks, such as making Recall strictly opt-in. However, early users claim that the guardrails still don’t seem to stop the tool from capturing sensitive information.

2. ByteDance flexes reasoning muscle with upcoming AI model: TikTok’s parent company unveiled a technical paper for Seed-Thinking-v1.5, a new "reasoning" LLM designed to go head-to-head with OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek R1. Using a mixture-of-experts architecture that activates only 20B of its 200B parameters at once, ByteDance claims the model "outperforms humans on most economically valuable tasks". It beats DeepSeek R1 and even edges out Gemini 2.5 Pro and o3-mini-high on some benchmarks like ARC-AGI, which measures progress towards artificial general intelligence.

3. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever raises mega funding round for his startup: Safe Superintelligence (SSI) has reportedly raised an additional $2B in new funding, sending its valuation soaring to $32B. Google and Nvidia are among investors pouring cash into the company, despite SSI having no public product or roadmap beyond a mission statement promising "one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence." The former OpenAI chief scientist continues to attract unprecedented investor confidence.

PRESENTED BY VANTA

Scaling a business?

To scale your company, you need compliance. And by investing in compliance early, you protect sensitive data and simplify the process of meeting industry standards—ensuring long-term trust and security.

Vanta helps growing companies achieve compliance quickly and painlessly by automating 35+ frameworks—including SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more.

Start with Vanta’s Compliance for Startups Bundle, with key resources to accelerate your journey.

• Step-by-step compliance checklists

• Case studies from fast-growing startups

• On-demand videos with industry leaders

Get it here

FROM THE FRONTIER

ChatGPT’s user base is exploding. Here’s why:

The next big thing will start out looking like a toy. Those are the famous words of technologist Chris Dixon, who argued back in 2010 that the big technologies of tomorrow are often dismissed as playful toys at launch. This seems to be particularly true with the Studio Ghibli image trend unleashed by ChatGPT’s recently released image capabilities.

A picture is worth a million users. While people around the world playfully turned their pictures into Ghibli styled images and shared them on socials, ChatGPT quietly rode the wave of virality and added millions of new users each day. On March 31, CEO Sam Altman posted: “the ChatGPT launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments I'd ever seen, and we added one million users in five days. We added one million users in the last hour.”

But there’s more to the story. The Ghibli image trend appears to have unlocked a massive new market for OpenAI — India. ChatGPT usage in the subcontinent has exploded over the past month. A week after the image generation feature was released, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said that India was officially their fastest growing ChatGPT market. Sam Altman confirmed this in a separate post and even shared a Ghibli style image of himself playing cricket to pour more fuel on the fire.

The Ghibli image trend and the momentum from India were enough to help ChatGPT become the most downloaded app globally in March. But another viral trend is already gathering momentum. Users are now generating action figure images of themselves and public figures with ChatGPT (pictured above). The next big thing may once again — both literally and figuratively — be a toy.

THE AI ACADEMY

How to build and prototype an app with Firebase Studio

• Go to Firebase Studio and sign in with your account.

• Enter a prompt describing the app you want to create and hit Enter.

Sample Prompt: ‘Create an app that helps me plan my day’

• Firebase Studio will generate a blueprint of the app, including screens, features, and logic.

• Edit the prototype if needed by adjusting text, flows, or features.

• Click on ‘Prototype this App’ and wait a few minutes.

• You’ll get an interactive, working prototype you can test.

• Keep prompting to refine, add features, or improve the design.

• Once you're satisfied, you can export the code or deploy it directly with Firebase.

PRESENTED BY CODEIUM

Code like a pro (with zero coding experience)

Need to build but don’t know code? Welcome to Windsurf by Codeium–the world’s first AI IDE designed for beginners and experts alike:

• Powered by the smarter, more stable Cascade agent

• Unmatched context awareness for accurate, high-quality code

• One-click deployments and intuitive UX

Start building today at no cost.

AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

⌚️ Cryptic Countdown: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman teased a week of major announcements starting tomorrow in a post that’s got industry watchers on the edge of their seats.

📺️ Vibe Watch: Netflix is testing an OpenAI-powered search feature that lets users find content based on their mood. Currently available to iOS users in Australia and New Zealand, a US rollout is planned in the coming weeks.

🎸 Prompt to Music: YouTube is reportedly rolling out "Music Assistant," an AI tool that generates copyright-free instrumental tracks for creators based on text prompts. The feature is gradually showing up in the Creator Music beta section.

🚧 Check Point: OpenAI is implementing a "Verified Organization" process to combat policy violations, requiring government-issued IDs to access future advanced AI models through its API. Verification is to be limited to one organization per ID every 90 days.

👓️ Peeping Pixels: ByteDance is reportedly building AI-powered smart glasses similar to Meta's Ray-Ban collaboration. However, further details about release timing and market availability for the wearable remain under wraps.

PRODUCTIVITY

5 AI Tools to Supercharge Your Productivity

✅ Sider: Create expert-level, interactive reports in minutes by auto-scanning 100+ sources and highlighting insights.

✅ Voicenotes: Record your thoughts and meetings, remember everything, and get insights right when you need them.

✅ Veed: AI-powered video creation tools to help you edit and create videos faster.

✅ SimplAI: Build complex, high-accuracy agentic AI apps for the enterprise without writing any code.

✅ Llama 4: Meta’s next-generation open-source AI model designed for advanced reasoning, coding, and language understanding.

^{* indicates a promoted tool, if any}

PROMPT OF THE DAY

Cold Outreach

Prompt: Act as an expert B2B copywriter and SDR. Help me write a cold outreach email that sparks curiosity, feels personal, and avoids sounding like a typical sales pitch. I’m selling [brief description of your product/service and its core benefit], targeting [specific audience], and solving [pain point]. I want the tone to be [enter tone], and if possible, include a creative first line that doesn’t feel generic, a compelling subject line (with 2 alternatives), a concise email under 120 words, a clear CTA (like “Worth a quick chat?”), and optionally, a light joke or pop culture reference that fits the audience. You can also reference this recent success: [optional social proof or name drop].

SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

📉 Meta Miss: Meta’s Llama 4 models are dropping fast in benchmark rankings just a few days after release. Some are criticizing Meta and calling it a “debacle.“

💻️ CodeGPT: CFO Sarah Friar revealed that OpenAI is working on an AI-powered software engineer that will build apps, fix bugs, write documentation, and more.

🎙️ Watch Out Oprah: Microsoft Copilot interviewed Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Satya Nadella simultaneously and it makes for an entertaining watch.

📹️ Better Than Ever: A post that compared the viral Will Smith spaghetti video from 2 years ago to a video generated with a similar prompt today shows how far AI has come in such a short time.

😂 Meme Lord: Someone asked ChatGPT to create the greatest meme not yet created, and went viral with the results. The comments have some funny memes too.

AI-GENERATED IMAGES

Spring in the Valley

Midjourney Prompt: spring season, A serene countryside during early spring rain, vivid green grass swaying under gentle raindrops, warm mist rising from the earth, traditional Chinese painting style, delicate and evocative, flat design, vector graphics, bright colors, simple lines, high resolution, rich details. No background. A vibrant and lively atmosphere, symbolizing growth, harmony between nature and culture, ue5 engine, 3D rendering, Chinese style --sref 2077236407 --v 7 --stylize 250 --profile a262o3j --ar 9:16

Acquire new customers and drive revenue by partnering with us

Superhuman is the world’s biggest AI newsletter for businesses and professionals with 1M+ readers and 2M+ followers on socials working at the world’s leading startups and enterprises. Companies like Amazon, Hubspot, and Salesforce feature their products in Superhuman. You can learn more about partnering with us here.

🧞 Your wish is my command

Got more feedback or just want to get in touch? Reply to this email and we’ll get back to you.

Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

Zain & the Superhuman AI team