on thursday, openai announced that its newly launched image-generation tool, chatgpt images 2.0, has quickly made india the largest user base for this feature since its release last week. designed to handle complex prompts and generate highly detailed images with multilingual, precise text, this new tool marks another deep dive by openai into the realm of multimodal interaction.
market data reveal regional differences in global user response. according to sensor tower, downloads of the chatgpt app surged 11% in its first week of release, yet core engagement metrics such as daily active users and session counts increased by only about 1%. similarweb’s data similarly confirms this moderate trend, with global website traffic up roughly 1.6% month over month. however, emerging markets led by india are showing strong growth momentum, with app downloads in pakistan, vietnam, and indonesia surging as much as 79% week over week during the promotional period.
in the indian market, chatgpt recorded approximately 5 million downloads in its first week, significantly outpacing the 2 million in the united states. openai has observed that indian users are shifting from using the tool primarily for functional outputs to engaging in deeper “self-expression,” widely applying it to create studio-style portraits, stylized avatars, and fantasy-themed visuals. to accommodate this trend, images 2.0 has enhanced its ability to render non-latin scripts such as hindi and bengali, while also introducing a “thinking” feature that allows users to generate multiple variations from a single prompt and perform image restoration. industry analysts note that, following the strong reception of google’s nano banana model in india, openai’s latest move once again underscores the strategic importance of south asian and southeast asian markets in the field of image generation. as demand for ai-powered visual creation explodes in emerging markets, localized language support and personalized use cases are becoming key battlegrounds for tech giants.
