Perhaps most telling in this entire report is Table 1. It shows that the non-work has grown 8x in 1 year, whereas work has only ~3.4x. Considering that non-work related usage of ChatGPT now makes up 73% of the requests, ChatGPT is very much in the consumer market, despite substantial marketing of LLM products in a professional context and even as much as compelled usage in some corporations.
Since many consumers are typically relatively tight-fisted in the b2c market, I don't think this bodes well for the long-term economics of the market. This may explain the relatively recent pivot to attempt to "discover" uses.
Replace AI with electricity and the argument looks very different. I think the whole industry is going the Utility route over time. When electricity or railroads or shipping containers or other similar large infrastructure-cost systems were first released the value unlocked for the smallest most profitable customers expanded consumption far more than it did for the large users at the beginning. In electricity for example: Few could have predicted data centers, or crypto, or electric cars boosting demand at the start. As soon as something becomes cheaper with scale (which is what AI companies are going for) the consumption skyrockets as tech catches up. The utility down side is obviously guaranteed monopoly eventually and potentially government involvement, or in this case possibility of AI becoming a chunk of the government as well. Especially with social media content steering votes (text generation really being a tool to steer human opinions) and power, and public funding as a result.
OAI has a very strong potential play in the consumer devices market. The question is if they approach it right. If OAI developed high end laptops/tablets with deep AI integration, with hardware designed around a very specific model architecture (hyper-sparse large MoE with cold expert marshalling/offloading via NVME), that would be incredibly compelling. Don't forget they've got Jony, it wouldn't just be a groundbreaking AI box, it'd be an aesthetic artifact and status symbol.
> ChatGPT is widely used for practical guidance, information seeking, and writing, which together make up nearly 80% of usage. Non-work queries now dominate (70%). Writing is the main work task, mostly editing user text. Users are younger, increasingly female, global, and adoption is growing fastest in lower-income countries
I think the 73% non-work usage ratio will flip again within 2-3 years, but not because consumer usage shrinks. As AI becomes embedded in workflows through APIs the "work" category is set to expand dramatically.
I commonly switch between chatgpt, perplexity, and copilot. Whatever is closest to my mouse or shortcut. Copilot is clearly the worst of the three but I have not true loyalty or most of the time, care. I suspect I am getting weak model responses from perplexity at times but it’s good enough to keep moving fast. Sam mentioned brining memory to people, not just because it’s what ppl want but I suspect my it will help to lock ppl into one platform of snowballing context.
This is crazy. I was having a conversation earlier where I divided the use cases and my taxonomy was almost identical: I didn't include "writing help" but everything else. Then I guessed the trends trends and nailed it with respect to the other of usage.
I mean how often to you make fairly speculative claims and then an hour later see a just published report on it and get it validated? Nuts.
I personally hate chatgpt's voice (writing style) but I guess that's a minority position.
People don’t really use ChatGPT as a search engine replacement. It’s more about decision support, writing, and formatting tasks. That matches what I see at work: younger colleagues often use it for drafting text or templates, but not for “just looking things up.”
> People don’t really use ChatGPT as a search engine replacement
Some do, and they think that they are using it as a replacement. I've been doing research on its use among college students and I've heard firsthand that some of them (especially from students in non-STEM fields) think ChatGPT can be as useful as, if not better than, search engines at times for _seeking_ information.
You may be talking to a specific subset of the population, but once you branch out and observe/hear from broader demographics, you'd be surprised to learn about people's mental model of the genAI technologies.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 38.3 ms ] threadSince many consumers are typically relatively tight-fisted in the b2c market, I don't think this bodes well for the long-term economics of the market. This may explain the relatively recent pivot to attempt to "discover" uses.
I don't think this ends happily.
people said same thing for youtube, "videos are bandwidth hungry", no way make money off of it.
consumer user is still feeding the LLM with training data.
> ChatGPT is widely used for practical guidance, information seeking, and writing, which together make up nearly 80% of usage. Non-work queries now dominate (70%). Writing is the main work task, mostly editing user text. Users are younger, increasingly female, global, and adoption is growing fastest in lower-income countries
https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/
I mean how often to you make fairly speculative claims and then an hour later see a just published report on it and get it validated? Nuts.
I personally hate chatgpt's voice (writing style) but I guess that's a minority position.
Ofc ChatGPT goes in hard to syncopanthically confirm all 'suggestive' leads with zero pushback.
Some do, and they think that they are using it as a replacement. I've been doing research on its use among college students and I've heard firsthand that some of them (especially from students in non-STEM fields) think ChatGPT can be as useful as, if not better than, search engines at times for _seeking_ information.
You may be talking to a specific subset of the population, but once you branch out and observe/hear from broader demographics, you'd be surprised to learn about people's mental model of the genAI technologies.