According to a Friday article in The Washington Post, OpenAI’s enormously popular ChatGPT has begun to lose members for the first time.
According to statistics company Similarweb, worldwide traffic to ChatGPT on mobile and desktop dropped by about 10% between May and June.
The downloads of ChatGPT’s iPhone app have been progressively declining since they peaked in early June, according to Sensor Tower, another analytics company.
This, according to the Post, may be a hint that customer interest in chatbots and other AI tools is dwindling as tech companies make significant investments in the creation of AI products.
The AI tool broke the record for having the fastest-growing user base in history earlier this year.
However, Ars pointed out at the time that technology adoption rates have usually accelerated over the previous few decades. At the time, many internet companies, most notably Google, wanted to rapidly mimic OpenAI success.
ChatGPT Declining Users
The popularity of AI tool may have been more due to its novelty, which may be waning now, than to a general interest in chatbots.
This week, Meta introduced a rival to Twitter called Threads, which serves as an illustration of how AI tool might have merely profited from rising user adoption rates.
Even with serious design flaws and several privacy concerns, Threads quickly surpassed OpenAI’s tool as the consumer app with the quickest rate of growth.
According to CNBC, Threads reached 70 million users in less than two days, whereas ChatGPT reached 100 million members in just two months.
And Meta accomplished that without relying on any eye-catching new AI features (Twitter actually filed a lawsuit, claiming that Threads is just a Twitter knockoff).
It’s still unclear, though, if a 10% drop in ChatGPT users in a single summer month should worry tech companies investing heavily in chatbots.
The Post offered several explanations for why ChatGPT might be losing users, including a potential decline in chatbot quality as expenditures to maintain it rose due to its popularity and OpenAI’s attempts to make adjustments to cut costs.
Even the fact that fewer students are required to produce academic papers over the summer may be significant.
However, ChatGPT has also had to deal with user drama, including a recent lawsuit and a growing number of businesses, including Apple, advising staff members not to use tools like ChatGPT due to privacy concerns.
In addition, OpenAI began limiting detrimental ChatGPT responses in response to user complaints and regulatory pressure, which may have caused some users to stop using the service because they perceived it as less trustworthy, less enjoyable, or less useful.
To read our blog on “Microsoft uses ChatGPT to create a better AI,” click here.
