Since it was made public, at the end of November 2022 (here is our first piece talking about it), ChatGPT has known only growth: in popularity, in functionality and above all in users. At least so far. Last June, in fact, the popular artificial intelligence developed by OpenAI seems to have started to lose speed: according to data from Similarweb, taken from the Washington Post, last month traffic from mobiles and computers to the site where you can chat with ChatGPT has decreased by 9.7% worldwide.
The decrease in users is also confirmed by data from Sensor Tower, which recorded a drop in downloads of the ChatGPT app for iOS, after the peak reached at the beginning of the month.
Search interest over time, ChatGPT (blue) vs Minecraft (red).
There’s an obvious factor that might well underlie both trends (down for ChatGPT, up for Minecraft). Can you guess what it is?
As it happens, the answer matters for both the future of AI and the future of education. pic.twitter.com/ctZ4slz3BN
— Francois Chollet (@fchollet) June 24, 2023
Blame the school closures?
The most probable hypothesis is that the drop is due to the end of the school year: more or less all over the world, most students are on vacation, including university students, and therefore have evidently stopped asking questions to ChatGPT to get help with homework, review, prepare a paper or an exam. According to Fortune, these requests rank second among the most frequent ones on ChatGPT, preceded only by those concerning the drafting of resumes and cover letters to find work.
And there is a fact that could perhaps be more than a coincidence, as he claims Francois Chollet, software engineer and Google AI researcher: searches for Minecraft have increased on the web. In short, young people of school age, no longer busy with their homework, would have time again to devote to the popular Microsoft game. The thesis is plausible, if only because the age groups are partially superimposable, but it seems to us that the arguments are a bit weak: we could find another rising interest index and correlate it with ChatGPT and build a equally plausible inference.
A perhaps more concrete reason is underlined by other analysts: the ban imposed on employees by many large companies (such as Apple) to use ChatGPT on company computers to avoid potential data leaks. It would be more about using AI to create code, probably, but even here the extent of the decline would remain to be demonstrated.
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The alternative
In addition, the alternatives are multiplying: in recent months visits to the sites of Bard (what is it?) and Character.AI have increased. Microsoft saw a surge in traffic to its search engine between February and March when Bing AI (which we tested) was made publicly available, but since then, traffic to the site has steadily declined, almost back to normal levels. prior to using ChatGPT and GPT-4. In figures, according to Similarweb, this is an 8.5% drop from May 2023.
Whether this is the first sign of a general trend is too early to tell. It is probable that those of OpenAI are not worried (at least for the moment): Sam Altman, the number one of the company, has reminded several times that the management of ChatGPT costs a “dizzying” amount. In addition to being “almost immoral from an environmental point of view”, as Professor Annalisa Barla reminded us last December, whom we interviewed to have us explain how these artificial intelligences work.
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