Is the ChatGpt-mania already over?
Before Threads, it was the fastest growing application ever, but now, for the first time, OpenAI's chatbot, ChatGpt, has seen its site's monthly traffic drop. What does it mean and what are the causes?
Who hasn't had the curiosity to query ChatGpt at least once since its launch?
Apparently few considering that, before being unseated by Threads , it had been called the busiest site in the world. Now, however, the analysis firm Similarweb reports that in June the chatbot recorded a drop in visits for the first time since its launch in November.
Here are the data and possible causes.
CHATGPT BRAKING
In particular, worldwide desktop and mobile traffic to the ChatGpt site decreased by 9.7% in June compared to May, while unique visitors decreased by 5.7%. The time visitors spend on the site also decreased by 8.5%.
On the other hand, the data concerning the traffic to the url dedicated to developers, which is up by 3.1% in June compared to the previous month, goes against the trend.
ALL CHATGPT RECORDS
Starting from November, the ChatGpt site began to be very popular with professionals, nerds but also simply curious as well as students looking for someone to do their homework for them. Generative artificial intelligence has entered people's daily lives, so much so that it reached 100 million monthly active users in January – just two months after its launch.
In late May, Visual Capitalist wrote that "site traffic has increased over the course of the year, going from about 20 million a month in the fall of last year to 1.8 billion in April 2023".
Before Instagram, Threads – Twitter's competitor that reached 100 million users in five days – was the fastest growing consumer app of all time.
“In 20 years of the internet business, we don't recall faster expansion,” wrote UBS analysts. According to data from Sensor Tower reported by Reuters , it took TikTok about nine months from its global launch to reach 100 million users and Instagram two and a half years.
Today, it boasts over 1.5 billion monthly visits, which still places it among the top 20 sites in the world.
IS FASHION ALREADY PASSED?
For David Carr , Senior Insights Manager of Similarweb, the drop in visits to the ChatGpt site is the "sign that the chatbot novelty is running out", while for Rishi Jaluria, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, "the data indicate a greater request for generative AI with real-time information”.
FROM SITE TO APP
The creation of the ChatGpt app on the iOS system, released in May, may also have taken some traffic away from the site. As of July 4, the chatbot had been downloaded by more than 17 million people globally, according to data.ai, quoted by Reuters .
The analytics firm also reported that downloads peaked on May 31 and continued to roll out across the US, averaging 530,000 downloads per week in the first 6 weeks of launch.
USERS ON HOLIDAY
Now that schools have closed for the summer break in both the United States and Europe, the Washington Post notes, there is speculation that the decline in visits may be due to the lack of students who relied on them for homework, revision or preparation for a essay. Fortune states that these requests are second only to those of writing a resume or a cover letter.
WHAT IF IT WAS ABOUT CHATGPT LIMITS?
According to some analysts cited by the WP , one cannot fail to take into account the limits and drop in quality of ChatGpt's responses, which could be due to a reduction in the management costs of the chatbot which consumes "an enormous amount of expensive processing".
The same Sam Altman, father of ChatGpt, has defined the management costs of the services as "mind-boggling" – external estimates reported by Similarweb have valued them at around 700,000 dollars a day. OpenAI has projected revenue of $200 million this year.
The chatbot is currently free to use, but it also comes with a premium subscription, where users can pay $20 a month to access Gpt-4, OpenAI's most advanced model. So far, according to the latest estimates by YipitData, it has been subscribed by about 1.5 million people in the United States.
WHAT DOES THE REGULATION HAVE TO DO?
Finally, others speculate that concerns about looming AI regulation have prompted OpenAI and other AI companies to scale back the capabilities of their chatbots “lest incur the fears of politicians concerned that bots are being used to spread disinformation, instill bias in other tech products and impact the jobs of real people.”
However, for Macquarie investment bank analyst Sarah Hindlian-Bowler, it is “a combination of the need to change model training and to manage the potential implications of regulation” since “if we continue to see an increase of production along the lines of 'I am unable to answer this question because I am a chatbot, we will increasingly worry that regulation is disempowering ChatGpt”.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/e-gia-finita-la-chatgpt-mania/ on Tue, 11 Jul 2023 10:20:02 +0000.