Less than a year ago, ChatGPT came seemingly out of nowhere and quickly became the world’s most talked-about app. In this extensive overview of the latest ChatGPT statistics, we’ll examine this AI tool’s popularity, usage rates, business model, and revenue. We’ll also discuss certain controversies surrounding the app’s use and reveal some interesting facts about it.
Top 10 ChatGPT Statistics and Facts for 2023
As of May 2023, ChatGPT had nearly 200 million monthly active users.
ChatGPT is the second-fastest app ever to reach 100 million users.
ChatGPT saw its first monthly drop in web traffic in June 2023.
As of March 2023, 55% of US marketers used ChatGPT for work.
ChatGPT will hold 79% of the US generative AI market in 2023.
ChatGPT could generate up to $1 billion in income by 2024.
ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI was valued at $29 billion in 2023.
30% of US college students used ChatGPT for schoolwork in 2022/23.
48% of companies using ChatGPT say it has already replaced workers.
81.2% of tech enthusiasts believe ChatGPT is a security risk.
ChatGPT Usage Statistics
As of May 2023, ChatGPT had nearly 200 million monthly active users.
Since its November 2022 launch, ChatGPT has rapidly built its user base. Within the first month, it had already reached 57 million monthly active users, only to cross the 100-million mark by the end of January 2023. By May 2023, the app had just short of 200 million monthly active users, while the visits to ChatGPT’s site from desktop and mobile peaked at 1.8 billion in April 2023.
ChatGPT is the second-fastest app ever to reach 100 million users.
Until July 2023, ChatGPT was the fastest app ever to reach 100 million users. ChatGPT growth statistics show it needed just two months to reach that milestone. But when Threads, Meta’s new Twitter competitor, launched on July 5, 2023, it only took five days to amass 100 million users. This was mainly due to the fact that registering for Threads required having an Instagram account, so Meta could leverage its existing user base to speed up the new platform’s growth.
54% of US adults were unaware of ChatGPT as of February 2023.
According to a YouGov survey, only 13% of US adults said they’d heard a lot, and another 34% said they’d heard a little about this generative AI platform. Three months after its release, only 6% of Americans admitted to actually using ChatGPT, with another 17% saying they were there while someone else was using it. As for their thoughts on generative AI, 13% of US adults think it’s a good thing, while 36% believe the development of generative AI will prove bad for society.
(YouGov)
ChatGPT saw its first monthly drop in web traffic in June 2023.
After six months of ChatGPT’s steady user growth, the app’s official website experienced its first monthly drop in traffic in June 2023. Compared to May 2023, combined mobile and desktop visits dropped by 9.7% globally. Additionally, reports reveal the time users spent on ChatGPT’s site was down by 8.5% month-on-month.
(ZDNET)
In June 2023, 12.12% of ChatGPT’s traffic came from the US.
ChatGPT stats point to a sizable 17.19% drop in the share of traffic coming to ChatGPT’s site from the US compared to the previous month. The top five for June 2023 also includes India (7.61% of all visits to the site; down by 2.38% from May 2023), Japan (4.14%; down by 4.34%), Brazil (3.34%; a 4.19% increase), and Colombia (3.16; down by 22.57%).
As of March 2023, 55% of US marketers used ChatGPT for work.
Other generative AI tools are also popular among marketers, though not as much as ChatGPT. In March 2023, the leading ChatGPT alternatives included Copy.ai (used by 42% of marketing professionals), Jasper.ai (36%), and Peppertype.ai (29%). Marketers also relied heavily on AI image editors and generators, including Lensa (28%), DALL-E (25%), and Midjourney (24%).
(Statista)
ChatGPT will hold 79% of the US generative AI market in 2023.
According to ChatGPT user statistics, this share could drop slightly to 75.2% by 2025, as more and more competitors enter the market. Analysts predict the number of users in the US will see a gigantic 882% year-over-year increase, from 6.3 million in 2022 to 61.5 million in 2023. By 2025, 25.5% of the country’s population (more than 1 in 4 Americans) will be ChatGPT users.
ChatGPT Revenue Overview
Most ChatGPT features are still available for free.
ChatGPT was entirely free to use during its first two months, so the app generated no income for its owners. Although the platform has since introduced a paid version, most initial features remain available for free. However, non-paying users will face slower response times, won’t have access to the latest generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) updates, and may see a holding page saying “ChatGPT is at capacity now” when using the platform during peak hours.
In February 2023, ChatGPT introduced its subscription model.
For $20/month, ChatGPT Plus promised users speedier response times and immediate access to new features. One such feature was GPT-4, the updated version of the platform’s language model. Comparing ChatGPT-4 vs. 3.5, experts noted far more accurate responses, eight times more short-term memory, and the ability to use images as prompts. What’s more, subscribers can now instruct ChatGPT to search the internet via Bing, thus providing more up-to-date info.
ChatGPT could generate up to $1 billion in income by 2024.
According to Reuters, industry insiders believe ChatGPT’s current revenue model will help it generate $200 million by the end of 2023. In 2024, the service could see up to $1 billion in revenue — a massive 500% increase year-over-year. But analysts warn these projections may just be “wishful thinking” of ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI. They cite that OpenAI has been around since 2019 and has spent all that time as a nonprofit, open-source operation.
Microsoft could add up to $40 billion in gross revenue from ChatGPT.
Microsoft and ChatGPT formed a partnership in early 2023, when the tech giant invested $13 billion in OpenAI. According to estimates from April 2023, ChatGPT could add between $30 and $40 billion to Microsoft’s top line. Microsoft’s stock is already up by 19% in 2023, but the rapid development of generative AI and Microsoft’s own lead in building the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer may help the company’s deal with OpenAI take its stock value even higher.
(Forbes)
ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI was valued at $29 billion in 2023.
Thanks to Microsoft and others who invested in ChatGPT, as well as the platform’s rapid rise in popularity, OpenAI’s valuation exceeded all expectations. It propelled the company to the top of the business news network CNBC’s annual Disruptors 50 list in 2023. ChatGPT’s parent ranked ahead of other companies using AI in innovative ways, including the design tool Canva (#3), aerospace manufacturer Relativity Space (#4), and defense company Anduril Industries (#7).
(CNBC)
In April 2023, OpenAI raised $495 million as part of a share sale.
Based on the $29 billion valuation, ChatGPT’s owner launched a sale allowing its employees to sell their shares to accredited investors. Aiming to raise an extra $536 million in equity, OpenAI’s SEC filings reveal the total raised was $495 million, just short of the initial goal. The long list of investors that bought shares during this sale includes, among others, venture capital firms K2 Global, Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, Thrive, Khosla Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz.
Controversial Facts About ChatGPT
In March 2023, Italy became the first Western country to ban ChatGPT.
The ban was initiated by the country’s data protection authority due to privacy concerns related to the AI model the platform uses. This was only a temporary measure, though. On April 28, four weeks after the ban, OpenAI unlocked access to Italian visitors, having added several new help articles outlining ChatGPT’s data collection policy and how it complies with the EU regulation.
Dozens of schools and universities have banned the use of ChatGPT.
Due to the increased use of ChatGPT in schools, several US school districts decided to block access to it from school-owned networks and devices as early as January 2023. To prevent students from cheating and plagiarizing others’ work, schools and universities in New York City, Seattle, Michigan, and California have all joined the ban. Similar bans are enforced worldwide, including schools in three Australian states — New South Wales, Queensland, and Tasmania.
30% of US college students used ChatGPT for schoolwork in 2022/23.
Despite the numerous bans, ChatGPT statistics reveal nearly 1 in 3 US college students used the popular AI tool for schoolwork in academic year 2022/23. Of these students, 10.6% said they used it very frequently, while another 35% admitted to using it “somewhat frequently.” The top subjects for which students used ChatGPT include English (49.1%), hard sciences (40.9%), soft sciences (38.8%), math (37.9%), foreign languages (18.8%), and art and music (14.4%).
48% of companies using ChatGPT say it has already replaced workers.
While many claim the concerns are unfounded, there may be reason to worry about ChatGPT replacing jobs after all. According to a February 2023 survey, 49% of US companies use the AI tool regularly, and 48% of those organizations say the tool has already replaced some workers. Though this means that nearly 1 in 4 businesses have replaced one or more workers with ChatGPT, it’s important to note only 1,000 companies participated in the survey.
81% of tech enthusiasts believe ChatGPT is a security risk.
Unsurprisingly, only 7% of participants in the same survey believe that chatbots like ChatGPT and other AI tools will improve internet safety. This isn’t the first time those in the know have voiced their concerns. In March 2023, thousands of tech insiders signed an open letter urging all AI labs to stop training AI systems more advanced than GPT-4, warning about the potential risks of systems with human-level intelligence and the lack of related rules and safety protocols.
Despite controversies, ChatGPT could find application in healthcare.
Amid the ongoing discussion about the potential uses of ChatGPT, researchers have already conducted more than a dozen studies about its possible role in healthcare. The results suggest the tool is moderately accurate in determining the clinical workflow in patient care, and it may also prove helpful in medical education and scientific research. Of course, before any of this could ever happen, the numerous shortcomings noted by researchers would have to be fixed.
More Interesting Facts About ChatGPT
ChatGPT’s knowledge cutoff date is September 2021.
Although the upgrade to GPT-4 brought about many improvements, the cutoff date of the app’s knowledge base has remained the same since its launch. As such, no matter how specific the prompts, ChatGPT won’t know about events that took place after September 2021. However, paid subscribers may be able to overcome this limitation by conducting an in-app web search.
Besides dated information, ChatGPT has more limitations.
For one, users have reported issues with accuracy, especially when performing multiple tasks at once. Also, because ChatGPT’s original language model was built using thousands of Reddit posts, it may sometimes return biased responses. Finally, there are some things ChatGPT will refuse to do — it won’t engage in political conversations, it will never promote violent, harmful, or illegal content, and it will avoid discussing sensitive issues like race, gender, and sexuality.
Some researchers believe ChatGPT could pass the Turing test.
As part of this test, a human observer converses with two intelligent subjects — a human and a machine. The goal is for the machine to trick the observer into believing it, too, is human, at which point artificial intelligence will have officially reached the levels of human intelligence.
In recent months, several news reports have claimed that some AI language models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4 and LaMDA (used by Google’s ChatGPT rival Bard), had managed to fool people in specific scenarios. However, in response to these reports, the scientific community argued that, while these models may mimic human chatter, they can’t display reason. So if they really did pass the full-scale Turing test, it would only prove that the test is faulty in its current form and that scientists need to come up with new ways to assess AI systems’ performance.
ChatGPT Stats: The Takeaway
Merely six months after its launch, ChatGPT already had 200 million monthly active users and close to 2 billion monthly visits to its website. The tool and its parent company, OpenAI, caught the attention of some of the tech industry’s most influential players — among other investors, Microsoft backed OpenAI with $13 billion, helping it reach $29 billion in a recent valuation.
Despite the increasing competition, the future of ChatGPT looks very bright. Experts predict its user base will grow exponentially in the coming period. By 2025, this tool will hold 75.2% of the US generative AI market, with 1 in 4 Americans using it. Thanks to ChatGPT’s success, its parent company stands to make $1 billion by 2024. And though people from all walks of life have valid concerns about the technology, one thing seems certain — ChatGPT is here to stay.
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