ChatGPT’s popularity drops, say new figures

ChatGPT is struggling to grow, according to new data. As rival systems from huge companies such as Google and Meta continue to establish footholds in the AI market, OpenAI’s much-talked-about chatbot is seeing traffic decline. 

The Wrap reports data from analytics firm Similarweb that shows ChatGPT use peaked in May last year and has fallen ever since. According to Similarweb, this is evidence that ChatGPT hasn’t crossed over to the mainstream, despite a year of widespread press coverage.

ChatGPT’s peak came in May 2023, when it scored 1.8 billion web visits from people looking for the controversial generative AI to write something for them. In August 2023, the number of online visits was 21% lower than the peak in May. In November traffic was down 3%, in December it was 7% lower, and in January 2024 traffic fell to 11% lower than the peak.

ChatGPT’s popularity drop is obvious in other ways, too. For example, the ChatGPT app is struggling to grow. 4.3 million people in the US used the app when it launched in summer 2023 for iOS and Android, but by the New Year that figured had only grown to 6.3 million users.

ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and quickly became the poster child for the current boom of interest and investment in generative AI, LLMs and other artificial intelligence systems. ChatGPT is also a component of big-name AI systems like Microsoft Copilot, making OpenAI a billion-dollar business.

Despite those close ties with Microsoft, OpenAI faces competition from rivals with direct access to mass market devices. Rivals such as Google, which is busy building AI features into best-selling Samsung devices like the flagship S24, and Meta, which is adding AI to its Ray-Ban smart glasses.

And, as always, Apple is waiting in the wings to drop its own AI.

ChatGPT’s peak 

Similarweb estimates that traffic to ChatGPT peaked in May 2023. That was when ChatGPT was heavily featured in Google’s developer conference Google I/O.

But it was also the same month that a coalition of scientists and experts compared the apocalyptic risks of AI to nuclear war and pandemics; attorneys were fined for using ChatGPT to generate an error-riddled legal motion; and Samsung banned employees from using generative AI tools after a worker uploaded company data to the chatbot.

In June and July, comedians and artists including Sarah Silverman were among those suing OpenAI for failing to seek consent or offer compensation when training the LLM with existing writing and art.

With OpenAI’s boardroom shenanigans and ongoing arguments over LLM plagiarism, ChatGPT is a lightning rod for controversy. The question is whether OpenAI can recapture last year’s spark of interest, or whether ChatGPT will decline in importance as a product while OpenAI focuses on being the back-end for better-known companies.

Why is ChatGPT’s popularity dropping?

So why do industry watchers think ChatGPT’s popularity is dropping? There’s certainly a strong view that times are changing. For example, Microsoft’s Copilot has gone mainstream, while OpenAI itself has moved on, having just launched a jawdropping video-generating AI named Sora.

“There has been a recent notable rise in competitive AI models, as seen with Anthropic and Groq,” said Aki Balogh, Founder of Bitcoin escrow service DLC Link. And people can now create their own LLMs. “ChatGPT is a great general-purpose LLM but it’s not specialised in any specific way. In the future, I expect there will be millions of different special-purpose LLMs created to cater to different needs.”

He adds: “ChatGPT was the fastest-growing product ever in terms of adoption but now that the initial push is over, it’s returning to a more normal growth rate, which is still very high, even though we’re still in the early stages of the AI lifecycle.”

When we asked ChatGPT 3.5, it suggested that competition, user expectations, algorithmic limitations and novelty wearing off were all factors. Micosoft’s Copilot went into more detail:

“Based on our research and analysis, we have identified four main factors that have negatively affected ChatGPT’s popularity and reputation among users and chatbot enthusiasts. These are:

• Lack of consistency and reliability
• Lack of diversity and personalization
• Lack of safety and ethics
• Lack of innovation and novelty”

Bad week for ChatGPT

It hasn’t been a great week for ChatGPT: users have reported that the chatbot was responding to their prompts with gibberish. OpenAI’s status page stated that the company’s engineers have identified the issue causing “unexpected responses”, and they’re working on fixing it.

OpenAI did not reply to a request for comment.