Five charts to start your day

Is generative AI taking over the world or plateauing?

I was in Boston attending an MIT conference when I heard about it. It was a bleak cold winters day. This young chap with far too much energy for my liking offered me a cup of black coffee. He was in statistical arbitrage and had flown in from San Diego that morning.

We were surrounded by hundreds of laminate pieces of paper, plastered on the walls, tables and billboards with a QR code to download the timetable of events. It was a classic analog solution from MIT for a digital problem.

So the conversation went like this: “Have you used ChatGPT?”, he asked.

“Nope, what’s that?”, I replied.

He looks at me incredulously and say: “Have you been living under a rock?”

It was late December 2022, a week before Christmas, so ChatGPT had been out for about three weeks. That’s a long time in tech circles so despite my ignorance, I learnt quickly. This was an AI conference so that’s all I heard about for the rest of the day. Life has never been the same since.

That is until I saw this chart. ChatGPT is stalling! But let’s be clear. It’s still getting 1.8 billion visits a month, even if visitor numbers have flatlined.

What’s happened? Here’s a few reasons:

1. Competitors: there’s Gemini (Google), Character Al, Claude (Anthropic) and Mistral, presenting a friction to visitor for ChatGPT visitor growth.

2. The enterprise version: companies are moving to the enterprise version which is cannibalising WebApp traffic.

3. There’s an app: There's an app on Android and iOS which is pretty good. The web version is still pretty good. But the App version offers a lot of flexible. I use it as a substitute for Google. So visitor numbers to the web app don't reveal the full story.

What it does reveal is that businesses and consumers are using ChatGPT differently.

Source: trendlineHQ

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