Hajra Naz
It appears that OpenAI’s chatbot is starting to lose steam after experiencing a spectacular spike in popularity late last year and into early 2023. The Washington Post received information from web analytics company Similarweb that showed a 9.7% global decline in mobile and desktop traffic to ChatGPT’s website in the past month.
If Similarweb’s data is reliable, this is the first time a user decline has been observed by the chatbot. The iOS client of ChatGPT showed a decline in downloads in June after reaching a peak earlier in the month, according to app tracker Sensor Tower.
A market trend appears to be contributing to the declining interest in ChatGPT. According to data from Similarweb, fewer users are accessing the desktop and mobile versions of Microsoft Bing, Google Bard, and Character.AI in the recent past. For instance, Microsoft experienced a spike in traffic to their search engine between the months of February and March as a result of Bing AI’s release as a public preview.
Since then, the website’s monthly traffic has slowly decreased and is now almost back to the levels it was before Microsoft redesigned Bing to work with GPT-4. Separately, Similarweb reports that as of May 2023, user minutes on ChatGPT were down by 8.5 percent.
The Post suggests that the conclusion of the school year might be the reason behind the decline. It is assumed that fewer young adults are using ChatGPT to compose their papers now that the majority of college students are on summer breaks. Another factor might be the fact that organizations like Samsung forbid staff from using AI chatbots out of very serious concern for a potential data leak.
No one at OpenAI is in a panic, whatever the cause of the fall. The research lab is most likely content that fewer people are using ChatGPT’s public edition. According to CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI incurs “eye-watering” operating expenses to provide the service.
