ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot launched in November last year, last month saw monthly traffic to its Web site and unique visitors decline for the first time ever, analytics firm Similarweb said.
Worldwide desktop and mobile traffic to the ChatGPT Web site decreased by 9.7 percent last month from May, while unique visitors to ChatGPT’s site dropped 5.7 percent. The amount of time visitors spent on the site was also down 8.5 percent, the data showed.
Decreasing traffic is a sign of the chatbot’s novelty wearing off, Similarweb senior insights manager David Carr said. RBC Capital Markets analyst Rishi Jaluria said that the data point to more demand for generative AI with real-time information.
Photo: AFP
ChatGPT set off an increasing use of generative AI in daily tasks from writing to coding and reached 100 million monthly active users in January, two months after its launch.
It is the fastest-growing consumer application ever, and now boasts more than 1.5 billion monthly visits, one of the top 20 Web sites in the world.
A few ChatGPT competitors, including Google’s Bard chatbot, have been launched in the past few months. Microsoft’s Bing also provides a chatbot powered by OpenAI for free, but ChatGPT has far surpassed it.
“I think there are growing pains when you go from zero to 100 million users that quickly. The extraordinarily heavy infrastructure would result in less accuracy. It’s a combination of having to change what the model is trained on and having to deal with the potential implications of regulation,” said Sarah Hindlian-Bowler, head of technology research Americas at Macquarie Capital.
OpenAI also released the ChatGPT app on iOS in May, which could sap some traffic from its Web site. Some also tie the usage change to the summer break for schools, as fewer students look for help with homework.
The chatbot was downloaded more than 17 million times on iOS globally as of Tuesday this week, data.ai said.
The analytics firm said downloads peaked on May 31 and have averaged 530,000 downloads per week in its first six full weeks of availability.
The recent slowdown in growth might help control the cost of running ChatGPT, which requires intensive computing power to answer queries.
Sam Altman, chief executive at OpenAI, has described the cost of running the services as “eye-watering.”
ChatGPT is free to use, but also provides a premium subscription, where users can pay US$20 a month to access OpenAI’s more advanced model, GPT-4. About 1.5 million people have signed up for the subscription in the US, according to the latest estimates from YipitData.
OpenAI has projected US$200 million in revenue this year.
Besides ChatGPT, it makes money by selling API access to its AI models for developers and enterprises directly, and through a partnership with Microsoft, which invested more than US$10 billion into the company.
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