ChatGPT’s user traffic decreased by 9.7% in June—raising questions about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots.
Key Details
- OpenAI’s ChatGPT launched on November 30, 2022, and became one of the fastest-growing apps in history and grossing 100 million subscribers in less than three months.
- For the first time, ChatGPT’s userbase appears to be shrinking, with website visitors and app downloads steadily decreasing for the first time in six months, The Washington Post reports.
- The novelty factor of chatbots could be wearing off, but it remains to be seen how the decline of ChatGPT will reflect on the larger AI revolution and if other projects will lose interest too.
Why It’s Important
The AI revolution has become the predominant force of his year, with eight months of rapid development and product launches from massive corporations like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Baidu scrambling to be the first to mark with new productions and technology solutions. OpenAI was at the cusp of it, launching its impressive large-language model and immediately partnering with Microsoft to apply it to search engines, customer service, and generative writing features.
Billions of dollars have already been poured into the technology, although early effects have created concerns about the applicability of the technology. Early Google and Microsoft demonstrations showed that the technology was prone to bias and incorrectly sourcing data, and several lawsuits have been filed against the apps for infringing copyright. Watchdog groups have also raised concerns about how the technology could be abused.
Opposing Perspectives
“In Silicon Valley and beyond, chatbots have been a staple of dinner-party conversations. Some companies even fired copywriters and replaced them with ChatGPT. But the drop in usage suggests that the tech’s limitations are catching up with it, and at least some of the hype surrounding chatbots is overblown … As people began to encounter the chatbot making up false information, they realized it wasn’t as broadly useful as they initially thought,” says The Washington Post.
“It’s a neat theory, and it fits the facts. But it’s nonsense. Artificial intelligence is huge, and ChatGPT is only a tiny part of it. When AI is more fully implemented many years from now, the last six months of experience with ChatGPT will be long forgotten,” says Forbes. “It’s going to take time for AI to be developed. While we are used to seeing computers do things that are hard or impossible for humans, computers are fundamentally stupid. They need much more information to learn things than people do, and that’s one of the major reasons why the implementation of AI will take a long time.”
