8 ms·

58% of US adults have heard of ChatGPT; 14% have tried it

112 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

lagniappe 3y ago
I'm curious what the distribution is with relation to how it is being used.
- treeman79 3y ago
  All the teachers at wife’s school use it like crazy to help with writing crazy long report card comments for students. Usually a 40 hour task 6-8 times a year. School requires multiple paragraphs per student.
  - lucb1e 3y ago
    I can't shake the feeling that we're going to pad everything with GPT-generated filler text only for other people to use GPT to distill the text again into a consumable summary, from websites to emails to, apparently, teacher evaluations. In some situations, there are social norms to be respected, but often the content rather than the form matters. So not a condolences card from your employer's HR department, but a report on how a student is doing and how to potentially improve. Does it actually help to write five keywords and have GPT fill it out to such a crazy long report card with no meaning beyond five keywords? Edit: Or do the teachers just rant a bunch to GPT (or feed it other kind of data, like from a report log like my old high school had) and then ask it to nicely format, professionalize, and remove redundant points? There I would see a beneficial use.
    - asdff 3y ago
      Its like a game of telephone, only using a supercomputer and all the energy it needs.
    - syntheweave 3y ago
      I would consider it equivalent to putting data into Excel to generate a report with visuals. There are a lot of cases where the data is the same data, but the "wrapper" is different for consumption purposes...and entering it by hand is time consuming and sometimes emotionally complex - e.g. if you are trying to articulate a specific challenge a student faces, it's easier to "talk to the chatbot" to generate completely new variations on what you meant to say than to sit at the word processor in a start-stop edit workflow. GPT, even 3.5, is very, very good at putting new wrappers on things. It's much better at that than at solving logical challenges or acting as an oracle. If you need that for work, you'll probably already be among the adoptees.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
    This seems so dangerous and this was my fear. Things will become meaningless especially in education.
    - faeriechangling 3y ago
      The education was meaningless the whole time as it turns out.
  - tssva 3y ago
    That seems insane to me. My daughter's report card has one of about 5 canned single line comments which teachers can choose from. Occasionally we will get an email with some further input around report card time. My daughter is in high school now but this has been the same since elementary school.
beebmam 3y ago
I wonder how many have paid for access to GPT-4. GPT-4 was a total game changer for me.
- tail_exchange 3y ago
  As someone who never used GPT-4, what is so good about it?
  - negamax 3y ago
    Plugins and web browsing. You can enable web browsing for it. It will search the internet for you and read the articles, sites and get back with some pretty decent information
    - reaperman 3y ago
      IMO right now it's absurdly awful at searching the web. Which sort of makes sense because that's a truly difficult, nuanced thing to do. I often have much better responses re-running the same prompt on the non-web enabled GPT-4. The only use I've found for that so far is giving it a specific URL to use so I don't have to copy/paste some piece of documentation/etc.
      - jiggawatts 3y ago
        phind.com is GPT 3.5 and 4.0 (selectable) with web browsing, and is 100x better than what ChatGPT is doing.
        davidatbu 3y ago
        It's still bad for my use case though. My use case being: (1) figuring out rails magic, and (2) coming up with ways to twist the Rust borrow checker into submission.
    - solarkraft 3y ago
      Doesn't Phind already do this well? FWIW I keep "best model" (that should be GPT-4) off because I just find it too slow and it doesn't seem like that much of an improvement.
crims0n 3y ago
Wow that is significantly more than I would have guessed. Fun little comparison, it took until 1996 for 14% of North Americans to have used the internet. https://ourworldindata.org/internet https://ourworldindata.org/internet
- nickthegreek 3y ago
  I wonder what the under 18 usage rate is. It would have been near impossible for me to resist this as a kid in school.
  - AnotherGoodName 3y ago
    It wasn't that easily available and took a lot of knowledge to make use of it. I racked up ~$300 in one month of hourly dial up internet on my parents credit card at that age in that era. Huge amounts of trouble. Mainly using Kali (software for emulating an ipx lan over the internet) and playing warcraft 2. Most games didn't have internet play as an option so you had to resort to things like Kali. Irc was fun too but all in all it was nothing like you know it today and it was a pain to get on and use.
- MrFoof 3y ago
  To be fair, internet adoption rates in the 90s was largely a function of ISP pricing regime changes. I think it was 1995 when WOW!, which was a subsidiary of CompuServe, offered unlimited hours for $15/month. AOL followed shortly thereafter. Prior to that it was something like $4-6/hour, usually at only 14.4kbps - 28.8kbps. Going from 2.5 - 4 hours a month to a household being able to easily surpass 100 hours a month (for households with multiple kids, easily 150-200 hours a month!) was an absolute game changer for internet adoption, at least in the United States. Then add in Mosaic (eventually Netscape Navigator) taking off and that's when adoption really ramped up. Then cable modems and DSL starting to become more widely available in 1997-1998. Plus instant messaging software basically being the precursor to what we would see later on with SMS.
  - crims0n 3y ago
RheingoldRiver 3y ago
The original headline says "but few have tried it," but reaching over 1/10 of the population as actual users in under 6 months seems crazy impressive right? And also, that a quarter of the people who have heard of your product have also used it? I would say both of these numbers are really impressive, not just the first one.
- chatmasta 3y ago
  It definitely sounds impressive, yeah. Does anyone have data on products with similar growth trajectories? I'm thinking of Google, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and more faddy trends like Pokemon Go. Unlike some of those, ChatGPT seems like it has real staying power. I'd love to see their retention numbers.
  - SeanAnderson 3y ago
    https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/29174.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/29174.jpeg Comes to mind
    - wodenokoto 3y ago
      As far as I can tell, all of these are signups, some even paid signups except for chatgpt. Moreover, chatgpt is a service offered by - while far from a household name - an established player. OpenAI was founded in 2015. They got their 1 million users in 2022, after 7 years, not 5 days. And lastly, there’s over a decade between chatgpt and the newest player on that list
- NikkiA 3y ago
  I wonder if 'ChatGPT' is being used as a generic noun by a lot of those surveyed, I can possibly stretch my belief to believing 14% of people have tried some form of conversational AI, including bing, bard, and random chatbots, but for it to be specifically ChatGPT seems high.
slowhand09 3y ago
I think I may be a unicorn...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ThorsBane 3y ago
ChatGPT is amazing.
raphaelmerx 3y ago
> This survey was conducted among 10,701 U.S. adults from March 13 to 19, 2023 Very possible this stat has increased in the last two months, would be interested to see the trend here
- lucb1e 3y ago
  What I find makes it a lot more accessible is third party sites that don't require you to identify with personal information before you're allowed to use it. These seem to be popping up more and more and lets me feel like I can talk without it being added to a permanent record somewhere. Sure, you can subpoena my ISP and get the IP+datetime turned into a subscriber, but that's different from tying it all to my phone number that hasn't changed since I was eight. Another lesson I might draw is that I need more burner phones, but it gets tedious to queue up for 20 minutes to activate your prepaid SIM via a government ID in this democratic country. Had to verify six numbers for work once because a BigCorp which shall not be named couldn't internally arrange accounts for us to do the desired audit on their systems. Annoying, but we billed them per hour at security consultancy rates (and the client apparently found that worth it) so that's not the same as having to do this to use an online bot. On the other hand, these third parties might also muddle any survey results that ask about ChatGPT specifically, when people use something like a virtual career coaching site without realizing this was "Open"AI they were using.
  - chatmasta 3y ago
    I didn't need to provide a phone number to OpenAI when I signed up for ChatGPT via OAuth with my Google account (which also has no device or phone number associated with it). But maybe I was just lucky enough to register before the requirement existed. I did need to put some effort into configuring TOTP 2FA for the Google account without first giving Google a phone number, but I was able to do it by simulating a WebAuthn device with DevTools, which satisfied the pre-requisite of an existing hardware token or phone number method of 2FA that I needed to gain the ability to enable TOTP 2FA.
    - lucb1e 3y ago
jgalt212 3y ago
And 99% of VCs have climaxed to ChatGPT.
- asdff 3y ago
  Just wait for the flood of hedge funds that use "next generation ai-driven modelling" thats actually just a 23 year old fresh out of school typing into chatgpt what stocks to pick with their clients money for today.
  - asdff 3y ago
    And what do you know, I guess JP Morgan beat me to market with the idea: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/25/jpmorgan-develops-ai-investment-advisor.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/25/jpmorgan-develops-ai-investm...
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Actually, now that I think bit deeper. There might be some value in sentiment analysis. But that would mean access to user input and the GPT output data. Thankfully probably available in USA. Just get what people are asking or what they are being recommended evaluate how well they follow it and then exploit them for that money, either to front run or do opposite.
osigurdson 3y ago
I’d say 0.1% have used it for something useful. Most people are just trying to find out if it has political biases or not. Usually this is followed by claims that it is simultaneously useless and will take over the world.
- osigurdson 3y ago
  To the downvoters, this is 8 million people using ChatGPT in a very effective way. It is very useful. My suggestion is many people have not yet discovered it’s true value.
sour-taste 3y ago
Open AI is the 21'th most visited site in Japan: https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/japan/ https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/japan/ 47th in the US: https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/united-states/ https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/united-states/ I kind of didn't think that ChatGPT was getting traction outside of tech circles but this 100% changed my mind.
- tkgally 3y ago
  I live in Japan and follow the news in Japanese, and I’ve been surprised at how quickly awareness of ChatGPT has spread in the government and the mainstream media here. The prime minister met Sam Altman last month [1] and has mentioned generative AI in official statements [2, in Japanese]. Every day I see articles in the Japanese press about it. This morning’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun—both digital and paper editions—has a detailed guide to prompt engineering [3, in Japanese, firewalled]. I am on the faculty of a university in Tokyo, and next week I’m going to be giving a couple of online workshops for the staff members in my department. I plan to show them how they can use GPT-4 in their work: translating and summarizing documents, writing and polishing e-mails, composing Excel functions, brainstorming, etc. Interest seems high, but usage is still limited. I sent out a survey yesterday to people planning to attend the workshops. One of the questions was “How much have you used ChatGPT, Google Bard, or other LLMs?” Of the 26 who have replied so far, only two replied “frequently.” Half have used them “only a little,” and 11 have not used them yet at all. [1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/OpenAI-CEO-vows-to-work-with-Japan-on-user-protections https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/OpenAI-CEO-vows-... [2] https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/101_kishida/actions/202304/25shihon.html https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/101_kishida/actions/202304/25shi... [3] https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUC1177N0R10C23A4000000/ https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUC1177N0R10C23A4000000/
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- dorkwood 3y ago
  In my experience it's getting traction everywhere. In the last few months I've spoken to a lawyer, a builder, a marketer, a graphic designer, and several taxi drivers, all who were using it themselves. The lawyer even said they used it at work. I asked them if their firm had any rules around what they could put into it, and they said no.
hideo 3y ago
That is an absolutely massive number. I wonder if openAI or anyone has published their retention rate.
PeterStuer 3y ago
Note: "survey conducted in March" Today's figures would be very different IMHO
gumballindie 3y ago
Never underestimate the power of a marketing campaign based on fud. Always works.

112 points by mfiguiere 3y ago

lagniappe 3y ago

I'm curious what the distribution is with relation to how it is being used.

treeman79 3y ago
All the teachers at wife’s school use it like crazy to help with writing crazy long report card comments for students. Usually a 40 hour task 6-8 times a year. School requires multiple paragraphs per student.
- lucb1e 3y ago
  I can't shake the feeling that we're going to pad everything with GPT-generated filler text only for other people to use GPT to distill the text again into a consumable summary, from websites to emails to, apparently, teacher evaluations. In some situations, there are social norms to be respected, but often the content rather than the form matters. So not a condolences card from your employer's HR department, but a report on how a student is doing and how to potentially improve. Does it actually help to write five keywords and have GPT fill it out to such a crazy long report card with no meaning beyond five keywords? Edit: Or do the teachers just rant a bunch to GPT (or feed it other kind of data, like from a report log like my old high school had) and then ask it to nicely format, professionalize, and remove redundant points? There I would see a beneficial use.
  - asdff 3y ago
    Its like a game of telephone, only using a supercomputer and all the energy it needs.
  - syntheweave 3y ago
    I would consider it equivalent to putting data into Excel to generate a report with visuals. There are a lot of cases where the data is the same data, but the "wrapper" is different for consumption purposes...and entering it by hand is time consuming and sometimes emotionally complex - e.g. if you are trying to articulate a specific challenge a student faces, it's easier to "talk to the chatbot" to generate completely new variations on what you meant to say than to sit at the word processor in a start-stop edit workflow. GPT, even 3.5, is very, very good at putting new wrappers on things. It's much better at that than at solving logical challenges or acting as an oracle. If you need that for work, you'll probably already be among the adoptees.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  This seems so dangerous and this was my fear. Things will become meaningless especially in education.
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    The education was meaningless the whole time as it turns out.
- tssva 3y ago
  That seems insane to me. My daughter's report card has one of about 5 canned single line comments which teachers can choose from. Occasionally we will get an email with some further input around report card time. My daughter is in high school now but this has been the same since elementary school.

beebmam 3y ago

I wonder how many have paid for access to GPT-4. GPT-4 was a total game changer for me.

tail_exchange 3y ago
As someone who never used GPT-4, what is so good about it?
- negamax 3y ago
  Plugins and web browsing. You can enable web browsing for it. It will search the internet for you and read the articles, sites and get back with some pretty decent information
  - reaperman 3y ago
    IMO right now it's absurdly awful at searching the web. Which sort of makes sense because that's a truly difficult, nuanced thing to do. I often have much better responses re-running the same prompt on the non-web enabled GPT-4. The only use I've found for that so far is giving it a specific URL to use so I don't have to copy/paste some piece of documentation/etc.
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      phind.com is GPT 3.5 and 4.0 (selectable) with web browsing, and is 100x better than what ChatGPT is doing.
      - davidatbu 3y ago
        It's still bad for my use case though. My use case being: (1) figuring out rails magic, and (2) coming up with ways to twist the Rust borrow checker into submission.
  - solarkraft 3y ago
    Doesn't Phind already do this well? FWIW I keep "best model" (that should be GPT-4) off because I just find it too slow and it doesn't seem like that much of an improvement.

crims0n 3y ago

Wow that is significantly more than I would have guessed. Fun little comparison, it took until 1996 for 14% of North Americans to have used the internet. https://ourworldindata.org/internet https://ourworldindata.org/internet

nickthegreek 3y ago
I wonder what the under 18 usage rate is. It would have been near impossible for me to resist this as a kid in school.
- AnotherGoodName 3y ago
  It wasn't that easily available and took a lot of knowledge to make use of it. I racked up ~$300 in one month of hourly dial up internet on my parents credit card at that age in that era. Huge amounts of trouble. Mainly using Kali (software for emulating an ipx lan over the internet) and playing warcraft 2. Most games didn't have internet play as an option so you had to resort to things like Kali. Irc was fun too but all in all it was nothing like you know it today and it was a pain to get on and use.
MrFoof 3y ago
To be fair, internet adoption rates in the 90s was largely a function of ISP pricing regime changes. I think it was 1995 when WOW!, which was a subsidiary of CompuServe, offered unlimited hours for $15/month. AOL followed shortly thereafter. Prior to that it was something like $4-6/hour, usually at only 14.4kbps - 28.8kbps. Going from 2.5 - 4 hours a month to a household being able to easily surpass 100 hours a month (for households with multiple kids, easily 150-200 hours a month!) was an absolute game changer for internet adoption, at least in the United States. Then add in Mosaic (eventually Netscape Navigator) taking off and that's when adoption really ramped up. Then cable modems and DSL starting to become more widely available in 1997-1998. Plus instant messaging software basically being the precursor to what we would see later on with SMS.
- crims0n 3y ago

RheingoldRiver 3y ago

The original headline says "but few have tried it," but reaching over 1/10 of the population as actual users in under 6 months seems crazy impressive right? And also, that a quarter of the people who have heard of your product have also used it? I would say both of these numbers are really impressive, not just the first one.

chatmasta 3y ago
It definitely sounds impressive, yeah. Does anyone have data on products with similar growth trajectories? I'm thinking of Google, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and more faddy trends like Pokemon Go. Unlike some of those, ChatGPT seems like it has real staying power. I'd love to see their retention numbers.
- SeanAnderson 3y ago
  https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/29174.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/29174.jpeg Comes to mind
  - wodenokoto 3y ago
    As far as I can tell, all of these are signups, some even paid signups except for chatgpt. Moreover, chatgpt is a service offered by - while far from a household name - an established player. OpenAI was founded in 2015. They got their 1 million users in 2022, after 7 years, not 5 days. And lastly, there’s over a decade between chatgpt and the newest player on that list
NikkiA 3y ago
I wonder if 'ChatGPT' is being used as a generic noun by a lot of those surveyed, I can possibly stretch my belief to believing 14% of people have tried some form of conversational AI, including bing, bard, and random chatbots, but for it to be specifically ChatGPT seems high.

slowhand09 3y ago

I think I may be a unicorn...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ThorsBane 3y ago

ChatGPT is amazing.

raphaelmerx 3y ago

> This survey was conducted among 10,701 U.S. adults from March 13 to 19, 2023 Very possible this stat has increased in the last two months, would be interested to see the trend here

lucb1e 3y ago
What I find makes it a lot more accessible is third party sites that don't require you to identify with personal information before you're allowed to use it. These seem to be popping up more and more and lets me feel like I can talk without it being added to a permanent record somewhere. Sure, you can subpoena my ISP and get the IP+datetime turned into a subscriber, but that's different from tying it all to my phone number that hasn't changed since I was eight. Another lesson I might draw is that I need more burner phones, but it gets tedious to queue up for 20 minutes to activate your prepaid SIM via a government ID in this democratic country. Had to verify six numbers for work once because a BigCorp which shall not be named couldn't internally arrange accounts for us to do the desired audit on their systems. Annoying, but we billed them per hour at security consultancy rates (and the client apparently found that worth it) so that's not the same as having to do this to use an online bot. On the other hand, these third parties might also muddle any survey results that ask about ChatGPT specifically, when people use something like a virtual career coaching site without realizing this was "Open"AI they were using.
- chatmasta 3y ago
  I didn't need to provide a phone number to OpenAI when I signed up for ChatGPT via OAuth with my Google account (which also has no device or phone number associated with it). But maybe I was just lucky enough to register before the requirement existed. I did need to put some effort into configuring TOTP 2FA for the Google account without first giving Google a phone number, but I was able to do it by simulating a WebAuthn device with DevTools, which satisfied the pre-requisite of an existing hardware token or phone number method of 2FA that I needed to gain the ability to enable TOTP 2FA.
  - lucb1e 3y ago

jgalt212 3y ago

And 99% of VCs have climaxed to ChatGPT.

asdff 3y ago
Just wait for the flood of hedge funds that use "next generation ai-driven modelling" thats actually just a 23 year old fresh out of school typing into chatgpt what stocks to pick with their clients money for today.
- asdff 3y ago
  And what do you know, I guess JP Morgan beat me to market with the idea: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/25/jpmorgan-develops-ai-investment-advisor.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/25/jpmorgan-develops-ai-investm...
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Actually, now that I think bit deeper. There might be some value in sentiment analysis. But that would mean access to user input and the GPT output data. Thankfully probably available in USA. Just get what people are asking or what they are being recommended evaluate how well they follow it and then exploit them for that money, either to front run or do opposite.

osigurdson 3y ago

I’d say 0.1% have used it for something useful. Most people are just trying to find out if it has political biases or not. Usually this is followed by claims that it is simultaneously useless and will take over the world.

osigurdson 3y ago
To the downvoters, this is 8 million people using ChatGPT in a very effective way. It is very useful. My suggestion is many people have not yet discovered it’s true value.

sour-taste 3y ago

Open AI is the 21'th most visited site in Japan: https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/japan/ https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/japan/ 47th in the US: https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/united-states/ https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/united-states/ I kind of didn't think that ChatGPT was getting traction outside of tech circles but this 100% changed my mind.

tkgally 3y ago
I live in Japan and follow the news in Japanese, and I’ve been surprised at how quickly awareness of ChatGPT has spread in the government and the mainstream media here. The prime minister met Sam Altman last month [1] and has mentioned generative AI in official statements [2, in Japanese]. Every day I see articles in the Japanese press about it. This morning’s Nihon Keizai Shimbun—both digital and paper editions—has a detailed guide to prompt engineering [3, in Japanese, firewalled]. I am on the faculty of a university in Tokyo, and next week I’m going to be giving a couple of online workshops for the staff members in my department. I plan to show them how they can use GPT-4 in their work: translating and summarizing documents, writing and polishing e-mails, composing Excel functions, brainstorming, etc. Interest seems high, but usage is still limited. I sent out a survey yesterday to people planning to attend the workshops. One of the questions was “How much have you used ChatGPT, Google Bard, or other LLMs?” Of the 26 who have replied so far, only two replied “frequently.” Half have used them “only a little,” and 11 have not used them yet at all. [1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/OpenAI-CEO-vows-to-work-with-Japan-on-user-protections https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Technology/OpenAI-CEO-vows-... [2] https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/101_kishida/actions/202304/25shihon.html https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/101_kishida/actions/202304/25shi... [3] https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUC1177N0R10C23A4000000/ https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUC1177N0R10C23A4000000/
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dorkwood 3y ago
In my experience it's getting traction everywhere. In the last few months I've spoken to a lawyer, a builder, a marketer, a graphic designer, and several taxi drivers, all who were using it themselves. The lawyer even said they used it at work. I asked them if their firm had any rules around what they could put into it, and they said no.

hideo 3y ago

That is an absolutely massive number. I wonder if openAI or anyone has published their retention rate.

PeterStuer 3y ago

Note: "survey conducted in March" Today's figures would be very different IMHO

gumballindie 3y ago

Never underestimate the power of a marketing campaign based on fud. Always works.