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Given that ChatGPT was just released last fall and it was expected to revolutionize practically everything, isn't it still telling that usage is falling? Where

Given that ChatGPT was just released last fall and it was expected to revolutionize practically everything, isn't it still telling that usage is falling? Where are the scientists, lawyers, doctors, office workers etc? You'd expect a slowing in the rate of growth, not shrinking. I don't know, if high school and undergrad students being off for the summer is enough to shrink your app maybe it's not all that? Edit: I understand there are new tools coming, but most of them aren't out yet. GPT4 was just released. For the most part, if you want to play with AI, ChatGPT is it. If they're really experiencing a decline in users that's not great for them.

caeril 3y ago
These metrics are based on traffic to chat.openai.com. Speaking for myself, I used to use the crappy chat interface but I now exclusively use tooling I've built up around their API. So, n=1, I'm using OpenAI much more, despite using chat.openai.com less.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> If they're really experiencing a decline in users that's not great for them. If it's the case that "there are new tools coming, but most of them aren't out yet" - and I believe it is[0] - then the overall userbase of ChatGPT doesn't matter to OpenAI, because soon enough the same models will come back with a vengeance, in a different, more streamlined form. In fact, I feel that the major change will happen if and when Microsoft gets their Office 365 and Windows copilots working and properly released: they'll have instant penetration into every industry, including scientists, lawyers, doctors, and office workers. -- [0] - It's been only few months. Between playing around, experimenting, then developing, testing and marketing a tool, there just hasn't been enough time to do all of that.
charrondev 3y ago
Honestly does it really matter much if their B2C usage is primarily students? I’m more curious about their B2B operations which is likely what will trickle into more people’s lives. Their APIs seem to enable quite a few interesting possibilities with a low up front technical investment. Too me the whole “generate me a bunch of text and display it as text” is a niche use case for a lot of people. Integrations for web search, document search, summarization, data extraction/transformation, and sentiment analysis are more useful and less likely to have hallucinations affect the end product. Regarding their revenue I’m curious how the Azure hosted OpenAI services work for OpenAI. Billing is all through Microsoft and the documentation tries really hard to make it clear these are Azure services. I wonder if Microsoft just pays a licensing fee or if there is some revenue sharing going on.
- stubybubs 3y ago
  > Honestly does it really matter much if their B2C usage is primarily students? For ChatGPT specifically, yes, because it keeps getting hyped so much, and I think B2C is going to be what ChatGPT ends up with. My company isn't known for its tech innovation and we're spinning up our own LLM based on our own data. It doesn't need to be super fast because I doubt we're going to go the chatbot route. It will likely be for content generation, so less horsepower is fine. No need to pay OpenAI for excess capacity. They could go public now with an unreal valuation based on the hype of B2B usage that may never materialize. Revealing that you're mainly a cheat/study tool for students puts you in a box with Chegg and others, at a much lower valuation.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
Was ChatGPT supposed to revolutionize everything or was it the harbinger of LLMs?
- pbronez 3y ago
  ChatGPT is the Killer App that made people notice the potential of LLMs that had been brewing for several years.
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
    I see it as multiple things combining to reach a critical mass. Yes it was the killer app but it was also the first time it was actually good enough to chat with. Put another way- it's the shittiest LLM application going forward or the worst LLM application that people are willing to pay for. The hype isn't specifically for ChatGPT but imagining the trendline of LLMs or LLM adjacent tech projected forward combined with still falling compute cost and further democratization.
joshxyz 3y ago
another factor in my mind could be users migrating to apps that are using gpt api instead of using the chatgpt ui itself. only they can tell though.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Given that ChatGPT was just released last fall and it was expected to revolutionize practically everything, isn't it still telling that usage is falling? Its not, though. ChatGPT, the website is basically an (increasingly non-exclusive, given BingAI) frontend. What is claimed to be revolutionary is the underlying models (in the narrow view) and similar generative AI systems (in the broader view). As more applications are built with either OpenAIs own underlying models or those from the broader space, the ChatGPT website should be expected to represent a smaller share of the relevant universe of use.
- readyplayeremma 3y ago
  This is the correct viewpoint. ChatGPT is one specific implementation of the technology, which was most people's first exposure to it. The broader applications of the technology itself are still in the very early stages, but are already making significant impacts.
CydeWeys 3y ago
I see people using ChatGPT, Bard, etc. to answer questions on mailing list threads. It'll be a long thread of thoughtful human written responses, and then someone will come along and say "I asked Bard what it thought about this issue, here's the response". And then out comes five paragraphs of text that I might as well not even bother reading, as it often contains falsehoods that I have to waste time looking up and double-checking. It bothers me so much that these LLMs don't have any inherent understanding of truth or facts, so the only thing they're really good at is writing fiction (e.g. I hear they're pretty good as a DM's assistant to flesh out flavor/scenario descriptions and such). The Midjourney generated images fall into the same fiction category and are generally pretty good too. But for actual non-fiction usage, you have to spend so much time triple-checking everything they say to ensure that it isn't simply complete nonsense. What's the point?
- KingLancelot 3y ago
  [dead]
- deeviant 3y ago
  > And then out comes five paragraphs of text that I might as well not even bother reading, as it often contains falsehoods that I have to waste time looking up and double-checking. I'm curious on if you feel human generated content does not contain falsehoods.
- barbariangrunge 3y ago
  As a fiction author, I don’t feel gpt writes good fiction at all. It’s a non-fiction tool, just one that lies to you constantly. Half of what it says is a lie…
  - nimbleal 3y ago
    Yes, it’s terrible at writing fiction. Cliché laden, dull, repetitive prose and somehow, in terms of actual content, it never generates anything of interest. Its desire to always wrap things up into a happy ending within a couple of paragraphs also means it’s almost incapable of generating conflict. At best it can generate teenage fan fiction — and bad teenage fan fiction, at that.
josho 3y ago
> isn't it still telling that usage is falling? No. Every tech company at the moment is scrambling to build LLMs into their product. That's where the real value is going to be.
Simulacra 3y ago
I've always seen it as a toy, programed by humans, with human fallacies. It's a fun search engine for sure, but I think it's a decade (at least) until it becomes practical and useful.
- flangola7 3y ago
  The GPT-4 API has 5x or 50x'd some of my tasks. It's easily the most useful tool I've used in my entire life.

caeril 3y ago

These metrics are based on traffic to chat.openai.com. Speaking for myself, I used to use the crappy chat interface but I now exclusively use tooling I've built up around their API. So, n=1, I'm using OpenAI much more, despite using chat.openai.com less.

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> If they're really experiencing a decline in users that's not great for them. If it's the case that "there are new tools coming, but most of them aren't out yet" - and I believe it is[0] - then the overall userbase of ChatGPT doesn't matter to OpenAI, because soon enough the same models will come back with a vengeance, in a different, more streamlined form. In fact, I feel that the major change will happen if and when Microsoft gets their Office 365 and Windows copilots working and properly released: they'll have instant penetration into every industry, including scientists, lawyers, doctors, and office workers. -- [0] - It's been only few months. Between playing around, experimenting, then developing, testing and marketing a tool, there just hasn't been enough time to do all of that.

charrondev 3y ago

Honestly does it really matter much if their B2C usage is primarily students? I’m more curious about their B2B operations which is likely what will trickle into more people’s lives. Their APIs seem to enable quite a few interesting possibilities with a low up front technical investment. Too me the whole “generate me a bunch of text and display it as text” is a niche use case for a lot of people. Integrations for web search, document search, summarization, data extraction/transformation, and sentiment analysis are more useful and less likely to have hallucinations affect the end product. Regarding their revenue I’m curious how the Azure hosted OpenAI services work for OpenAI. Billing is all through Microsoft and the documentation tries really hard to make it clear these are Azure services. I wonder if Microsoft just pays a licensing fee or if there is some revenue sharing going on.

stubybubs 3y ago
> Honestly does it really matter much if their B2C usage is primarily students? For ChatGPT specifically, yes, because it keeps getting hyped so much, and I think B2C is going to be what ChatGPT ends up with. My company isn't known for its tech innovation and we're spinning up our own LLM based on our own data. It doesn't need to be super fast because I doubt we're going to go the chatbot route. It will likely be for content generation, so less horsepower is fine. No need to pay OpenAI for excess capacity. They could go public now with an unreal valuation based on the hype of B2B usage that may never materialize. Revealing that you're mainly a cheat/study tool for students puts you in a box with Chegg and others, at a much lower valuation.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

Was ChatGPT supposed to revolutionize everything or was it the harbinger of LLMs?

pbronez 3y ago
ChatGPT is the Killer App that made people notice the potential of LLMs that had been brewing for several years.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  I see it as multiple things combining to reach a critical mass. Yes it was the killer app but it was also the first time it was actually good enough to chat with. Put another way- it's the shittiest LLM application going forward or the worst LLM application that people are willing to pay for. The hype isn't specifically for ChatGPT but imagining the trendline of LLMs or LLM adjacent tech projected forward combined with still falling compute cost and further democratization.

joshxyz 3y ago

another factor in my mind could be users migrating to apps that are using gpt api instead of using the chatgpt ui itself. only they can tell though.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Given that ChatGPT was just released last fall and it was expected to revolutionize practically everything, isn't it still telling that usage is falling? Its not, though. ChatGPT, the website is basically an (increasingly non-exclusive, given BingAI) frontend. What is claimed to be revolutionary is the underlying models (in the narrow view) and similar generative AI systems (in the broader view). As more applications are built with either OpenAIs own underlying models or those from the broader space, the ChatGPT website should be expected to represent a smaller share of the relevant universe of use.

readyplayeremma 3y ago
This is the correct viewpoint. ChatGPT is one specific implementation of the technology, which was most people's first exposure to it. The broader applications of the technology itself are still in the very early stages, but are already making significant impacts.

CydeWeys 3y ago

I see people using ChatGPT, Bard, etc. to answer questions on mailing list threads. It'll be a long thread of thoughtful human written responses, and then someone will come along and say "I asked Bard what it thought about this issue, here's the response". And then out comes five paragraphs of text that I might as well not even bother reading, as it often contains falsehoods that I have to waste time looking up and double-checking. It bothers me so much that these LLMs don't have any inherent understanding of truth or facts, so the only thing they're really good at is writing fiction (e.g. I hear they're pretty good as a DM's assistant to flesh out flavor/scenario descriptions and such). The Midjourney generated images fall into the same fiction category and are generally pretty good too. But for actual non-fiction usage, you have to spend so much time triple-checking everything they say to ensure that it isn't simply complete nonsense. What's the point?

KingLancelot 3y ago
[dead]
deeviant 3y ago
> And then out comes five paragraphs of text that I might as well not even bother reading, as it often contains falsehoods that I have to waste time looking up and double-checking. I'm curious on if you feel human generated content does not contain falsehoods.
barbariangrunge 3y ago
As a fiction author, I don’t feel gpt writes good fiction at all. It’s a non-fiction tool, just one that lies to you constantly. Half of what it says is a lie…
- nimbleal 3y ago
  Yes, it’s terrible at writing fiction. Cliché laden, dull, repetitive prose and somehow, in terms of actual content, it never generates anything of interest. Its desire to always wrap things up into a happy ending within a couple of paragraphs also means it’s almost incapable of generating conflict. At best it can generate teenage fan fiction — and bad teenage fan fiction, at that.

josho 3y ago

> isn't it still telling that usage is falling? No. Every tech company at the moment is scrambling to build LLMs into their product. That's where the real value is going to be.

Simulacra 3y ago

I've always seen it as a toy, programed by humans, with human fallacies. It's a fun search engine for sure, but I think it's a decade (at least) until it becomes practical and useful.

flangola7 3y ago
The GPT-4 API has 5x or 50x'd some of my tasks. It's easily the most useful tool I've used in my entire life.