13 ms·

How People Use ChatGPT [pdf]

193 points by nycdatasci 1y ago

mgh95 1y ago
Perhaps most telling in this entire report is Table 1. It shows that the non-work has grown 8x in 1 year, whereas work has only ~3.4x. Considering that non-work related usage of ChatGPT now makes up 73% of the requests, ChatGPT is very much in the consumer market, despite substantial marketing of LLM products in a professional context and even as much as compelled usage in some corporations. Since many consumers are typically relatively tight-fisted in the b2c market, I don't think this bodes well for the long-term economics of the market. This may explain the relatively recent pivot to attempt to "discover" uses. I don't think this ends happily.
- _23sd 1y ago
  The statistic is from ChatGPT consumer plans, so I don't think it says anything useful about enterprise adoption of LLM products or usage patterns in those enterprise contexts.
  - adeelk93 1y ago
    Exactly. Enterprise use has a carveout for analytics - so it wouldn’t be in the paper’s population anyways
- ares623 1y ago
  Looks like they only included actual chats and not agentic/copilot usage. IMO that makes the study quite incomplete.
  - mgh95 1y ago
    The chats alone are backbreakingly costly relative to the market mix of ChatGPT. Rest of the market be damned -- combined with the poor customer mix (low to middle income countries) this explains why there has been such a push by the big labs to attempt to quantize models and save costs. You effectively have highly paid engineers/scientists running computationally expensive models on some of the most expensive hardware on the market to serve instructions on how to do things to people in low income countries. This doesn't sound good, even for ad-supported business models.
    - ares623 1y ago
      I also wonder how much of those "writing" assistance is for propaganda, troll farms, or scams. Such value. $500B well spent.
    - haijo2 1y ago
      Yep and lets not forget, those people are incredibly price sensitive. Is there enough product differentiation between OAI and Gemini? Not that I can see. And even if it was a low price, thats not the point - people hate paying a penny for something they expect to be free. By the time OAI has developed anything that enables them to acquire and exercise market power (profitably), they will have ran out of funding (at least on favourable terms). Which could cause key talent to leave to competitors and so on. Essentially a downward spiral to death.
      - astrange 1y ago
        Deep Research is pretty different between the two, which I think is the most useful mode. OAI's has very low limits unfortunately. Google's is fast but not really "deep" and mostly seems to cite Reddit.
- dolphinscorpion 1y ago
  "I don't think this ends happily." Still, 700 million users, and they can still add a lot of products within ChatGPT. Ads will also be slapped on answers. If all fails, Sam will start wearing "Occupy Jupiter" t-shirts.
  - mgh95 1y ago
    And friendster at one point had over 100m users. A gross margin (and more importantly, positive cash flow) business is more important than users. This data is not a good indicator of either.
    - bix6 1y ago
      But if they slap on ads their margin improves so it is possible no?
      - mgh95 1y ago
        Yeah but the problem then becomes you are in a knife fight with google. Welcome to margin compression on already thin margins and high capex. Its not a like they buy commodity hardware that is cheap, or have the depth of talent like Google to do ASICs + DC management. Once OpenAI turns to ads, I think it's an indicator they are out of ideas.
        babelfish 1y ago
        You could have said this about Meta 15 years ago, and now they're a ~$2 trillion dollar company!
        haijo2 1y ago
        Meta (FB, IG, WA) and Google Search arent really comparable... OAI and Google def are though.
        MangoToupe 1y ago
- andy99 1y ago
  If people find it useful but enterprise adoption is lagging, doesn't that indicate there's still a big upside? On the other hand, I remember when BlackBerry had enterprise locked down and got wiped out by consumer focused Apple. In any event, having big consumer growth doesn't seem like a bad thing. It will be bad if it starts a race to the bottom for ad driven offering though.
  - mgh95 1y ago
    When Apple sells a device, they get more revenue with minimal coats turbocharging revenue and profits. When OpenAI sells a ChatGPT subscription, they incur large costs just to serve the product, shrinking margins. Big difference in unit economics, hence the quantization push.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - ares623 1y ago
    It’s been shoved down enterprise throats for months/years. Shareholders, CEOs, workers (at the start) and users (at the start) have never had such a unified understanding in what they want than this AI frenzy. All stars were aligned for it to gain more traction. And yet… It’s the prodigal child of tech.
  - majormajor 1y ago
    > If people find it useful but enterprise adoption is lagging, doesn't that indicate there's still a big upside? It could indicate that many people find it more of an entertainment product than a tool, and those are often harder to monetize. You've got ads, and that's about it, and puts a probable cap on your monthly revenue per user that's less than most of the subscription prices these companies are trying to get (especially in non-USA countries). (I find it way more of a tool and basically don't use it outside of work... but I see a LOT of AI pics and videos in discord and forums and such.)
- DenisM 1y ago
  Consumers have low friction on the way in and on the way out. Especially when media hype gets involved. Business have higher friction - legal, integrations, access control, internal knowledge leaks (a document can be restricted access but result may leak into a more open query). Not to mention the typical general inertia. This friction works both ways. Think capacitive vs induction electric circuits.
  - mgh95 1y ago
    I don't see how friction is the primary driver here. ChatGPT is available through the most enterprise sales channel available -- Azure. The Microsoft enterprise sales engine is probably the best in the world. Similarly, if costs double (or worse, increase to a point to be close to typical SaaS margins) and LLMs lose their shine I dont think there will be friction on the way out. People (especially executives) will offer up ChatGPT as a sacrifice.
  - ares623 1y ago
    Consumers do have very very high friction with chatbots. As clearly demonstrated by the gpt5 update and the loss of gpt4.
    - lm28469 1y ago
      Meanwhile I have 5 free accounts on each of the big platforms that I rotate whenever I hit a limit.
- standardUser 1y ago
  LLMs are the next ISPs, and those households who haven't yet found room for it on their monthly budgets soon will. And much like ISPs, i'd expect to see the starting $20/mo evolve over time into a full size utility bill. Not all households, of course, but at utility-scale nonetheless.
  - gdhkgdhkvff 1y ago
    The difference is ISPs usually have monopoly/duopoly pricing power and LLMs already have freely available open source models. If one AI company decides they want to start gouging, they have to compete with other providers AND open source. And if all of the ai companies start colluding on price gouging, there’s always the option of new competitors cloud hosting open source models. That said I do think eventually prices will increase somewhat, unless SOTA models start becoming profitable at current prices (my knowledge is at least 6 months old on this so maybe they have already become profitable?)
- lispisok 1y ago
  OpenAI makes a profile of you based on your chat history and people are far more personal with these things than Google search. It's gonna be a goldmine when they decide to use that profile to make money.
- vonnik 1y ago
  As google has shown, consumer/business market is not either/or.
- qwerty_clicks 1y ago
  Work could Be dropping from the limit of ChatGPT in the workplace and use of CoPilot in a secured Microsoft tenant.
- EagnaIonat 1y ago
  I think the data might be skewed. They only analyze the consumer plans, and ignored Enterprise, Teams and Education plans.
- dzink 1y ago
  Replace AI with electricity and the argument looks very different. I think the whole industry is going the Utility route over time. When electricity or railroads or shipping containers or other similar large infrastructure-cost systems were first released the value unlocked for the smallest most profitable customers expanded consumption far more than it did for the large users at the beginning. In electricity for example: Few could have predicted data centers, or crypto, or electric cars boosting demand at the start. As soon as something becomes cheaper with scale (which is what AI companies are going for) the consumption skyrockets as tech catches up. The utility down side is obviously guaranteed monopoly eventually and potentially government involvement, or in this case possibility of AI becoming a chunk of the government as well. Especially with social media content steering votes (text generation really being a tool to steer human opinions) and power, and public funding as a result.
  - TriangleEdge 1y ago
    I think AI will also enable the discovery of psychopaths and narcissists, so the dystopia mentioned is uncertain. When AI will confidently boil down someone to some labels like this, we may get competent leadership for the first time ever.
    - macintux 1y ago
      Openly being psychopaths & narcissists hasn't impeded today's autocrats. Apparently it's a positive indicator for many.
  - dzink 1y ago
    In case anyone doubts the growth and progress for scammers enabled by it: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ai-chatbots-cyber/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ai-chatb...
- CuriouslyC 1y ago
  OAI has a very strong potential play in the consumer devices market. The question is if they approach it right. If OAI developed high end laptops/tablets with deep AI integration, with hardware designed around a very specific model architecture (hyper-sparse large MoE with cold expert marshalling/offloading via NVME), that would be incredibly compelling. Don't forget they've got Jony, it wouldn't just be a groundbreaking AI box, it'd be an aesthetic artifact and status symbol.
- variadix 1y ago
  The drop in ChatGPT usage once summer started was similarly indicative of what is driving growth.
- faangguyindia 1y ago
  >I don't think this ends happily. people said same thing for youtube, "videos are bandwidth hungry", no way make money off of it. consumer user is still feeding the LLM with training data.
daviding 1y ago
Not going to read all that.. ;) > ChatGPT is widely used for practical guidance, information seeking, and writing, which together make up nearly 80% of usage. Non-work queries now dominate (70%). Writing is the main work task, mostly editing user text. Users are younger, increasingly female, global, and adoption is growing fastest in lower-income countries
- dgfitz 1y ago
  > Users are younger, increasingly female, global, and adoption is growing fastest in lower-income countries Young moms with no money in poor countries use this product the most. I bet that was fun news to deliver up the chain.
  - Gigachad 1y ago
    Surely this user base can make back the hundreds of billions of dollars they invested in it.
    - klibertp 1y ago
      If they mostly ask how to raise their children and follow the received advice... Then yeah, in some 20 years we'll see what kind of return we get. People raised on social media are one thing; people raised by (with the assistance of) ChatGPT may be even worse off because of it.
      - rglynn 1y ago
        Interesting. Do you really think that? My initial assumption would be that there are a lot, likely a majority, of parents who have had next to no advice on how to raise kids. Furthermore, I would posit that many of them were not raised in particularly nurturing circumstances themselves. As such, I would expect that the advice ChatGPT gives (i.e. an average from parenting advice blogs and forums), would on average result in better parenting. That's obviously not to say that ChatGPT gives great advice, but that the bar is very low already.
lazyant 1y ago
[flagged]
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  Don't do that. If I wanted to read slop I could generate it myself.
  - senectus1 1y ago
    i think that's the point of the article.. people dont want to generate their own slop (read an article and be forced to form an informed opinion) they want it made for them (article summarized so they can skim an opinion and move on to the next slop)
- Cheer2171 1y ago
  Delete this comment, then delete your account.
- jamiek88 1y ago
  Relevant user name.
- nerevarthelame 1y ago
  I get that not everyone wants to read a 62-page paper. But this has an abstract, a conclusion, and an accompanying blog post that each serve the same purpose as this summary. Just use the existing, better materials if you're not willing to go in depth.
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Blog post with highlights: https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/ https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/
cantalopes 1y ago
> to tl;dr tbis article
LeicaLatte 1y ago
I think the 73% non-work usage ratio will flip again within 2-3 years, but not because consumer usage shrinks. As AI becomes embedded in workflows through APIs the "work" category is set to expand dramatically.
- apwell23 1y ago
  no
qwerty_clicks 1y ago
I commonly switch between chatgpt, perplexity, and copilot. Whatever is closest to my mouse or shortcut. Copilot is clearly the worst of the three but I have not true loyalty or most of the time, care. I suspect I am getting weak model responses from perplexity at times but it’s good enough to keep moving fast. Sam mentioned brining memory to people, not just because it’s what ppl want but I suspect my it will help to lock ppl into one platform of snowballing context.
kristopolous 1y ago
This is crazy. I was having a conversation earlier where I divided the use cases and my taxonomy was almost identical: I didn't include "writing help" but everything else. Then I guessed the trends trends and nailed it with respect to the other of usage. I mean how often to you make fairly speculative claims and then an hour later see a just published report on it and get it validated? Nuts. I personally hate chatgpt's voice (writing style) but I guess that's a minority position.
PeterStuer 1y ago
Absolute worst by far I have encountered is people using ChatGPT to self diagnose their presumed psychological conditions. Ofc ChatGPT goes in hard to syncopanthically confirm all 'suggestive' leads with zero pushback.
- okdood64 1y ago
  > syncopanthically confirm all 'suggestive' leads with zero pushback This is true. However: As someone who's done multiple assessments in a clinical setting for anxiety & depression, there is no special magic that requires a human to do it, and many providers are happy to confirm a diagnosis pretty quickly without digging in more. There's GAD-7 & PHQ-9 respectively. While the interview is semi-structured and there is some discretion to the interviewer (how the patient presents in terms of affect, mood, etc.) they mostly go off the quiz. The trouble you can run into is if there's another condition or differential diagnosis which could be missed. (By both an LLM and the interviewer alike.)
PolicyPhantom 1y ago
People don’t really use ChatGPT as a search engine replacement. It’s more about decision support, writing, and formatting tasks. That matches what I see at work: younger colleagues often use it for drafting text or templates, but not for “just looking things up.”
- hawngyeedun 1y ago
  > People don’t really use ChatGPT as a search engine replacement Some do, and they think that they are using it as a replacement. I've been doing research on its use among college students and I've heard firsthand that some of them (especially from students in non-STEM fields) think ChatGPT can be as useful as, if not better than, search engines at times for _seeking_ information. You may be talking to a specific subset of the population, but once you branch out and observe/hear from broader demographics, you'd be surprised to learn about people's mental model of the genAI technologies.
ProllyInfamous 1y ago
Per article, 1 in 11 people (globally) use ChatGPT at least weekly. Smarter tech -types, as well as students, are heavier users.

193 points by nycdatasci 1y ago

Perhaps most telling in this entire report is Table 1. It shows that the non-work has grown 8x in 1 year, whereas work has only ~3.4x. Considering that non-work related usage of ChatGPT now makes up 73% of the requests, ChatGPT is very much in the consumer market, despite substantial marketing of LLM products in a professional context and even as much as compelled usage in some corporations. Since many consumers are typically relatively tight-fisted in the b2c market, I don't think this bodes well for the long-term economics of the market. This may explain the relatively recent pivot to attempt to "discover" uses. I don't think this ends happily.

_23sd 1y ago
The statistic is from ChatGPT consumer plans, so I don't think it says anything useful about enterprise adoption of LLM products or usage patterns in those enterprise contexts.
- adeelk93 1y ago
  Exactly. Enterprise use has a carveout for analytics - so it wouldn’t be in the paper’s population anyways
ares623 1y ago
Looks like they only included actual chats and not agentic/copilot usage. IMO that makes the study quite incomplete.
- mgh95 1y ago
  The chats alone are backbreakingly costly relative to the market mix of ChatGPT. Rest of the market be damned -- combined with the poor customer mix (low to middle income countries) this explains why there has been such a push by the big labs to attempt to quantize models and save costs. You effectively have highly paid engineers/scientists running computationally expensive models on some of the most expensive hardware on the market to serve instructions on how to do things to people in low income countries. This doesn't sound good, even for ad-supported business models.
  - ares623 1y ago
    I also wonder how much of those "writing" assistance is for propaganda, troll farms, or scams. Such value. $500B well spent.
  - haijo2 1y ago
    Yep and lets not forget, those people are incredibly price sensitive. Is there enough product differentiation between OAI and Gemini? Not that I can see. And even if it was a low price, thats not the point - people hate paying a penny for something they expect to be free. By the time OAI has developed anything that enables them to acquire and exercise market power (profitably), they will have ran out of funding (at least on favourable terms). Which could cause key talent to leave to competitors and so on. Essentially a downward spiral to death.
    - astrange 1y ago
      Deep Research is pretty different between the two, which I think is the most useful mode. OAI's has very low limits unfortunately. Google's is fast but not really "deep" and mostly seems to cite Reddit.
dolphinscorpion 1y ago
"I don't think this ends happily." Still, 700 million users, and they can still add a lot of products within ChatGPT. Ads will also be slapped on answers. If all fails, Sam will start wearing "Occupy Jupiter" t-shirts.
- mgh95 1y ago
  And friendster at one point had over 100m users. A gross margin (and more importantly, positive cash flow) business is more important than users. This data is not a good indicator of either.
  - bix6 1y ago
    But if they slap on ads their margin improves so it is possible no?
    - mgh95 1y ago
      Yeah but the problem then becomes you are in a knife fight with google. Welcome to margin compression on already thin margins and high capex. Its not a like they buy commodity hardware that is cheap, or have the depth of talent like Google to do ASICs + DC management. Once OpenAI turns to ads, I think it's an indicator they are out of ideas.
      - babelfish 1y ago
        You could have said this about Meta 15 years ago, and now they're a ~$2 trillion dollar company!
        haijo2 1y ago
        Meta (FB, IG, WA) and Google Search arent really comparable... OAI and Google def are though.
        MangoToupe 1y ago
andy99 1y ago
If people find it useful but enterprise adoption is lagging, doesn't that indicate there's still a big upside? On the other hand, I remember when BlackBerry had enterprise locked down and got wiped out by consumer focused Apple. In any event, having big consumer growth doesn't seem like a bad thing. It will be bad if it starts a race to the bottom for ad driven offering though.
- mgh95 1y ago
  When Apple sells a device, they get more revenue with minimal coats turbocharging revenue and profits. When OpenAI sells a ChatGPT subscription, they incur large costs just to serve the product, shrinking margins. Big difference in unit economics, hence the quantization push.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- ares623 1y ago
  It’s been shoved down enterprise throats for months/years. Shareholders, CEOs, workers (at the start) and users (at the start) have never had such a unified understanding in what they want than this AI frenzy. All stars were aligned for it to gain more traction. And yet… It’s the prodigal child of tech.
- majormajor 1y ago
  > If people find it useful but enterprise adoption is lagging, doesn't that indicate there's still a big upside? It could indicate that many people find it more of an entertainment product than a tool, and those are often harder to monetize. You've got ads, and that's about it, and puts a probable cap on your monthly revenue per user that's less than most of the subscription prices these companies are trying to get (especially in non-USA countries). (I find it way more of a tool and basically don't use it outside of work... but I see a LOT of AI pics and videos in discord and forums and such.)
DenisM 1y ago
Consumers have low friction on the way in and on the way out. Especially when media hype gets involved. Business have higher friction - legal, integrations, access control, internal knowledge leaks (a document can be restricted access but result may leak into a more open query). Not to mention the typical general inertia. This friction works both ways. Think capacitive vs induction electric circuits.
- mgh95 1y ago
  I don't see how friction is the primary driver here. ChatGPT is available through the most enterprise sales channel available -- Azure. The Microsoft enterprise sales engine is probably the best in the world. Similarly, if costs double (or worse, increase to a point to be close to typical SaaS margins) and LLMs lose their shine I dont think there will be friction on the way out. People (especially executives) will offer up ChatGPT as a sacrifice.
- ares623 1y ago
  Consumers do have very very high friction with chatbots. As clearly demonstrated by the gpt5 update and the loss of gpt4.
  - lm28469 1y ago
    Meanwhile I have 5 free accounts on each of the big platforms that I rotate whenever I hit a limit.
standardUser 1y ago
LLMs are the next ISPs, and those households who haven't yet found room for it on their monthly budgets soon will. And much like ISPs, i'd expect to see the starting $20/mo evolve over time into a full size utility bill. Not all households, of course, but at utility-scale nonetheless.
- gdhkgdhkvff 1y ago
  The difference is ISPs usually have monopoly/duopoly pricing power and LLMs already have freely available open source models. If one AI company decides they want to start gouging, they have to compete with other providers AND open source. And if all of the ai companies start colluding on price gouging, there’s always the option of new competitors cloud hosting open source models. That said I do think eventually prices will increase somewhat, unless SOTA models start becoming profitable at current prices (my knowledge is at least 6 months old on this so maybe they have already become profitable?)
lispisok 1y ago
OpenAI makes a profile of you based on your chat history and people are far more personal with these things than Google search. It's gonna be a goldmine when they decide to use that profile to make money.
vonnik 1y ago
As google has shown, consumer/business market is not either/or.
qwerty_clicks 1y ago
Work could Be dropping from the limit of ChatGPT in the workplace and use of CoPilot in a secured Microsoft tenant.
EagnaIonat 1y ago
I think the data might be skewed. They only analyze the consumer plans, and ignored Enterprise, Teams and Education plans.
dzink 1y ago
Replace AI with electricity and the argument looks very different. I think the whole industry is going the Utility route over time. When electricity or railroads or shipping containers or other similar large infrastructure-cost systems were first released the value unlocked for the smallest most profitable customers expanded consumption far more than it did for the large users at the beginning. In electricity for example: Few could have predicted data centers, or crypto, or electric cars boosting demand at the start. As soon as something becomes cheaper with scale (which is what AI companies are going for) the consumption skyrockets as tech catches up. The utility down side is obviously guaranteed monopoly eventually and potentially government involvement, or in this case possibility of AI becoming a chunk of the government as well. Especially with social media content steering votes (text generation really being a tool to steer human opinions) and power, and public funding as a result.
- TriangleEdge 1y ago
  I think AI will also enable the discovery of psychopaths and narcissists, so the dystopia mentioned is uncertain. When AI will confidently boil down someone to some labels like this, we may get competent leadership for the first time ever.
  - macintux 1y ago
    Openly being psychopaths & narcissists hasn't impeded today's autocrats. Apparently it's a positive indicator for many.
- dzink 1y ago
  In case anyone doubts the growth and progress for scammers enabled by it: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ai-chatbots-cyber/ https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ai-chatb...
CuriouslyC 1y ago
OAI has a very strong potential play in the consumer devices market. The question is if they approach it right. If OAI developed high end laptops/tablets with deep AI integration, with hardware designed around a very specific model architecture (hyper-sparse large MoE with cold expert marshalling/offloading via NVME), that would be incredibly compelling. Don't forget they've got Jony, it wouldn't just be a groundbreaking AI box, it'd be an aesthetic artifact and status symbol.
variadix 1y ago
The drop in ChatGPT usage once summer started was similarly indicative of what is driving growth.
faangguyindia 1y ago
>I don't think this ends happily. people said same thing for youtube, "videos are bandwidth hungry", no way make money off of it. consumer user is still feeding the LLM with training data.

daviding 1y ago

Not going to read all that.. ;) > ChatGPT is widely used for practical guidance, information seeking, and writing, which together make up nearly 80% of usage. Non-work queries now dominate (70%). Writing is the main work task, mostly editing user text. Users are younger, increasingly female, global, and adoption is growing fastest in lower-income countries

dgfitz 1y ago
> Users are younger, increasingly female, global, and adoption is growing fastest in lower-income countries Young moms with no money in poor countries use this product the most. I bet that was fun news to deliver up the chain.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  Surely this user base can make back the hundreds of billions of dollars they invested in it.
  - klibertp 1y ago
    If they mostly ask how to raise their children and follow the received advice... Then yeah, in some 20 years we'll see what kind of return we get. People raised on social media are one thing; people raised by (with the assistance of) ChatGPT may be even worse off because of it.
    - rglynn 1y ago
      Interesting. Do you really think that? My initial assumption would be that there are a lot, likely a majority, of parents who have had next to no advice on how to raise kids. Furthermore, I would posit that many of them were not raised in particularly nurturing circumstances themselves. As such, I would expect that the advice ChatGPT gives (i.e. an average from parenting advice blogs and forums), would on average result in better parenting. That's obviously not to say that ChatGPT gives great advice, but that the bar is very low already.

lazyant 1y ago

[flagged]

LeoPanthera 1y ago
Don't do that. If I wanted to read slop I could generate it myself.
- senectus1 1y ago
  i think that's the point of the article.. people dont want to generate their own slop (read an article and be forced to form an informed opinion) they want it made for them (article summarized so they can skim an opinion and move on to the next slop)
Cheer2171 1y ago
Delete this comment, then delete your account.
jamiek88 1y ago
Relevant user name.
nerevarthelame 1y ago
I get that not everyone wants to read a 62-page paper. But this has an abstract, a conclusion, and an accompanying blog post that each serve the same purpose as this summary. Just use the existing, better materials if you're not willing to go in depth.

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Blog post with highlights: https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/ https://openai.com/index/how-people-are-using-chatgpt/

cantalopes 1y ago

> to tl;dr tbis article

LeicaLatte 1y ago

I think the 73% non-work usage ratio will flip again within 2-3 years, but not because consumer usage shrinks. As AI becomes embedded in workflows through APIs the "work" category is set to expand dramatically.

apwell23 1y ago
no

qwerty_clicks 1y ago

I commonly switch between chatgpt, perplexity, and copilot. Whatever is closest to my mouse or shortcut. Copilot is clearly the worst of the three but I have not true loyalty or most of the time, care. I suspect I am getting weak model responses from perplexity at times but it’s good enough to keep moving fast. Sam mentioned brining memory to people, not just because it’s what ppl want but I suspect my it will help to lock ppl into one platform of snowballing context.

kristopolous 1y ago

This is crazy. I was having a conversation earlier where I divided the use cases and my taxonomy was almost identical: I didn't include "writing help" but everything else. Then I guessed the trends trends and nailed it with respect to the other of usage. I mean how often to you make fairly speculative claims and then an hour later see a just published report on it and get it validated? Nuts. I personally hate chatgpt's voice (writing style) but I guess that's a minority position.

PeterStuer 1y ago

Absolute worst by far I have encountered is people using ChatGPT to self diagnose their presumed psychological conditions. Ofc ChatGPT goes in hard to syncopanthically confirm all 'suggestive' leads with zero pushback.

okdood64 1y ago
> syncopanthically confirm all 'suggestive' leads with zero pushback This is true. However: As someone who's done multiple assessments in a clinical setting for anxiety & depression, there is no special magic that requires a human to do it, and many providers are happy to confirm a diagnosis pretty quickly without digging in more. There's GAD-7 & PHQ-9 respectively. While the interview is semi-structured and there is some discretion to the interviewer (how the patient presents in terms of affect, mood, etc.) they mostly go off the quiz. The trouble you can run into is if there's another condition or differential diagnosis which could be missed. (By both an LLM and the interviewer alike.)

PolicyPhantom 1y ago

People don’t really use ChatGPT as a search engine replacement. It’s more about decision support, writing, and formatting tasks. That matches what I see at work: younger colleagues often use it for drafting text or templates, but not for “just looking things up.”

hawngyeedun 1y ago
> People don’t really use ChatGPT as a search engine replacement Some do, and they think that they are using it as a replacement. I've been doing research on its use among college students and I've heard firsthand that some of them (especially from students in non-STEM fields) think ChatGPT can be as useful as, if not better than, search engines at times for _seeking_ information. You may be talking to a specific subset of the population, but once you branch out and observe/hear from broader demographics, you'd be surprised to learn about people's mental model of the genAI technologies.

ProllyInfamous 1y ago

Per article, 1 in 11 people (globally) use ChatGPT at least weekly. Smarter tech -types, as well as students, are heavier users.