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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

by 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.

by mgh95 1y ago

_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.