> Even if you think that OpenAI’s growth is impressive — it went from 700 million to 800 million weekly active users in the last two months — that is not the kind of growth that says “build capacity assuming that literally every single human being on Earth uses this all the time.”
I’d argue the other way around: 100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time, and it’s just a matter of enabling them to.
Beware the sigmoidal curve, though. Growth is exponential till it’s not.
> 100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time, and it’s just a matter of enabling them to.
This doesn’t make any sense. Popular is not the same as useful. You’d have a more compelling argument if you included data showing that all this increased LLM usage has had some kind of impact on productivity metrics.
Instead, some studies have shown that LLMs are making professionals less productive:
>This doesn’t make any sense. Popular is not the same as useful.
If you are using a service weekly for a long period, you find it useful.
>You’d have a more compelling argument if you included data showing that all this increased LLM usage has had some kind of impact on productivity metrics.
Why would you need to do that? Why is a vague (in this instance) notion of 'productivity' the only measure of usefulness? ChatGPT (not the API, just the app) processes over 2.6 B messages every single day. Most of these (1.9B) are for Non work purposes. So what 'productivity' would you even be measuring here ? Do you think everything that doesn't have to do with work is useless ? I hope not, because you'd be wrong.
If something makes you laugh consistently, it's useful. If it makes you happy, it's useful. 'Productivity' is not even close to being the be-all and end-all of usefulness.
This is free users though. The number of paid users is significantly less (like any other freemium product). Finding it useful enough to use weekly doesn't mean finding it useful enough to pay continuously for use.
Free users can still be monetized or else Google Search would be a money loser. Open AI's free users are at the moment not monetized in any way. It's clear they plan to change this, given recent hirings and the value they'd need to extract from their free active userbase to be profitable is pretty low, so it's not really a problem.
> If you are using a service weekly for a long period, you find it useful.
Do alcoholics find their daily usage of alcohol really useful? You can of course make a case for this, but it's quite a stretch. I think people use stuff weekly for all sorts of reasons besides usefulness for the most common interpretation of the word.
> Do alcoholics find their daily usage of alcohol really useful?
Of course they do. They use it to get drunk and to avoid withdrawals. You're trying to confuse useful with productive. Being productive does make a difference, though, because if something isn't productive it doesn't generate enough cash to buy more of it - you have to pull the cash from somewhere else.
So I think your feeling is correct, although your argument is wrong. Buying gas for your car is productive, because it gets you to work which gets you money to pay for more gas and other things (like alcohol.) Buying alcohol is not productive, and that means that people can't pay too much for it.
Exactly, for how many people is Instagram/TikTok and friends actually useful? Sure, they're popular and also used by billions, but would every human on earth benefit from using those services?
I finally used it for a couple little things, but mostly as a fuzzier replacement for search, where it does do pretty well. Of course nowadays classic search is in shambolic so it is kind like a mediocre prime-aged boxer fighting an 70 year old champion or something.
Anyway, I bet it will be really useful for cool stuff if it can ever run on my laptop!
idk "it will be really useful" is a bit too fuzzy and vague -- how do I infer about numbers related to return-in-investment?
of course, it's better than "this is so crap no one would buy it" -- but for investors, they want to know: "if I put X dollars now, would I get 10*X dollars or 1/10 X dollars?"
it's weird that all these comments on "usefulness" doesn't even attempt to explain whether the numbers add up ok or not
I don’t care about investors making their money back. ChatGPT did a good enough proof of concept. They can go out of business now, that would be fine.
Now, Mistral or DeepSeek or somebody can put out open weights models. The existing frameworks are good enough to act as very nice autocompletes, coding buddies, or writing style nitpickers. Or probably they could make more interesting video game NPCs.
OpenAI's bottleneck first shifted from GPUs to energy. Next it will shift from energy to meatbags. I'm sure they will figure out some way to produce more of us to keep the growthrate going.
> 100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time, and it’s just a matter of enabling them to.
For OpenAI I think the problem is that if eventually browsers, operating systems, phones, word processors [some other system people already use and/or pay for] integrate some form of generative AI that is good enough - and an integrated AI can be a lot less capable than the cutting edge to win, what will be the market for a stand alone AI for the general public.
There will always be a market for professional products, cutting edge research and coding tools, but I don’t think that makes a trillion dollar company.
About 10% of the total world population is using it on a weekly basis. Take out those too old or young or illiterate technically or otherwise. Now subtract out the people without reliable internet and computer/phone. That 10% gets a whole lot bigger.
That seems like pretty strong evidence that it is generally, if not universally, useful to everyone given the opportunity.
It’s interesting with the whole quote:
“OpenAI has 800 million weekly active users, and putting aside the fact that OpenAI’s own research (see page 10, footnote 20) says it double-counts users who are logged out if they’re use different devices”
The number may not actually be too accurate - but I imagine it’s also paired with what another commentator has said - OpenAI is basically giving their product to companies and the companies are making the employees log in and use it in some way - it’s not natural growth in any sense of the word.
My work is apparently paying for seats in multiple AI tools for everybody. There's a corporate mandate that you "have to use AI for your job". People seem to mostly be using it to for (a) slide decks with cringe images (b) making their PRs look more impressive by generating a bunch of ineffective boilerplate unit tests.
Utility and destructive addictiveness are two very different things. You could argue this way about opium back when recreational consumption was widespread.
I’m sorry but I don’t see much logic in an argument that boils down to “A lot of people use it and that means it would also be useful to the people who don’t use it”. Maybe the people who don’t use it have an actual reason not to use it.
> 100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time, and it’s just a matter of enabling them to.
Only about 5% see enough value to drop $20 a month... It's like VR and AR, if people get a headset for free they'll use them every now and then, but virtually nobody wants to drop money on these.
It's about a 5% conversion rate but here are some things to remember:
1. They're haemorrhaging money even on paying customers, even at the $200/mo subscription level
2. 5% conversion rates are pretty dismal for what AI is purported to be - IE if you're a free user and it's able to replace everything you do for free why pay for it? If it's not able to, why pay for it? If it's truly amazingly transformative you'd similarly expect huge buy-in from people swarming to use this amazing new tool.
I just stopped paying for ChatGPT this month, once I found out that they made the projects available to free users too. The free version is just as good and I can shuffle between Grok, Mistral, Deepseek and Gemini when I run out of free quota.
So maybe giving away more and more free stuff is good for growth? The product is excellent, ChatGPT is still my favorite but the competition isn't that behind. If fact, I started liking Grok better for most tasks
Reality check. UNICEF and the WHO say there are 2 billion people without access to clean drinking water. They have slightly more pressuring issues than trying to log into chatgpt. Only slightly.
The blockchain/bitcoin bros tried the same marketing spin. "Bitcoin will end poverty once we get it into everyone's hands." When that started slipping, NFTs will save us all.
Yeah. Sure. Been there. Done that. Just needs "more investment"... and then more... then more... all because of self reported "growth".
Nearly six billion people are using mobile phones, most of those are smartphones now. There's no reason to think extending that small cost utility device to the next billion adults isn't a good idea (so long as the cost isn't coming from their pocket, ie it should be subsidized). These are not at all mutually exclusive goals.
The latest LLMs are extraordinarily useful life agents as is. Most people would benefit from using them.
It'd be like pretending it's either water or education (pick one). The answer is both and you don't have to pick one or the other in reality at all. The entities trying to solve each aspect are typically different organization anyway.
Spare me the rehash of marketing hype rhetoric. It's either a white collar tool to avoid doing boring work or great to identify targets on a battlefield. That's it and both are still questionable. This techno-fetishism of "New technology good, ugga-ooga-booga." 99% of the blind evangelists just spew that same slop just because of fomo of making a few extra shekels by proving "I'm a true believer, and so should you by buying my AI course."
Someone who doesn't have access to clean water and stable food will not benefit from this, nor will powers at be that "make it available" will actually improve their lives. It's already apparent, the tech nerds of the late 90s and early 2000s were NOT the good guys. Being good at computers does not make you a good person. The business model for AI makes zero sense when you have real world experience. Without massive, complete social and economic absolute changes, it won't work out. And for those championing that change, what makes you think you'll be the special comrade brought up the ranks to benefit as the truest of believers?
Sorry, but this shit is really starting to rub me the wrong way, especially with the massive bubble investment that's growing around all of it. This wont be good. The housing collapsed sucked. The same pattern is emerging and I'm getting a bad, bad feeling this will make the housing collapse look like nothing due to long term ramifications.
It's also useful if your blind, I know this from personal experience. The ability to recognize objects, read package labels, read bios and boot menus, etc has been very useful to me. Claiming that the only things it's good for is white collar work or battlefield targeting isn't accurate. In spite of how useful I've found it I'm not claiming it's going to be net positive, I have no idea how this will all turn out.
It's a wonderful way to find new tools and materials. Its knowledge of materials is as encyclopedic as it is for everything else.
I use it as a much more efficient version of Wikipedia for quickly finding the basics on many design options in software and physical artifacts. Also great at finding specific words in English or other languages. Unlike a thesaurus it pulls a lot of background on each word including subjective shades.
I could go on, and on.
I think the usefulness of these models is very different for different people. As a way to quickly start digging into novel problems, with aspects that require discovery, I don't know of anything that could possibly compare. No human being or web resource comes close.
As many people relate, it can save me time, but the greater value is it makes my time far more productive, and I tackle problems without hesitation I wouldn't have ever had the time to even think about before.
I could not imagine going back to Google for instance. Stone-age. I still use Kagi, but often for its quick AI question responses. And I still use Wikipedia, and more specific resources.
The number of users is irrelevant. Revenue is only slightly relevant. The only thing that matters is profit. It would even be a decent thing if they could show marginal profit per user.
I don't really think people understand there are all sorts of non-chatgpt users that pay OpenAI thousands of dollars PER DAY - (>100k customers like this). They're not going to publish the data, but agentic flows make ChatGPT look like a cereal box.
I’d argue the other way around: 100M growth in two months suggests literally every single human being on Earth would benefit from using this all the time, and it’s just a matter of enabling them to.
Beware the sigmoidal curve, though. Growth is exponential till it’s not.