The genie is out
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of November last year, the tech world and the Extremely Online community went into something of a meltdown, racing to try the chatbot and sample its hilarious / genuinely insightful responses. The process was simple: put in a prompt — anything from “solve this complex coding problem” to “come up with rap battle verses between a caveman and Shakespeare” — and ChatGPT would often spit out exactly what you were after.
Back in December, the chatbot was making waves as one of the quickest platforms in history to reach 1 million users — hitting the milestone ~15x faster than Instagram and ~30x quicker than Spotify. Indeed, by the time the new year rolled around, ChatGPT already had 25 million users. Since then, however, even as more details of the bot’s full capabilities and ever-developing skillset have emerged, ChatGPT’s usage has started to temper.
Data from Similar Web, via Insider, reveals that total users had been growing every month until May, when visitors to chat.openai.com hit 97 million, but they fell for the first time in June. Indeed, traffic to the site dropped more than 7%, and new users fell by almost a third — a sign that ChatGPT may have lost some of its novelty as the tech’s developed and more AI has come to the public fore.
