After a meteoric rise in popularity last year and early this year, OpenAI’s AI chatbot ChatGPT seems to be starting to lose its momentum.
Data from analytics company Similarweb shows that in June, mobile and desktop traffic to the ChatGPT site fell 9.7 percent worldwide. If this data is correct, the drop actually represents the first time that the chatbot has experienced a decrease in the number of users. In June, app tracker Sensor Tower also saw a drop in ChatGPT downloads for iOS after peaking earlier that month. OpenAI has yet to announce.
Declining interest in ChatGPT may be part of an industry trend. Similarweb’s numbers show that fewer people visited the desktop and mobile sites for Microsoft Bing, Google Bard and Character.AI in recent months. For example, Microsoft saw a spike in traffic to its search engine between February and March when Bing AI became available, but since then monthly traffic has gradually declined and is almost back to the level it was before Microsoft “equipped” Bing with GPT model. -4.
Similarweb also recorded a decline in engagement on ChatGPT, with the number of user minutes falling by 8.5 percent in May 2023.
The reason for the decline may be the end of the school year and the holidays, as many young adults do not use ChatGPT to write their papers. Another reason could be that companies like Samsung forbid employees from using AI chatbots due to real fears of possible data “leakage”.
Regardless of the reason for the drop, OpenAI is definitely not panicking, rather, the company may be happy that fewer people are using the public version of ChatGPT, which is costing the company a lot.