Has the ChatGPT bubble burst? A.I. sensation sees traffic fall for the first time – Fortune
ChatGPT, the viral chatbot developed by OpenAI, revolutionized the tech conversation when it burst onto the scene last year. It garnered over 100 million monthly active users in just a few months, making it the fastest-growing app in history. The new buzz around generative A.I. pushed tech giants to rapidly adopt the new technology, encouraged CEOs to evaluate their labor needs, and sparked a rally in A.I. stocks worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Yet people may be starting to get a little tired of chatbots.
Traffic to ChatGPT’s website fell by 9.7% over the month of June, according to preliminary estimates from Similarweb, a web analytics firm, released this week. The decline was even greater just in the U.S., with a 10.3% month-on-month decline. The number of unique visitors to ChatGPT also fell by 5.7% from the previous month.
OpenAI’s chatbot is still by far the most visited site providing an A.I.-powered chatbot. ChatGPT gets more worldwide traffic than Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which recently launched its own GPT-powered chatbot.
Google’s chatbot Bard doesn’t even rank in Similarweb’s top three, coming in just behind Character.ai, a startup that allows users to design and develop their own chatbots. (Popular chatbots include those based on Elon Musk, Marvel’s Tony Stark, and Nintendo’s Mario.) Character.ai raised $150 million in late March in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the startup at $1 billion.
In an email to Fortune, Character.ai disputed some of the findings from the report. “Our usage is up,” says CEO and cofounder Noam Shazeer. Shazeer suggests that users have migrated to the startup’s new apps, which launched in May. (Similarweb’s report says it tracks “desktop and mobile web traffic.”)
Character.ai’s app was installed 1.7 million times just a week after launch, the startup claimed in early June.
OpenAI also launched a mobile app version of ChatGPT in May.
OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Still, OpenAI may not mind that traffic to ChatGPT is slowing down, as the chatbot is a “loss leader generating sales leads,” writes David Carr, a senior insights manager at Similarweb.
OpenAI hopes to pitch business clients on using its A.I. services. Microsoft, which has invested $10 billion into the A.I developer, is also selling OpenAI’s services while also integrating the A.I. developer’s technology into products like Office.
While corporate leaders are excited about A.I., some companies are worried about data privacy, warning employees against submitting confidential or sensitive information through ChatGPT. OpenAI no longer trains its models on data from paying customers, CEO Sam Altman told CNBC in May.
Update, July 6, 2023: This piece has been updated with a response from Character.ai.
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