This isn’t relevant to that debate. A billion people use the ChatGPT app without paying a dime. They don’t care what score the model gets on a hundred technical benchmarks. They don’t care if the weights are open or closed. They are definitely not hosting anything on their own. They want to ask a question and get an answer. If OpenAI can monetize that audience with ads at the level of Google then who cares about Anthropic or Deepseek?
"A billion people use the ChatGPT"
lol uh source? even if you generously count my dad trying it out once out of curiosity in response to the news or w/e that doesn't seem true.
1. Open AI reported 900M+ weekly active users in February. [0]
2. Consistently ranks as the 5th most visited site. 5B+ visits last month. Only Google, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram rank higher. [1]
[0] https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/
[1] https://www.semrush.com/trending-websites/global/all
Those numbers seem in conflict.
900M active users per week, but less than 6B visits in a month. Those users don't seem very active.
I think the third party only has an estimate for web visitors. Most users are probably on the mobile app?
Let’s not forget to count all the people who use a MS office product at work, and are therefore opted into counting for copilot numbers, which almost _certainly_ counts towards ChatGPT numbers by default!
I’ve been wondering for a while if these ludicrously high numbers are just MAU and count people running 16 free accounts load balanced for more access without paying.
No way 1/7 people globally use ChatGPT?
I can believe it. I've seen how popular it is in the general population. You just say something and the computer answers it? No need to learn how to use it? Of course it's popular! And the only well-known one is ChatGPT.
If the numbers are based purely on an account count, or IP count (maybe?) I could see it. Lots of people are forced to use it at work.
I have no idea. Doesn't seem implausible to me. Apparently, ≈75% of the world population has internet access now. And if a person has internet access, is it that unlikely that he was successfully targeted by at least one of these idiotic marketing campaigns (turn your photo into a barbie doll or whatever)? 10% sounds plausible to me, more or less. So maybe not really literally a 1B, but doesn't need to be very far from the real numbers, IMO.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-app-hits-1-billio...
this...there is a lot of value here, and the user data they gather from actual conversations is likely way better at using for ads than just the search data that google has.
Google has significantly more data than merely what you're googling.
virtually every website transaction is observed by Google Analytics. nearly everywebsite has a google pixel installed. nearly every phyical location you visit and relationship you have is logged by Google.
even if you never use google search, they have you marked
If your phone is Android they are tracking your location and nearby devices and who owns the devices you are consistently nearby. If your browser is Chrome they know your full browsing history. If your email is Gmail they know everything you emailed anyone or who emailed you.
It is scary how often I'll mention something in a face-to-have conversation and suddenly it's showing up in ads. It's way too often to be coincidence, especially with how unlikely some of those topics are. They are definitely monitoring everything and feeding it into their ad system.
Sometimes I see on YouTube videos "debunking" this but there's never any good evidence either way. I just assume it's Google propaganda.
at the level of Google? Like you are underestimating how massive google is when it comes to ads. It is not that easy to just be at the level of google in advertising even if you are oai
This should be upvoted more. Saying it is not easy is an understatement. The chasm is so large that if you were to represent it on a globe it would rival oceans. I've been brought into places that were bought for half a billion+ to try and claw back half of a tenth of a percent of traffic. A redesign is pushed through that minimizes content, inflates metrics, and triples the ads. Users leave, everyone is fired, it's written off and the cycle repeats.
OAI is going to try and ape facebook's opening plays. Burn at any expense to optimize for time spent, give you what you want, establish usage habits, dial it back to foster a dependency. Leverage their position as an arbiter of truth, claim they are going to act like x and do y. Fuck people up, roll out shiny new safeguards, silently peel them back. Dig a regulatory moat that makes anything resembling competition prohibitively expensive.
The only time I have gone to best buy in the past 10 years was because they have a garbage can full of sand ready to accept any spicy pillows (batteries that have become genuinely dangerous).
People are getting pissed and takes years of people not caring to create a regulatory moat like that. The current admin is not a moat maker. You can pay to play then your dropped 20 minutes later.
but google sucks, its a terrible product thanks to its ads. Internet is terrible without adblockers.
Now chatgpt can add some subtle ads in their apps and they have enough users for companies to spend money on it.
You are speaking from the point of view of an engineer I am guessing or a consumer. If you work in marketing or advertising, you will see things differently and why google and meta to a certain extent are giants. Yes, Chatgpt can subtlely influence people but what matters more is how much roi you get on your spend if you are a marketing agency. You might run experiments and figure out how OAI ads will work but there is no way you will put up significant spend on GEO. In fact, most likely OAI will go some other mechanism than subtle nudge or influence because that will be godly more expensive and also extremely unethical. You are more like to see some sponsored links on each prompt or some crap like that where its easy to measure roi. But even then chatgpt footprint is tiny compared to Google to the point where it is a bit ridiculous to say they can just be like google with ads soon
It's relevant politically, and the discussion in question is political.