How People Use ChatGPT [pdf]
(cdn.openai.com)58 points by nycdatasci 7 hours ago
58 points by nycdatasci 7 hours ago
"I don't think this ends happily."
Still, 700 million users, and they can still add a lot of products within ChatGPT. Ads will also be slapped on answers.
If all fails, Sam will start wearing "Occupy Jupiter" t-shirts.
> Ads will also be slapped on answers.
Ads won't be slapped onto answers, my guess is that they will be subtly and silently inserted into them so that you don't even notice. It won't always be what you see either as companies, political groups, and others who seek to influence you will pay to have specific words/phrases omitted from answers as well.
AI at this point is little more than a toy that outright lies occasionally yet we're already seeing AI hurting people's ability to think, be creative, use critical thinking skills, and research independently.
And friendster at one point had over 100m users. A gross margin (and more importantly, positive cash flow) business is more important than users. This data is not a good indicator of either.
They have literally hundreds of millions of users that are completely free. Not google search or facebook free, but free free, and only suffer a few billion in losses. Inference is cheap and their unit economics is fine. There is literally no business that would be making profit under those constraints. If they need to make profit, they can implement ads and that will be that.
No one ever paid for social media, or were expected to in the future.
Consumers have low friction on the way in and on the way out. Especially when media hype gets involved.
Business have higher friction - legal, integrations, access control, internal knowledge leaks (a document can be restricted access but result may leak into a more open query). Not to mention the typical general inertia. This friction works both ways.
Think capacitive vs induction electric circuits.
I don't see how friction is the primary driver here. ChatGPT is available through the most enterprise sales channel available -- Azure. The Microsoft enterprise sales engine is probably the best in the world.
Similarly, if costs double (or worse, increase to a point to be close to typical SaaS margins) and LLMs lose their shine I dont think there will be friction on the way out. People (especially executives) will offer up ChatGPT as a sacrifice.
If people find it useful but enterprise adoption is lagging, doesn't that indicate there's still a big upside?
On the other hand, I remember when BlackBerry had enterprise locked down and got wiped out by consumer focused Apple.
In any event, having big consumer growth doesn't seem like a bad thing.
It will be bad if it starts a race to the bottom for ad driven offering though.
It’s been shoved down enterprise throats for months/years. Shareholders, CEOs, workers (at the start) and users (at the start) have never had such a unified understanding in what they want than this AI frenzy. All stars were aligned for it to gain more traction. And yet…
It’s the prodigal child of tech.
When Apple sells a device, they get more revenue with minimal coats turbocharging revenue and profits.
When OpenAI sells a ChatGPT subscription, they incur large costs just to serve the product, shrinking margins.
Big difference in unit economics, hence the quantization push.
The statistic is from ChatGPT consumer plans, so I don't think it says anything useful about enterprise adoption of LLM products or usage patterns in those enterprise contexts.
The chats alone are backbreakingly costly relative to the market mix of ChatGPT.
Rest of the market be damned -- combined with the poor customer mix (low to middle income countries) this explains why there has been such a push by the big labs to attempt to quantize models and save costs. You effectively have highly paid engineers/scientists running computationally expensive models on some of the most expensive hardware on the market to serve instructions on how to do things to people in low income countries.
This doesn't sound good, even for ad-supported business models.
Yep and lets not forget, those people are incredibly price sensitive.
Is there enough product differentiation between OAI and Gemini? Not that I can see. And even if it was a low price, thats not the point - people hate paying a penny for something they expect to be free.
By the time OAI has developed anything that enables them to acquire and exercise market power (profitably), they will have ran out of funding (at least on favourable terms). Which could cause key talent to leave to competitors and so on. Essentially a downward spiral to death.
LLMs are the next ISPs, and those households who haven't yet found room for it on their monthly budgets soon will. And much like ISPs, i'd expect to see the starting $20/mo evolve over time into a full size utility bill. Not all households, of course, but at utility-scale nonetheless.
Blog post with highlights:
Not going to read all that.. ;)
> ChatGPT is widely used for practical guidance, information seeking, and writing, which together make up nearly 80% of usage. Non-work queries now dominate (70%). Writing is the main work task, mostly editing user text. Users are younger, increasingly female, global, and adoption is growing fastest in lower-income countries
A strong foothold among an ambitious, educated, technologically-connected cohort in emerging economies? Yes please.
No amount of LinkedEn speech can fix the poor part of it.
In 2025, it's abundantly clear that the mask is off. Only the whales matter in video games. Only the top donors matter in donation funding. Modern laptops with GPUs are all $2k+ dollars machines. Luxury condos are everywhere. McDonalds revenues and profits are up despite pricing out a lot of low income people.
The poor have less of the nothing they already have. You can make a hundred affordable cars or get as much, if not order of magnitudes more, profit with just one luxury vehicle sale.
I asked ChatGPT to summarize the paper:
# How People Use ChatGPT (Chatterji, Cunningham, Deming, Hitzig, Ong, Shan, Wadman – Sept 2025)
### Scope - Study of ChatGPT consumer plans (Free, Plus, Pro) from Nov 2022–Jul 2025. - Covers ~700M weekly active users by mid-2025 (~10% of world’s adults). - Uses automated, privacy-preserving classification of billions of messages.
---
### Key Findings
*Adoption & Growth* - Usage grew 5× between mid-2024 and mid-2025. - Growth from both new users and heavier use by existing users.
*Work vs. Non-Work* - Mid-2024: ~47% work / 53% non-work. - Mid-2025: ~27% work / 73% non-work. - Shift due to both new cohorts and existing users expanding non-work use.
*Topics of Use* - 3 main topics = ~80% of all use: 1. Practical Guidance (advice, tutoring, ideas) 2. Seeking Information (facts, search-like queries) 3. Writing (drafting, editing, summarizing) - Technical help (e.g. coding, math) ≈ 4%.
*Intent* - Asking (49%), Doing (40%), Expressing (11%). - Work-related chats skew toward Doing (esp. Writing tasks).
*Work Activities (ONET mapping)* - Common across occupations: - Getting Information - Documenting / Interpreting - Problem Solving & Decision Making - Thinking Creatively - Advising/Consulting
*Demographics* - Early skew male; now near gender balance. - Younger users dominate; older users more work-focused. - Strong growth in low- & middle-income countries. - Higher education correlates with more work use.
*Quality / Satisfaction* - Positive (“good”) user feedback outnumbers negative and is improving. - Asking messages have highest satisfaction rates.
---
### Implications - ChatGPT’s value is broad: not just coding/technical, but also decision support, writing, learning, and personal tasks. - Increasing non-work use suggests large social value beyond workplace productivity. - Broad relevance across occupations → general-purpose tool. - Adoption trends point to narrowing gaps across gender and geography.
I get that not everyone wants to read a 62-page paper. But this has an abstract, a conclusion, and an accompanying blog post that each serve the same purpose as this summary. Just use the existing, better materials if you're not willing to go in depth.
Don't do that. If I wanted to read slop I could generate it myself.
Perhaps most telling in this entire report is Table 1. It shows that the non-work has grown 8x in 1 year, whereas work has only ~3.4x. Considering that non-work related usage of ChatGPT now makes up 73% of the requests, ChatGPT is very much in the consumer market, despite substantial marketing of LLM products in a professional context and even as much as compelled usage in some corporations.
Since many consumers are typically relatively tight-fisted in the b2c market, I don't think this bodes well for the long-term economics of the market. This may explain the relatively recent pivot to attempt to "discover" uses.
I don't think this ends happily.