Hello and welcome to Eye on AI…In this edition: OpenAI and Anthropic detail chatbot usage trends…AI companies promise big investments in the U.K….and the FTC probes chatbots’ impact on kids.
Yesterday saw the release of dueling studies from OpenAI and Anthropic about the usage of their respective AI chatbots, ChatGPT and Claude. The studies provide a good snapshot of who is using AI chatbots and what they are using them for. But the two reports were also a study in contrasts, with OpenAI clearly emerging as primarily a consumer product, while Claude’s use cases were more professionally-oriented.
The ChatGPT study confirmed the huge reach OpenAI has, with 700 million active weekly users, or almost 10% of the global population, exchanging some 18 billion messages with the chatbot every week. And the majority of those messages—70%—were classified by the study’s authors as “non-work” queries. Of these, about 80% of the messages fell into three big categories: practical guidance, writing help, and seeking information. Within practical guidance, teaching or tutoring queries accounted for more than a third of messages. How many of these were students using ChatGPT to “help” with homework or class assignments was unclear—but ChatGPT has a young user base, with nearly half of all messages coming from those under the age of 26.
