Good morning! The words “artificial intelligence” have whirred through corporate boardrooms, newspapers, and watercooler conversations across the world for months now, but nothing has captured public attention quite like ChatGPT. Now, 9 months on from when the Chartr office first wasted an entire afternoon experimenting with the chatbot, we’re asking the question: has it lived up to the monumental hype yet?

The genie is out

‍When OpenAI launched ChatGPT at the end of November last year, the tech world and the Extremely Online community went into something of a meltdown, racing to try the chatbot and sample its hilarious / genuinely insightful responses. The process was simple: put in a prompt — anything from “solve this complex coding problem” to “come up with rap battle verses between a caveman and Shakespeare” — and ChatGPT would often spit out exactly what you were after.

Back in December, the chatbot was making waves as one of the quickest platforms in history to reach 1 million users — hitting the milestone ~15x faster than Instagram and ~30x quicker than Spotify. Indeed, by the time the new year rolled around, ChatGPT already had 25 million users. Since then, however, even as more details of the bot’s full capabilities and ever-developing skillset have emerged, ChatGPT’s usage has started to temper.

Data from Similar Web, via Insider, reveals that total users had been growing every month until May, when visitors to chat.openai.com hit 97 million, but they fell for the first time in June. Indeed, traffic to the site dropped more than 7%, and new users fell by almost a third — a sign that ChatGPT may have lost some of its novelty as the tech’s developed and more AI has come to the public fore.

Et tu, reddit?

‍Even arenas where the most fervent fans of the tech once gathered have started to empty, as consumer enthusiasm looks to be fading. Thousands of posters on the social platform reddit immediately flocked to the forum r/chatgpt, flaunting their interactions with the chatbot and sharing mischievous ways to push its parameters and get the technology to flout its own rules. Comments on the subreddit reached a peak of 5,800 in a single day back in May after a post from a worker expressing dismay at losing their job to AI racked up ~3,000 comments in less than 24 hours.

The forum r/chatgpt now has 2.8 million members, but the rate of growth of new members has slowed, and activity on the subreddit has dwindled. Daily posts now hover around 200-300 and comments have also dropped to roughly half of what they were back in April. Google searches for “chatgpt” have also dropped by roughly half.

‍Substandard

‍Furthermore, many of the most popular posts on the site now seem to be negative about the tool. The most “liked” post from the last month is a meme about how the tool has supposedly been “dumbed down” from the version that was originally released. It seems that, even for ChatGPT superfans, conversation with and around the chatbot could be starting to run a little dry.

A little more conversation

‍Interestingly, executives at top companies seem to be doing the exact opposite — they can’t stop talking about AI, perhaps hoping that if they position their companies as “AI forward” they may be more attractive to investors (see Nvidia becoming the latest company to join the $1 trillion club).

Data collated by Goldman Sachs reveals that artificial intelligence has been cropping up more and more in the quarterly earnings calls of Russell 3000 companies, as businesses like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta line up to explain to investors how AI will play a pivotal role in the wider world and within their organizations… in the future at least.

‍Tried and tested

‍That’s a lot of corporate chatter, but how much are companies actually using AI? The answer depends somewhat on your perspective.

‍McKinsey’s latest report into AI, published in early August, reveals that 79% of people surveyed have had at least some exposure to the tools, although only 22% of respondents say that they personally are regularly using it in their own work. For tools that (mostly) haven’t even celebrated a first birthday yet, that feels like quite a lot.

The people using it most are your pals in marketing and sales, with 14% of respondents reporting that their organizations were regularly using generative AI in that function, more than any other.

The most common uses cited in the survey were for creating first drafts of text, personalizing marketing materials, identifying trends or communicating with customers with chatbots. AI isn't quite doing iRobot stuff yet, but taking the sting out of some of the more "boring" corporate tasks will always have its place.

‍We aren’t in Kansas anymore

‍Clearly, the answer to the question “have we had peak AI?” is a resounding, definitive “no”. The buzz around ChatGPT specifically may have slightly diminished, but that’s only because its mind boggling initial success has birthed — literally — thousands of competitors.

One website, accurately called theresanaiforthat.com, currently tracks more than 6,900 different tools. There’s AI to summarize your emails, edit your videos, build your website, design your house, write your dating profile, plan your vacation, edit your code, test new hairstyles on you, create personalized stories for children, be your personal assistant… or even just be your friend who is “always on your side”. There’s even one that creates a chatbot so you can "talk" to a PDF document(?), and there's quite a few to make charts and analyze data. Luckily for us, they aren’t very good... yet.

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