ChatGPT Is Declining In Popularity: Here's What's Taking Its Place

It's been about half a year since OpenAI launched its AI-powered chatbot service, ChatGPT. Since then, the ChatGPT app has drawn equal measures of acclaim and controversy. On the one hand, it's been praised as a revolutionary advancement in artificial intelligence's ease of access, with numerous businesses and services adopting its framework to create their own AI-based features. On the other hand, ChatGPT has raised concerns about its ability to falsify information and replace human jobs. It's both of these sides of the argument that have kept the service firmly in the spotlight for all these months.

However, it seems that the popularity of the ChatGPT app may have finally peaked. According to a Washington Post report, the number of users of ChatGPT has begun to decline, showing its first month-to-month decrease since its launch in November 2022. Usage statistics show that both mobile and desktop ChatGPT apps have experienced a notable dropoff in the number of users in June and, despite a couple of bumps in early July, have yet to recover. As a forerunner in the modern AI paradigm, ChatGPT has found itself as the one to beat in the scene, and tech companies have wasted no time.

When ChatGPT released to the public, AI developers around the world swiftly began developing their own AI platforms. Chatbot systems from global tech giants like Google Bard and Microsoft Bing AI, with the backing of their gargantuan namesakes, have had extremely accelerated developments, catching up to and, debatably, exceeding OpenAI's comparatively smaller efforts in short order.

In addition to the deluge of fierce competition in the AI scene, ChatGPT still remains mired in controversy, not just for its potential forgery applications, but for economic reasons as well. The European Union is currently in the midst of developing new rules and regulations for AI-based software platforms built upon the aforementioned concerns. If and when these new laws go into effect, OpenAI may find itself severely kneecapped in a key global market, a cost that, unlike a company like Google, they cannot eat.

Some have also posited that the dropoff in ChatGPT users is simply a matter of the novelty of the program wearing off. Indeed, while ChatGPT can be extraordinarily useful if you know how to use it, it's not much more than an interesting doodad to the average user, who submits a couple of prompts out of curiosity before getting on with their day. The Washington Post even speculated that, now that summer breaks have begun and kids are out of school, there are less users on the app because students aren't using it to cheat on their homework.