ChatGPT Hits 1 Billion Monthly Active Users Despite Growing AI Scepticism

Public opinion of AI has significantly decreased since its early exhilaration, with college graduates mocking mentions of the technology at commencement speeches and voices as diverse as the Pope and tech giant Anthropic cautioning of the dangers of unchecked AI development.

But despite growing public opposition, the use of AI has reached all-time highs worldwide. According to recent projections from market research firm Sensor Tower, OpenAI's ChatGPT topped 1 billion monthly app users or monthly active users in May. According to the analytics company, some AI apps, such as Anthropic's Claude, saw triple-digit percentage increases in users year over year, as reported by CNBC.

According to Sensor Tower, ChatGPT broke the previous record set by Google Maps, which took around five years after its debut to reach the same amount of usage. With its billion-MAU statistic, which was reached about 3.5 years after its November 2022 launch, ChatGPT became the fastest program ever to reach the milestone.

Sensor Tower claims that competitors' products, such as Google's Gemini, ByteDance's Doubao and its international variant Dola, and Claude from rival developer Anthropic, underperformed OpenAI's market-leading large language model.

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Although ChatGPT has a substantial monthly user advantage, other models are rapidly catching up. According to Sensor Tower estimations, monthly usage of Claude and Meta AI increased by 640% and 973%, respectively, year over year, while ChatGPT's usage increased by 62%.

Abe Yousef, senior insights analyst at Sensor Tower, told CNBC that despite ChatGPT's "early mover advantage," usage of its rivals has increased due to noticeable model improvements and improved market sentiment.

Yousef gave the example of OpenAI's February agreement with the US Department of Defence to utilise its algorithms on secret Pentagon networks as an example of how usership was motivated by public disquiet.

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Sensor Tower data shows that on February 28, the day after OpenAI announced its Pentagon partnership, ChatGPT uninstalls increased by over 295% day over day.

As Claude surged to the top place in the App Store the same weekend, surpassing ChatGPT by US downloads for the first time after it denied involvement in Pentagon activities, Anthropic benefited from sentiment toward ChatGPT.

Both Anthropic and OpenAI have recently started the much-awaited public listing process. Sam Altman's OpenAI filed its IPO prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, following Anthropic's filing of its IPO prospectus a week earlier.

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