Recently, ChatGPT turned one year old with impressive data: more than 4 million monthly users in Spain, according to a study by the consulting firm GfK DAM. But what is behind these roughly collected data? While it is true that Open AI has begun to carve out an important niche among the digital tools we use, a more detailed look leads us to a somewhat contradictory conclusion: when it comes to its effective use, it is not a service that arouses enormous enthusiasm.

Each ChatGPT user in Spain spends a couple of hours a month using it. It is not a negligible figure. It is equivalent to the time we would spend watching a movie in the cinema. But what this data reflects is that the use of ChatGPT is far from being an everyday occurrence.

According to the analysis of the GfK DAM meter, ChatGPT in Spain has gone from 1.4 million monthly users in December 2022, at the time of its shocking launch, to more than 4 million in October 2023.

A good pace, much higher than that of other online services in their beginnings that are widely used today. But it is important to keep in mind that this OpenAI tool has landed on a very fertile Internet, with great network connection speeds and a wide range of devices capable of running applications on the network.

A little perspective. 94% of Spaniards who regularly use the Internet; nine out of ten use WhatsApp. Most consult it more than once a day. In the case of social networks, the figures are not so overwhelming, but they far exceed the number of users and the time spent using ChatGPT today.

Those four million people who use ChatGPT in Spain are 12% of Internet users (33.5 million). A good figure for a first year of life, but we will see what the future holds. Be that as it may, the truth is that only a minority of people use OpenAI’s artificial intelligence, by far the most popular within the range of online generative artificial intelligence services.

Another important fact. The main competitor, Google’s Bard, has only been in Spain for five months and Google has not yet made a great effort to integrate the service into our daily routines. Although it will do so very soon, and with a very relevant detail: Gemini Nano, one of the three versions of artificial intelligence that will arrive in 2024 from Google, can be run directly on our mobile phone, without having to connect to the cloud. We will have a “pocket AI”.

It’s a bit unfair to compare ChatGPT with a communication tool like WhatsApp or a social network. But there are indications that seem to refute that this AI can continue to grow at this rate in the future if things do not change.

Almost no one uses ChatGPT with the phone app. And this is unusual in 2023. ChatGPT is consulted by users in Spain for only 12 minutes from their mobile phone per month. A very timid figure that tells us a lot about the perception we have of conversational chatbots today.

ChatGPT remains anchored in the field of productivity and work. That alone explains why the vast majority of people use it with their computer browser. In addition, it must be taken into account that the price of its paid version is very high by Internet standards.

Paying 22 euros per month for ChatGPT Plus, which includes ChatGPT 4 with a network connection and access to the Dall-E imaging tool, is not something that helps the expansion of this artificial intelligence. The most expensive Netflix plan costs 18 euros, for example.

And here may lie a large part of the problem: why are we going to use an AI that cannot work with updated data if we do not checkout? As we said at the time, Google may have a better chance of expanding its AI user base by continuing to offer Bard for free.

Especially since Bard already incorporates the new Gemini engine, at least in its version for the United States, and is connected to the network. Even in the most primitive version. Additionally, Google plans to expand Bard throughout its ecosystem of services.

That ChatGPT is still a minority service may be due to other reasons. A couple of rhetorical questions: Do we really find ChatGPT useful considering the large number of errors it makes? Do we know how to integrate it into our daily lives? Everything indicates that at the moment we do not know very well how ChatGPT can really help us.