Today marks one year since the launch of the world’s most famous conversational bot, ChatGPT. Since then, not only has it achieved unprecedented growth, with 100 million users in the first month, but it has served to popularize artificial intelligence and to foster an intense public debate about its uses, its limits and the necessary regulation, which is, as always, behind progress.
OpenAI, the company that uses large language models – GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 – to power the ChatGPT bot, does not usually live up to its name – open means open in English – because it tends to hide all kinds of relative figures in operation, but a few weeks ago, its CEO, Sam Altman, explained during a presentation that its AI service has 100 million weekly users.
This same figure was what ChatGPT achieved after its first month of operation, with record growth that has popularized the technology and extended it to generative AIs – capable of creating text, images, music and coding programming, for example – from other companies.
ChatGPT has 4.1 million users in Spain, according to the company measuring internet consumption in Spain, GfK DAM, which has prepared a report indicating that “Spanish people from the highest social classes are the ones who use it the most of ChatGPT, the more monthly consumption time they spend on it and the more affinity they have with this technology”.
The age segment that uses ChatGPT the most is the one between 16 and 24, the so-called Generation Z, which represents 144% of the average user population. This group is followed by the millennials, aged 25 to 35, who comprise 63%. There is also some gender difference, although not very marked. The men who use it in Spain are 2,246,118, 54%, compared to 1,884,477 women.
One of the differentiating characteristics in the use of the internet with AI compared to other types of digital content is that ChatGPT is preferably accessed via computer (2.9 million monthly unique users), instead of the phone mobile, the means by which 1.7 million people access it. In July and August, with academic activity at a standstill, access dropped below 2.7 million unique users.
Over the past 12 months, the launch of ChatGPT has been the spark that has sparked expectations for generative AI. Since its launch, OpenAI has been the company with this most coveted technology. Microsoft, which in 2019 invested $1 billion in the company – on paper, a non-profit company – announced in January a new investment of another $10 billion. The goal, already underway, is to integrate ChatGPT’s same AI into products of daily use, such as the Office software (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and the Bing search engine.
It is the same strategy that other companies have followed. It’s about adapting their great language models to the products they now offer users. It’s a type of technology that everyone has, because it’s based on a neural network architecture designed by Google called Transformer that was made available to the entire AI research community.
The latest blow came less than two weeks ago, when OpenAI’s board of directors fired Altman in thunderous fashion. Microsoft announced it was hiring him, and other shareholders pushed for his return.
Altman returned as CEO four days later. The reason for the dismissal, according to a leak published by the Reuters agency, was a letter from company employees to managers warning that Altman’s team was developing an AI that was potentially dangerous to the future of humanity . To be continued.
