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Comment by htormey | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. ChatGPT reached 100 million MAUs 2 months after launch. It’s one of the fastest-growing consumer applications in history.

Anecdotally, lots of my non technical friends (and me) are using it for everything from cooking to learning a foreign language.

Lots of my technical friends are using it for side projects on the weekends. I’d say it’s the top new technology all of them are working with or incorporating into their workflows.

I and all of my teammates are using it to help us write sql and answer basic programming questions.

It’s clearly a way bigger deal than VR right now.

The problem here seems to be that Snap rammed this feature into their product in a really awkward fashion that doesn’t make sense for their users. Hence the backlash.

source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/chatg...

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You're inside a bubble though. The 100 MAU is certainly totally misleading, maybe 1/10 of that in reality, and something that's only out for a few months can easily rollercoaster up and down as people try it once for novelty and then forget it.

I have a good group of friends who keep me grounded - we all went to my average state school alma mater, and none of them are in tech.

Not one of them has brought it up, no one uses it or cares about it, and only two of them even know what it is beyond having seen some headlines.

The playoffs have gotten about 200 texts recently, AI 0. This is closer to the reality on the ground.

I'd venture almost all of the hype is students and kids who are excited to see what mischief it can help them achieve, techies who just like playing with new things, and companies trying to cash in. All of those are non-durable.

“You're inside a bubble though. The 100 MAU is certainly totally misleading, maybe 1/10 of that in reality, and something that's only out for a few months can easily rollercoaster up and down as people try it once for novelty and then forget it.”

What’a your basis for saying this is misleading and doubting that figure?

Anecdotal friend groups aside, if their was no user traction, they wouldn’t be getting a ten billion dollar investment from MSFT.

Their growth in web traffic is also pretty impressive:

In my personal and professional life I’ve been using it every day and happily pay $20 for premium. It has replaced google for me for a huge variety of queries.

Because they’ve had limits on accounts combined with trivial registration of new accounts, combined with counting enterprise “accounts” from stuff like bing or api usage which really is just the same people using them over and over. That and startups tend to look at numbers that please them once and never question them. I don’t doubt they had a ton of accounts sign up. But MAU after 2 months isn’t a statistic it’s a data point, and coming from the most unreliable source possible.

Incredible growth in traffic is easy to explain - a lot of big companies and the most influential investors invested a ton of money in this. They have connections to all the top media sources. They pushed this stuff absolutely everywhere. It was a massive media blitz. You’re being manipulated. They’re hyping AI, they’re talking about doom and fear, they’re getting front pages everywhere. Everyone wants in - media wants in on the hype, social media users realize they can gain tons of viral views, it’s a giant pit of self reinforcing hype. That happens with things. See Pokémon Go, and then what happened a short while later. Or the crypto bubble. Or any number of bubbles. You can’t base your predictions of future success on self published popularity numbers after a huge and expensive media blitz.

What's the source of the 100 million MAU number? I have seen it thrown around but haven't found something from OpenAI stating that.

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