Comment by htormey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by htormey | Hacker News Reader

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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.”

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:

https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ai-news/chatgpt-bin...

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.

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