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Comment by ohgr | Hacker News Reader

I’d be more interested in user retention. Every AI product I’ve seen (from the investment side) does not speak of this. I have seen some data though that suggests user retention is short (3mo avg). People try it, find it’s not that useful or even harmful after the initial experimentation and dump it.

Gotta keep hype to keep MRR up though even if it’s from different people. They will run out of interest and new users soon. Going to be a big fall.

Models will stagnate on this funding crush and the promises will be gone in a puff of smoke. And everyone will have to unfuck their dependency on it for upselling their existing crap to end users.

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The author previously wrote an article about dissecting this very question:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

What's interesting is that they stopped reporting monthly active users and prefer weekly active users. The author argues that this is a bad thing, but I'm having trouble understanding why?

It’s likely bad because it may show volatility quicker and people will trade on it. That’s bad for the company and the existing users generally.

Anyway active users doesn’t matter at all regardless of the period. It’s retention AND active users. The result of having the two figures gives you user base churn.

That number is missing.

Well, I haven't kept any of my subscriptions for longer than 3 months...BUT I'm always subscribed to something... innovation has been so quick, I've just hopped around quite a bit.

I don't think you realize how much people use ChatGPT.

That doesn’t really matter if they don’t retain users and continue to project a loss.

Where's your evidence that ChatGPT does not retain users?

I’ve seen an independent commissioned analytics report that surveyed a fairly large panel of users across several sectors about their usage.

It’s not ChatGPT specifically but all services. It doesn’t become heavily integrated into people’s workflow or lives and they stop paying for it.

The tech industry’s usage should not be extrapolated to everyone.

This just sounds like cope. There is no evidence that ChatGPT has a retention problem. Quite the contrary.

> Quite the contrary.

So what is this evidence that shows that ChatGPT is having good user retention numbers?

Their weekly active user number is 10% of the estimated total number of Internet users (and growing rapidly). It's quite hard for that to happen with a high churn rate, because they'd very quickly run out of new users. For the numbers to remain high, either the users are retained of they return.

The vast numbers of people online who have been very public about how much they use ChatGPT.

Oh, well if that is the standard of evidence that is acceptable to you then here is some contradictory evidence. I paid for ChatGPT for 2 months and then canceled it. Did not even bother getting it trough work after that.

On a more serious note the only ones that could prove that ChatGPT user retention numbers are really good is OpenAi. Since it would be very good for them to do that and they haven't done it one should infer that the numbers aren't that good.

That's fine. I'm not the one making claims about chatGPTs retention. But assuming they have poor retention is just silly.

Why would OpenAI share their retention numbers for their competitors to know? Nobody outside of silly AI-skeptic HN devs would think they have crappy retention.

> That's fine. I'm not the one making claims about chatGPTs retention

But you did. Here, I'll quote you: "There is no evidence that ChatGPT has a retention problem. Quite the contrary.". That is your claim about ChatGPTs retention, that it is good. Later we find out that there is no evidence but only anecdotes to support your claim.

> But assuming they have poor retention is just silly.

What would be silly is to assume that they have good retention numbers. The logic of it I wrote in the previous post. What logic are you using to arrive to your conclusion?

> Why would OpenAI share their retention numbers for their competitors to know?

One would usually share those numbers to get more money from investors.

What the fuck would their competitors do with their retention numbers?

> Nobody outside of silly AI-skeptic HN devs would think they have crappy retention.

They say that name calling is the last resort of the truly desperate. No wonder your post ends like this.

> One would usually share those numbers to get more money from investors.

.... yes they share them with their prospective investors, not publicly lol. did you seriously just say this?

> What the fuck would their competitors do with their retention numbers?

The fact that you would even ask this question (and your ridiculous previous comment) shows your ineptitude and how pointless it is to discuss this with you

Run along now, go tell everyone how Dropbox is just a pointless FTP wrapper and will never catch on

> The fact that you would even ask this question (and your ridiculous previous comment) shows your ineptitude and how pointless it is to discuss this with you

Maybe look in the mirror. The fact that you wrote this instead of writing what their competitors could do with their retention numbers shows that there is no point in any discussion with you.

There seems to be a fairly large cohort among the HN crowd that does not understand the hold ChatGPT has on the cultural zeitgeist.

No normie in my life ever talks of using Gemini or Llama in their day to day life. Maybe some turbo twitter addict boomies talk about using grok, but that's about it.

Regular people are leveraging chatGPT to pick up the slack that google search enshittification left in their lives. It's a Skype to Zoom shift and lots of people here seem to not really appreciate it. They are too caught up on esoteric benchmark scores to recognize the tectonic plates moving beneath them.

Technical people yes.

Everyone else doesn’t even know the difference. They don’t even know copilot is a chat bot or LLM.

And there aren’t enough technical people on the planet to pay those bills.

> And there aren’t enough technical people on the planet to pay those bills.

This rings so true to me. The tech side seems hyperfocused in on these diminishing return results around benchmarks, but I just don't see a 4% improvement in X benchmark as any kind of market mover.

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