ChatGPT user base declines for the first time in the month of June

After its launch in late 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the world by storm with experts fearing job loss and ethical dilemmas arising from its human-like conversations. But now it seems like the chatbot is losing some of its charm.

Last month, traffic on mobile and the web versions of the ChatGPT website fell by 9.7 percent globally, as per a report by Engadget via The Washington Post. This is the first time the chatbot has seen a decline in traffic since its launch. 

The decline in user base is not limited to the website only, app tracker Sensor Tower also noted a decline in downloads of ChatGPT’s iOS app in June after it reached its peak earlier that month. 

Not just OpenAI

Other generative AI-based platforms such as Google Bard and Character.AI also saw fewer people visiting their websites. 

The impact is also visible in Microsoft Bing, which saw a surge in traffic between February and March after its integration with ChatGPT. However, monthly traffic on the AI-powered search engine is now on par with the pre-integration level. 

Similarweb has also seen a decline in ChatGPT’s user engagement, with user minutes down by 8.5 percent as of May 2023.

The reason

There is no clear indication of what the reason behind the decline in the user base and user engagement could be, but Engadget via The Post suggests that the end current school and college session could be a year behind the trend. Most college students are on summer break, which could mean less demand for ChatGPT’s paper-writing service.

However, the decline in user base on the public version of generative AI websites is not a big concern for companies out there because the service cost a lot of money to these companies, as pointed out by OpenAI CEO earlier.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has announced the general availability of GPT-4, its latest text-generating model. Developers can now access GPT-4 through its API.

Currently, GPT-4 API access will be limited to developers with a history of successful payments, but the company has planned to open access to new developers by the end of this month. OpenAI will also increase the availability depending upon the compute availability.

“All existing API developers with a history of successful payments can access the GPT-4 API with 8K context,” OpenAI said in a statement.

GPT-4 is a successor of GPT-3.5 and is much more capable than its predecessor. It can generate text including codes and can accept image and text inputs.