Dear readers, here we are. Sorry: we were talking about foreign policy with ChatGPT.
Seriously, we don’t even need to repeat it: in recent months, the conversational chatbot created by OpenAI, and now integrated into the Bing search engine, is perhaps the most talked-about topic in the technological field. Chatted (for better or for worse) but also exploited, because there are now many who, for professional reasons or driven by pure curiosity, have opened a chat with the OpenAI chatbot.
But, from that November 3, 2022 when ChatGPT was launched to today, do we have any numbers on the phenomenon?
That is: how much is the chatbot used, and who are its main users?
ChatGPT in Italia
Here, as far as our country is concerned, the answer comes from a research published on the Comscore blog on Tuesday 14 March.
The data in the report refer to the month of January 2023, when access to ChatGPT was still free. That is when, due to an excessive number of simultaneous requests, the company has not found itself forced to limit a maximum of 50 conversation shifts per day.
And what were the results?
A boom in visits
As it was easy to imagine, (also) in Italy ChatGPT has been full of visits.
The OpenAI website, from which the virtual dialogue with ChatGPT can be accessed from a desktop or mobile device, recorded over 1.4 million unique visitors in our country in the month of January 2023 alone.
To be precise, 905,000 unique visitors through mobile and 523,000 from desktop. The latter, as required by the very nature of the device, spend more time on the site: 11.1 minutes per visitor per month against 9.7 minutes per visitor per month from mobile devices.
Make way for young people
And which are the age groups most attracted by conversations with ChatGPT?
Again, no big surprise: the ChatGPT site in Italy was among the 150 most visited in January 2023 thanks above all to boys and young men between 15 and 24 years old.
But it is still a flash and unstructured curiosity: this same segment of the population, in fact, spent an average of 13.1 minutes a month on the OpenAI site, very little if compared, for example, with the 23 hours a month spent on Tiktok or the 11 on Youtube.
Permanence times are more similar when compared with those of Wikipedia (11.2 minutes per month), or with those of newspapers such as Gazzetta Dello Sport and Fanpage.it (5.1 and 3.5 minutes respectively) or OnlyFans (4 ,2 minutes).
Exponential growth
These data tell us that, in Italy, ChatGPT is still approached with a certain awe.
Curiosity is great, but the permanence on the site shows that the chatbot is questioned above all to satisfy the instinct, in short, to discover its potential firsthand.
They are short and unstructured sessions: it is no coincidence that the permanence time differs slightly from that of Wikipedia, which is used to search for news on a specific item.
Certainly, visits are growing exponentially. Suffice it to say that OpenAI recorded more than one million interactions on social networks in January 2023. That is a figure that is almost double that of the entire fourth quarter of 2022.
Going more specifically, the interactions for ChatGPT in January 2023 were 9.2 million: + 330% compared to the fourth quarter of 2022.
ChatGPT e Bing
If these are the premises, ChatGPT could really upset the proportions between the various search engines.
Which for now still see Microsoft’s Bing in a clearly minority position compared to Google.
Yet in recent days Yusuf Mehdi, vice president of the Modern Life, Search and Devices division of Microsoft, announced that since the debut of Bing Chat, Microsoft’s search engine has exceeded 100 million daily active users worldwide.
Bing users have initiated 45 million chats since the introduction of the AI-powered chatbot feature.
And overall visits to the search engine increased by as much as 600%.
Verso ChatGPT 4
In the past few hours Microsoft has made it official that very soon the Bing search engine will integrate the latest version of the OpenAI chatbot, i.e. ChatGPT 4.
The comprehension of the videos will be integrated, and immediate answers may be provided in a language different from that of the question.
In all likelihood, visits to the OpenAI site will decrease and interaction times with ChatGPT will expand: it will be used less and less “stealthy” and more and more functional to real needs.