OpenAI：ChatGPT周活12亿，搜索量达Google五分之一

OpenAI says ChatGPT growth is accelerating.

The company added 200 million users over just the past two months, jumping from 1 billion to 1.2 billion weekly active users in 60 days. Its search volume, it says, is approximately 20% of Google’s. Its users create 1.5 billion images with it per week. And its voice mode, between dictation and speaking with ChatGPT, now has 250 million combined weekly active users.

ChatGPT consumer product lead Adam Fry told me this during a brief fireside chat at an OpenAI-hosted dinner in New York City on Monday night. “The growth is just going big,” he said.

During our conversation, Fry also revealed plans to merge ChatGPT’s Chat and Work modes (so that confusing toggle up top will soon go away), agreed with feedback that ChatGPT-created restaurant signage looks too uniform, and addressed the cost to serve its personal assistant Dots.

Here’s a look at our full conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length. We also cover image generation, interactive interfaces, advertising, education, and public unease about AI:

ChatGPT’s search growth

Alex Kantrowitz: OpenAI has analyzed ChatGPT’s search volume and compared it with Google’s. What did you find?

Adam Fry: ChatGPT has been growing quite quickly. ChatGPT’s volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth the volume of queries of Google.

It’s a pretty amazing statistic when you think about it, mainly because we started just about a year and a half ago. It’s hard to remember this, but ChatGPT at a time didn’t have any up-to-date information. You’d ask a question, it would say something like, “It’s past my training date,” and nobody had any idea what that meant.

You’re saying ChatGPT’s search volume is one-fifth of Google’s. Bing’s share of the search market is around 5%. Does that make you multiple times larger than Bing?

To say that more directly, ChatGPT has gone from one billion to 1.2 in just the last two months. That’s roughly 100 million users in 30 days, and another 100 million in another 30 days. The growth is just going big, and we’re staying very focused on how fast ChatGPT is growing.

What counts as a search? I might have 20 prompts back and forth in a ChatGPT conversation. Does each one count as a query?

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Continued from above….

Adam Fry: What people came to ChatGPT for to start, if you go back about two years, is really writing help and coding help. Those wouldn’t be things that you really search for.

What we’ve seen over the last year is people have grown into all these other topics. Things like you’re looking up a person or people or a place or a thing, and it requires up-to-date information. That’s a key element.

Another big part is finance questions or health questions, where you really want to make sure it’s up-to-date information that’s quite factual, and we’ll do a web search for those questions.

It’s basically anything that a user would have traditionally gone to a traditional search engine for, but is now deciding to go to ChatGPT for.

Does each conversation with a search embedded count as one search, or does every question that requires a web search count?

Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that’s a search.

You used to work at Google. How would you say the nature of search is changing?

One of the things that people really love about ChatGPT is this personalization and this understanding of the broader journey.

If you look in the past, people would go for a Q&A box, and you’d ask a one-off question, like how tall is the Eiffel Tower. But there’s so much context in our lives around, “Maybe I’m taking a trip to Paris.”

It’s actually helpful for ChatGPT to respond, “Here’s how tall the Eiffel Tower is, but I know you’re going on a trip to Paris.” It’s that ability for people to actually maintain context over time that has led them to start using ChatGPT in this way.

Voice reaches 250 million weekly users

You’ve also announced 250 million weekly active users of voice input, including dictation and conversations with voice mode.

We are at 250 million weekly active users. What’s amazing about this is, if you look at those 250 million, what we’re seeing is it’s actually also incremental to the product.

It’s no longer just a novelty. People aren’t just trying out voice. We’re seeing them use voice input day to day in their daily life, and it’s grown so quickly.

Those 250 million users are using voice input, and that could just be a quick question or a long conversation. We’re seeing both behaviors. We’re seeing people just not want to type. You just hold it and start talking to it, or it turns into a longer conversation where people just sit with it.

The big reason for this is the frontier capabilities of our models that we’ve shipped. We shipped what we call GPT Live 1, and then we shipped GPT Live 1.1. The big change with this is that it’s much more natural to speak with.

It’s something we call backchanneling and interruptibility.

Mhhhm…

What you just did there is what the model does, because it’s really good at having a bidirectional conversation. That push to the frontier—we were the first to really release this at scale—has made it so much more natural for people to chat.

That’s still only about 20% of the user base. From the outside, that looks small. Why is it exciting from the inside?

It’s very exciting for a few reasons. We see from the data that when people start using voice, they stay around using voice.

One of the things, transparently, we can do a better job of is bringing more people into discovering it. We see that the number of people who discover it could be a lot higher. But once they do, it’s a really new way for people to interact with AI.

We’ve made a lot of improvements to it too, where we’re just going to see the number go up. You have background mode, so now by default, if you close the app, it’ll show, “Hey, the conversation’s still going.”

If you want to walk around the house or you’re putting away the groceries, you can still have a chat. That kind of continuity has also changed how much people use it.

Dots, permissions, and trust

Dots launched on September 29 and is about a month old. How’s it doing?

It’s doing great. We talk to people about their Dot, and the first thing that everyone says is, “I love my Dot.”

One of the reasons we’re seeing this is the proactivity, its ability to reach out to you and figure out things. The biggest use case I see all the time is, “Did I forget something today that I was supposed to do?”

You can just say to your Dot, “Remind me of things at the end of the day that I may have forgotten. Somebody emailed me or messaged me,” and it’ll do that.

This Dot changes the paradigm of the relationship with AI, where it’s actually helping you and giving you time back.

You’re more conservative with permissions than some competitors. I tried to give my Dot my credit card, and it wouldn’t take it. With the creator of OpenClaw in-house, why are Dots’ permissions more limited?

This is a space where we want to be very thoughtful and conservative because it’s a new space where you’re entrusting your Dot to take care of things on behalf of you that matter and are meaningful.

We’ve just talked about how you go to this 1.2 billion user growth and asking questions. Now we’re asking people, “Can you ask ChatGPT or your Dot to help get things done?” But when you ask it to help get things done, it’s a whole new level of trust.

We’ve built up a tremendous amount of trust in giving the right answers to your questions, and we want to make sure that when we build this new product, it has a high degree of trust.