It took Netflix three and a half years to reach 1 million users after introducing its groundbreaking, web-driven DVDs-by-mail subscription service in 1999. That was quite an accomplishment, given that people buying into new technologies at that time were considered a niche audience of first adopters unafraid to live on the cutting edge.
In the early 2000s, it took Airbnb two and half years to attract a million users, Facebook 10 months and music streaming service Spotify just five months to reach that audience size — a sign of increasing consumer comfort with innovative tech services that could add value to their daily lives. When Instagram attracted a million users after less than three months in 2010, it was a big deal, with industry watchers calling out the “insane growth” of the photo-sharing app.
If hitting a million users is a key milestone for turning an untested tech service into a mainstream destination, then think about this: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot that debuted on Nov. 30, 2022, reached 1 million users in five days.
Five days.
That’s mind-blowing.
Then think about this: ChatGPT drew 100 million users in just two months.
It speaks to the attention we’re all giving to a new generation of chatbots able to have human-like conversations. A year after its launch, ChatGPT has over 150 million unique users (who have to set up an account to use the site) and hosted nearly 1.7 billion visits in November, making it one of the world’s top online destinations, according to Similarweb. The researcher tracks the adoption of today’s most popular generative AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Bard, Microsoft Bing, Character.ai and Claude.ai.
What does that mean? They can understand, summarize, predict and generate new content in a way that’s easily accessible to everyone. Instead of needing to know programming code to speak to a gen AI chatbot, you can ask questions (known as “prompts” in AI lingo) using plain English. Version 3.5 of OpenAI’s GPT LLM, for instance, is trained on 300 billion words. Depending on what data it’s been fed, a chatbot can generate text, images, video and audio; do math calculations; analyze data and chart the results and even write programming code for you — often delivering results in seconds.
Old jobs, new jobs, more jobs?
The expected productivity and profit boost that automated tech could help deliver are already leading businesses to think about what they’ll expect from their human employees as soon as this year.
MIT’s Sloan School of Management partnered with the Boston Consulting Group and found that generative AI can improve performance by as much as 40% for highly skilled workers compared with those who don’t use it. Software engineers can code up to twice as fast using gen AI tools, according to studies cited by the Brookings Institute.
LinkedIn surveyed CIOs, CEOs, data scientists, software engineers and other heavy data users and asked them to use generative AI to see how much time they saved on tasks such as drafting emails, analyzing text and creating documents. What they said is that tasks that would now take them 10 hours manually could take them five to six hours less. That translates into spending 50% to 60% less time on some routine tasks so you can instead devote attention to more rewarding or higher-value work.
Most Americans (82%) haven’t even tried ChatGPT and over half say they’re more concerned than excited by the increased use of AI in their daily life, according to the Pew Research Center. Researchers there have started identifying jobs that may be affected in some way by generative AI. They include budget analysts, tax preparers, data entry keyers, law clerks, technical writers and web developers. Think roles whose tasks include “getting information” and “analyzing data or information,” Pew said.
Before you start worrying that AI will eat all the jobs, Goldman Sachs cautions that such concerns may be overblown, since new tech has historically ushered in new kinds of jobs. In a widely cited March 2023 report, the firm noted that 60% of today’s workers are employed in occupations that didn’t exist in 1940.
