Global traffic to OpenAI's ChatGPT website fell 10% between May and June, the first drop in visits to the large language model since it launched in November 2022.
ChatGPT has gone viral since its launch, reaching 100 million monthly active users by January 2023. But new data from Sametimeweb suggests that the ChatGPT boom is starting to fade. Global traffic to the ChatGPT website from desktop and mobile devices fell 9.7% in June from the previous month, according to Sameweb data . In the U.S., unique visitors fell 5.7 percent, with a 10.3 percent drop in the U.S.
Users also spent less time interacting with ChatGPT, with engagement in May down 8.5% from the previous month.
But the decline in ChatGPT website traffic does not mean that the AI boom has faded. The less time users spend on the ChatGPT website does not mean that they are not interested, but they may have mastered the method of asking questions and accurately obtained the required content, so they spend less time talking.
On the other hand, OpenAI's models (including its GPT family) are available through APIs and Microsoft Azure, so the decline in usage of the ChatGPT website may be due to users turning to programming interfaces and other alternative tools, such as Microsoft's search engine Bing, which uses OpenAI's GPT-4 model has reinvented itself to make search results more accurate. Bing currently has an 8.7 percent share of the global desktop search market, up from 6.8 percent in May.
OpenAI also announced that its GPT-4 API has been opened to all paid OpenAI API customers, and the APIs of GPT-3.5 Turbo, DALL·E and Whisper have also been fully opened. The fine-tuning feature is currently being tested on GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 Turbo and is expected to be available later this year.