Global traffic to OpenAI's ChatGPT website fell by an estimated 10 percent between May and June, marking the first time the number of visitors to the conversational large language model has decreased since it was launched in November.
The text-generation tool quickly went viral and was said to be the fastest-growing web app in internet history, attracting 100 million monthly active users by January 2023, according to data collected by analytics biz Similarweb. Although OpenAI and rival AI businesses had developed other large language models, ChatGPT was free, seemingly quite capable, and was widely accessible. Netizens flocked to the site, experimenting with the software and asking it to generate all sorts of text like emails, essays, or code.
ChatGPT propelled the hype behind generative AI to new heights; its ability to carry out general natural language tasks such as question and answering, and summarization captured imaginations and led to a new wave of chatbot applications. But the latest data from Similarweb suggests the initial excitement for ChatGPT is beginning to die down.
In June, worldwide traffic from desktop and mobile to the bot's website dropped by 9.7 percent compared to the previous month, said Similarweb. In the US, it decreased by 10.3 percent. Similarly, the number of unique visitors around the globe declined by 5.7 percent. Users are also spending less time interacting with ChatGPT, too, with engagement decreasing by 8.5 percent in May compared to the previous month.