To mark ChatGPT’s first anniversary, a new study on the use of the top 50 AI tools available crowns OpenAI’s chatbot as the world’s most popular AI tool. ChatGPT accounted for 60% of traffic visits to the most popular AI tools between September 2022 and August 2023, an explosive period for the use of generative AI tools.
For this study, the authors retrieved data from various directories listing AI tools and studied the usage of more than 3,000 AI tools. They then selected the 50 most used tools to study how people use AI.
What are the most popular AI tools?
It’s no surprise that ChatGPT comes out on top with the highest number of visits, 14.6 billion visits in total since its launch in November 2022 through August 2023. The launch of ChatGPT sparked a boom in generative AI which has sparked interest in other available AI tools.
Top Winners in the AI Industry
ChatGPT, Character AI and Google Bard are the biggest winners in terms of traffic.
“After the initial boom, hype continued to climb until May 2023, when monthly visits peaked at around 4.1 billion,” says Sujan Sarkar, one of the study’s authors.
Growth rate and monthly growth
The top 50 AI tools saw more than 24 billion combined visits and experienced a growth rate of 10.7x, with an average monthly growth of 236.3 million visits. Overall, AI tools saw an average of 2 billion visits per month, with a jump to 3.3 billion over the past six months.
Although Quillbot and Midjourney are in the top 5 most visited AI tools, they have both seen a drop in traffic over the past year. This stands in stark contrast to the explosive traffic growth that other AI tools have experienced and could be attributed to the greater variety of tools created since ChatGPT’s launch. Midjourney lost 8.66 million visits over the past year, while Quillbot lost 5 million.
Average duration of AI use
The average visit lasted 12 minutes and 34 seconds, enough to ask ChatGPT about black holes and then get the recipe for a cocktail or two. Interestingly, ChatGPT is among the tools that failed to maintain user interest beyond an average of 10 minutes, while tools like Character AI, Dezgo, and Janitor AI achieved a average of 25 minutes per session.
Most Popular AI Categories
Chatbots and artificial writing have been the most popular categories in the use of AI tools over the past year, with ChatGPT, Character AI and Google Bard in the top three. Image generators came second after text generators, including Midjourney, DeepAI and Craiyon.
Less popular categories include design, video generators, voice and music generators, etc. Hugging Face, Taskade, and Cutout are among the most notable “other” categories.
Which countries are using AI?
AI users in France generated 481 million visits to AI services (11th position) during the period observed. And this only represents 1.98% of the total Internet traffic observed.
The United States comes in first position in this ranking, with 5.5 billion sessions and 22.62% of traffic. India and Indonesia follow, with respectively 2.1 billion sessions (8.52% of traffic), and 1.4 billion sessions (5.60% of traffic).
But overall, European countries come in second with 3.9 billion users.
Note that China is not among the top 20 countries in this ranking, despite its population of 1.4 billion inhabitants.
AI User Demographics
Men seem more inclined to use AI tools, since 69.5% of users are men, compared to only 30.5% women. The study did not delve into the reasons for this gender gap, but it should be noted that the different roles of men and women in various societies around the world could influence this result.
Among the top 50 AI tools, 80.5% were reached through direct access, indicating “a well-established user base or frequent and repeat visitors,” according to Sarkar. Organic search accounted for 11.4% of traffic sources, referrals for 6.7%. Only 0.12% of users accessed AI tools through paid search.
Source: “ZDNet.com”