The Secrets OpenAI Revealed About ChatGPT

Public interest in ChatGPT's impact on society is rising fast, especially given recent high-profile lawsuits filed by family members of people who used the chatbot before taking their own life. On Monday, OpenAI opened the chabot's kimono a little bit, with a new study showing exactly how users are using ChatGPT.  

Notably, non-work usage of ChatGPT dominates; between last June and this June, non-work-related queries have exploded from 53% to 73% of all queries sent, according to the study. Most of these queries were people looking up information as a Google Search alternative.

That’s in stark comparison to Anthropic, which coincidentally published its own usage study on the same day and found that more than half of Claude users were using the chatbot for work-related tasks such as coding, business and financial operations and office and administrative support. (It’s worth noting that by every metric, the Claude chatbot’s usage is a fraction of ChatGPT’s.)

Surprisingly, only a small percentage of ChatGPT users use the chatbot for coding—4.2% compared to Claude’s 36.9%. It could be that users are more likely to use OpenAI’s models for coding through its coding assistant Codex or other coding apps like Cursor, which are powered by models from OpenAI and Anthropic, rather than through ChatGPT.