Cal Newport, computer science professor at Georgetown and prolific workflow and lifestyle wrier, discussed another aspect of GenerativeAI on his May 26 podcast. His currently thinks generative AI companies will start making money when people use it several times daily like they use Google search. Responding to reports that OpenAI sells $20,000 licenses to companies for specialty usages, he responds that ChatGPT and its competitors must become so usable that they reach a critical mass of daily users.
That’s not even close to happening right now—at least according to an analyst report I frequently receive purporting to show LLMs make little dent in Google search numbers..
Analyst Ben Evans recently released an essay with statistics from 2024 about daily average use (DAU) and weekly average use (WAU) of AI.
Generative AI chatbots might be a life-changing transformation in the nature of computing, that can replace all software, but so far, most of its users only pick it up every week or two, and far fewer have made it part of their lives. Is that a time problem or a product problem?
The proportion of daily users to weekly users is astonishingly small.
But another reaction is say that even with those advantages, if this is a life-changing transformation in the possibilities of computing, why is the DAU/WAU (daily average useage/weekly average usage) ratio so bad? Something between 5% and 15% of people are finding a use for this every day, but at least twice as many people are familiar with it, and know how it works, and know how to use it… and yet only find it useful once a week. Again, you didn’t have to buy a thousand dollar device, so you’re not committed – but if this is THE THING – why do most people shrug?
Media coverage and hype could lead one to believe that everyone uses these tools. But, no.
DAU is everything. Sam Altman knows this – he was trying to build a social media app at the time, and yet the traction number he always gives is, well, ‘weekly active users’. That’s a big number (the latest is 1bn globally)… but then, why is he giving us that number instead of DAUs? If you’re only using ChatGPT once a week, is it really working for you?
Evans asks, is it a people problem or a product problem? We just have not found a sufficient use case to integrate ChatGPT into our daily workflow. That’s a problem for those companies.
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