Latest data from market intelligence company Sensor Tower shows that OpenAI’s chatbot application ChatGPT has become the fastest application in history to reach 1 billion monthly active users (MAU), breaking the record previously held by Google Maps. In comparison, it took Google Maps about five years from launch to reach the same user scale, while ChatGPT has only taken about 3.5 years to complete this milestone since its launch in November 2022.
The overall application ecosystem of generative AI is also expanding rapidly. According to Sensor Tower data, the monthly active users of Anthropic's two competing products, Claude and Meta AI, increased by 640% and 973% respectively year-on-year, which is much higher than ChatGPT's 62% year-on-year growth. However, the latter still maintains a clear lead in terms of total volume and continues to dominate the market. Abe Yousef, senior analyst at Sensor Tower, said in an interview with CNBC that improved model capabilities and more positive market sentiment have driven the accelerated growth of ChatGPT competing products.
However, as the number of users continues to rise, the public opinion surrounding generative AI has become increasingly complex, and there is even a paradoxical situation of "more and more people are using it, but the more they use it, the more disgusted they become." Earlier this year, OpenAI signed a cooperation agreement with the Pentagon, triggering a massive consumer backlash and focusing on concerns about companies applying AI technology to military and intelligence fields. Under pressure from public opinion, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman promised to increase security measures to prevent the U.S. government from using its own technology to monitor its own citizens. However, the outside world generally believes that there are still obvious loopholes and ambiguities in the relevant statements.
The storm had a direct impact on product data. Sensor Tower statistics show that on February 28, the day after OpenAI announced an agreement with the Pentagon, the number of uninstalls of the ChatGPT application surged by about 295% month-on-month, becoming a rare single-day "uninstall wave." During the same period, Anthropic Claude, which focused on "stricter government usage restrictions," once topped the iPhone free app rankings, reflecting some users' attempts to express dissatisfaction by "voting with their feet."
Anthropic has chosen a very different tack in its stance on cooperation with the government. The company has explicitly refused to allow governments to use its models for large-scale domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems, an attitude that has sparked a bitter dispute with relevant agencies. Subsequently, relevant parties put Anthropic on the "blacklist" on the grounds of "national security risks", and relations between the two parties were tense for a time. However, recent reports indicate that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is using Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model for offensive cyber operations, once again triggering discussions about the boundaries of AI application in the field of cyber offense and defense.
At the employment and infrastructure levels, the expansion of AI is equally controversial. On the one hand, the outside world has long been worried that generative AI will lead to a large number of job losses. However, some economists point out that there is currently almost no empirical data to show that AI has "taken away jobs" on a large scale, and the relevant claims "lack statistical evidence." On the other hand, public opposition to the construction of AI data centers continues to rise. Surveys show that about 70% of Americans oppose the construction of new AI data centers near their communities for reasons including energy consumption, environmental impact, and pressure on local infrastructure.
At the same time, geopolitical narratives and information warfare dimensions have gradually entered the center of AI topics. OpenAI recently released a report stating that some ChatGPT users from China are trying to spread content through the platform and encourage the American public to oppose the construction of new data centers in order to influence public sentiment. OpenAI stated that the actual influence of these accounts is limited, and "it is difficult to say what has really changed." However, the company also admitted that such incidents may prompt some people who originally opposed the data center to re-examine their position out of a mentality of "refusing to be seen as influenced by other countries."
Against this complex background, ChatGPT’s record user scale and the rapid popularity of generative AI are intertwined with increasingly fierce regulatory debates, ethical debates, and social backlash. On the one hand, various enterprises and institutions continue to explore the use of large models to improve efficiency and expand business boundaries; on the other hand, from the labor market to network security, from privacy protection to infrastructure layout, society's concerns and distrust of AI are also accumulating simultaneously. The fact that ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing application in history is not only a business achievement in itself, but also a microcosm of the current global dispute over the development route and governance framework of artificial intelligence.