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Title: OpenAI's First Study On ChatGPT Usage

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/09/15/2151235/o...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, OpenAI's
Economic Research Team went a long way toward answering that question, on a
population level, releasing a first-of-its-kind National Bureau of Economic
Research working paper (in association with Harvard economist David Denning)
detailing how people end up using ChatGPT across time and tasks. While other
research has sought to estimate this kind of usage data using self-reported
surveys, this is the first such paper with direct access to OpenAI's internal
user data. As such, it gives us an unprecedented direct window into reliable
usage stats for what is still the most popular application of LLMs by far.
After digging through the dense 65-page paper, here are seven of the most
interesting and/or surprising things we discovered about how people are using
OpenAI today. Here are the seven most interesting and surprising findings
from the study: 1. ChatGPT is now used by "nearly 10% of the world's adult
population," up from 100 million users in early 2024 to over 700 million
users in 2025. Daily traffic is about one-fifth of Google's at 2.6 billion
GPT messages per day. 2. Long-term users' daily activity has plateaued since
June 2025. Almost all recent growth comes from new sign-ups experimenting
with ChatGPT, not from established users increasing their usage. 3. 46% of
users are aged 18-25, making ChatGPT especially popular among the youngest
adult cohort. Factoring in under-18 users (not counted in the study), the
majority of ChatGPT users likely weren't alive in the 20th century. 4. At
launch in 2022, ChatGPT was 80% male-dominated. By late 2025, the balance has
shifted: 52.4% of users are now female. 5. In 2024, work vs. personal use was
close to even. By mid-2025, 72% of usage is non-work related -- people are
using ChatGPT more for personal, creative, and casual needs than for
productivity. 6. 28% of all conversations involve writing assistance (emails,
edits, translations). For work-related queries, that jumps to 42% overall,
and 52% among business/management jobs. Furthermore, the report found that
editing and critiquing text is more common than generating text from scratch.
7. 14.9% of work-related usage is dealt with "making decisions and solving
problems." This shows people don't just use ChatGPT to do tasks -- they use
it as an advisor or co-pilot to help weigh options and guide choices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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