Since the launch of the chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022, artificial intelligence (AI) has captured everyone’s attention and is the brightest star of technology. Based on large language models (LLMs), the first AI tools were chatbots capable of conversations in a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language, but newer ones can generate images and videos according to users’ prompts and specifications. 

There are currently more than 5,000 AI tools for a wide variety of purpose and the number is growing. Yet a small portion of them have become truly popular and employed on a daily basis. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, enjoys the highest demand worldwide, according to a statistical report by WriterBuddy, an AI analytical tool. 

The report says that the 50 top AI tools out of 3,000 AI tools WriterBuddy analyzed between September 2022 and August 2023 generated more than 24 billion visits, with an average growth of 236.3 million visits a month. Of this number, ChatGPT alone accounted for 14 billion, covering a massive 60% of the traffic.

The second most popular AI tool is Character.AI, is a neural language model chatbot service developed by two former Google engineers. Rather than being a singular LLM for general and productivity-related user queries, it is a collection of characters (known as “dialog agents”) that can generate human-like text responses and participate in contextual conversation.

It attracted 3,8 billion visits during the given period. 

QuillBot, a writing tool, comes third with 1.1 billion visits, followed by the image generator Midjourney (500.4 million) and the open-source community Hugging Face (316.6 million). The top 10 also includes Google Bard, NovelAI, CapCut, JanitorAI, and CivitAI. By category, chatbots captured 19.1 billion visits.

Where the users are

The United States contributed 5.5 billion visits, equating to 22.62% of the total traffic, whereas European countries together accounted for 3.9 billion visits. Individually, India came second with 2.1 billion visits and Indonesia third with 1.4 billion visits.

The top 10 countries with the largest number of visits also includes the Philippines (1.3 billion visits), Brazil (1.3 billion), the United Kingdom (665 million), Japan (642 million), Germany (630 million), Mexico (579m), and Canada (534m).

Over 63% of AI users accessed the products vis mobile devices. Despite being at an early stage of adoption, some products have attracted thousands of paying users for premium versions – though the report does not disclose any numbers in this regard.

During the studied period, the 50 tools covered by the report experienced a 10.7-fold growth, the number of visits in August 2023 alone – the final month covered by the analysis – stood at 2.8 billion.

“The AI industry has been one of the most significant tech developments we’ve seen in a long time,” WriterBuddy emphasized.

According to Statista, the number of AI tool users in 2023 more than doubled since 2020 (almost 116 million) and in 2030 there will be 729 million users worldwide.

The growth of the AI sector acts as a magnet for investors. Coatue Management, an American technology-focused investment manager, notes in a report titled “The AI Revolution” that the AI ecosystem exploded in the first half of last year and that open-source research, data, and community are at the core of this evolution.

Coatue expects AI to become more powerful, more accessible, scalable, and useful, moving from generalist purposes to narrower, more specific uses, and from data centers to users’ mobile phones.

“The best of AI is yet to come,” it promised.

***
NewsCafe is a small, independent outlet that cares about big issues. Our sources of income amount to ads and donations from readers. You can support us via PayPal: office[at]rudeana.com or paypal.me/newscafeeu. We promise to reward this gesture with more captivating and important topics.