ChatGPT's Growth Flattened

Welcome to another edition of the best damn newsletter in AI.

As a reminder, we’ve opened up Reader Questions. Our mission is to make using AI accessible to every business, and a huge part of that is making sure you’re not stuck and that we continue answering diverse questions. So, submit your question here. We’ll review every single one and cover answers here in the newsletter.

Here's what we're covering today:

• AI adoption wave 1 is plateauing after initial spike in ChatGPT usage

• What AI adoption wave 2 will look like

• Rise in open source AI and generative AI applications

Let’s get to it! 👇

THE TOP NEWS

• Stability AI’s CEO stepped down and is focusing on decentralized AI

• Adobe Summit is happening right now, and there’s no shortage of AI updates (read details below!)

TODAY’S PERSPECTIVE

AI adoption wave 1 is plateauing?

ChatGPT is the fastest growing app ever. But very few people are talking about the fact that ChatGPT usage has been relatively flat since it’s initial spike in Spring 2023.

Here’s a graph of estimated visits to the ChatGPT website over the past 2 years:

And there’s many data points of this, including OpenAI spilling the beans that their user numbers hadn’t grown in months at their Developer Day conference last fall.

Meanwhile, it feels like hundreds of VC backed startups are launching every month, thousands of AI thought leaders coming onto the scene, and company’s AI budgets keep growing.

So the growth must be going somewhere…?

Welcome to the chaos of being early.

There’s two things this plateau could mean: either AI is a fad, or this first wave of AI is about to be replaced by something even better.

We’re betting on the later.

What might be coming in the “2nd wave AI” solutions? Here’s a glimpse of what we’re tracking w/ links to companies we’re loving:

• AI-native search that’s just undeniably more useful than Google (check out Perplexity.ai)

• AI wearables that give you perfect context and recall on every interaction (check out Rabbit)

• AI automation, workflow and agent tools that help you encode your expertise and delegate processes to AI (check out Zapier’s AI suite)

• Functional tools that write code for you, act as a customer support agent, get your company warm leads, scrape & clean data for you and more (check out Devin, the first AI software engineer)

While wave 1 was all about learning and discovering use cases, we think wave 2 is about reliability, performance and ROI.

LINKS

For your reading list 📚

Open source AI is picking up steam, fast...

• AI and data infrastructure drives demand for open source startups: A look at the top 50 trending commercial open source software startups and the increasing investor appetite for AI and data infrastructure.

• Fireworks.ai open source API puts generative AI in reach of any developer: Fireworks.ai is providing APIs to help companies fine-tune generative AI models on their own data.

The Adobe Summit had a big focus on AI capabilities...

• Adobe’s GenStudio brings brand-safe generative AI to marketers: Adobe's new GenStudio application uses generative AI to create personalized marketing content while maintaining brand safety.

• Adobe’s Firefly Services makes over 20 new generative and creative APIs available to developers: Adobe launches Firefly Services, providing over 20 new generative AI and creative APIs, tools, and services to developers.

Airtable and Teams users rejoice...

• Microsoft Teams is getting smarter Copilot AI features: Microsoft is upgrading its AI assistant Copilot in Teams with expanded abilities for meetings, chats, camera views, and speaker identification.

• Airtable brings AI summarization to paying users: Airtable introduces generative AI features to enhance productivity, including summarization for quick insights, automated data categorization, and routing of action items.

Thought pieces we liked this week...

• Here’s why AI search engines really can’t kill Google: A thorough test of AI search tools against Google on the main types of search queries.

• Why it’s impossible to review AIs, and why TechCrunch is doing it anyway: A look at the challenges of evaluating AI systems like ChatGPT.

• Why is AI so bad at spelling?: An exploration of why advanced AI models such as DALL-E, ChatGPT, and Adobe Firefly still struggle with basic spelling and letter recognition.

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Cheers,

🪄 The AI Exchange Team