AI in the US: Young people at the forefront of ChatGPT’s momentum

On average, interest in AI in the U.S. shot up 119% over the period Q4 2020 to Q4 2022¹. The growing interest in AI can be seen across all regions in the U.S. albeit to varying degrees, depending on the region.

The South Atlantic region, which is home to governmental institutions, is where the largest number of people consumed AI-related content, at 9.6 million unique visitors in Q4 2022 – an increase of 5.1 million unique visitors over two years, most of which occurred in 2022 (see chart below).

The Pacific region, with its high concentration of tech companies, comes next: 7.3 million individuals visited AI-related content in Q4 2022, a 83% increase relative to the same quarter of the prior year.

Both OpenAI, the research organization that developed ChatGPT, and ChatGPT are the object of much buzz on social media: OpenAI registered more than one million actions on social media in January 2023 – double the number it generated in the entire fourth quarter of 2022. For ChatGPT, the numbers are even higher, with 9.2 million actions as of January 2023, a 330% increase compared to Q4 2022. These trends are reflected in the chart a keyword cloud below.

How do people access ChatGPT?

A measure of this can be approximated through the number of people who visited OpenAI’s website – either through desktop or mobile devices. Specifically, OpenAI.com received over 9 million unique visitors in the U.S. as of January 2023. Desktop was the most popular platform for accessing the website, with 5.2M unique visitors (58%), compared with 3.8M on mobile devices (42%). Desktop users also spend more time on OpenAI’s website – 12.4 minutes per visitor per month – compared with 9.6 on mobile. This is no surprise, since desktop devices tend to lend themselves better to extended research.

What about OpenAI.com’s audience profile?

A demographic breakdown of OpenAI’s audience shows that those aged 18-24 years old are the most over-represented: OpenAI’s reach within this group (at 8.1%) is 2.49 times higher (UV composition index = 249) than its average reach on the internet (at 3.3%).

For men aged 18-24, the hype around ChatGPT has propelled OpenAI.com into the top 150 sites and apps on which they spend time. But this needs to be put into perspective: at 11.1 minutes per user and per month it is far behind the 63 hours per month spent on YouTube.com or 13 hours per month spent on the TikTok mobile app. Yet it compares well with high profile sites such as Wikipedia (13.2 minutes), media sites such as CNN, CBS Sports, and Men's Health (7.4, 7.2, and 4.7 minutes, respectively). It also compares well with… ahem ... the content-sharing site, OnlyFans (6.9 minutes).

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Definitions

**Number of actions (i.e., reactions, shares, comments, retweets, favorites, loves) is calculated across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube.

***Composition index UV compares the proportion of a user profile on a given site to the proportion of this profile across the whole internet. So, if a user profile corresponds to 20% of a site’s audience but 10% of all internet users, then Composition index UV = 20% / 10% x 100 = 200

Sources

1. Based on the number of individuals who consumed content covering the topic of AI. Source: Comscore Plan Metrix, Multi-platform, Audience 18+, Q4 2020, Q4 2021, Q4 2022, U.S.