As ChatGPT Marks One Year Of Availability, Indians Rank Among Its Top Users

The recent drama surrounding the sudden sacking of OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman, his swift hiring by Microsoft, the firestorm of protest by almost all of OpenAI’s employees, and Altman's consequent reinstatement just two weeks later have tended to distract from the observance of a major milestone as we moved into December: ChatGPT, the hugely disruptive flagship product created by OpenAI, is one year old.

As eager users the world over discovered after they rushed to download the free chatbot, ChatGPT — the "GPT" stands for generative pretrained transformer — could generate an answer to almost any question it’s asked.

Released for testing to the public on the last day of November 2022, it has since become the most popular and arguably the best artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chatbot ever launched.

Six months after it went live on the web, its mobile version arrived for the iOS operating system, followed by Google Play two months later.

One week after its launch on Google Play, the mobile application (app) saw 18 million installations. The cumulative downloads on both iOS and Android combined have been above 4 million in the past five weeks.

The mobile version has now achieved 110 million downloads. ChatGPT now ranks first among generative AI apps in terms of total downloads.

According to a study by data.ai to mark the one-year landmark, India has contributed the single-largest portion of global ChatGPT app installations, at 18 per cent, just ahead of the United States, at 17.5 per cent.

McKinsey explains that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) algorithms, such as ChatGPT, can be used to create new content, including music and art, audio, code, images, text, simulations, and videos, to entire virtual worlds.

This is a form of machine learning, and it’s not just for fun — GenAI has plenty of practical uses, like creating new product designs and optimising business processes.

But the first release of ChatGPT had its limitations, the inability to draw on live data being one of them. This sometimes skewed the results.

Altman was the first to recognise this aspect. He wrote in an X (formerly Twitter) post: "It does know a lot, but the danger is that it is confident and wrong a significant fraction of the time."

However, the launch of GPT-4 in March 2023 was a major upgrade that made it much more reliable. And it received another significant update in September this year, enabling users to have voice conversations and interact with the chatbot using images.

This upgrade put ChatGPT in competition with AI services like Siri, Google Voice Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa. The new feature was available to subscribers of ChatGPT’s Plus and Enterprise plans.

All this activity has stirred major players to compete. Google launched its own AI assistant, Bard. On the sound premise that 'If you can't fight 'em, join 'em', Microsoft powered its search engine Bing with ChatGPT.

However, ChatGPT's GPT-4 is still considered the best of the AI assistant options today.

Corporates Embrace ChatGPT

Today, ChatGPT is increasingly harnessed by corporations and industry to perform basic office documentation and content creation tasks — and even writing code.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT can potentially transform how many jobs are performed. But we do not as yet know the full scope of their impact. Clearly, there are some risks.

Even while the rise of GenAI has triggered a debate on its risks and benefits, a wave of adoption by companies was reported by GlobalData.

"Companies are embedding Gen AI technologies into their platform. Meanwhile, they also seem to be considering ChatGPT to be useful in a variety of applications such as chatbots, virtual assistants, customer service, and content creation," says Misa Singh, Business Fundamentals Analyst at GlobalData.

GlobalData reports recent developments:

– Samsung has announced its own GenAI model, "Samsung Gauss," which it will soon launch.

– Thomson Reuters Corp is implementing GenAI into legal research, to create a single AI capacity for legal research.

– Google’s parent company Alphabet has launched ‘Product Studio’, which uses GenAI to create eye-catching imagery for free. This product can be beneficial for advertisers to create high-quality images.

– Accenture has announced a $3 billion investment in AI and is collaborating with Telefonica Brazil, popularly known as Vivo, to provide GenAI solutions.

– NVIDIA is spending and investing billions in R&D (research and development) to optimise GenAI for training and inference scale.

– Microsoft is investing in AI across the entire company and integrating GenAI capabilities into its consumer and commercial offerings.

– Meta (Facebook) has introduced AI Sandbox, a testing playground for GenAI-powered tools like automatic text variation, background generation, and image outcropping.

Indian Companies and GenAI

Indian businesses are not to be left behind.

Moneycontrol has compiled a useful list of nine Indian entities that are 'doubling down' on GenAI. They range from Swiggy, which is creating a neural search engine to aid customers with suggestions, to Amazon, which is deploying large language models (LLMs) to help its sellers create better listings of their products, to Tech Mahindra, which has launched a tool called AmplifAIer to manage its e-mailers for better customer relations management (CRM).

GenAI is not going away, some dire warnings about AI notwithstanding. And as it moves into its second year, ChatGPT is still for many — lay users and businesses alike — the preferred choice.