> ChatGPT is widely used for practical guidance, information seeking, and writing, which together make up nearly 80% of usage. Non-work queries now dominate (70%). Writing is the main work task, mostly editing user text. Users are younger, increasingly female, global, and adoption is growing fastest in lower-income countries
Young moms with no money in poor countries use this product the most. I bet that was fun news to deliver up the chain.
# How People Use ChatGPT (Chatterji, Cunningham, Deming, Hitzig, Ong, Shan, Wadman – Sept 2025)
### Scope - Study of ChatGPT consumer plans (Free, Plus, Pro) from Nov 2022–Jul 2025. - Covers ~700M weekly active users by mid-2025 (~10% of world’s adults). - Uses automated, privacy-preserving classification of billions of messages.
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### Key Findings
*Adoption & Growth* - Usage grew 5× between mid-2024 and mid-2025. - Growth from both new users and heavier use by existing users.
*Work vs. Non-Work* - Mid-2024: ~47% work / 53% non-work. - Mid-2025: ~27% work / 73% non-work. - Shift due to both new cohorts and existing users expanding non-work use.
*Topics of Use* - 3 main topics = ~80% of all use: 1. Practical Guidance (advice, tutoring, ideas) 2. Seeking Information (facts, search-like queries) 3. Writing (drafting, editing, summarizing) - Technical help (e.g. coding, math) ≈ 4%.
*Intent* - Asking (49%), Doing (40%), Expressing (11%). - Work-related chats skew toward Doing (esp. Writing tasks).
*Work Activities (ONET mapping)* - Common across occupations: - Getting Information - Documenting / Interpreting - Problem Solving & Decision Making - Thinking Creatively - Advising/Consulting
*Demographics* - Early skew male; now near gender balance. - Younger users dominate; older users more work-focused. - Strong growth in low- & middle-income countries. - Higher education correlates with more work use.
*Quality / Satisfaction* - Positive (“good”) user feedback outnumbers negative and is improving. - Asking messages have highest satisfaction rates.
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### Implications - ChatGPT’s value is broad: not just coding/technical, but also decision support, writing, learning, and personal tasks. - Increasing non-work use suggests large social value beyond workplace productivity. - Broad relevance across occupations → general-purpose tool. - Adoption trends point to narrowing gaps across gender and geography.
mgh95•1h ago
Since many consumers are typically relatively tight-fisted in the b2c market, I don't think this bodes well for the long-term economics of the market. This may explain the relatively recent pivot to attempt to "discover" uses.
I don't think this ends happily.
ares623•1h ago
mgh95•1h ago
Rest of the market be damned -- combined with the poor customer mix (low to middle income countries) this explains why there has been such a push by the big labs to attempt to quantize models and save costs. You effectively have highly paid engineers/scientists running computationally expensive models on some of the most expensive hardware on the market to serve instructions on how to do things to people in low income countries.
This doesn't sound good, even for ad-supported business models.
ares623•1h ago
dolphinscorpion•1h ago
Still, 700 million users, and they can still add a lot of products within ChatGPT. Ads will also be slapped on answers.
If all fails, Sam will start wearing "Occupy Jupiter" t-shirts.
mgh95•36m ago
bix6•20m ago
mgh95•7m ago
Once OpenAI turns to ads, I think it's an indicator they are out of ideas.
og_kalu•11m ago
mgh95•4m ago
They aren't pulling an Amazon snd balancing cash flow with costs. They're just incinerating money for a low value userbase. Even at FB arpu the economics are still very poor.
standardUser•8m ago
andy99•52m ago
On the other hand, I remember when BlackBerry had enterprise locked down and got wiped out by consumer focused Apple.
In any event, having big consumer growth doesn't seem like a bad thing.
It will be bad if it starts a race to the bottom for ad driven offering though.
mgh95•41m ago
When OpenAI sells a ChatGPT subscription, they incur large costs just to serve the product, shrinking margins.
Big difference in unit economics, hence the quantization push.
ares623•22m ago
It’s the prodigal child of tech.
DenisM•48m ago
Business have higher friction - legal, integrations, access control, internal knowledge leaks (a document can be restricted access but result may leak into a more open query). Not to mention the typical general inertia. This friction works both ways.
Think capacitive vs induction electric circuits.
mgh95•37m ago
Similarly, if costs double (or worse, increase to a point to be close to typical SaaS margins) and LLMs lose their shine I dont think there will be friction on the way out. People (especially executives) will offer up ChatGPT as a sacrifice.
standardUser•9m ago