Key points
- OpenAI puts ChatGPT's searches at a fifth of Google's
- How OpenAI counts a ChatGPT search
- ChatGPT voice reaches 250 million weekly users
OpenAI says ChatGPT now handles roughly one-fifth as many searches as Google (GOOGL). The figure comes from OpenAI's own analysis, which counts each question that sends ChatGPT to search the web.
ChatGPT consumer product lead Adam Fry shared the number with Alex Kantrowitz at an OpenAI dinner in New York on Monday, Big Technology reported. "ChatGPT's volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth the volume of queries of Google," Fry said.
How OpenAI counts a ChatGPT search
Kantrowitz asked whether a conversation with 20 back-and-forth prompts counts as 20 queries. Fry tied the count to questions that send ChatGPT to the web. "Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that's a search," he said.
Fry said those searches cover looking up "a person or people or a place or a thing," along with finance and health questions where people want up-to-date information. "It's basically anything that a user would have traditionally gone to a traditional search engine for, but is now deciding to go to ChatGPT for," he said.
Fry didn't give the number of searches or say how OpenAI estimated Google's volume. When Kantrowitz noted that Bing has around 5% of the search market and asked whether that made ChatGPT several times larger, Fry answered with user growth instead. ChatGPT went from 1 billion to 1.2 billion weekly active users in 60 days, Big Technology reported.
Google says its own searches are growing fast
Google is still growing too. On October 29, Alphabet said Google searches grew at their fastest year-over-year rate in five years. Revenue from Google Search and related products rose 12% to $63.35 billion in the third quarter, but that was only about $80 million more than in the second quarter, as we wrote last week.
Fry, who previously worked at Google, said people value something different in ChatGPT. "One of the things that people really love about ChatGPT is this personalization and this understanding of the broader journey," he said. His example was a question about the Eiffel Tower from someone planning a trip to Paris.
Voice, images, and money
ChatGPT's voice features, which include dictation and spoken conversations, now have 250 million weekly users, Fry said. Users create 1.5 billion images a week.
On revenue, Fry said, "we announced several months back that we had passed 50 million subscriptions, and the number has grown considerably since then." He repeated that ChatGPT ads passed $1 billion in annualized revenue within 200 days, a milestone OpenAI first announced in August.
OpenAI also plans to combine ChatGPT's separate Chat and Work modes, so users won't have to choose between a quick answer and a longer task. Asked when, Fry said, "Coming soon."
