GenAI’s adoption puzzle

This chart is very ‘glass half-empty or half-full?’, and it’s a puzzle.

You could say that this is amazingly fast adoption, and much faster than PCs, the web or smartphones. 30% in two years! In a sense that’s a skewed comparison - ChatGPT is just a website, it gets wall-to-wall media coverage (this is part of Sam Altman’s job), and you don’t need to buy a thousand dollar device or wait for telcos to deploy broadband. Anyone can just go and use it today, so of course adoption is faster. It’s standing on the shoulders of giants. But either way, 30%!

But another reaction is say that even with those advantages, if this is a life-changing transformation in the possibilities of computing, why is the DAU/WAU ratio so bad? Something between 5% and 15% of people are finding a use for this every day, but at least twice as many people are familiar with it, and know how it works, and know how to use it… and yet only find it useful once a week. Again, you didn’t have to buy a thousand dollar device, so you’re not committed - but if this is THE THING - why do most people shrug?

It’s also worth noting that when social media was a new thing we quickly realised that ‘weekly active’ and ‘monthly active’ numbers were bullshit. If someone was only using WhatsApp or Instagram once a month, it really wasn’t working for them. DAU is everything. Sam Altman knows this - he was trying to build a social media app at the time, and yet the traction number he always gives is, well, ‘weekly active users’. That's a big number (the latest is 1bn globally)… but then, why is he giving us that number instead of DAUs? If you’re only using ChatGPT once a week, is it really working for you?

It might be that this gap is just a matter of time: the models will mature, people will break old habits and form new ones, and the WAUs and the ‘looked once six months ago’ cohorts will convert to DAUS. The S-Curve will curve upwards. But it might also be that we’re in the part of the S-Curve that came before the iPhone: the latent possibility is there, it all seems to be working and we can all see it’s going to be huge, but we need something to crystallise. So, this might be a time problem, or it might be a product problem. Paging Jony Ive?

It might also be that the chatbot _as chatbot_ is the right UX only for some people and some use-cases, and most people will experience this technology as features and capabilities wrapped inside other things. I don’t think we can know that. When I was a baby telecoms analyst in 2000, everyone kept asking me ‘what’s the killer app for 3G?’ and that turned out to be the wrong question: the killer app for having the internet in your pocket was having the internet in your pocket, but it had to be done in a different way.

But however these questions turn out, it’s important to remember that if you use five different LLMs every day, and haven’t done a Google search this year, and all your friends are the same… then you’re in a bubble, for now.