OpenAI Research on Usage Trends at ChatGPT: 24% Messages Seek Info, Majority of Chats Are Personal

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IBL News
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IBL News | New York

The majority of requests to ChatGPT are related to personal lives rather than for help at work, and come from women and people aged 18 to 25, according to OpenAI, which disclosed these data as part of a study of what users do with AI.

In June 2024, prompts to the chatbot were split roughly evenly between work and personal uses. By June 2025, nonwork uses made up 73 percent of all conversations, the company said.

Additionally, the San Francisco-based company said it now has over 700 million weekly users.

OpenAI sorted the more than 1 million chats studied across that period into seven categories. The largest category was practical guidance at 28.3 percent of all chats, which encompassed people seeking how-to advice, help with schoolwork, and tips on working out.

The second, people asking ChatGPT for writing help, and here, for editing or critiquing text, followed by personal writing, mostly on emails and social media posts, or communication, a category defined to include helping with emails or social media posts.

Generating computer code has also been enthusiastically adopted by many in the tech industry, with approximately 4.2% of the sampled chats related to programming.

Another popular case for ChatGPT across the data included in the study was seeking information, a category that includes purchasable products, and the researchers said is a very close substitute for web search — the basis of Google’s $55 billion annual search ads business. Google has responded by putting content from its own AI tools at the top of search results pages.

OpenAI used AI technology to analyze the chats it studied.