Recently, the number of users of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot applications has surged. The industry analyzes that various consumer groups, from early adopters due to frequent AI chatbot updates to the general public, who are curious about the popularity of ChatGPT's 'Ghibli-style' images, have entered the AI chatbot market.
On the 3rd, according to the mobile statistics analysis platform Mobile Index, the monthly active users (MAU) of the top six AI chatbot apps, excluding ChatGPT, such as Copilot, adot, wrtn, and perplexity, were recorded at 6,936,387 last month. This figure represents an increase of 8.4% compared to the previous month (6,398,563), indicating that the MAU has grown by over 540,000 in one month.
Specifically, all corporations excluding SK Telecom's AI service, adot, saw an increase in their MAU. The domestic startup wrtn Technologies, which operates wrtn, recorded an MAU of 1,049,224 last month, surpassing the 1 million mark with an increase of more than 200,000 in one month. Microsoft's (MS) AI service, Copilot, increased from 3,507,301 in February to 3,744,902 in March, while the American AI company perplexity saw its MAU rise from 457,209 in February to 550,714 in March. During the same period, Anthropic's AI service, Claude (estimated for Android only), also rose from 29,703 to 39,788.
Experts analyzed that there are various reasons for the increase in the number of AI chatbot users. Choi Byeong-ho, a professor at Korea University’s AI Research Institute, noted, "Recently, AI companies have been updating their services almost every week. In the business sector and among AI early adopters, there has been overall traffic growth as people try to keep up with this trend."
In addition, the soaring popularity of ChatGPT, a leader in the AI chatbot market, has also been pointed out as a reason for the general public's increasing curiosity about AI chatbots. OpenAI released a new image generation AI model called 'ChatGPT-4o Image Generation' at the end of last month, which has gained explosive popularity. This feature allows users to obtain images in their desired style with just a simple command, such as 'draw a picture in the Ghibli style.' It has become a trend among users to create images in the style of famous animations and share them on social media (SNS).
As a result, the number of domestic ChatGPT users has greatly increased. According to Mobile Index, the MAU of ChatGPT reached an all-time high of 5,099,965 last month. The user count has grown by nearly 1.2 million in just one month. There are indications that the general public, encountering AI chatbots through ChatGPT, have developed curiosity towards other AI chatbots, triggering the popularization of AI.
Professor Choi stated, "The phenomenon of posting AI-generated images on SNS has formed a kind of meme, increasing overall interest in AI chatbots. Also, there has been a significant rise in users downloading and subscribing to various AI chatbots for comparison. These complex factors are contributing to the increase in traffic for AI chatbots."