OpenAI ChatGPT-5 introduction displayed on smartphone screen

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Here’s how people are actually using ChatGPT

The new report released in collaboration with the National Bureau of Economic Research offers one of the largest surveys of real-world AI chatbot use.

Jon Keegan

9/15/25 2:51PM

OpenAI has released its largest report yet on how real people are actually using ChatGPT. The fascinating working research paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, describes a wide-ranging study that used AI to analyze 1 million chat transcripts (no humans read any of the chats). The study has not been peer reviewed.

Some of the big takeaways from the paper:

💃 70% (!!!) of all queries were not related to work. That number may send a chill down the spine of Big Tech, as it’s betting on enterprise AI to generate enough revenue to justify the hundreds of billions it’s spending to build out AI infrastructure.
📝 Among work-related messages, the most common use for ChatGPT is writing, and mostly just to modify or improve a user’s text. Writing queries made up 42% of work-related messages and 52% of all messages from users who work in business and management.
🙋🏻 About half (49%) of all queries were classified as “asking” — for guidance, advice, or information. 40% of messages were requests classified as “doing,” or asking the chatbot to complete a task.
👩‍💻 Female users contributed more than half of all queries, as of July 2025. This is a massive shift from early on, when the vast majority of users were male. But it’s worth noting that the study determined this by classifying first names as masculine or feminine.
🛹 The youth loves AI. Half of all messages were from adults under 26.

The OpenAI researchers took a random sample of about 1 million messages between May 2024 and June 2025 from logged-in, adult ChatGPT users (who did not opt out of sharing their messages for training).

ChatGPT usage - Breakdown of tasks by topic. — Breakdown of tasks by topic (Chart: OpenAI/NBER)

This study is one of the largest surveys of real-world AI use, so this data will be of great interest to all the companies trying to figure out how they’re going to make money selling AI services.

One thing that stood out was how utilitarian the usage of AI was. Rather than falling in love with an AI chatbot or having deep conversations with your new AI buddy, it looks like people are just using it to make their work better and figure things out.

It remains to be seen how AI will end up being part of our everyday lives, but it might look a lot more boring than Silicon Valley is making it out to be.

Rani Molla17h

Amazon raises the price for ad-free Prime Video to $4.99

Amazon is giving consumers more — for more. The e-commerce giant is raising the price of its ad-free Prime Video tier to $4.99 a month, up from $2.99.

On April 10, the service, now rebranded as Prime Video Ultra, will allow more concurrent streams (five instead of three) and up to 100 downloads, up from 25. Ad-free Prime Video had been included with a Prime membership until 2024, when Amazon added ads and began charging $2.99 a month to remove them.

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Prime Video’s Ad Free subscription becomes Prime Video Ultra for $4.99 a month

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Jon Keegan

19h

Most Americans have heard about data centers — the more they learn, the more negative their views

A major survey by Pew gives us a good look at how Americans are thinking about data centers as they start popping up in communities across the US.

Rani Molla20h

Uber relaunches robotaxi service with Hyundai-backed Motional in Las Vegas

What happens in Vegas, keeps happening in Vegas.

Uber users in Las Vegas can now be matched with an electric Motional IONIQ 5 robotaxi along parts of the Strip and at select casinos, resorts, and the Town Square shopping district near the airport, the companies said. For now, each vehicle includes a human safety operator monitoring from behind the wheel, who the companies say will be removed by year’s end.

Uber and Hyundai-backed autonomous tech company Motional previously tested a service there in 2022. “Motional is ready to put our extensive ride hail experience to work with Uber again,” said David Carroll, vice president of commercialization at Motional, which paused its commercial deployments in 2024 to refocus on its core driverless technology after scaling back operations.

This time around, the companies will be joining a much more crowded field. Amazon-owned Zoox has been offering free rides along select destinations on the Strip since last year, and both Tesla’s Robotaxi and Alphabet-owned Waymo have plans to open up shop there in the near future.

Thanks to a spate of recent AV partnerships, Uber, which sold its own autonomous unit back in 2020, is finding itself at the center of the nascent robotaxi boom.

Rani Molla21h

Musk says “xAI was not built right” amid executive departures, Cursor hires

There’s been a lot of turnover lately at xAI, with numerous executive departures and, yesterday, news that the SpaceX-owned company was hiring two senior leaders from Cursor, an AI coding startup that’s raising funds at a $50 billion valuation.

The reason? “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” CEO Elon Musk posted on xAI-owned X yesterday, in response to a post about the Cursor hires. Earlier this month, Musk told a conference audience, “Grok is currently behind on coding.”

The news amounts to an admission of a reset inside xAI and an acknowledgment that the company is trailing AI peers like Anthropic and OpenAI in one of AI’s most commercially important applications: coding.

xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.

Same thing happened with Tesla.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 12, 2026

Jon Keegan22h

War in the Middle East halts Meta’s undersea fiber project

Meta’s massive undersea cable project connecting Africa and the Middle East to Europe has run into an unexpected obstacle — not under the sea, but in the sky and land above: the war in the Middle East.

According to a report from Bloomberg, France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks, the company that is laying the cable, notified customers that it can no longer safely operate in the area.

The 2Africa project consists of a 45,000-kilometer chain of undersea fiber-optic cables that encircles Africa and runs through the Red Sea, up through the Gulf of Oman, where the Strait of Hormuz sits. Iran has declared the strait — a crucial choke point for oil and natural gas tankers — closed for traffic.

Meta is building the network in partnership with Bayobab, China Mobile, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, WIOCC, and Center3.

Big Tech’s most important infrastructure is at the bottom of the sea