How People Use ChatGPT (www.nber.org)

A large-scale study tracking ChatGPT from its November 2022 launch through July 2025 shows the chatbot reached roughly 10% of the world’s adult population and reveals how people actually use LLM chatbots. Using a privacy-preserving automated pipeline to classify a representative sample of conversations, the researchers document shifting demographics (early users skewed male but the gender gap narrowed substantially) and faster adoption growth in lower-income countries. Work-related messaging has risen steadily, but non-work use has grown faster — from 53% to over 70% of sessions — indicating broad consumer engagement beyond productivity tasks. The analysis classifies conversations by topic and finds “Practical Guidance,” “Seeking Information,” and “Writing” make up nearly 80% of use; writing is especially dominant for work tasks, underscoring chatbots’ edge at producing digital outputs versus traditional search. Computer programming and self-expression are comparatively small slices. For the AI/ML community, these findings highlight where models deliver economic value—decision support and content generation in knowledge-intensive roles—and suggest priorities for product design and research (robust instruction-following, reliable information retrieval, and output-quality control) to maximize real-world impact.