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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says people use ChatGPT differently depending on their age.
“Gross oversimplification, but like, older people use ChatGPT as a Google replacement,” Altman said at Sequoia Capital’s AI Ascent event.
“Maybe people in their 20s and 30s use it like a life advisor, something,” Altman said. “And then, like, people in college use it as an operating system.”
Altman’s interview, which took place on May 2, was published to Sequoia Capital’s YouTube channel on Monday. He was responding to a question about how young people use ChatGPT.
“They really do use it like an operating system. They have complex ways to set it up to connect it to a bunch of files, and they have fairly complex prompts memorized in their head or in something where they paste in and out,” Altman said of ChatGPT’s younger users.
“There’s this other thing where they don’t really make life decisions without asking ChatGPT what they should do. It has the full context on every person in their life and what they’ve talked about,” Altman added.
When asked how OpenAI itself was using ChatGPT, Altman said ChatGPT “writes a lot of our code” but did not specify the exact percentage of code it generated. In October, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said AI wrote over 25% of Google’s new code.
In February, OpenAI published a report which said college students in the US were using ChatGPT “more than any other use case, more than any other kind of user.”
The report added that over one-third of people aged 18 to 24 in the US use ChatGPT.
The Pew Research Center published a survey in January, which said that 26% of US teenagers aged between 13 to 17 used ChatGPT for their schoolwork in 2024, compared to 13% in 2023.
Representatives for Altman at OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
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