Character.ai App Could Reach ChatGPT Level of Popularity in the USA

Character.ai is an artificial intelligence application that allows each registered user to create their own AI character or virtual personality and publish it for everyone to interact with. According to the analytics company SimilarWeb, its popularity among Americans is steadily growing. Launched in May 2023, the platform has already attracted 4.2 million active users in the United States. For comparison, ChatGPT has about 6 million users.

Comparing the demand for these platforms in general, it can be argued that ChatGPT is still ahead of Character.ai, and by a significant margin. In terms of global MAU on mobile, ChatGPT's 22.5 million left Character.ai, with just 5.27 million, far behind.

It’s interesting to see the difference between chatbots based on the age of users. It turned out that Character.ai is more often chosen by younger audiences. About 60% of its users are between 18 and 24 years old. For ChatGPT, this age group only made up 27% of its total traffic as of July 2023. For other applications with artificial intelligence, this figure is even lower: for example, the group of 18–24-year-olds accounts for 22.7% of Perplexity.ai users, 22.3% for Midjourney, 25.3% for Anthropic, and 18.5% for Bard.

Character.ai's prospects for growing its user base are promising. In March of this year, its developers received substantial funding for their brainchild in Series A – $150 million with a total valuation of $1 billion. Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas managed to gain the trust of investors, as they previously headed the research group at Google that created the LaMDA language model.

It looks like Character.ai will continue to grow in development in the near future. And only time will tell whether it will become a must-have for young people for a long time, or just a brightly flashing trend.