700 Million People Use ChatGPT, But Not How You Think

Author(s): Sanskar Gupta

Originally published on Towards AI.

By July 2025, ChatGPT hit 700 million weekly users, sending over 2.5 billion messages every day. That’s one in ten adults on the planet talking to AI every week.

I was curious enough to spend some time getting deep into an NBER paper that analyzed millions of conversations to figure out what people actually do with ChatGPT.

And, I just love the fact that the reality is very different from the hype.

ChatGPT Isn’t About Work Anymore

Forget the productivity talk. Over 70% of ChatGPT use is now non-work related. And this isn’t because a new crowd showed up. The same people who once logged in for help with emails and presentations are now using it for cooking advice, fitness planning, or learning guitar chords.

That’s a quiet revolution. We’ve been sold the “AI for work” narrative, but the real value is in everyday life. Economists put the annual consumer surplus in the US alone at $97 billion.

Translation: people value what ChatGPT does for them outside work almost as much as inside.

The AI Everyone Wants Is an Editor, Not a Creator

One of the biggest surprises is how people use ChatGPT for writing. Two-thirds of all writing requests aren’t “write me an essay” but “fix this draft,” “translate this email,” or “make this sound smarter.”

People aren’t replacing their words with AI. They’re making their words better.

That shifts the story from “AI as a replacement” to “AI as a refinement tool.”

And honestly, that feels more real. Nobody wants to hand over their voice. They just want it sharpened.

Asking Beats Doing

The researchers split ChatGPT use into three buckets:

• Asking: getting advice, explanations, or decision support.
• Doing: asking for tasks to be completed, like summaries or reports.
• Expressing: sharing personal thoughts or feelings.

Here’s the kicker: Asking makes up half of all usage, is growing faster, and consistently delivers higher satisfaction. People don’t just want AI to do things. They want it to think with them.

At work, sure, there’s more “Doing”: reports, drafts, outputs. But even there, the “Asking” side is huge.

Which means the most valuable role of AI isn’t automation, it’s augmentation. It’s a thought partner.

The Gender Gap Closed Shockingly Fast

When ChatGPT launched, about 80% of active users had typically male names. By mid-2025, that gap not only closed but flipped slightly. Women are now just as likely, if not more, to be regular users.

That kind of demographic shift usually takes years, if not decades. The fact that it happened in two years shows how quickly AI is embedding itself across different groups once the use cases feel relevant.

AI Is Growing Faster in Places You Don’t Expect

The fastest growth isn’t in Silicon Valley or Europe. It’s in low- and middle-income countries. That flips the usual tech adoption script, where rich nations lead and others follow.

AI is becoming a leveling tool. Whether you’re in San Francisco or Nairobi, the same system is available to you. The same tutoring. The same advice. The same help. That’s a democratization effect we rarely see with new technologies.

AI as the Universal Toolkit

Strip away the specific tasks, and the core activities are strikingly similar across jobs: making decisions, solving problems, and documenting information. About 81% of work-related conversations map back to those fundamentals.

That means AI isn’t just for coders, managers, or marketers. It’s a cognitive toolkit that plugs into the core of how people think and work, regardless of the field.

Education Might Be the Killer App

Tutoring and teaching make up over 10% of all usage. That’s massive. People are using ChatGPT not just to finish homework but to learn new skills, get tailored explanations, or dive into hobbies.

It’s hard not to see this as the start of a new education layer — one that’s always available, cheap, and personalized.

So What’s Really Happening?

AI isn’t replacing people. It’s blending into how we think and learn. It’s helping us ask better questions, refine our ideas, and make decisions. The “work vs jobs” debate is missing the point. The deeper story is about AI becoming a universal advisor, editor, and tutor — an always-on partner in our daily cognition.

That’s the real revolution: not machines thinking for us, but machines helping us think better.

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Published via Towards AI