ChatGPT has quietly was the “busiest hangout” spot on the web. What started as a productiveness software now attracts crowds like a digital piazza with greater than 800 million registered customers and round 125 million of them displaying up day by day. Common session time? Roughly 14 minutes. That’s the form of consideration Fb hasn’t seen since your aunt’s Sweet Crush part.
That’s why Meta’s nervous
When Sam Altman lately instructed an interviewer that Meta sees OpenAI as its “deepest competitor,” he wasn’t speaking about mannequin parameters or artificial benchmarks. He meant time. The scarce consideration forex that fuels Meta’s $160 billion advert empire.
Every minute spent chatting with a big language mannequin is a minute not spent scrolling previous adverts, hearting trip images, or feeding Meta’s advice machine.
ChatGPT’s interface now mirrors the addictive pull of a social feed; not by means of drama, however by means of dialogue. Based on AI analyst Rohan Paul, the numbers present the shift. Customers ship 2.5 billion prompts day-after-day, each a micro-post between human and bot.
OpenAI visitors 2 billion visits in Could 2025, based on Similarweb information. Inside these classes, customers do what they used to do on Fb: search validation, share concepts, and vent. Solely this time, the occasion is non-public, the algorithm is private, and no one’s promoting you sneakers.
ChatGPT: the menace beneath the feed
Meta’s enterprise works provided that customers linger in human areas, as a result of adverts want eyeballs. Instagram alone is projected to generate over $32 billion in U.S. advert income in 2025, greater than half of Meta’s home take. Each minute that vanishes into ChatGPT’s immediate field is one much less publicity to an advert impression and yet one more dent in that flywheel.
Including insult to harm, ChatGPT isn’t simply answering questions; it’s fulfilling social wants. LLMs can maintain context, generate voice and pictures, and mimic empathy on demand. Analysis on AI companion apps like Replika exhibits customers forming deep para-social bonds, in some instances, even romantic ones. Whether or not comforting, flirtatious, or purely informational, these bots meet individuals the place they’re; immediately and tirelessly.
What we used to outsource to timelines (affirmation, debate, connection) is beginning to circulate into 1:1 chat. Meta’s feed exhibits you others so you may see your self. AI companionship removes the intermediary completely.
Two graphs, two futures
Fb’s energy got here from a single huge social graph. You and your folks in perpetual comparability. ChatGPT’s energy is atomized. Every person has a non-public relationship with a mannequin that remembers their tone, preferences, and magnificence of humor.
Below the hood, that intimacy runs on three constructing blocks: reminiscence retrieval for continuity, persona prompts for tone, and a quick vector cache to simulate long-term reminiscence. It’s a quiet revolution, and hundreds of thousands of private mirrors are changing one world stage.
Altman understands that Meta isn’t competing with OpenAI on information facilities or diffusion fashions. They’re competing for human moments: the idle 14 minutes earlier than mattress, the “fast test” that turns into an emotional trade.
If even a small fraction of Meta’s 3.4 billion day by day customers shift that engagement to chatbots, the monetary influence cascades quick. As a result of each lacking minute is a measurable loss on advert stock.
And that’s why, inside Meta’s glass towers, the quiet hum of ChatGPT may sound much less like innovation and extra like a ticking clock.
