At first glance its like Hollywood movies announcing they're the best selling of all time, ignoring inflation. In other words a ratchet just to get clicks.

However this is relevant because this is an investor report helping people forecast, and this stat helps calibrate readers expectations of just how fast a product can scale in this day & age, using a relevant comparison of products in the same category that when launched offered the same step change in value.

Also, quantity has a quality of its own.

My gripe is not with relevancy of the data, its with the chosen comparison. Comparing with Google at the beginning of the internet revolution, to now with billions of internet enabled devices across the world, is not a fair comparison and does not give any meaningful insight.

but that’s precisely the point and it does give insight. Google scaled off of existing infrastructure like computers. Computers scale off of existing infrastructure like electricity.

The point is to compare current era of scaling to the previous era and see how much faster it is.

It’s not comparing Google to Open Ai. It’s comparing the environment that produced Google to the environment that produced Open Ai.

With all respect, I'm not convinced what you're saying is wisdom

It’s not wisdom, it’s research.

It’s kind of obvious that new eras will produce faster scaling. But what if you ran the numbers and it wasn’t true?

There are plenty of times when this happens, the obvious is actually something different. This time isn’t the case but that’s the point of research, to back up common sense with evidence.

Also, it is very different to know that it is faster vs it is 5.5x faster. The 5.5x might not be completely accurate but it’s more in depth than just your intuition.

There is wisdom in simple, profound statements that open up new lines of thought. But There is also wisdom in doing research to make things you already know quantified and more concrete.

One example of research being wisdom is demographics. It’s one thing to know that there are more whites than blacks in the US, it’s another thing to know that there are 200m whites and 40m blacks. The numbers shed light into precision and also validate or clarify your thinking. For instance maybe you thought that blacks should be the second largest demographic since they have been here longest. Not so, Hispanic is at around 60m. Or maybe you knew that already. But if you wanted to argue with others about demographic growth and what is actually happening in immigration, knowing the numbers is wisdom, and going off of intuition leads to “they took my job” hot takes.

What does it mean to be fair in this context? The world is different now… it is plausible at least that the best comparison isn’t a fair one.

If you continue reading, they're comparing ChatGPT with more companies than just Google. TikTok and Fortnite are also included for example, both came much later so I'm guessing you'll feel it is a bit fairer of comparison.

Yes? With internet access being more prevalent than ever, it is expected that new product categories will have faster adoption. This demonstrates how much faster using ChatGPT and Google as proxies for their respective product categories.

Sure but it doesn't mean anything, how much has the internet grown since Google's inception?

How can it not mean anything that the internet has grown a lot since Google's inception?

It’s not a contest that needs to be adjudicated fairly, it’s a report on the state of today and looking forward. So yes, the gazillion phones are definitely relevant.

Pretty impressive numbers for google i must say, only 5.5x slower in a time with significant lower number of users, devices and online time.

I also wonder how much of ChatGPT's usage is to basically cheat on homework. Basically 100% of the users of ChatGPT I know mostly use it to do their homework for them.

Maybe this will turn out to be a valuable user segment, but I'm not sure.

> Maybe this will turn out to be a valuable user segment, but I'm not sure.

Practices learned during school do enter the workforce. Messaging during class turned into messaging during meetings.

So, if 100% try using it to do their work toil for them...

These types of comparisons are always annoying.

I saw another one recently that said something like "ChatGPT has 350 millions unique visits per month, if it were a country, it would be the 3rd largest in the world"

Or something along those lines.

This may be my single biggest pet peeve. I think of this problem more broadly every time I see some new movie is the highest grossing movie of all time. No shit, Sherlock. More people, more screens, more movie theaters, inflation... the record is always going to be broken.

I hate this so much I actually ran the numbers and saw that per capita box office revenues have remained generally stable since the 1980s.

Growth in the installed base of computing and connectivity is not the same thing as simple inflation.

Meeker is illustrating a material change in the environment.

Come on. That's like being bugged about a pizza joint describing itself as "world famous"

Well, I dislike both. And in either case I am going to trust less whoever repeats it uncritically.

I don't hold pizza joints to the same standards as large companies and the media.

No. As a vc their job is to raise capital from investors and then invest that capital to make a return.

Data scientists bring out relevant, thought-provoking metrics. They work for the people who work for the people who are the target audience here.

> Data scientists bring out relevant, thought-provoking metrics

With all due respect, I’ve seen more corporate drivel and slide-show sugar out of data scientists than VCs. (Largely as a product of attention span.)

> Is this really relevant?

Yes. The question isn’t which team is better. The question is how fast they can grow. Similar companies in Pakistan and America will grow disparately. Same for companies on the Internet in 1998 versus, practically, 2022. That isn't fair. But nobody cares about fair, we’re measuring what’s true. It’s fair, from those data, to conclude that the latter should beat the former's record, whether separated by space or time.

(You correctly conclude, from that slide, that Google grew in a less favourable environment than OpenAI et al. You just need to take it one step further into the potential rate for growth and disruption today versus in the past. Put another way, Google could be disrupted quicker than it could disrupt.)

Right, needs more context. How many more people have internet access now?