How fast has AI been adopted compared to social media?

I salute all of you tech titans and illuminati who've got in on this gravy train. Let the empire building begin!

Up for adoption

ChartR

If 2023 was the year it announced itself on the global stage, and 2024 was the year it started to take a leading role, then 2025 has been the year that AI really began calling the shots — whether we like it or not. The technology’s progress has driven the economy, powered the stock market, dictated political discourse, inflamed the trade tensions between the US and China, encroached on the art world, infiltrated nearly all of our devices, and influenced the algorithms that decide what we watch, read, love, and hate. It’s also (finally) driving our cars.

So, how many people are actually using AI today?

If you’ve been on the internet lately, then you’ve definitely interacted with it in some form, whether through an AI-powered social media algorithm, a Google search that offered an AI summary you didn’t ask for, a customer assistance chatbot, or an article that perhaps wasn’t as human-penned as you’d thought. But among a myriad of surveys and benchmarks, one of the easiest ways to gauge the demand for AI is to track the development of the biggest name in the game: ChatGPT, which just last week was reported to be nearing 900 million weekly users. Not bad for a service that’s barely 3 years old.

In fact, most tech platforms have taken much longer to get to a billion users: Gmail had to wait more than a decade, Facebook about 8.5 years, and even the mighty TikTok took ~5 years. Considering those milestones were based on monthly users, whereas the reports for OpenAI’s app are weekly figures, it seems pretty likely that ChatGPT has already blown past the 1 billion monthly user mark… and Google’s not far behind. The tech behemoth’s own AI chatbot effort, Gemini — which recently made such a splash it caused a “code red” threat to OpenAI — is already up to 650 million monthly users.

Of course, as we’ve noted before, it’s a lot easier to scale a tech platform or app in 2025 than it was in 2005 — just ask teenagers, who have found ways to cram yet another platform into their ever-expanding screen time.

Taking accounts

Teenagers’ use of social media has become a hot topic in recent years, with parents and policymakers alike concerned about the impacts of the AI-powered recommendation engines behind many popular apps. Just last week, Australia enacted a world-first ban, blocking under-16s from accessing 10 of the largest platforms to quell teen social media use.

American teens are similarly online, it seems, with a recent Pew Research Center study finding that a record number of them reported being on those platforms “almost constantly,” with huge shares visiting YouTube (76%) and TikTok (61%) every single day. Perhaps more concerning, though, are Pew’s new findings about young people’s AI chatbot use: roughly two-thirds (64%) of surveyed American teens reported ever using chatbots like ChatGPT and Character.AI, with 28% saying they use the tools daily.

From helping students with their homework to acting as an online companion, a growing number of young people are turning to AI to answer their questions on everything from personal issues, to recipes, to career and relationship advice. And, with the ubiquity and frequency of chatbot use rising, there’s a good chance AI could have a bigger impact on teens in the future than social media does today.