From Search Bar to Life Coach: How Different Generations Use ChatGPT

On the subject of synthetic intelligence, your age would possibly form your perspective greater than you assume.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Child Boomers, millennials, and Gen Z every see AI via a unique lens—a generational divide that might affect how the know-how evolves.

Older generations are inclined to view AI as a sophisticated search engine. Millennials usually use it extra like a digital therapist, Altman stated throughout Sequoia Capital’s AI Ascent 2025 occasion earlier this month.

Right now’s faculty college students push it even additional, treating AI as an all-purpose assistant, counting on it for the whole lot from finding out to inventive tasks.

“It’s a simplification, however older individuals use ChatGPT like Google,” Altman stated. “Folks of their 20s and 30s use it as a life advisor.”

Altman in contrast this generational hole in AI use to the early days of smartphones, when youthful customers tailored shortly whereas older generations took longer to regulate.

“[College students] use it like an working system,” Altman stated. “They set it up in complicated methods, join it to recordsdata, and have detailed prompts memorized or saved to stick out and in. It’s spectacular. Some don’t make life choices with out asking ChatGPT, which has full context on the individuals of their lives and previous conversations.”

Altman attributed this transformation within the youngest cohort’s conduct to GPT’s new reminiscence characteristic, which OpenAI launched in April.

The reminiscence improve permits the AI to retain context from previous interactions, making its responses extra customized and constant over time.

The OpenAI CEO’s feedback replicate a broader pattern in generational AI adoption. Solely 20% of child boomers use AI weekly, in comparison with 70% of Gen Z.

In the meantime, 55% of Gen X and 58% of millennials say they count on the know-how to have a major influence on their lives, in response to a December 2024 report by the Affiliation of Gear Producers.

This influence is primarily pushed by advances in generative AI and its capacity to imitate human interplay, a phenomenon that consultants warn may result in an unhealthy attachment as know-how turns into extra ubiquitous.

Regardless of these issues, Altman sees a way forward for elevated worth for AI.

“The worth will proceed to come back from three issues: constructing extra infrastructure, smarter fashions, and the type of scaffolding to combine these things into society,” he stated. “For those who push on these, I feel the remainder will type itself out at the next stage of element.”

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair