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

In the case of synthetic intelligence, your age would possibly form your perspective greater than you suppose.

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

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

Right this moment’s school college students push it even additional, treating AI as an all-purpose assistant, counting on it for every little thing from learning to inventive tasks.

“It’s a simplification, however older folks use ChatGPT like Google,” Altman mentioned. “Individuals 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 mentioned. “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 selections with out asking ChatGPT, which has full context on the folks of their lives and previous conversations.”

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

The reminiscence improve permits the AI to retain context from previous interactions, making its responses extra personalised 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 anticipate the know-how to have a major influence on their lives, based on a December 2024 report by the Affiliation of Gear Producers.

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

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

“The worth will proceed to return from three issues: constructing extra infrastructure, smarter fashions, and the sort of scaffolding to combine these things into society,” he mentioned. “In case you push on these, I feel the remainder will kind itself out at the next stage of element.”

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair