ChatGPT is a word now. People may use Perplexity, or Google, or Grok to ask questions online. And later they tell you "ChatGPT told me this". It's a new "I googled in Yahoo".
ChatGPT is the 5th most visited site (as well as has nearly a billion weekly active users) and none of the competitors are even close. In the consumer space, Gemini is doing well but Claude is not even in the same galaxy. OpenAI is undoubtedly the leader in consumer LLMs and by a large margin. I'm sure there are mixups, but if someone is telling you they're using chatGPT, they almost certainly mean they're using chatGPT.
The consumer market is worthless though. Consumers will never pay, so the only revenue option is ads which barely, if even at all, pay for inference costs.
Ads implemented remotely competently would be worth a lot of money and more than pay for inference. Inference is cheap, especially outside token expensive ordeals like agentic coding.
I’m pretty sure Gemini would be the leader in consumer LLMs considering it’s on every single search result. Every single google search is also usage of gemini.
Google stuffing things in the search results of existing users does not mean active participation or usage. (Not that I'm saying it's not getting used but it's just a feature of google search, and only a fraction of the kind of queries llms get anyway)
Perhaps it's just regional, but I've been noticing more and more people saying "chat" to describe ANY ai chat interface including ChatGPT. They might have a Kleenex problem on their hands.
