Claude is Having a Hard Time Chasing ChatGPT - Is AI All About the Model?
This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - AI Wars. Check out the full article for more insights.
These days, when most people think about AI they think about OPenAI's ChatGPT, even though there are a few direct competitors and loads of thin wrappers.
Anthropic, the company behind Claude, a model competing directly with ChatGPT, is trying to change that.
Claude, which was released to the App Store and Google Play over the last few months, has finally reached its first $1,000,000 of gross revenue.
Is it a milestone? Yes. But is it a record? Not at all...
I used our App Intelligence to see how fast different AI apps, originals and wrappers, reached their first $1M of gross revenue. Let's have a look at the results:
For this comparison, I chose Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and ChatOn, which is one of the most popular wrappers right now.
It should come as no surprise that ChatGPT wins this race. Our estimates show it reached its first million in just three weeks. Right now ChatGPT is grossing around $1.5M every day, and that's also growing rapidly.
ChatOn, a thin wrapper on ChatGPT with a few conveniences, reached its first million in 11 weeks. Our estimates show ChatOn grossed $6.6M in July.
Claude ranked third in this comparison, having reached its first million in 16 weeks. I think Claude's way forward will be extremely challenging on mobile. More on that in a bit - let's finish the analysis first.
Microsoft's Copilot, which is really a wrapper around ChatGPT, got its first million after 19 weeks and needed a super bowl ad to get there. Copilot grossed just $678K in July, according to our App Intelligence. What a difference.
And last on our list is Perplexity, which aims to replace traditional search engines with AI. Our estimates show Perplexity got to a million after 22 weeks. It grossed just over a million in July, its highest haul to date.
Given this comparison, the obvious question is, "can Claude grow?". The answer is maybe...
As it is right now, Claude, the app, feels like a plain version of ChatGPT. An older one at that. So if you compare the two, there's really no reason to use it over ChatGPT. I suspect Anthropic is banking on its model outshining ChatGPT, and even if it will, I doubt people will switch over.
Why?
I've been saying this for a while but the main challenge of these apps is making it easier for the masses to interact with a text based AI. ChatGPT didn't exactly do it, but it was the first, had a ton of publicity early on, and augmented that with paid ads, that it became the go-to solution.
Thin wrappers like ChatOn are trying to do that by building little conveniences that are really just predefined prompts, to make AI more user-friendly, and that's leading to millions in revenue without owning the core technology.
Claude has neither, and based on its monthly revenue, we estimate that Claude has 25K paying subscribers so far. Sounds like a lot but ChatGPT added 291K new paying subscribers in July, so it really isn't.
I believe that for Claude to have a chance it needs to learn from the thin wrappers and not to copy ChatGPT. If Claude augments it s simple chat interface with more actionable features the masses can use, and also takes promoting its mobile app seriously, it might have a chance. And none of this has anything to do with its model.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
