Here’s What Your ChatGPT Use Says About Your Age

“Gross oversimplification, but older people use ChatGPT as a Google replacement,” says OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as reported by Business Insider. Older Gen Zers (Zoomers?) and Millennials? They “use it like a life advisor…” he says, of people in their 20s and 30s. And younger than that? “People in college use it as an operating system.”

Altman’s interview took place on May 2, although it was only just uploaded to Sequoia Capital’s YouTube channel on Monday, May 12 for everybody to watch.

as an operating system?

OpenAI owns ChatGPT, a generative AI that burst onto the scene in such a way that only people living under a rock since late 2022 wouldn’t have heard of it by now. In which case, you can simply ask ChatGPT, “What is ChatGPT?”

So how does one use ChatGPT (or any generative AI) as an operating system? As a Google replacement, sure. That one’s easy to understand. And as a life advisor, I can question the wisdom of entrusting important life decisions to AI, but the “how” is easy enough to comprehend.

It’s the operating system comment that gets me wondering. So how does Altman see ChatGPT’s younger users using it?

“They really do use it like an operating system,” he says. “They have complex ways to set it up to connect it to a bunch of files, and they have fairly complex prompts memorized in their head or in something where they paste in and out…

“There’s this other thing where they don’t really make life decisions without asking ChatGPT what they should do. It has the full context on every person in their life and what they’ve talked about.”

Connected to a bunch of files? Giving ChatGPT a sort of background profile on themselves so that it has more context sounds clever. But the privacy implications would be alarming. I’ll stick to using ChatGPT as a partner with which to practice languages.