At first glance its like Hollywood movies announcing they're the best selling of all time, ignoring inflation. In other words a ratchet just to get clicks.
However this is relevant because this is an investor report helping people forecast, and this stat helps calibrate readers expectations of just how fast a product can scale in this day & age, using a relevant comparison of products in the same category that when launched offered the same step change in value.
My gripe is not with relevancy of the data, its with the chosen comparison. Comparing with Google at the beginning of the internet revolution, to now with billions of internet enabled devices across the world, is not a fair comparison and does not give any meaningful insight.
but that’s precisely the point and it does give insight. Google scaled off of existing infrastructure like computers. Computers scale off of existing infrastructure like electricity.
The point is to compare current era of scaling to the previous era and see how much faster it is.
It’s not comparing Google to Open Ai. It’s comparing the environment that produced Google to the environment that produced Open Ai.
It’s kind of obvious that new eras will produce faster scaling. But what if you ran the numbers and it wasn’t true?
There are plenty of times when this happens, the obvious is actually something different. This time isn’t the case but that’s the point of research, to back up common sense with evidence.
Also, it is very different to know that it is faster vs it is 5.5x faster. The 5.5x might not be completely accurate but it’s more in depth than just your intuition.
There is wisdom in simple, profound statements that open up new lines of thought. But There is also wisdom in doing research to make things you already know quantified and more concrete.
One example of research being wisdom is demographics. It’s one thing to know that there are more whites than blacks in the US, it’s another thing to know that there are 200m whites and 40m blacks. The numbers shed light into precision and also validate or clarify your thinking. For instance maybe you thought that blacks should be the second largest demographic since they have been here longest. Not so, Hispanic is at around 60m. Or maybe you knew that already. But if you wanted to argue with others about demographic growth and what is actually happening in immigration, knowing the numbers is wisdom, and going off of intuition leads to “they took my job” hot takes.
If you continue reading, they're comparing ChatGPT with more companies than just Google. TikTok and Fortnite are also included for example, both came much later so I'm guessing you'll feel it is a bit fairer of comparison.
However this is relevant because this is an investor report helping people forecast, and this stat helps calibrate readers expectations of just how fast a product can scale in this day & age, using a relevant comparison of products in the same category that when launched offered the same step change in value.
Also, quantity has a quality of its own.