On June 4th, the quest for an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT surged, with global searches for Google’s Gemini reaching a remarkable 327,058,
At the time, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, claimed that Gemini Ultra performed better than GPT-V4 on a series of text and multimodal capabilities.
The spike coincided with the outage of ChatGPT, as evident from the parallel trend lines of search volumes for “Gemini” and “ChatGPT down” on that morning.
Initial reports of ChatGPT’s downtime surfaced just before 8 AM London time on June 4th, as per DownDetector. Consequently, users turned to Google, propelling Gemini, Google’s chatbot alternative, into the limelight with a significant surge in searches.
Normally, “Gemini” garners around 204,991 daily searches globally, based on data from May 4th to June 3rd, 2024. However, in the wake of ChatGPT’s outage, searches for “Gemini” skyrocketed by nearly 60%.
As users worldwide grappled with ChatGPT’s unavailability, Gemini emerged as a trending topic and a viable substitute for conversational AI needs. Within just four hours of ChatGPT’s downtime, global searches for Gemini peaked at 327,058.
The absence of ChatGPT also led to increased interest in alternatives such as “Microsoft Copilot” and “ChatGPT alternative.” Typically, there are about 11,090 daily searches for “Microsoft Copilot” and 898 for “ChatGPT alternative.”
However, on June 4th, these figures rose to 16,677 and 11,000, respectively. Nevertheless, the search volumes for these alternatives pale in comparison to those for Gemini.
Anthropic’s Claude 3, Perplexity AI and Gemini also experienced some downtime shortly after ChatGPT went down. Tech experts believe the wider AI outages happened most likely due to high demand from migrating ChatGPT users seeking alternatives and thus briefly overloading competitors’ capacities.
This is according to an analysis from QR Code Generator. Their experts also observed that the surge in searches for “Gemini” correlates to how much people searched for “ChatGPT down” over the same period.
The search volume axes for these two keywords trended in parallel on the morning of June 4th
The following day, they observed the search volumes for “Perplexity” and “Claude”, both of which offer AI-powered chatbots. Their axes had a consistent evolution with axes for searches of “ChatGPT down”, “Gemini” and “ChatGPT alternative”.
Both Perplexity and Claude, as well as Gemini, suffered brief outages on June 4th. Perplexity’s error screen read: “We’re getting a lot of questions right now and have reached our capacity. Please come back soon.”
Considering Google search patterns for all four AI services, tech experts were more inclined to believe that the reason for the outages of Perplexity, Claude and Gemini is migrating ChatGPT users overloading their capacities.
The first reports of ChatGPT’s outage occurred in the early hours of June 4th, just before 8 AM in London (or 3 AM New York time), according to DownDetector.
ChatGPT Alternatives
Marc Porcar, CEO of QR Code Generator PRO S.L, says people seem to have gravitated towards ChatGPT alternatives, which most likely saw their capacities stretched too thin to a breaking point.
“What is really interesting about this wide AI outage is how big of a demand there is for AI chatbots and other associated tools,” Porcar said.
“And bear in mind that these alternatives are tech giants themselves and yet even they could not withstand handling the volume of work usually required by ChatGPT users,”
“This is a snapshot of where we are today in terms of AI usage, which further cements just how massive of a role AI plays in our daily lives already.” he said.
The surge in Gemini searches by 60% during the OpenAI downtime underscores the dependency on AI platforms like ChatGPT for information retrieval and engagement.
Meanwhile, on May 24th, 2024, findings from the ChatGPT taskforce, initiated by the European Data Protection Board (EDPB), were disclosed. The report highlighted OpenAI’s ongoing struggle to meet European Data Accuracy Standards.
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, has become increasingly popular as a leading AI-powered conversational agent. Google released the Gemini chatbot at the end of 2023 chatbot as a successor to LaMDA and PaLM 2.
