ChatGPT has quietly become the “busiest hangout” spot on the internet. What started as a productivity tool has now become a digital plaza with more than 800 million registered users, approximately 125 million of whom participate every day. Average session time? Approximately 14 minutes. Facebook hasn’t gotten this much attention since your aunt’s Candy Crush phase.
That’s why meta is nervous
When Sam Altman recently told an interviewer that Meta sees OpenAI as its “strongest competitor,” he wasn’t talking about model parameters or synthetic benchmarks. He mentioned time. The rare attention currency that powers Meta’s $160 billion advertising empire.
Every minute spent chatting with a large language model is a minute not spent scrolling through ads, looking at vacation photos, or inputting information into Meta’s recommendation machines.
ChatGPT’s interface reflects the addictive nature of social feeds. Not through drama, but through dialogue. AI analyst Rohan Paul says the numbers show that’s changing. Users send 2.5 billion prompts every day, each one a micropost between a human and a bot.
According to Samelweb data, OpenAI trafficked 2 billion visitors in May 2025. Within these sessions, users do what they used to do on Facebook: seek validation, share ideas, and vent. Only this time, the party is private, the algorithm is personal, and no one will sell you sneakers.
ChatGPT: The threat behind the feed
Meta businesses only work if users stay in the human space. Because advertising requires attention. Instagram alone is projected to generate more than $32 billion in advertising revenue in the U.S. by 2025, representing more than half of Meta’s domestic revenue. Every minute spent in the ChatGPT prompt box is one less ad impression and one more dent in the flywheel.
What’s more, ChatGPT does more than just answer questions. It is about meeting social needs. LLM can preserve context, generate audio and images, and mimic empathy on demand. Research on AI companion apps like Replika shows that users form deep parasocial and even romantic bonds. Whether it’s comforting, flirting, or simply providing information, these bots meet people where they are. Instantly and effortlessly.
Things that were previously outsourced to timelines (affirmations, discussions, connections) are starting to flow into one-on-one chats. Meta’s feed shows other people so you can get to know yourself. AI companions completely remove the middleman.
Two graphs, two futures
Facebook’s power comes from a single, vast social graph. You and your friend will be compared forever. The power of ChatGPT is fragmented. Each user has a private relationship with a model that remembers their tone, preferences, and humor style.
Inside, that intimacy is carried out in three components. They are memory retrieval for continuity, persona prompts for tone, and fast vector caching to simulate long-term memory. This is a quiet revolution, where the mirrors of millions of individuals are being replaced by one global stage.
Altman understands that Meta is not competing with OpenAI in terms of data centers or proliferation models. They compete for human moments. It’s a “quick check” that turns into 14 minutes of inactivity and emotional interaction before bed.
If even a fraction of Meta’s 3.4 billion daily users shift their engagement to chatbots, the economic impact will quickly cascade. This is because any missing portion represents a measurable loss to your ad inventory.
That’s why, inside Meta’s glass towers, the quiet hum of ChatGPT may sound more like clockwork than innovation.
