OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has highlighted how people across different age groups are using ChatGPT in unique ways—ranging from a Google substitute to a trusted life advisor. Speaking at Sequoia Capital’s AI Ascent event on May 2, Altman offered insights into the platform’s evolving user demographics and behaviors. The interview was later published on Sequoia Capital’s YouTube channel on Monday.
Altman noted that older users tend to treat ChatGPT like a search engine.
“Gross oversimplification, but like, older people use ChatGPT as a Google replacement,” he said during the event. This group, according to Altman, relies on the chatbot for retrieving factual information and seeking answers in much the same way one would use a traditional search engine.
The usage pattern shifts significantly among younger adults.
“Maybe people in their 20s and 30s use it like a life advisor, something,” Altman said. This demographic, he observed, turns to ChatGPT for decision-making and personal guidance, reflecting a deeper level of engagement with the AI’s conversational and contextual abilities.
Among college students, the integration of ChatGPT is even more immersive.
“And then, like, people in college use it as an operating system,” Altman noted. He elaborated on this point, describing how students build complex workflows around the tool.
“They really do use it like an operating system. 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,” he said.
Altman further shared that for some younger users, ChatGPT plays a near-constant role in personal decision-making.
“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,” he said, pointing to the increasingly personalized and context-aware usage among students.
When asked about how OpenAI itself uses ChatGPT, Altman responded that the AI chatbot plays a major role in development.
“ChatGPT writes a lot of our code,” he said, though he didn’t specify exactly what portion of OpenAI’s codebase was AI-generated. For context, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in October that over 25% of Google’s new code is written by AI.
OpenAI’s own data supports Altman’s observations. In a report released in February, the company said that college students in the United States were using ChatGPT “more than any other use case, more than any other kind of user.”
The same report highlighted that over one-third of individuals aged 18 to 24 in the US had used ChatGPT, underlining the tool’s popularity among younger users.
