OpenAI Shares Data on How People Are Using ChatGPT
Your weekly dose of AI & Startup news on our path to 1000 Aussie Startups
Did you know that while everyone's debating AI's future, the most interesting stories are happening right now? From ChatGPT users quietly rewriting how we interact with AI, to Australian startups challenging Silicon Valley giants, to violinist-founders solving problems you didn't know existed.
Welcome to MLAI's newsletter, spotting the trends before they become headlines.
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Ecosystem Pulse
How people are using ChatGPT
Largest study to date of consumer ChatGPT usage shows demographic gaps narrowing, with economic value emerging across both personal and professional applications.
ChatGPT report reveals that as of mid-2025, non-work usage has surged to become the dominant mode of interaction, making up more than 70% of all consumer conversations. This marks a significant shift from just a year prior, when non-work messages represented only 53% of usage. The study credits this growth primarily to evolving user behaviour across cohorts rather than a change in the types of new users joining the platform, indicating that users are gradually discovering broader personal and everyday applications for AI tools.
The report identifies three central themes, practical guidance, seeking information, and writing, that collectively account for nearly 80% of all ChatGPT interactions. Practical guidance includes tutoring, advice, and creative ideation; seeking information serves as a flexible substitute for web search; and writing encompasses everything from editing and critiquing user text to drafting emails and translating documents.
Notably, most writing tasks involve improving existing content rather than generating entirely new text, reinforcing the platform’s role as a collaborative aide in users’ daily digital activities.
Demographically, ChatGPT has seen a broadening of its user base, with the gender gap closing and even reversing: by June 2025, active users with typically feminine names slightly outnumber those with masculine names. Younger users under 26 send nearly half of all messages, but adoption rates have increased fastest in low- and middle-income countries over the last year. Highly educated users and professionals, in particular, continue to favour ChatGPT for work-related communication and decision support, but the accelerating growth in leisure and practical everyday uses suggests the platform’s value extends well beyond the workplace.
Read the full report here.
Aussie Startup Targets Sub-$100M ChatGPT Alternative
Sovereign Australia AI pushes for a locally built, ethically sourced large language model
Sovereign Australia AI, a new entrant in the artificial intelligence space, has announced plans to develop an Australian-built large language model for less than AUD 100 million.
The company’s approach includes allocating AUD 10 million to fairly compensate copyright holders, covering content such as books, news, and music, while adhering to robots.txt restrictions to respect websites that opt out of data scraping.
On the infrastructure side, Sovereign Australia AI has secured 256 Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs, which will be hosted at a NextDC data centre in Melbourne.
The broader goal: to establish sovereign AI capability in Australia, models that are trained, governed, and owned locally. The startup argues this will reduce reliance on overseas systems, safeguard intellectual property, and better align AI tools with Australian standards and values.
Startup to lookout for - MUSEAI
MuseAI, selected for the Techstars Sydney 2025 cohort, is an AI-powered second brain for music creators drowning in 600+ untitled voice memos, scattered lyrics, and unfinished songs. MuseAI solves this by providing a unified workspace where ideas are intelligently captured, organised, and made both searchable and shareable.
The platform turns fleeting sparks into rediscoverable building blocks for finished songs, using AI-powered tagging, organisation, audio-to-audio similarity search, and lyric transcription. Its standout feature, Ask Your Muse, lets artists literally chat with their music. They can ask questions like “What ideas do I have in A minor?” or “How would you describe this song for a marketing release?” and get instant, context-aware answers.
Behind MuseAI is founder & CEO Jad Al Masri — a violinist, composer, lawyer, and creative director, alongside a powerful early team. His musical work fuses over a dozen genres and has been endorsed by Timbaland. As someone living the very problem, his background fuels MuseAI’s mission to let artists stay in flow while AI handles the chaos.
Not long ago, Jad pitched at MLAI Pitch Night, and now MuseAI is preparing to launch its iOS app with early music creator partnerships open and a waitlist that can be joined here.
🎓 Learn in 1 Minute: Function Calling vs. Agents
Function calling is like giving an AI a panel of buttons it can press. Each button represents a function you’ve defined check the weather, look up a stock price, or send a calendar invite. When you ask, “What’s the weather in Sydney?”, the model doesn’t guess. It presses the weather button with the right input and returns the result. It’s reliable, predictable, and safe.
Agents, on the other hand, are AIs that can decide what to do next. Instead of pressing one button, they plan a series of steps. If you ask for the best time to visit Sydney, an agent might search the web, compare different sources, check historical weather patterns, and then draft a travel summary. They’re more flexible, but also harder to control, sometimes they get stuck or wander off track.
The difference comes down to control. Function calling gives you precision and trust, while agents give you initiative and adaptability. Think of function calling as a calculator that always gets the answer right, and agents as a junior assistant who can take on bigger tasks but still needs supervision.
🎧 Podcast Picks
The Bootstrap – Building Startups from Scratch – Featuring Dr Sam Donegan
This episode tackles some of the biggest misunderstandings about AI, essential listening for any founder. If you’re drowning in conflicting advice on how AI fits into your startup, Dr Sam shares clear, practical insights to help you cut through the noise.
Listen here:
Upcoming Events
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📅 AFC Founder Campus
Icerberg on The Future of Fundraising - Pre-raise essentials for Founders.
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Find me a job in tech (this week)
💼 Fouding AI Engineer - indi (Full-time - Sydney)
indi is the shared AI co-pilot for child development - built to support the parents, carers, and clinicians navigating complex health journeys with kids who don't fit the mould.
Stack: Python, Supabase, React/Next.js, ReactNative, Cloud infra (Fly.io, Docker, Postgres), and AI tooling (LangGraph, OpenAI API, custom evals).
📧Apply here.
💼 Senior Back End Engineer - Magic Eden (Remote - Australia)
Magic Eden is building something that’s never been done before: a global, always-on sports betting exchange designed to be the fairest in the world. Instead of the house always winning, it’s peer-to-peer, transparent, and instant. That alone makes it compelling, fixing a system that’s been broken forever.
Requirements:
6+ years’ experience in software engineering (Node.js, AWS, databases). Bonus for fintech, blockchain, or sports betting experience.
📧Apply here.
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