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How many of the apps downloaded in India deliver the GPT technology they say they are?
The growing popularity of AI-based GPT technology apps for chat has been taken up enthusiastically in India too where they are being downloaded in vast numbers.
This is reflected in the sharp increase in their rankings, based on the number of times they have been downloaded in India, according to data from Sensor Tower and App Annie (now known as data.ai).
While there is no firm number for the total downloads, many experts and chatbots say it is an estimated one million over the last few months.
GPT or AI-based Generative Pre-Training Transformer chat technology has taken the world by storm since it was launched last November by San Francisco-based OpenAI.
GPT is a neural machine learning technology trained by using data from the internet to generate and type text.
The user gives a prompt to the app, asking a question, and in seconds GPT gives a written response.
Its potential has generated enormous excitement because it is better at creating content that has a language structure than anything that has come before it.
Close on the heels of OpenAI's launch, both Google and Microsoft, not wanting to be left behind, announced last week that they would incorporate GPT into their search engines.
According to Sensor Tower, Open Chat, a popular chatbot app which is headquartered in Vietnam and was released last December, has seen a phenomenal rise in its rankings in India, based on downloads.
It has moved from 28 position in the productivity app tool segment charts on February 2 to number eight position on February 14 on Google Play.
Chat God, which was also released globally in December, saw its ranking move up steeply from 225 on February 2 on the productivity list to 34 position on February 14, again on Google Play.
The phenomenon is not limited only to Android phones in India.
Sensor Tower data shows that AI+Chatbot, another global player in the space, has also moved up during the same period from number 130 position in the productivity segment on February 2 to number 29 position on February 14 on the Apple store.
In fact, a whole host of new apps in this space have been released in January-February and are jostling for customer attention.
A new app which was released this month, Rapid ChatGPT, has risen from number 341 in the rankings on February 8 to 132 just six days later in the productivity segment by App Annie which lists new apps separately.
As for Chat AI GPT which was released on February 3, it has moved in the productivity segment from number 409 in the rankings on February 12 to 109 on February 14.
Then there is South Korean block chain company Wemix which launched Ask Me GPT in the first week of last month and is ranked at 533 in the productivity list in India by App Annie.
A whole battalion of Indian startups have also joined the party though it is currently difficult to ascertain the total number.
But there is growing concern about how many of the apps downloaded in India are fakes and even whether they are delivering the GPT technology they say they are, especially as some of them are moving to a subscription model with pretty hefty charges starting from Rs 499.
On the question of whether they are delivering the goods, Nikhil Gupta, co-founder and CEO of ArmorCode Inc in the US which is in the digital security business, says the challenge is for users to know whether the app is actually using the GPT chat engine at all or other chatbot technologies but claiming something else.
"The other problem is whether malware is being injected into the phone while downloading these apps.
"Because of their open architecture, it will be more difficult for Google Play to ascertain these things than Apple which is a closed system," said Gupta.
He believes the solution is to get third party endorsement that the apps are actually doing what they claim.
The only way to ascertain the genuineness of their claims, he adds, is by asking for a bill of material from the app developers for all the libraries which have gone into the making of the software.
This can then be certified by companies like ArmorCode.
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff.com
