Rebecca Winthrop
Biography
Brookings Institution
Publications
A new direction for students in an AI world: prosper, prepare, protectIn November 2022, OpenAI released its frontier Large Language Model (LL M), ChatGPT. Within five days, ChatGPT had five million users. Within two months, that number swelled to 100 million monthly active users. By August 2025, 700 million users across the globe were using ChatGPT (Mehta 2025). Many of those users are students harnessing LLMs for brainstorming, tutoring, creating, and learning; to work better and faster; and, crucially, to outsource their thinking.