A great technology drives its own adoption, its usage is pioneered by the tweens and young adults, it requires minimum effort and investment to hop on board, and it does not need explaining. It grows organically. Examples: internet bubble.
A bad technology: despised by the young adults and tweens, needs trillion of investments and marketing to drive market penetration, every day some boomer (=not in terms of age, but in terms of mentality) explains how you are holding it wrong and it needs a fuckton of explanation. The Pope himself issues an Encyclica warning on the dangers of it, spurning the greatest popular interest in Catholicism since the dark ages. Examples: LLMs.
According to Pew, almost 70% of teens report to have used LLMs/chatbots, and 30% use it daily. This is also over 6 months out of date, which feels like an eternity at the current rate things change.
You mean that after multiple years, 30% of teens haven't even ever used an LLM? Those kids probably don't even know what an LLM means since using google is now using an LLM.
No, it's a myth - actually they scoffed and complained very loudly recently when they were picking a destination for a school trip, and the teacher suggested they would use ChatGPT "quickly" to compare their suggestions. Also anyone who thinks the kids could survive school assignments based on ChatGPT...clearly does not know who schools work these days...
I think my company is a microcosm of the current state. The non-engineering side (HR, correspondence, marketing) are on the "forced adoption" side, giving out gift cards to folks using Glean the most.
In engineering, we can't raise token budgets fast enough. Devs are "routing around damage" when they hit caps, going from claude to opencode to copilot. Productivity is up (roughly) 100-300% in terms of story points and 75-200% in lines of code. And defect rate is down [0], more bugs are caught in review before QA or prod. Our teams are just starting to figure out our new workflows too, for design -> spec -> code -> review, it'll only get better as we refine the process.
It's looking like software industries will reap massive benefits, while most others which have some error tolerance will only see modest gains. It's unclear how it will impact high accuracy fields like legal (it might even be net negative).
Also which is it - a useless technology that has to be force-fed because it sucks, or a economy-shaking game changer that will put folks out of jobs en masse? Those seem like a contradiction.
0 - i think process here is extremely important. I think it would be very easy to create an unmaintainable slopocaplypse. We have an informal platform team of about three (including myself) that have been affectionately and informally dubbed the Tech Priests of Mechanicus Adeptus (warhammer reference) that ensure the prompts/skills and associated tooling are optimal, that code standards are enforced, and that solutions are converging at the system-wide level.
That's a lot of words, out of which I am unable to understand what your material gains had been so far. And I don't mean the bullshit that the hired managers/CEOs usually mention, like story point "productivity" and "tickets closed". I mean the stuff that founders, i.e. people with skin in the game value: what key features did you build with the incredibly productive new workflows and how much ARR did they generate? How much did you decrease your cost of customer acquisition and how much did you increase your customer LTV? Let's skip the gamified "playing house" bullshit and talk numbers.
>A majority of teens use AI chatbots. Roughly two-thirds of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 (64%) say they ever use an AI chatbot, according to a fall 2025 survey.
>Around half of adults under 50 say they interact with AI about once a day or more often. Smaller shares of those 50 and older say the same, according to the June survey.
and mind you, that particular study bends over backwards to say "AI bad".
Most teens do homework, but I'm sure they also despise it, too. And it's been known for years that the industrial school pedagogy is backwards; readings/lectures should be done at home, problem sets should be done in class. But we keep doing it the wrong way because entrenched interests prefer it that way.
We all use them at some point, given how much effort the big tech is investing to make the shitty LLMs un-avoidable, from search to cramming them into support processes etc. The issue is whether people like them. And they mostly do not. (apart from the Office Idiot, who absolutely loves them).
Pretty much every young person whom I know who says “AI bad”, also uses it for work/personal reasons. Which, i think, isn’t wrong. But just funny.
Most understand how LLMs are handy in a lot of scenarios. Pretty much every single person I know in the age range of 12-70s use one app or the other. It doesn’t even matter how much we like it, as if it’s somewhat useful, it will be enshifticated, and profits will soar.
People said the same about Facebook, Netflix/Spotify, Uber/Instacart/etc. Eventually ads will be injected everywhere to turn it into profits.
the completely avoidable ChatGPT app has 1B+ installs on Play Store alone.
your reddit/bluesky/whatever circle of terminally online folx is not representative of the general population. you're utterly detached from reality if you think that young adults in particular give a flying fuck about copyright, water, electricity, or artists and journalists losing their jobs.
Buddy you keep changing the parameters. Nobody talks about downloads, what are you talking about? What circle? Have you been following the graduation ceremonies in the US recently? Seen the AI boosters being booed off into oblivion ? Is that a "terminally online circle"? And if you think young people don't care about the envionment or ethics ... Maybe you should get out a bit more, it sounds like you are describing yourself, talking about terminally online folks...
Not him but in my anecdotal experience I've noticed there's two distinct crowds of younger people: Those that embrace AI, and those that reject it.
There are certainly more that "embrace" it. Maybe not as much as tech executives, but there's a huge amount of students using it for both homework and personal tasks.
Conversely, the second crowd that believe AI is an ontological evil, are a much more vocal (and insular) minority.
All in all though, I've found much more people just generally apathetic than anything. People are generally not positive about slop content, but aren't about to boo tech executives.
The download count of the ChatGPT app per GP, and the insanely pervasive use inside education, somewhat back this up. It's a useful tool, thus people will use it.
> the second crowd that believe AI is an ontological evil, are a much more vocal (and insular) minority.
Wasn't that generally the case that people seeing through something as bad, regardless of whether it indeed was evil or something of lesser degree of badness, were usually the minority? Think we've got ample evidence in each century.
yes, yes. graduate ceremony booing/cheering, the pope's highly invaluable opinion, all the things you saw on the front page here, all the comments you read on reddit, all irrefutable evidence that everyone hates AI.
but meanwhile, new data centers are being frantically built to satisfy the demand.
A great technology drives its own adoption, its usage is pioneered by the tweens and young adults, it requires minimum effort and investment to hop on board, and it does not need explaining. It grows organically. Examples: internet bubble.
A bad technology: despised by the young adults and tweens, needs trillion of investments and marketing to drive market penetration, every day some boomer (=not in terms of age, but in terms of mentality) explains how you are holding it wrong and it needs a fuckton of explanation. The Pope himself issues an Encyclica warning on the dangers of it, spurning the greatest popular interest in Catholicism since the dark ages. Examples: LLMs.