> never saw people talking about VR in public, nor NFTs, and the closest I got to seeing blockchain in public were adverts, not hearing random people around me chatting about it. The only people I ever saw in real life talking about self-driving cars were the ones I was talking to myself, and everyone else was dismissive of them. Voice assistants were mainly mocked from day 1, with the Alex advert being re-dubbed as a dystopian nightmare.
Isn't that funny? It speaks exactly to the GP's point about how frothing and uninformative the "zeitgeist" can be, as my experience happens to have been the opposite of yours. The people I happened to be casually brushing around during those earlier fads happened to be hip to them, or maybe my ears were more attentive, and so I heard them mentioned more often and with more enthusiasm.
In contrast, most of what I happen to hear about generative AI, outside of HN, tends to be idly laughing at its foibles and misrepresentation if it's mentioned at all.
I don't expect you to have the same experience as me, but I'm careful not to assume too much based on either of ours.
I mean nobody needs to bother with anecdotes here. chatgpt.com hit 3.7B visits in October and was #8 in worldwide internet traffic. Open AI say they have 300M weekly active users and 1B messages per day.
The idea that it's some fad with no utility or that the general public knows little about it is at this point laughable. It's the software product with by far the fastest adoption any software product has ever seen.
And if people want to lump that in with bitcoin or VR or whatever, shrug, i just don't know what to say.
How many paid users? Is a paid user generating profit right now? Google had to inject advertising in its search results to start earning real money. What will OpenAI do? That's the PMF.
I don't know what you think nearly 4B visits per month is (and top ten in worldwide traffic) that "a small group of active users" can generate. 300M active users a week is not a small group and you do not get there without general public awareness.
> I mean nobody needs to bother with anecdotes here. chatgpt.com hit 3.7B visits in October and was #8 in worldwide internet traffic. Open AI say they have 300M weekly active users and 1B messages per day.
As far as the "zeitgeist" conversation goes, though, there's one story in the non-tech news about AI right now and it isn't how it's making everyone's life easier. It's, yet again, a story about how someone trusted it and got burned because the markov chain landed on something not true.
Isn't that funny? It speaks exactly to the GP's point about how frothing and uninformative the "zeitgeist" can be, as my experience happens to have been the opposite of yours. The people I happened to be casually brushing around during those earlier fads happened to be hip to them, or maybe my ears were more attentive, and so I heard them mentioned more often and with more enthusiasm.
In contrast, most of what I happen to hear about generative AI, outside of HN, tends to be idly laughing at its foibles and misrepresentation if it's mentioned at all.
I don't expect you to have the same experience as me, but I'm careful not to assume too much based on either of ours.