AI is still underhyped

Looking at all the online discourse, it might feel like everybody is using AI.

But that’s really not the case.

Contrary to all the proclamations that AI is overhyped, if anything, I’d argue that AI is still underhyped.

And I think the best available data is broadly on my side.

If you look at surveys of AI usage, regular usage is still surprisingly low. Depending on how you define usage and which survey you look at, only a minority of people seem to be using these tools frequently. And in places like India, we don’t even have particularly good surveys to begin with.

More importantly, the people who use these tools the most are still largely what we’d call early adopters.

The adoption among the normies, so to speak, isn’t all that much.

And if you exclude tech workers, power users, and people who spend their entire lives online talking about AI, I’d imagine the numbers drop quite sharply.

I was reminded of this recently when a friend called me to ask about some financial course he was thinking of taking.

I told him that he’d probably be better off using ChatGPT to learn whatever he wanted to learn instead of paying for some overpriced, pointless course which, more often than not, will have some idiotic instructor who has very little clue what he’s talking about.

He found this a little hard to believe.

He asked me: isn’t a course better because it has some structure?

And I said, well, ChatGPT can give you all the structure you want.

But more importantly, the fact that you don’t need structure is precisely what makes these tools so useful for learning.

You can ask whatever you want. You can ask stupid questions. You can ask the same question ten different ways. You can ask it to explain something like you’re five or like an idiot. You can jump from one topic to another, go down some random rabbit hole, and come back.

It felt like he couldn’t quite picture what I was talking about.

And this is precisely why I think AI is underhyped.

I’m not even talking about the fancy stuff.

Forget agents, autonomous companies, AGI, and whatever else people are verbally ejaculating about on Twitter on a given day.

I’m talking about what Zvi Mowshowitz calls mundane utility.

Just boring, everyday usefulness.

Using an LLM instead of Googling something.

Asking basic questions.

Summarizing something.

Writing a response to an annoying email.

Writing some basic ad copy.

Creating an image for social media.

Translating text.

Transcribing audio.

Understanding some concept you don’t know.

Learning how to use Excel.

Taking some incoherent brain dump and turning it into something vaguely readable.

These are all incredibly mundane things.

But that’s the point.

I don’t think most people realize just how much utility these tools can offer ordinary people on an ordinary day.

And yes, the absolute user numbers for things like ChatGPT and Gemini are already enormous.

But those big numbers can be misleading.

There is a massive difference between having opened ChatGPT a few times and having internalized the idea that whenever you’re confused, stuck, curious, trying to learn something, trying to write something, or trying to avoid some irritating piece of grunt work, you can just ask an LLM.

These are still very, very early days.

And if you’re sitting there thinking you’re too late to AI, that everybody else has gotten some enormous head start, that other people are already “AI natives” or “AI experts,” and that you’re somehow behind in your career because you haven’t figured all of this out yet—

all of that is utter bullshit.

You’re not late.

In fact, I suspect it’ll be very hard to be late for quite some time.

Because most people probably won’t use these tools heavily. They’ll continue doing whatever they’ve always been doing in their personal and professional lives because it works well enough.

So regardless of what you think about AI, regardless of whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic about it, and regardless of whatever everybody else is saying online, I’d recommend doing something much simpler.

Use these tools heavily.

Try them for everything.

Personal things. Professional things. Serious things. Stupid things.

See where they work for you and where they don’t.

And then make up your own mind.

You might be surprised by just how useful they are.