AI People Live in an Absolute Bubble
A new report by Reuters/Oxford says it loud and clear
It’s funny.
When I refer to “AI people” I often mean insiders—devs and engineers working at the labs, or scientists doing research at university—or, if I’m being generous, bloggers, journalists, and analysts, who dedicate their full-time jobs to talk/write about AI.
The funny part is that “AI people” today includes literally anyone who knows what AI is—and the headline is still true.
You’d think that the number of people who’d check the box of “Have you heard of generative AI” would be literally everyone by now. A recent international survey (six countries, ~2000 participants from each) conducted by YouGov for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) at the University of Oxford presents a different picture. A rather bubbly one.
Here’s a graph showing the amount of people who have heard about (not even used) generative AI tools:
Across those six countries, a staggering 2-8% have heard of Midjourney. 2-5% for Anthropic’s Claude (not long ago the literal best AI model in the world). What about Perplexity, praised as the next Google? 3% in the US and that’s the highest number.
30% of people in the UK haven’t heard of any generative AI tool, which includes ChatGPT, Bard (Gemini), Bing, Copilot, Llama… In the mother of all Anglo-Saxon countries 1 in 3 people don’t know, quite literally, what the hell AI is (as you all know, AI=ChatGPT for the non-initiated, so it’s a good approximation).
I don’t even want to know how the statistics look for Spain.
Before we jump to premature conclusions, let’s take a look at the entire report and comment on the findings. There’s a lot to unpack.
You thought you were late? Think again.