Is AI all a fad? A new report suggests very few people are using tools like ChatGPT and the hype is being misconstrued for actual public interest
What you need to know
A new report suggests that AI is just hype, with only a few users leveraging the technology's capabilities daily.
The report's author claims most people are misconstruing AI hype for public interest.
A separate report suggests GPT-4o's launch led to the biggest spike ever in ChatGPT's downloads and revenue on mobile.
As you might have probably figured out, huge corporations are investing heavily in generative AI. Apple pulled the plug on its electric car project and channeled the resources to AI advances. A new report suggests OpenAI and Apple recently signed a deal to bring ChatGPT to the iPhone.
Perhaps a bid to catch up with Microsoft, which according to analysts is on the brink of reaching its iPhone moment with AI after becoming the world's most valuable company ahead of Apple with over $3 trillion in market capitalization.
Interestingly, a new report by the Reuters Institute and Oxford University indicates very few people are using AI, despite the overwhelming hype around the technology and its advances (via BBC).
The research included a survey that examined 12,000 people across six countries to determine the usefulness of AI tools like ChatGPT. Strangely enough, only 2% of the participants use AI tools daily. The study also revealed that the youth (ages 18-24) are more inclined toward AI and more likely to integrate the technology into their routines.
While speaking to the BBC, the report's lead author, Dr. Richard Fletcher explained that most people are misconstruing the hype around AI for public interest.
Is anyone actually using AI tools?
In a poll recently featured on Windows Central's website, half of our polled readers disclosed that they never use Copilot. At the time, Microsoft had just begun testing a new way to launch the tool like an AI genie if you so much as tickle the taskbar icon.
Interestingly, a separate report by Appfigures suggests that OpenAI's launch of its new flagship GPT-4o model with reasoning capabilities across text, audio, and image in real-time contributed to ChatGPT's biggest spike ever in revenue and downloads on mobile.
In my opinion, the reservations towards AI are mainly centered on privacy, security, and applicable use cases. A great example would be Microsoft's next-gen AI Windows Recall feature, which is expected to ship to Windows 11 in June. It acts like a time capsule capturing snapshots of everything you do on your PC, allowing you to refer to the locally stored snapshots for future reference.
While Microsoft promises the feature is 100% privacy-focused and presents it as an opt-in experience, most users have blatantly raised security and privacy concerns across social media, with some even comparing it to a Black Mirror episode. The UK data watchdog is already looking into some of the raised issues.
Microsoft promised that it wouldn't use the data accessed by the feature to train its models. The tech giant is shipping these next-gen AI features exclusively to Copilot+ PCs with powerful NPUs, however, we already know that Windows Recall can run on unsupported hardware but with a huge performance compromise.
