Saying that AI is everywhere is an axiom by now, but a question that begets answering is "how much, exactly?" That's what the Financial Times (FT) set out to discover, by collecting data and interviewing execs from popular consumer-facing AI services. While most findings are expected, there are a handful of quite surprising pieces of information, including but not limited to the growth of adoption and shifts in usage patterns. As a minor spoiler, the rate of AI adoption is far outpacing that of even the Internet, as fast as that seemed in the early 2000s.
To illustrate that exact point, OpenAI notes that about one in ten people worldwide have already used ChatGPT in some capacity. Over the span of only three years, the service went from zero to close to 800 million users, a feat that took the Internet some 13-odd years. While there's an easy argument to be made that chatbots have it easy by relying on existing infrastructure (the Internet itself), a comparative ratio of over 4:1 is nevertheless shocking and potentially unseen in the modern world.
