Not sure if these are the best stats to illustrate the point, but ChatGPT was released November 2022, 2.5 years ago, and they currently claim ~1 billion users [1]
By comparison, iPhone sales were something like 30 million over the same time period, June 2007 through 2009. [2]
In other words, what took ChatGPT several months took smartphones several years.
Of course there are problems with the comparison (iPhones are expensive, but many people bought each version of the iPhone making the raw user count go down, Sam Altman is exaggerating, people use LLMs other than ChatGPT, blah blah blah), so maybe let's not concentrate on this particular analogy. The point is: even a very skeptical view of how many people use LLMs day-to-day has to acknowledge they are relatively popular, for better or worse.
I think we're better served trying to keep the cat from scratching us rather than trying to put it back in the bag. Ham-fisted megalomaniac CEOs forcing a dangerous technology on workers before we all understand the danger is a big problem, that's for sure. To the original point, "AI-first is the new RTO", there's definitely some juice there, but it's not because the general public is anti-AI.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/martineparis/2025/04/12/chatgpt...
[2] https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/technology--media-a...
You are comparing a cheap subscription service to an expensive piece of hardware that would replace hardware that most people already owned
Of course smartphones were slower to adopt. Everyone had phones already, and they were expensive!
ChatGPT is *free