Nearly all colleagues I know working inside a very large non-tech organisation are using Copilot for part of their work in the past 12 months. I have never seen tech adoption this quick for normal every day consumer. Not PC, Not Internet, Not Smartphone.
I actually had discussions with parents about our kids using ChartGPT. Every single one of them at school are using it. Honestly I didn't like it but they were actually the one who got used to it first and I quote "Who still uses Google?". That was when I learn there will be a tectonic shift in tech.
Does it actually add productivity? may be. Is it worth the trillion dollar investment? I have no idea. But are we going back? As someone who knows a lot about consumer behaviour I will say that is a definite no.
Note to myself. This feels another iPhone moment again. Except this time around lots of the tech people are skeptic of it, but consumer are adopting faster. When iPhone launch a lot of tech people knew it will be the future. But consumer took some time. Even MKBHD acknowledge his first Smartphone was in the iPhone 4s era.
I'm not drinking the AGI kool-aid but I use LLMs daily. We pay not one but two AI subscriptions at home (including Claude).
It's extremely useful. From translation to proof-reading to synthetizing to expanding on something to writing little dumb functions to helping with spreadsheet formulas to documenting code to writing commit messages to helping find movie names (when I only remember very partially the plot) etc.
How is this not already adding a trillion dollars to the economy?
It's not about the infrastructure: all that counts are the models. They're here to stay. They're not going away.
It's the single biggest time-saver I've ever seen for mundane tasks (and, no, it doesn't write good code: it write shitty pathetic underperforming insecure code... And yet it's still useful for proofs of concept / one-offs / throwaway).