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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

> Pew writes that 44 percent of U.S. adults now say they use OpenAI’s chatbot, a figure that’s more than doubled since 2023.

> The next most popular chatbot is Gemini (24 percent), followed by Copilot (17 percent) and MetaAI (14 percent), with Grok (8 percent), Claude (6 percent) and Character.ai (3 percent) lagging behind.

Claude in 6th place, behind Gemini and Copilot and MetaAI and Grok?

No wonder the general public still think AI is junk.

Update: here's the underlying report: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...

The question there was "% of U.S. adults who say they ever use the following AI chatbots", so it's not a measure of overall usage, just exposure. Not surprising Gemini and Grok and MetaAI rank higher then.

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I think there is a valid point here that Anthropic has a found a great product-market fit among programmers.

By comparison, all the rest of the tools non-programmers get exposure to are floundering around trying to be everything to everyone. It's a push not a pull.

The rest of the pack, when given everyday real-world computing tasks, for people that don't know what a terminal is, just suck. (e.g. "copilot, fix the spacing issue in this word document" or literally any apple genmoji attempt with more than two basic english words)

I had a big culture shock moment when I had to prep some slides a few weeks back. I'd assumed it would be a breeze now: I've always been good at making slide decks, I had a clear classification-friendly idea of exactly what I wanted them to look like, and there's even an AI native integration! Nope, didn't work, just had to shuffle components around like I always have.

Ah, they're using the wrong model, of course. "AI" hasn't failed, it's the users who are wrong.

Is Claude really that much better than all the others for normal use?

Yes. There’s not really any doubt about it.

It's not that Claude is better, it's that Gemini and Copilot are so overwhelmingly bad.

Especially the free tiers. Meta AI, too.

Weaker models and less powerful harnesses give people a very sub-par experience compared to what you get if you pay for access to the better tools and models.

Normal users aren't using harnesses in the sense developers think of them. They're interacting with models where they've been shoehorned in for no good reason, or they're using them nearly entirely through chat interfaces.

Yeah, I'm sure the public will totally 180 on AI as soon as the newest model release rolls out lmfao

People here genuinely think public perception on AI is a model issue, that's how you know it's become an echo chamber.

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