If AI adoption is actually this low, as someone who’s worked in crypto for years, I can’t help but see the same mistake happening all over again. We spent years trying to get normal people to care about wallets, chains, tokens, gas, bridging, and all the machinery underneath the experience instead of abstracting it away behind products people simply wanted to use. AI increasingly feels like it’s doing the same thing with models, prompts, tokens, context windows, agents, tools, memory, harnesses, and all the other technical know-how you increasingly need to actually squeeze the full value out of these systems. The current AI paradigm asks an insane amount from the user. You have to recognize what problems AI can solve in the first place, imagine what the system might be capable of, figure out what you want, translate an abstract goal into instructions, break complex tasks down into something it can act on, provide the right context, decide what to delegate, and then evaluate, verify, and iterate on the output. Before AI can reduce your cognitive load, it often requires a ton of cognitive load just to figure out how to make it useful. And believe it or not, a lot of people simply do not think at that level of abstraction. A blank prompt box might be one of the most flexible interfaces we’ve ever created, but flexibility is not the same thing as usability. You have to imagine the capability before you can benefit from it. We’ve effectively made the user responsible for discovering the product’s capabilities, designing their own workflow, and inventing their own interface to the intelligence underneath it. I also think AI power users have already developed the exact same blind spot crypto power users had. Once you spend enough time with this stuff, it all starts feeling obvious. We mistake learned fluency for intuitive UX and forget how completely alien it still is to everyone else. And the gap might actually be bigger than it was with crypto. The average person isn’t just less knowledgeable about AI than the people on here. A lot of people have almost no mental model of what these systems are capable of, and plenty actively view AI as threatening, inauthentic, or even morally wrong. At its worst, crypto was scammy, complicated, or cringe. AI touches people’s sense of work, creativity, truth, agency, and what it even means to be human. So I don’t buy the idea that AI kills apps. There are really two ways out of this. Either agents become good enough to understand us, anticipate what we need, and proactively act on our behalf without fucking anything up, or apps continue doing what good apps have always done: constrain the possibility space and turn complicated technology into an obvious experience. The first is much harder than people want to admit. If anything, AI massively expands what apps can do. The opportunity is not to keep building “AI products.” Find net new consumer experiences that are only possible because of AI, put the problem and use case first, hide the underlying complexity, and see how far you can get without mentioning AI at all. There’s almost a pre- and post-AI way of experiencing computers now, and most of us on here are already designing from the other side of that divide, while the rest of the world is still living pre-singularity, unaware of what the singularity even is, let alone that they may already be living through its beginning.

This is what’s causing Anthropic to aggressively beg for govt protection (see below). Customers are finding cheaper alternatives. Keeping employees requires continuing ultra-rich secondaries ($$$) that are dependent on revenue growth. When you can’t win on the field go to DC.