[john_strinlai]

chatgpt alone had like ~900 million weekly active users last i checked.

thats a lot of c-suites

(or the anti-ai crowd is more vocal than the occasional chatgpt user)

[jaredwiener]

Theres a difference between users seeking out AI, and PMs cramming AI into previously existing products.

[john_strinlai]

i obviously agree that those are two different things.

but its also obviously not true that "AI is only popular with AI providers and delusional C-suites.

[jaredwiener]

I've noticed a lot of weaselly statistics associated with AI adoption.

Company replaces phone support with AI chatbot, then says "Call center interactions dropped 80%! People must really love our AI bot," even though they were given no other choice.

AI features are popular in the sense that people are using it. I think the popularity lessens when asked if people want these features.

My point being that people who visit chatgpt.com/claude.com/etc by their own free will are not the same as people who now have to use AI summaries on Google because they are just showing up there and making the ten blue links harder to find.

[skydhash]

That’s pretty much it. I have ai in my tracker, ai in my search engine, ai in my team chat, ai in the os (work computer),… I’ve never asked for it, but I bet I’m being counted as one of those users.

[john_strinlai]

they have 50MM non-business subscribers, if that’s a better metric for you. and that’s just one ai company - not counting the others or local models.

i hate unsolicited ai in my software as much as the next guy. but it’s silly to claim ai isn’t popular just because you don’t like it.

anything else with 50MM subscribers would reasonably be called “popular”.

[cassianoleal]

A lot of people who are fed up with AI use ChatGPT. Being fed up with something doesn't necessarily mean they start pretending it doesn't exist.

Furthermore, where did that number come from? What does "active" mean? What does "user" mean?

[john_strinlai]

>Furthermore, where did that number come from? What does "active" mean? What does "user" mean?

https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/

weekly and monthly active users are common industry terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_users

[cassianoleal]

Sure but how do those map to real people?

[organsnyder]

I use ChatGPT on occasion for certain tasks. But when I'm doing a web search, I want a web search without AI.

[john_strinlai]

same!

my comment is not in support of google's ai search. or ai in general.

just pushing back on "ai is not popular", because it is obviously popular by any reasonable metric.

[miyoji]

I don't think you understand that there's a difference between a user who wants an AI chatbot and a user who wants to perform a web search, and even if they're the exact same user, they expect for a web search to operate like a web search and not like a chatbot.

I don't think anyone who works in product management at any company in 2026 understands this, so you're not alone.

[john_strinlai]

my comment is literally only pushing back on the claim of "ai is not popular".

by any reasonable metric, ai is popular. that doesn't change just because you super-duper hate it.

your insistence that i dont understand something unrelated to the point of my comment is weird.