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AI Solutions in Search of Problems

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Liz Wolfe | 10.7.2026 9:30 AM

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Normie consumer use case: Is consumer AI a solution in search of a problem?

Last year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that artificial intelligence could wipe out half of entry-level jobs in the U.S., spiking unemployment to close to 20 percent sometime in the next one to five years.

"Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen," Amodei told Axios. "It sounds crazy, and people just don't believe it." 

Perhaps Amodei is talking about company-wide transformations as certain administrative, managerial, and tech jobs get automated away. The meme has long been "learn to code"—a snarky suggestion lobbed in the way of journalists who get laid off and bemoan the fact that their industry is less valued than it used to be, with less clear funding models than ever before. But what happens when learning to code is no longer good counsel? When even coders have been replaced by AI models? The conventional wisdom of the last five or 10 years no longer applies.

Still, compare these projections with the statistics we have on how many households nationally pay for AI subscriptions: Roughly 2.2 percent, as of April.

This is my thesis: no one uses AI. I repeat, absolutely no one. We live in a bubble.

Even among my friends who pay for it, when I ask them to open ChatGPT and show me their queries, it's the same handful of basic things.

Most don't even know they can upload a photo and ask… https://t.co/03GbUSJGKW

— Nicolas Bustamante (@nicbstme) October 3, 2026

The majority of consumers appear to currently use AI models as search engines: chatbots that can customize and tailor the search a little more finely, but not something meaningfully different. It's a substitute for Googling.

Some........

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