Tech leaders are beginning to worry about the public’s underwhelming enthusiasm for their plans to remake the world with artificial intelligence. Will that burst the bubble
Silicon Valley executives promise that artificial intelligence is going to radically change everyone’s life for the better, starting just a few minutes from now. A.I. is described as the new electricity. It’s even bigger than fire. Don’t bother saving money for retirement because everyone will be rich rich rich.
Your grandparents heard pretty much the same thing. The creators of a new technology have always sold it as producing a fundamental transformation of human existence. The radio was touted as bringing “perpetual peace on earth.” Television was supposed to arouse so much empathy for different cultures that it would end war. Cable television would educate the masses and lead to widespread enlightenment.
This time, though, the masses have not been won over.
In a You.gov survey last year, more than a third of respondents said they were concerned that A.I. would end human life on earth. Even those with a more hopeful attitude overwhelmingly said in another poll that they would not pay extra to put A.I. on their devices. And in the most recent large survey conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 80 percent of firms reported that A.I. was having no impact on their productivity or employment.
Looking at what’s possible, it does feel sort of surprisingly slow,” Mr. Altman said at an A.I. conference this month.
Jensen Huang, chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, is worried. The tech industry hype may seem omnipresent, but Mr. Huang feels “the battle of narratives” is being won by the critics.
“It’s extremely hurtful, frankly,” Mr. Huang said in a podcast interview last month. “A lot of damage” has been done by “very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end-of-the-world narrative, science fiction narrative
In Mr. Huang’s view, the critics want regulations that will hamper the A.I. industry and slow it down. Meanwhile, the skeptics are “scaring people from making the investments in A.I.” that would make it better.
Nvidia, which makes the chips that power A.I. data centers, does not lack investors. It is now the most highly valued company in the world, with a market capitalization of $4.5 trillion. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have also seen their values soar. Some A.I. start-ups have become fantastically valuable practically overnight in a way never quite seen before, starting with OpenAI.
Mr. Huang is nevertheless correct. Adoption has plateaued. In the fourth quarter of 2025, 38 percent of employees told Gallup that their workplace had integrated A.I. technology. That number was essentially unchanged from the third quarter.
A.I. is clearly not technology that is being universally encouraged as inevitable. Corporations often report that, so far, it does not seem to do much. But fears are everywhere. The S&P North American software index fell 15 percent in January, its biggest monthly decline in 17 years, on fears that A.I. would replace software.
“I can’t really remember a boom with such active hostility to it,” said William Quinn, co-author of “Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles.” “People usually find new technology exciting. It happened with electricity, bicycles, motorcars. There were fears but also hopes. A.I. is notable, perhaps unique, for the lack of enthusiasm.”
Even as more than half of Americans have tried large language models (and virtually everyone who has done anything online has inadvertently used A.I.), studies show that people are far more worried than they are excited. According to Pew, 61 percent of respondents to a 2025 survey said they wished they had more control over how A.I. was used in their own life.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
The indifference and hostility to A.I. were probably inevitable. A.I.’s champions describe an unsettling future where humans who use the technology will replace those who don’t.
Perhaps this is why A.I. regulation is one of the few issues that a divided America seems united on. Eighty percent of Americans want rules for A.I. even if that means the technology develops more slowly, according to a Gallup survey last spring.
It’s not just low-skill workers who are wary. Each year Edelman, the global communications firm, surveys trust in society. In its latest report, released in January, two-thirds of low-income U.S. respondents said that “people like me will be left behind rather than realize any real advantages from generative A.I.” Perhaps more remarkably, nearly half the high-income workers felt the same way.
These booms followed a familiar pattern. A few investors assert that new developments, usually involving technology, changed things. Early believers make money. That draws in more investors. Critics are drowned out. Speculators take over. The boom becomes a bubble and pops. Everyone has regrets and swears to be more sober in the future.
Eventually a new technology comes along. Utopia beckons, and the process begins again.
“One generation after another has renewed the belief that, whatever was said about earlier technologies, the latest one will fulfill a radical and revolutionary promise,” Vincent Mosco, a technology historian, wrote in “The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace.”
Bubbles are coming thick and fast these days. There is a boom in booms.
“There was the Japanese stock bubble, then the Thai and Taiwanese bubbles, then dot-com, housing, the Chinese stock market, crypto and now A.I.,” said Mr. Quinn, a senior lecturer in finance at Queen’s University Belfast. “You have very mobile financing, a deregulated financial system and rapid technological change, all of which make it easy for ordinary people to speculate.”
A few months ago, worried about a stock market that seemed to have little basis for its continued ascent, analysts and investors began wondering how the A.I. boom would end. The boom of the Roaring Twenties ended in the Great Depression, after all
