Where Tech Leaders and Students Really Think AI Is Going

"In that spirit, we recently interviewed a range of luminaries from the various worlds WIRED touches-and who participated in our recent Big Interview event in San Francisco-as well as students who have spent their whole lives inundated with technologies that seem increasingly likely to disrupt their lives and livelihoods. The main focus was unsurprisingly on artificial intelligence, but it extended to other areas of culture, tech, and politics. Think of it as a benchmark of how people think about the future today-and maybe even a rough map of where we're going."

"AI Everywhere, All the Time What's clear is that AI is already every bit as integrated into people's lives as search has been since the Alta Vista days. Like search, the use cases tend toward the practical or mundane. "I use a lot of LLMs to answer any questions I have throughout the day," says Angel Tramontin, a student at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Several of our respondents noted that they'd used AI within the last few hours, even in the last few minutes. Lately, Anthropic cofounder and president Daniela Amodei has been using her company's chatbot to assist with childcare. "Claude actually helped me and my husband potty-train our older son," she says. "And I've recently used Claude to do the equivalent of panic-Googling symptoms for my daughter.""

Rapid political, technological, cultural, and scientific change has made the future especially uncertain. Perspectives from industry leaders and younger generations place artificial intelligence at the center of cultural, technological, and political shifts. AI use has become as embedded as search, with largely practical and mundane applications dominating everyday behavior. Individuals report frequent and immediate use of large language models for routine questions. Executives and creators report relying on chatbots for personal tasks like childcare and quick medical information searches. These patterns offer a contemporary benchmark of how AI is reshaping personal and professional life.

Read at WIRED