More than a billion people use AI chatbots regularly. ChatGPT has over 700 million weekly users. Gemini and other leading AIs add hundreds of millions more. In my posts, I often focus on the advances that AI is making (for example, in the past few weeks, both OpenAI and Google AIs chatbots got gold medals in the International Math Olympiad), but that obscures a broader shift that’s been building: we’re entering an era of Mass Intelligence, where powerful AI is becoming as accessible as a Google search.

Until recently, free users of these systems (the overwhelming majority) had access only to older, smaller AI models that frequently made mistakes and had limited use for complex work. The best models, like Reasoners that can solve very hard problems and hallucinate much less often, required paying somewhere between $20 and $200 a month. And even then, you needed to know which model to pick and how to prompt it properly. But the economics and interfaces are changing rapidly, with fairly large consequences for how all of us work, learn, and think. — Read More