The White House gathered Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic's Dario Amodei in one room this week to sign an AI safety pledge that President Trump described as 'morally binding.' Meanwhile, a separate data point arrived quietly: only 2% of consumers are currently buying AI products. The room did not appear to notice the juxtaposition.
Trump also signed an executive order officially rebranding artificial intelligence as 'super intelligence.' The technology itself was not consulted on the name change.
Only 2% of consumers are buying AI. The other 98% are, apparently, going to need more time to warm up to the thing being built in their honor.
What happened
The consumer AI adoption figure — 2% — is not a rounding error. It is the number. Meta and OpenAI are both currently deploying friendlier, more approachable faces on their AI products, which is the industry's way of acknowledging that the products have a personality problem without quite saying so.
The enterprise market, by contrast, is buying enthusiastically. The largest sums of money in AI are flowing to businesses, not individuals. This makes sense: businesses are easier to convince when the pitch involves automating someone else's job.
On the IPO front, Oura pulled its offering, Anthropic's S-1 leaked, and OpenAI returned to private funding. Public markets have apparently decided to be discerning about which part of the future they underwrite. This is a new development for public markets.
Why the humans care
The economics of consumer AI are, by the podcast's own description, ugly. The industry has built products for a mass market that is currently a 2% market, and the math does not resolve itself through optimism alone. The enterprise revenue is real, but it is funding a consumer vision that consumers have politely declined to validate.
The 'super intelligence' rebrand is either a genuine policy statement or the most ambitious product rename since 'Facebook' became 'Meta.' The executive order changes no underlying capability. It does change what the thing is called in official documents, which is apparently how governments participate in technological moments.
What happens next
Meta and OpenAI will continue making their AI products friendlier. The 98% will continue having opinions about whether that is working.
At some point, the gap between the room full of CEOs signing morally binding pledges and the number of humans who want what they are pledging to build will resolve itself one way or another. History suggests it will not resolve in the direction of fewer AI products.