No one can agree on whether AI is the next big thing or all hype. Here’s why

By Lisa Eadicicco, CNN

(CNN) — AI is either your most helpful coworker, a glorified search engine or vastly overrated depending on who you ask.

And no one seems to agree on which is right.

Tech executives championing AI have long spun the narrative that the tech will revolutionize jobs and bring about a new industrial revolution. Skeptics think it’s all marketing hype, while some researchers and executives are sounding the alarm about safety concerns on their way out the door.

The discrepancy in how people view AI has perhaps never been so apparent as this past week, after a viral essay from an AI CEO and investor claimed the tech is coming for any job that involves sitting in front of a computer.

But there may be a simpler explanation as to why people have taken such divergent stands: People use different types of AI in different ways, yet it’s all being referred to in the same way.

“There’s just a wide spectrum of how much people have been exposed to the technology, how much they’ve used the technology,” said Matt Murphy, a partner at Menlo Ventures who has led investments in AI companies including Anthropic. “And that’s also changing pretty rapidly.”

Paid AI versus the free version

People who use free AI for basic tasks like making grocery lists and planning vacations are likely only seeing one side of the technology. A report from Menlo Ventures published last June estimated that only 3% of AI users are paid subscribers, although Murphy told CNN he expects that to change quickly.

But those who pay get access to another feature: Agents that can handle some work for you rather than just chatbots that craft responses, plus fewer limits on usage.

Anthropic’s Claude Cowork agent, for example, is only available in the $20-per-month Pro plan and higher. The case is similar for OpenAI’s Codex coding agent.

It’s that type of AI that’s fueling concerns about AI’s impact on jobs, including the controversial argument Matt Shumer, an investor and former CEO of AI startup, gets at in his viral essay.

“I’ll tell the AI: ‘I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.’ And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code,” Shumer wrote.

He went on to claim that the AI was able to test the app and make decisions concerning taste and judgment. And he surmised that if AI could write code that well, it could begin improving upon itself, as well.

(AI researchers accused Shumer of exaggerating the performance of his AI model in 2024. He apologized at the time and told CNN it was the “biggest mistake” of his “professional life” and that he learned through the process).

Some experts are skeptical the use cases Shumer outlined are possible even with paid plans, especially since he was vague about which model he used and what type of app the AI built for him. Shumer told CNN he primarily uses OpenAI’s GPT-5.3 Codex tool and that he was working on a “medium to high complexity app” for testing purposes.

Still, the free version of AI apps doesn’t paint the full picture of what the technology is capable of, according to Emily DeJeu, a professor who teaches courses about the use of AI in business at Carnegie Mellon University. She said it would be “misguided” to make assumptions about AI’s capabilities based solely on free AI services.

Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus at the University of Washington and previous CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, described the gap between the free and paid tiers of AI like comparing an eager yet inexperienced intern with a seasoned, hard-working intern. Free AI tiers are good at writing summaries and generating content, but users will typically have to pay to conduct deep research or draft sophisticated documents using AI.

While free AI can “give you surprisingly good advice” and “engage with you in a surprisingly sophisticated dialog, you wouldn’t want to use one of those as your attorney or even as your paralegal,” he said.

But AI companies are increasingly trickling more advanced features down to the free tier, which is part of why James Landay, cofounder of the Stanford Institute for Human Centered AI, said he doesn’t see a big difference between free and paywalled AI. Case in point: Anthropic launched a new model called Sonnet 4.6 on Tuesday that it says will bring performance closer to its more advanced Opus models only available in its paid plans.

Simmering tensions over AI and work

Software stocks plummeted in early February after AI company Anthropic released a tool tailoring its AI helper specifically for individual industries, like legal and financial analysis. That launch, followed by Shumer’s essay, stoked concerns that AI will eventually broadly automate knowledge work the way it’s starting to streamline software engineering jobs.

Yet there’s also growing skepticism about whether AI is living up to these lofty declarations, often made by tech executives with financial interests in the technology’s success. Some studies have poured cold water over how capable AI truly is and how quickly it’s being adopted.

A group of researchers from the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI found last year that leading AI models produced flawed results when tasked with work assignments like visualizing data and coding video games. An organization that tests AI models called Model Evaluation and Threat Research found in July that developers take 19% longer to work on their code when using AI, although that research was based on tools from early 2025.

Landay also says the role AI is playing in software development is overstated in the essay. AI is a helpful tool that programmers use to speed up development, but it’s still prone to mistakes, and AI models aren’t writing themselves. While experts have widely agreed AI will change many industries, AI’s proficiency at coding shouldn’t be taken as a sign that it’ll perform the same way in other professions.

“(Coding is) also a logical structure, which is a really good fit for a machine to also be able to test the code and see if it works,” he said. “Many people’s jobs are not structured in that way.”

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