Those caught on because they’re basically addictive drugs. Furthermore, while it may be hard to remember at this late stage of the game, those services did have genuine value to some users at the beginning. Today’s versions of those products have gone through countless iterations since then, each one reducing value to the end-user and increasing value to the data buyers and advertisers, like the proverbial “slowly boiling the frog”.

I think it is that its not useful for the end customer. Every anecdote I’ve heard about LLMs helping someone with their work were heavily qualified with special cases and circumstances and narrow use cases, resulting in a description of a process that was made more complex by adding the LLM, which then helped them eliminate nearly as much complication and effort as it added. These are the stories from the believers.

Now add in the fact that almost nobody is on a paid service tier outside of work, and all the paid tiers are currently heavily subsidized. If it has questionable utility at today’s prices, the value will only decline from there as prices rise to cover the real costs to run these things.

If it doesn’t do anything useful, I don’t think any amount of shoving in front of people is going to amount to much uptake beyond some cursory fiddling to determine its uselessness.

People hand out flyers to every passerby too, and nearly all of those end up in the nearest trash bin.