Re: Companies starting to back-off, I've seen several articles like this one https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/enterprise-ai-s... (yes I realize this source is generally anti-ai)

Regarding regular people being ambivalent or hostile, I feel like that's pretty obvious, at least in the western world. Across all social media, outside of tech-chambers, the anti-ai sentiment is very loud. Nearly everyone posses a misplaced hatred for data centers, and this both fuels and is fueled by ai-hate. There's massive backlash from gamers and inevitable walk-backs whenever a video game company proposes using ai for anything.