Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdlshore | Hacker News Reader

You’re implying that Apollo is biased, but the thing you’re quoting is a very brief report on publicly available research. This is the entirety of the article:

“The US Census Bureau conducts a biweekly survey of 1.2 million firms, and one question is whether a business has used AI tools such as machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents or voice recognition to help produce goods or services in the past two weeks. Recent data by firm size shows that AI adoption has been declining among companies with more than 250 employees, see chart below.”

Two questions:

1) What does that chart show today? (Genuine question. I’m curious and don’t know where to find it.)

2) Regardless of what it shows now, why do you think Apollo reporting on it is noteworthy?

View on HN

I'm implying they may be biased in what they chose to report on and how they frame it, yes. Deciding which figures to turn into a chart is an editorial decision.

I'm writing up a new version of the chart at the moment, but here's a preview: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026-11-01/5821A414-...

Notes on where to find the data here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/9/apollo-ai-adoption/

> I'm implying they may be biased in what they chose to report on and how they frame it, yes. Deciding which figures to turn into a chart is an editorial decision.

I think the Apollo thing is a fairly dumb hot take based on a near-term wiggle in a graph, but it's hilarious that you are calling them biased.

Pot, kettle, black, etc.

Substantively, I don't think it's surprising at all to see those lines go up -- it would be shocking if they didn't go up, given the intensity of the hype. The slope is what matters. In particular, I wouldn't argue that your graph shows any kind of acceleration in adoption over time.

Thanks for "a fairly dumb hot take based on a near-term wiggle in a graph", that's a much better way of expressing what I was trying to convey here.

I’m surprised it’s so low, actually. AI is defined so broadly that it includes voice recognition and machine learning of any sort, and in any business function. It’s hard to draw conclusions from that. I wish they had kept it narrowed to LLMs specifically.

It’s too bad they changed the definition midstream, too. It would have been nice to see the two lines side by side.

(Thanks, simonw, for the updated chart.)

Here's that write-up: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Nov/2/census-bureau-super-int...

Of course Apollo is biased. They are a hedge fund. They are biased towards their interpretation of the market.

In fact, they often put forward a hypothesis about a company or market and argue for it. I couldn’t think of anything less biased.

That’s not bias if it’s more explanatory of the future.

Apollo has the ability to predict the future?

> Of course Apollo is biased. They are a hedge fund.

They are not a hedge fund, they are a Private Equity/Private Credit fund, a financing firm and a venture fund all wrapped up in an alternative asset management company that does almost everything related to private credit.

I don't know if it's "bias", exactly. This particular guy has been wrong on AI recently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com