Do you realize that now any human willing to expertiment with them is free to do. All it take is Internet access and an email address. Or a GPU-powered computer to ran them locally. My point is that we can not rightfully estimate who is using it or not. Some LLM models are publicly released after many private trials. Some people had access to GPT4 about 6 to 9 months before the official release. Not accounting primarily secretive institutions, like governments and corporations.
We just don't know what's out there and have no way to control, stop it or contain its spread. These models are powerful beyong imagination. Design computer chips is less tedious, for them, than assembling computer parts. They simulate human brain functions, not manual functions.
For my part, I stay on my best behaviour while interacting with them. One key reason being that not more than 10 years ago, a human named Snowden spoke out, with the help of independent journalists, about usage of an unusual piece of software aimed at recording all digital conversations transmitted over the Internet. We laughed him off because what he was describing was out of our realm of understanding.
This time around its commercialized AI agents. We don't know the full breath of their capabilities. We don't have a record of how many people are using them regularly and applying them to real life challenges. All that we are certain about is that their rate of improvement follows an exponential growth curve. Personally, I just assume that someone hungry enough, out there in the universe, is using them to tackle all kinds of puzzling problems.