Business Insider reported on Aug. 5 that developers and power users deeply immersed in AI are feeling disconnected from people around them as they spend long hours on vibe coding and AI experiments to keep up with rapidly changing technology trends.

Jeffrey Escobar (제프리 에스코바르), a 25-year-old man from Miami, stayed home while his family went to watch a World Cup match between France and England. Escobar said he could not leave his desk even when his friends were hanging out or watching Netflix. Escobar, who co-founded AI app startup Addicting Elements, described himself as feeling like the only person holding a light in a dark room.

The problem is that this immersion leads to loneliness. Escobar said it is difficult to talk with other men or go on dates. He said it is because he feels the other person does not understand him. Escobar's only community is a group of startup co-founders. He said he is not completely cut off and spends much of his day in meetings, but relationships in real life where he can share passion for AI and the pressure are extremely limited.

There is another similar case. Kyle Smitherman (카일 스미더먼), a 26-year-old man from Houston, said his all-in commitment to AI consulting service UnlockAI created cracks in his relationship with his partner. Smitherman compared his AI business to a lawn-mowing business and said his partner would have understood a lawn-mowing business because what it does is clear. He said his partner did not understand his AI work of building agent-based workflows, learning graph loops and running iterations using agents, responding, "What?" He complained that while AI looks to him like a change as important as the dot-com boom or the arrival of the iPhone, his family and friends treat it as no big deal. He said this gap can make it look to people around him as if he is going crazy.

Immersion in AI also affects friendships. Vaibhav Kumar (바이바브 쿠마르), a 32-year-old flight physics engineer who travels between San Francisco and Las Vegas, said he had a conflict with a friend after talking at a dinner gathering about the Chinese AI model Kimi K3. He said the mood quickly sank because the friend criticised AI and data centres as evil. Kumar said he has only one friend interested in AI, and the rest do not want to hear about it. He likened following AI news to drinking from an ever-growing fire hose and described an isolating feeling as if there is almost no world outside AI.

The outlet said the loneliness felt by those enthusiastic about AI may not be simply a problem of personal over-immersion, but a cultural disconnect stemming from differences in the pace of technology adoption. Some young people show fatigue or rejection toward AI, while another group does not dislike AI but does not use it actively. By contrast, power users try not to fall behind as new models, tools and ways of automating work pour out every day. The outlet said this difference creates breakdowns in conversation and relationship fatigue.

As a solution, it suggested finding AI communities in real life. Online, there are communities such as X, and offline there are local founder groups and AI meetups. Jonathan Linton (조너선 린턴), a 39-year-old from Milwaukee who works as an AI leader at an accounting firm and runs a consulting business called Fresh Coast AI, compared AI to a new frontier. Recalling his time working in Myanmar, when a community formed as people with similar goals gathered during economic opening, he said the AI frontier can feel like being on an island because there are few people nearby with the same interest. Linton, who showed deep interest in AI, eventually chose to seek out founder events in his hometown while finding similar people online.

AI communities lean male, but feeling lonely is not only a problem for so-called tech bros. Alyssa Clarcq (알리사 클라크), a 31-year-old female accountant, said AI felt like a huge secret that no one wanted to hear. Clarcq said she eventually started posting on TikTok and LinkedIn about her experiences working with LLMs. Posts and meetups online ease her thirst to some extent, but the number of people she can talk to face-to-face remains limited. Even so, Clarcq said she was satisfied that she built a relationship where she could meet in real life for coffee with an AI-interested friend she got to know on TikTok.

The outlet added that what people who feel they are at the forefront of the AI era ultimately need may not be more tools, but a real-life community that can speak the same language.