That said, I'm surprised that I'm not too far off. I'd bet if they include all LLM usage such as Google search summaries, it's close to daily.

Maybe GPT 5.5 is heavily nerfed due to lack of compute, memory, and energy?

I agree that it's farfetched to conclude that bigger models have pleateued.

Claude is extremely good at connecting to databases. I don't see how Retool can be a big company if the moat is "you've already given us your database connection, so you might as well build and host on Retool".

For Claude, all it has to do is install a Postgres client library if your database is Postgres, etc.

In the past, we've tried using Retool before because it was tedious to build the frontend. Our backend developers wanted to build dashboards without having to learn frontend tooling.

Nowadays, our backend developers are flying with Claude Code building the frontend for them. No Retool needed. Retool would just get in the way.

The biggest problem for Retool is that you've always needed developers to build Retool but developers can move way faster building on Claude Code alone than Claude Code + Retool.

The pricing model of Retool is still absolutely crazy. How are you still able to charge per internal user per month? If I have 100 internal users, that's $18k alone. Totally crazy model in 2026.

  About half of U.S. adults now use AI chatbots, up from a third in 2024

  That includes a 58% majority of adults under 30.

  has roughly doubled since summer 2023.

My bubble is working adults, which is likely more represented by the 58% under 30 figure. However, this was a year ago. I'm guessing adoption has accelerated even more in a year. It wouldn't surprise me if it's 50% overall by now and 70-80% of adults under 30.

So these facts don't actually dispel my intuition.

I wouldn't let these toaster companies and Microsoft distract from the actual progress in SOTA AI.

The article should instead focus on how potentially overvalued SpaceX (and Tesla) is.

You can probably do it with 2,500 engineers. Maybe even fewer.

A toaster company saying their product now has AI is actually turning people off.

The toaster brand is just trying to fool people. Something like Mythos is actually what's driving change.

In tech, Microsoft is a big reason for this turnoff. First, they forced Copilot onto Windows users. Second, they decided to market "AI PCs" by forcing AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to put NPUs into their SoCs. But a tiny NPU is no match for frontier LLMs. Therefore, customers are sold on their PCs having something as good as ChatGPT built in but in reality, it's barely powerful enough to fix your grammar.

Everyone around me, including my elderly parents, love using ChatGPT. Go to any coffee shop and you'll see ChatGPT on nearly everyone's laptop. People aren't turned off by OpenAI or Anthropic. They're turned off by everyone else.

This administration will do or say something crazy to a private company, then this private company sends an envoy to the White House to negotiate, then the White House asks for 10% of the company or other concessions.

The White House wants 10% of Anthropic.

This is just a negotiation tactic that Trump keeps on using.

  Japan continues to "import" larger and larger numbers of foreign workers to do jobs that it doesn't have enough native-born workers to perform. Think factory workers, nurses, truck drivers, retail.