What People Are Actually Using AI For Right Now

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This podcast is sponsored by Google. Hey folks, I'm Amar, Product and Design Lead at Google DeepMind. Have you ever wanted to build an app for yourself, your friends, or finally launch that side project you've been dreaming about? Now you can bring any idea to life, no coding background required, with Gemini 3 in Google AI Studio. It's called Vibe Coding and we're making it dead simple. Just describe your app and Gemini will wire up the right models for you so you can focus on your creative vision. Head to ai.studio slash build to create your first app.

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:30)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, what 100 trillion tokens tell us about real world AI usage? And before that in the headlines, could we be getting GPT 5.2 this week? The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Gemini, Robots and Pencils, Blitzi, Rovo and Super Intelligent. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. In either case, it's just $3 a month for ad-free. And lastly, if you are interested in sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at aidailybrief.ai. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. And of course, we are kicking off the day with the recap of the weekend's rumors around OpenAI's Code Red response to Google. It appears that the first drop of Code Red will be GPT 5.2. The Verge's Tom Warren is on the understanding from his sources that GPT 5.2 is earmarked for release on Tuesday. The release date is of course still subject to change due to anything from server capacity issues to leaks from rival labs. And interestingly, Warren's sources said that the model was originally slated for this month. So even before Code Red, it was going to come sometime in December, but that it was being fast-tracked because of the pressure of Gemini 3 And as if OpenAI weren't dealing with enough from the pressure from Gemini 3 and skepticism in the markets, new data from Sensor Tower also suggest that ChatGPT user growth has slowed down. According to Sensor Tower, only 7 million new monthly active users were added last month. That compares to 40 to 60 million being added per month over the summer. What's more, growth was just 6% between August and November. Bloomberg also reported that investors are backing companies tied to Google's AI ecosystem and turning away from bets linked to OpenAI. Before the release of Gemini 3, their basket of OpenAI exposed public stocks was up 125%. That's now down to 74% since Gemini 3 was released. The basket that was exposed to Google was at around 110% year-to-date when Gemini was released and has now surged to 146%. There is also even some chatter that OpenAI stock has fallen marginally in private markets, although this one I think we need to have even a little bit more skepticism around, as the signal is really hard to tell in these non-public markets. Regardless, altogether, the stakes are very clearly high for the next iteration of ChatGPT, but the buzz is that the model could live up to the hype. On December 6th, Matt Schumer tweeted, The model landscape is about to be shaken up. Again. Reporting from last week suggested that GPT-5-2 was ahead of Gemini 3 on internal testing, and on Friday, model leaker and suspected insider iRuleTheWorld posted a fairly clearly fake benchmark card that went viral. Now on the one hand, I think most people assumed that this was a nano-banana creation, but still it seems to me like the general sentiment is to think that OpenAI might be right back in this after their next model drop. The betting markets are also going haywire. On Polymarket on Friday, in the market for which company would have the best AI model by the end of 2025, Google was at 87% while OpenAI was at just 10.5%. Keep in mind that 10.5% was already a fairly big jump from where it had been just a couple days earlier. Over the weekend, OpenAI jumped to 25%, although they've now fallen slightly back to 18%.
In the coding-specific market, however, OpenAI completely flipping things at the end of last week, going from 12.4% to Anthropix 85% on December 5th to now sitting at 75% compared to Anthropix 19% as of this morning, December 8th, when I'm recording. AI Breakfast wrote, The insiders know, and sure enough, it appears that users that exclusively bet on OpenAI-related markets are loading up in anticipation of the GPT-52 release. Still, as much as people may be focused on the new models, efforts to improve the user experience could end up being even more impactful. The Verge again reports that the focus will shift away from quote flashy new features and towards improving the chatbot's speed, reliability and customizability. And certainly, it's not hard to find evidence for the need for that as well. Also over the last week, we've seen a number of tweets like this one, with users showing links to integrated apps for Target, Spotify and Peloton in response to completely unrelated queries. And initially in response, OpenAI went the strategy of saying actually these aren't ads. Head of ChatGPT Nick Turley wrote, I'm seeing lots of confusion about ads rumors in ChatGPT. There are no live tests for ads. Any screenshots you've seen are either not real or not ads. If we do pursue ads, we'll take a thoughtful approach. People trust ChatGPT and anything we do will be designed to respect that. Unfortunately for them, a lot of people felt like Benjamin DeKraker who wrote, It's not an ad if we just keep repeating that it's not an ad. He shared an image of a recommendation to connect to Target to shop for home and groceries on a conversation that seems like it was about a computer issue and said, You guys literally announced a partnership with Target right before this. You're handling this very badly and people are noticing. A few hours later, Chief Research Officer Mark Chen took what I think was probably the better tact and acknowledged that being told to shop at Target in every session feels a lot like advertising even if it isn't an ad unit that OpenAI specifically sold. Chen wrote, I agree that anything that feels like an ad needs to be handled with care and we fell short. We've turned off this kind of suggestion while we improve the model's precision. We're also looking at better control so you can dial this down or off if you don't find it helpful. Benjamin DeKraker, whose post I was just mentioning, responded, thank you for taking this seriously, Mark. Point of all this is, OpenAI clearly has a lot of work ahead of it, but also there is lots of excitement about how they might respond. Buko Capital summed it up, OpenAI's Code Red is bullish, not bearish. It's an admission that they were overeating, getting beat and needed to focus. That's what great teams do. All eyes on how they execute Code Red. And so we'll just quickly go through a couple of other headlines before we move over into today's main episode. The first is another big thing that people are talking about, which is more departures from Apple. Last week, we learned that Senior VP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, i.e. their head of AI, John G and Andrea, would be leaving the company. A few days later, Meta secured the services of Alan Dye, Apple's head of UX design. By the end of the week, Apple announced that their general council and head of government affairs would also be moving on. Compounding with over a dozen departures from Apple's AI team, you're talking about a major loss of talent in Cupertino. Now, Bloomberg's Apple correspondent Mark Gurman reports that Senior VP of Hardware Technologies, Johnny Shruji, is considering leaving in the near future. Gurman says that Shruji, who he considers to be one of Apple's most respected executives, recently discussed leaving the company with CEO Tim Cook. And while the other departures kind of felt necessary, particularly around Gianandria, for this one, it is hard to find a silver lining. Shruji, as Gurman writes, was the architect of Apple's prized in-house chip efforts. And frankly, Apple's M series chips have been one of the few unambiguous bright spots for the company over recent years. Twitter user Nicholas wrote, Shruji has had AI-capable chips in hundreds of millions of devices for years and Apple's software teams still haven't put them to use outside the camera app. I imagine he wants to build chips relevant to AI today. Now Gurman wrote that, differently than the other executives, Tim Cook has apparently been working aggressively to retain Shruji. An effort that he said included offering a substantial pay package as well as the potential of more responsibility down the road. One scenario floated internally by some execs involved elevating him to the role of Chief Technology Officer. Basically, things just continued to be a mess over there, and we still feel very much in the part before they get things straight. Lastly today, a couple of meta stories. The first is that they have acquired an AI device startup called Limitless to further their wearable strategy, or perhaps to cut off the wearable strategy for others. Limitless was a part of the wave of AI wearables that launched last year. Their device was a small pendant that recorded the user's conversations throughout the day and delivered an AI generated summary. Now that segment, of course, so far, has fallen flat, and multiple companies have now been acquired for their talent, leaving their devices to fall by the wayside. Here again, the Limitless pendant will no longer be sold, although the device will still be supported for at least the next year. Subscriptions will be cancelled and existing device owners will have access to the unlimited plan for free. Other services, including their Rewind software that records desktop activity and meetings will be sunsetted immediately. Now Meta doesn't seem to be acquiring Limitless for their hardware. Instead the team will join Reality Labs, which produces the Meta Ray-Bans and other AI-enabled smart glasses. People are trying to figure out the signal in this one. Is the story Meta stocking up on talent in the wearable space because of their high conviction and their lead there? Is it them trying to cut off talent to competitors because of their lead there? Not totally clear. And so once more when it comes to AI wearables, that is a category that continues to be in the let's call it pre-product market fit stage. Lastly today, Meta's chatbot will now provide up-to-date news content under multiple new media deals. On Friday, Meta announced deals with CNN, Fox News, USA Today, People Inc. and more. Meta said the deals would, quote, improve Meta AI's ability to deliver timely and relevant content and information with a wide variety of viewpoints and content types. One of the stories that has been muted in 2025, relative to where I think people thought it was going to be, is the story of AI platforms versus copyright holders, but I imagine we'll get a lot more of that in 2026 Indeed, with Perplexity facing a pair of new lawsuits from the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times, arguing that Perplexity's web crawlers have intentionally ignored or evaded technical content protection measures, we have yet another example of where this is going to be fought out in courts in the coming year. Now that is longer than we can get into in this particular episode, so for now we will close the headlines and move on to today's main episode.