Half the country is using AI daily, yet nearly
everyone is convinced it's going to ruin society.
Welcome to the paradox of 2026. It's absolutely
wild. We're outsourcing our daily emails to models
we secretly fear. Welcome to the deep dive. Today
we're unpacking the G7 summit's shift toward
government AI equity grabs. Right, and we'll
run through a rapid -fire update of the newest
models hitting the market. Plus, we'll explore
that massive disconnect between AI adoption and
public trust. Now, neutrally speaking, there
are several different political proposals right
now. The Treasury Secretary wants to use AI equity
to fund Trump accounts. Right. But the Commerce
Secretary prefers routing equity into a sovereign
wealth fund. And Senator Bernie Sanders proposed
a totally different law. He wants to give Americans
direct ownership stakes in top firms. So the
source facts show different paths to the exact
same idea. The public sector wants financial
value directly from private labs. Exactly. The
specific political flavor just determines where
the money actually goes. The timing of this is
incredibly suspect to me, though. Oh, totally.
These talks happened right before the fable and
mythos restrictions hit. You know, that massive
export control clash. with Anthropic. Yeah, Anthropic's
Dario Amadei and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis
were pushing hard. They want a robust U .S.-led
coalition on AI rules and chips. Right. They're
trying to shape the cage before they get locked
inside. Exactly. The industry's best case scenario
is getting Fable 5 back online. And they want
to do it without aggressive power grabs. I mean,
there's also talk of naturally slowing down the
release cadence. This whole new model every month
schedule is just fundamentally broken. It exhausts
the developers entirely. And it severely confuses
everyday users trying to keep up. I completely
agree with that exhaustion. I mean, I still wrestle
with prompt drift myself. Oh, yeah. We all feel
that pain. You know the exact feeling. Your go
-to instructions, just quietly stop working under
the hood. Yeah, it breaks the user experience
completely. But zooming out, we're talking about
frontier models here. Let's define that real
quick. Frontier models are the most advanced,
cutting -edge AI systems currently available.
Right. And the worst -case scenario from the
sources is pretty dark. Imagine frontier models
locked entire... behind massive government gates.
Oh, wow. Yeah. Open source development gets banned
completely for national security reasons. So
the market just faces zero actual competition.
Exactly. We end up paying whatever the big labs
demand. Or we settle for vastly subpar intelligence
in our daily tools. Are we heading toward a world
where AI is treated as a public utility or just
a government sanctioned monopoly? It looks like
they want the broad structure of a public utility,
but the control remains tightly centralized among
a few key political players. Public utility vibes,
but entirely controlled by government gatekeepers.
Beat. Precisely. And that central control is
what labs are fighting. The government clearly
wants to slow things down right now. Right. But
the tech labs are sprinting in the absolute opposite
direction. They really are moving faster than
ever before. GPT 5 .6 and the pro version might
actually arrive next week. Yeah, and early testing
shows their logical understanding has improved
massively. But the coding limitations are still
a stubborn bottleneck. Yeah, front -end and web
dev are definitely not fully solved yet. No,
they still struggle with complex architectural
planning. But Anthropix's Chris Ciari is very
confident about CloudFable 5. He believes the
models will return to the market very soon. And
the tool updates are just as aggressive. Perplexity
Computer just received a massive brain upgrade
for max users. It literally makes you want to
provide more content. text every day. It learns
your specific workflows perfectly. Google's pushing
hard into the enterprise ad space too, right?
Yeah. Google's new Ask Ad Manager agent can troubleshoot
complex marketing campaigns. But we're also seeing
some fascinating cultural shifts around this
technology. Match Group recently released some
wild data about Tinder. Oh, right. 47 % of U
.S. singles feel negative about AI in dating.
Which isn't surprising. You don't want a robot
writing your romance. Right, but look at the
massive contradiction in their behavior. Many
of those same singles still want help with their
profiles. They hate the concept, but they love
the practical utility. Exactly. They still want
AI to help navigate awkward intro chats. On the
corporate side, companies are getting very creative
with structure. Snap is spinning off its internal
AI video team as Dotmo. Which just sounds like
basic corporate cost cutting on the surface.
But Snap is keeping a large equity bet in the
spinoff. Right. They want the upside. Without
the massive operational burn rate. Right. And
that burn rate is driven entirely by the hardware
bottleneck. Absolutely. Amazon is apparently
considering selling AI chips to outside companies.
A challenge NVIDIA. Yeah, they're trying to carve
out their own massive turf. AWS CEO Andy Jassy
estimates a $50 billion chip run rate. $50 billion?
Beat. That's a staggering amount of hardware.
It's almost impossible to comprehend that scale.
Whoa, imagine scaling to a billion queries. Two
secs silence. It requires a fundamental rewiring
of our global energy grid. And that compute power
fuels incredibly ambitious new startups today.
Like Odyssey, right? They just raised $310 million.
Yeah, at a $1 .45 billion valuation. And they're
building world models. Basically, AI that simulates
real world physics and complex human behavior.
Exactly. It's rendering a universe, not just
writing an essay. So with world models perfectly
simulating physical reality, is the hardware
demand ever going to plateau? The physical world
has infinite resolution and infinite complexity.
Simulating it perfectly requires exponentially
growing processing power. It definitely won't
stop anytime soon. Not until the physical and
digital worlds completely merge. That's the ultimate
endgame for these massive frontier labs. But
let's bring this back down to the human scale.
Yeah, let's do that. That massive hardware bottleneck
is exactly why everyday users feel squeezed.
Which brings us to the microtools patching specific
daily gaps. These microtools are solving specific
friction points for regular workers. Seaton's
2 .0 Mini is a fantastic example of this trend.
Yeah, it generates high -quality AI videos in
under a single minute. Faster, cheaper, and they
offer 30 free credits. It completely democratizes
video generation for the average creator. And
then there's Upstream, completely changing the
daily administrative grind. It sorts your messages
and drafts your replies automatically. It makes
checking your email feel light, fast, and fun
again. Honestly is another tool providing massive
value to modern digital marketers. It pulls sentiment
insights directly from Reddit. TikTok and X.
It also scrapes data from YouTube, Instagram,
and Facebook automatically. You get unfiltered
feedback without spending hours reading angry
comments manually. I want to highlight Tabstack
specifically for the developers listening today.
Tabstack is a highly specialized web data and
automation API. You pass a URL and it spits back
pristine JSON. Which is just a simple text format
for storing and moving digital data. It delivers
highly reliable structured output from a single
URL. It completely eliminates the parsing errors
that plague legacy web scrapers. Are these micro
tools permanently replacing whole software suites
or just bridging temporary gaps? Right now, they
act as brilliant little patches. But as they
interlock seamlessly, they will obsolete massive
legacy platforms entirely. They're bridging small
gaps today, replacing entire suites tomorrow.
Beat. Yeah. So let's recenter on the actual human
beings using these platforms. Yeah, that's arguably
the most important question we face today. We've
covered massive models and the incredible utility
of microtools. But how do we actually feel about
integrating this technology? Well, Pew Research
just dropped its massive 2026 data report. They
surveyed over 5000 U .S. adults. And the findings
highlight a very stark and deeply troubling contrast.
Yeah. Adoption rates are climbing rapidly everywhere.
Roughly half of all U .S. adults are now using
AI chat bots. And a solid 25 percent log in every
single day. But public pessimism is heavily outpacing
the optimism right now. Nearly 40 percent expect
AI to make. our society fundamentally worse.
Exactly. They believe it will degrade society
over the next two decades. Only 16 % actually
believe it will make things better. We're rapidly
adopting a technology we fundamentally fear right
now. And there's a fascinating demographic quirk
hidden inside this survey data. We really need
to point out the massive under 30 divide here.
Oh, right. Younger users lean on AI the absolute
hardest. But they're also the absolute biggest
skeptics in the entire survey. Just 14 % of them
see a positive long -term payoff. It feels so
counterintuitive at first glance. They grew up
entirely immersed in modern digital technology.
They see the potential for severe societal disruption
very clearly. Let's look at the actual market
share reality check here. ChatGPT is still the
undisputed heavyweight at 44 % usage. Yeah, and
Google's Gemini currently holds about 24 % of
the market. But Anthropic's Claude sits way down
at just 6%. Despite being constantly discussed
in tech circles, Claude barely registers. It
absolutely pales in comparison to the massive
footprint of chat GPT. Why do we keep using these
tools daily if we genuinely believe they'll eventually
ruin society? The immediate benefit to your personal
productivity is highly visible right now. That
tangible benefit completely overrides abstract
fears about long -term decay. Because personal
immediate convenience almost always overrides
long -term societal anxiety. Exactly. And if
we look at the core narrative thread of this
deep dive, we're trapped in a massive three -way
tug of war. Tech labs are moving at breakneck
speed to simulate reality perfectly. Right. And
the government is frantically scrambling to lock
down control. They literally want the deed to
the technological foundation. And the broader
public is caught squarely in the middle. We're
relying heavily on these tools to survive the
modern workday. But we fundamentally distrust
where this technological revolution is actually
heading. I want to leave you with a final provocative
thought today. Something for you to deeply mull
over on your own time. Let's hear it. We discussed
the government securing equity in these massive
AI labs. Imagine they eventually distribute those
financial dividends directly to regular citizens.
Like a universal basic income. Exactly. If that
happens, will that pay out finally by the public's
trust? Or will it just deepen our skepticism
of the machines running our lives? Thank you
for taking this deep dive with us. Otero Music.