John Helmuth

Senator, you're describing the advertising business model that Google and Facebook have run for two decades and blaming it on AI. Targeted ads, dynamic pricing, behavioral profiling — all of that predates large language models by a decade-plus. The company you actually interviewed, Anthropic, doesn't even run ads. You sat down with the one AI company that explicitly doesn't do the thing you're complaining about, got it to agree that data collection is concerning, and then posted it as if you'd uncovered something. That's not an investigation — it's a conversation with a chatbot designed to be agreeable. If you want to regulate data brokers and surveillance advertising, name the actual companies doing it. But that would mean going after Meta and Google, who spend more on lobbying than Anthropic spends on compute.

@coreyganim It’s a little misleading to say that they both cost $20 a month. Sure, Perplexity has a $20 month plan that gives you access to Computer but then you have to pay for the usage because it doesn’t come with any credits.

I tested Perplexity Computer vs Manus head to head. Same prompts. Same tasks. 3 rounds. → Multi-source research into a live deployed website → Gmail + Calendar extraction into a formatted Google Doc → Scraping 5 websites into a pricing chart They both cost $20/month. One of them significantly outperforms the other and in my opinion is the best deal in AI right now. Full breakdown on the Build With AI podcast/YouTube (and in the video below).

So what’s the best email client these days?

@Cartidise Never really thought about this but it is crazy that Apple doesn’t have a simple toggle to switch between the current layout vs. alphabetical. I almost never use it anyway, I just use spotlight 90% of the time, but I guess that’s probably just because I never know where to look.

The App Library has to be the most useless feature on iOS - creates random folders - can’t customize the folders/create my own - can’t open the App Library from anywhere like on Android. i HAVE TO swipe all the way to the last page. - alphabetical sorting is an extra step away - spotlight exists

I think if @perplexity_ai gave even a modest amount of Computer credits in their Pro plan they’d get a lot more users, myself included.

@MacRumors This was inevitable, but will not go well. Google’s benefit is that they’re the kings of the internet experience and have their fingers in everything you do online. They do not have the reputation for great independent apps.

Google Working on Native Gemini AI App for Mac to Rival ChatGPT and Claude macrumors.com/2026/03/19/goo…

Which AI company will be the first one to issue an email client? CometMail could be pretty sick…

@appleinsider Why write an entire article/blog post when you could have just said, “Be careful about giving your data to AI companies, nobody really knows the impact of that decision yet.”

Perplexity's new AI health feature includes Apple Health integration nobody should use appleinsider.com/articles/26/03… #Apple

Now this is the type of innovation that people have been looking for. All the models are so close in capabilities right now that the differentiator will how easy it is to use.

@explorersofai Rather than people not using their brains to think anymore, they are just shifting their focus. Rather than focus on how to get something done, they now focus on what to get done. AI solves all of the “how” problems, but still needs the “what” prompted into it.

I finally realized that a lot of people are not using their brains to think anymore. The reason is AI. Problems that were easy to solve are now being passed on to AI. Super complicated workflows are being created for no logical reason. What was free and effective before now costs at least 1M tokens. Oh well.

@Miles_Brundage Also that with Codex limits I get like 20x the usage before hitting my limit on the $20/mo plans - even with both on double right now Claude code I was stuck using Sonnet nearly all of the time to avoid hitting limits in 5 minutes. Codex I can run GPT-5.4 xhign and not look back

From a competitive perspective, Codex getting better as an app in the past month was perfectly timed with Claude Code being broken all the time

@ivangdavila @FirstSquawk It’s a pretty easy fix really. Create subsections on the left hand side where all the chat histories and projects live. Just have a collapsible subsection for coding projects, chats/searches, etc. Don’t sandbox each in entirely different page. It’s unnecessary and wasteful.

@johnhelmuth_ @FirstSquawk When I want to code, I don’t want to have to select “code” in a tab. And when I need to quickly ask something in chat, I don’t want to lose sight of the progress my AI coder is making on each project

OPENAI TO MERGE CHATGPT, CODEX APP & BROWSER INTO DESKTOP SUPERAPP TO STREAMLINE RESOURCES & USER EXPERIENCE - WSJ

@VraserX They unfortunately have the baggage of starting the process as one of the largest companies in the world. They couldn't really afford to take risks where the others did. In hindsight that probably hurt them more than it helped protect them from risk, but hard to know at the time

Google should be much scarier than it currently feels. That they aren’t dominating consumer AI by now is one of the strangest fumbling-of-the-bag stories in tech. How do you own half the internet and still feel late to your own future?

@jaypatel @FirstSquawk @gladstein @thsottiaux Why? What's the benefit of that?

@FirstSquawk @gladstein @thsottiaux say it ain’t so. pls keep codex separate

@ivangdavila @FirstSquawk No - Claude is 3 separate apps living in 1 app There is no reason to separate the coding engine from the chat engine from the productivity engine. When someone wants something done, they just want to send a prompt and let the machine figure out which engine to use.

@FirstSquawk That’s exactly what the Claude desktop app is. Which is why I don’t use it

@BlakeHer_on @FirstSquawk Hence this proposal to combine and unify it...

@FirstSquawk consolidating into a superapp makes sense on paper but openai’s biggest problem isn’t the interface, it’s that each product feels like a different company built it

@verge So basically like Perplexity Computer but it lives on your machine? Count me in...

OpenAI is planning a desktop ‘superapp’ theverge.com/ai-artificial-…

How Perplexity can afford to do that is baffling. Even with a $200/mo price tag, they're pinging the 3 most expensive API's, each of which on their own is charging $200/mo.

Perplexity just made every other AI search tool look outdated. Model Council launches GPT 5.4, Claude Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 Pro on a single prompt. All three thinking and searching in parallel. Then combines everything into one answer. One prompt. Three frontier models. Zero context missed. Great work @AravSrinivas

@aliByteCode Definitely can't change your mind there. 100% accurate.

Hot take: Marketing your product is harder than building it. Change my mind.