u/call_me_ninza
▲ 10 r/aigossips
Stanford paid 35,000 people to delete Instagram and Facebook for 6 weeks. The findings don't let either side of the social media debate win.
paper: The Effect of Deactivating Facebook and Instagram on
Users’ Emotional State
stanford paid participants to delete facebook and instagram, then tracked every phone passively so nobody could lie about what they actually did with the free time.
the findings:
- deleting instagram freed up ~20 mins a day
- nearly all of it went straight to tiktok, youtube, twitter, snapchat
- total screen time barely moved
- average emotional improvement from quitting was about 1/5th of a typical therapy session
for 10 years the dominant framing has been "delete instagram, touch grass." turns out quitting instagram doesn't put the phone down. it opens tiktok. the thumb doesn't know the difference.
women aged 18-24. emotional state improved 3x the average effect. statistically separate from every other group in the entire sample. earlier studies were too small to catch it. with 35,000 people you finally see it clean.
every parent, teacher, and young woman saying "instagram is specifically rough on young women" had the data the whole time.
this study doesn't let either side of the debate fully win:
- anti-platform crowd can't use it because the average effect is small and the thumb just moves to the next app
- pro-platform crowd can't use it because the young women finding is real and clean
platform response so far? a screen time reminder and some cosmetic settings. that's not a serious response.
longer writeup with the regulation angle and why this got buried: https://ninzaverse.beehiiv.com/p/what-quitting-facebook-and-instagram-actually-does-to-you
curious what people here think.. anyone deleted an app long-term and actually felt different? or did you just open something else?
u/call_me_ninza — 7 hours ago
OpenAI's market share dropped from 64.5% to 56.72% in two months. A Council on Foreign Relations journalist just publicly put bankruptcy odds at 50% in 18 months, on stage next to Demis Hassabis.
OpenAI
- Global market share: 64.5% in Jan 2026 → 56.72% in March
- Killed Sora in March to save compute
- April exits: Sora lead Bill Peebles resigned, science lead Kevin Weil resigned, product chief on medical leave, marketing chief stepped down, COO Brad Lightcap moved to "special projects"
- Stuck at 920M users
- Missed 2025 growth targets
Anthropic
- Head of growth Amol Avasare confirmed a 2% test pulling Claude Code from the Pro plan
- Prosumer subscribers paying less than the actual cost of tokens they're burning
- Opus 4.7 burns way more tokens than 4.6 with modest intelligence gains
- Rate limits hitting faster
SpaceX
- $60B deal with Cursor. Option to acquire outright this year or $10B joint venture
- Plugging Cursor into Colossus. 1M H100s pointed at coding agents
- Deep Research pushed to Gemini API with minimal fanfare
- 93.3% on DeepSearchQA, 54.6% on HLE
That was ONE Tuesday.
Then Sebastian Mallaby (Council on Foreign Relations, wrote the definitive book on hedge funds, actual finance journalist) sits on a stage in San Francisco and says publicly there's a 50% chance OpenAI goes bankrupt in 18 months.
He said this sitting next to Demis Hassabis.
Demis followed it with 8 takeaways that genuinely reframe this industry. One about Dario Amodei as a lab leader. One about China's actual timeline. One about India's posture toward AI. One about drug development and what AlphaFold can realistically compress. One about what he originally wanted AI to become when he started DeepMind.
He's still optimistic. Which might be the most interesting part of the whole thing.
Full breakdown with all 8 takeaways and honest takes on what's real vs what's pitching: https://ninzaverse.beehiiv.com/p/openai-is-bleeding-anthropic-is-pulling-features-google-is-quietly-winning
Is there any universe where frontier AI doesn't end up as pure commercial racing? Or was that baked in from day one?
u/call_me_ninza — 1 day ago
▲ 6 r/aigossips
Anthropic Removes Claude Code from New Pro Subscriptions in Quiet Test
anthropic is literally pulling features without telling anyone.
"For clarity, we're running a small test on ~2 percent of new prosumer signups"
head of growth amol avasare just confirmed they are yanking claude code from the pro plan for some new users.
subscribers are currently paying way less than the book value of tokens.
they are exploring further usage limitations to dampen demand.
users think they want former pro subscribers to adopt cheaper chinese models like qwen or kimi instead.
wtf happens to unlimited compute now??
u/call_me_ninza — 1 day ago