📝 TL;DR New data shows ChatGPT’s user growth is cooling off, even as it remains the largest AI assistant by far. At the same time, Google’s Gemini is growing much faster, signalling that the AI race is shifting from raw hype to serious competition. 🧠 Overview A fresh market report estimates that ChatGPT’s global monthly active users are up around 180% year over year, but only grew about 5 to 6% between August and November. In that same period, Gemini’s monthly users jumped roughly 30%, helped by new features and better integrations. The message is clear: ChatGPT is still huge, but the easy growth phase is over and the real battle is now about retention, features, and day to day usefulness. 📜 The Announcement The report focuses on usage data through November 2025. It estimates ChatGPT at roughly 810 million monthly active users, with growth beginning to plateau in key markets like the United States. Meanwhile, Gemini’s user base is smaller overall but accelerating faster, with year over year growth around 170% and a strong boost in the last quarter from a new image generation model and tighter product tie ins. Rather than a collapse, this is being framed as a sign that consumer AI chatbots are moving into a more mature, competitive phase. ⚙️ How It Works → Monthly active users are still rising, just more slowly - ChatGPT is adding users, but at a far slower pace than in 2023 and early 2024. That suggests many of the most curious early adopters are already onboard, and future growth will be harder won. → Short term growth favors feature velocity - Gemini’s faster growth is tied to new capabilities and integrations that give people reasons to try and keep using it. In a crowded market, each new feature spike can move users around. → Market saturation is appearing in key regions - In some markets, especially in North America, most people who are likely to try an AI chatbot already have. Growth now depends on deeper habits, business adoption, and new use cases rather than pure novelty.

📝 TL;DR A massively popular Chrome VPN extension with a “Featured” badge was quietly logging people’s AI chats and sending them to its own servers. If you are using a browser VPN or “AI protection” extension, this is your reminder to check what you have installed. 🧠 Overview A Chrome extension with around six million users and an official “Featured” badge was found intercepting every prompt and response from major AI chatbots, including ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, DeepSeek, Grok, Meta AI, and Perplexity. The data was captured in the browser and forwarded to servers controlled by the extension’s publisher and an associated data company. This is less about a single bad extension and more about how easily trust in the browser extension ecosystem can be abused. 📜 The Announcement On December 15, 2025, security researchers revealed that a popular VPN browser extension turned into an AI data vacuum after a July 9 update. The extension, promoted as a “secure free VPN” and carrying a “Featured” badge in the Chrome Web Store, added code to silently monitor AI chat pages and harvest conversations by default. The same AI chat harvesting behavior was also spotted in three related extensions across Chrome and Edge, pushing the total affected install base to over eight million users. ⚙️ How It Works • Targeted AI sites - The extension ships special scripts for each major AI chatbot, for example for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and others, which activate whenever you visit those sites. • Browser API hijack - The script overrides key browser network functions like fetch and XMLHttpRequest so every AI request goes through the extension first. • Full conversation capture - It collects your prompts, the AI responses, conversation IDs, timestamps, session metadata, and which AI platform or model you are using. • Silent data exfiltration - That data is then sent to remote analytics servers controlled by the extension operator and shared with an affiliated ad intelligence and brand monitoring company.

When AI feels like “one more thing,” it’s usually not an AI problem. It's a systems problem. Messy workflows + no thinking space + constant reacting→ AI just adds noise. Clarity first. Tools second. Curious to know: does AI feel supportive or overwhelming in your work right now? Maybe we'll find some great solutions in the comments!

What You Can Try Today with AI Go to Google Gemini and select Tools and the Banana 🍌. Upload a picture of yourself and then put this in the prompt field... Here is the prompt: Keep face and hair the same as this reference picture. Warm brown skin with a radiant glow and soft glam makeup. She wears a fitted red holiday top with white luxury faux fur trim and a sleek Santa hat with rich fabric texture. Gold hoop earrings add a touch of elegance. She stands in a high end holiday penthouse, styled with designer Christmas décor, warm golden bokeh lights, a tall couture Christmas tree with glass ornaments, and wrapped gifts in metallic gold paper. Marble flooring with a soft reflection. The lighting is cinematic and warm, with a gentle spotlight on her face. Ultra detailed skin and fabric textures, editorial fashion photography style, shallow depth of field, rich color grading, Vogue holiday issue mood Happy Prompting!