This Week's Tech: AI News, Tech News, OpenAI, ChatGPT, Google Gemini · This Week's Tech

AI App Crisis, OpenAI Does Math, Big Nvidia Deal

March 11, 2026·18 min·1 clip

After 12 months, AI apps retained 21% of subscribers versus 30.7% for non-AI apps.

Jaden Schaefer starts with a birthday check-in and quickly frames the day around a few major AI stories. He thanks listeners for the reviews and shoutouts before jumping into the news. The first story is about AI-powered apps and their weak long-term retention. He points to research showing that AI apps are getting plenty of attention, but not always holding onto users. Monthly retention is lower for AI apps than for non-AI apps. The twelve-month gap is even wider, with AI apps trailing conventional apps by a noticeable margin. He reads that as a sign that many AI products still feel impressive at first and then lose momentum once the novelty fades. He also suggests that some of the weakness may come from the category being new and from a lot of hype around what these apps can do. In his view, users are willing to try AI apps, but they leave quickly if the product does not solve the job cleanly. He argues that the future may look less like a separate AI app category and more like normal apps that quietly use AI when it helps. The second story is ChatGPT's new interactive visuals for math and science. He sees that as a meaningful step because it pushes the product toward explanation, not just text generation. He notes that Google has been doing something similar, which makes the feature feel like part of a wider product race. The third story is a large compute deal between Thinking Machine Labs and NVIDIA. He treats the deal as a sign of how central compute remains for frontier AI development. The company's background and funding make the news especially notable to him. Across all three stories, he keeps circling back to usefulness, retention, and infrastructure as the real battlegrounds. The tone stays conversational throughout. He is following a market that is still taking shape in public. By the end, the episode feels like a snapshot of AI's current pressure points: product stickiness, feature evolution, and the cost of staying in the race.

As heard by us

Three AI stories, with retention still the sharpest thread.

The episode tracks three AI stories without making them feel separate: retention problems in AI apps, ChatGPT's interactive visuals for math and science, and Thinking Machine Labs' compute deal with NVIDIA.

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