There is a difference between a toaster brand saying their toasting now has AI built in vs Anthropic releasing Mythos.
The toaster brand is just trying to fool people. Something like Mythos is actually what's driving change.
In tech, Microsoft is a big reason for this turnoff. First, they forced Copilot onto Windows users. Second, they decided to market "AI PCs" by forcing AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm to put NPUs into their SoCs. But a tiny NPU is no match for frontier LLMs. Therefore, customers are sold on their PCs having something as good as ChatGPT built in but in reality, it's barely powerful enough to fix your grammar.
Everyone around me, including my elderly parents, love using ChatGPT. Go to any coffee shop and you'll see ChatGPT on nearly everyone's laptop. People aren't turned off by OpenAI or Anthropic. They're turned off by everyone else.
More people see/are aware of the toaster than Mythos - those pointless integrations are (I suspect) what's driving sentiment.
That's my feeling too - that and Microsoft Windows being one of the most egregious examples of forced AI features.
I wouldn't let these toaster companies and Microsoft distract from the actual progress in SOTA AI.
Nah, Mythos are Fable primary purpose was marketing. And the fables about their danger were indeed lies.
Nah, Anthropic is the leading AI company.
A toaster company saying their product now has AI is actually turning people off.
A toaster with AI could potentially be useful. I've never had a toaster that can make toast for the whole family - you can do 2 slices but then you have to wait several minutes for it to cool down before making the next otherwise the second batch will not be done. (I have used restaurant toasters that can do this, but they are not for home use)
You wouldn't need AI for this; deterministic programming would be enough (and scads cheaper).
One would think, but...
I have a Sage toaster (Brevile in some markets) which does exactly this, even has a progress bar that counts down when your toast will popup.
my toasters have all been the opposite, once you warm it up with the first batch, the next batch actually gets more toasted than the first one, even with the same setting.
even a kalman filter would be overkill for this. Just buy a toaster that isn't terrible, the calibre of hardware needed for this costs $0.02 for a pack of 10 - thats the level of cheapness needed to make a toaster that bad.
Boring cheap old school toasters can make as many toasts as you want. You dont cool them before making toasts, you warm them up and then do toasts.
Umm my toaster doesn’t have this problem and it’s not AI …
why does this happen to you?
They're different, but average people dislike both of them.
The average person uses ChatGPT daily. This average person hates how their toaster, washing machine, pencil, eraser now all have "AI capabilities".
These stats are from last year, but in 2025, two-thirds of adult Americans had never used ChatGPT: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/25/34-of-us-...
Another stat I've heard, but can't cite at the moment, is that only 7% of Americans use ChatGPT daily - I think it is likely a bit older than 2025, though, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's closer to 10 or 20% now.
Everybody lives in their own bubble, and it can be easy to believe that you're in-touch with the public-at-large. That's why you gotta fact-check this stuff.
My bubble is working adults, which is likely more represented by the 58% under 30 figure. However, this was a year ago. I'm guessing adoption has accelerated even more in a year. It wouldn't surprise me if it's 50% overall by now and 70-80% of adults under 30.
So these facts don't actually dispel my intuition.
Looks like you're wrong about 2026 as well: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-an...
It's still a minority of adults who use chatbots, let alone are daily users. It took me approximately 2 minutes to look this up.
People around me, outside the programmer bubble, hate OpenAI with a passion. It's the symbol of antidemocratic US corporations cuddling with Trump etc, right there with Tesla. And no one outside my tech bubble has ever heard of Anthropic.
This is distinctly different than the dot com bubble were people actually were euphoric about the future unfolding before their eyes.