Welcome, humans.

This is it: our final week of publishing for the year! For the next five days, we’re going to promote our special holiday giveaway: if you help us reach 500K subscribers before the end of the year, we’ll pay for your AI for a year (at $20 / month)!

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Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

• We dive into new data on AI adoption rates + actual AI usage patterns.
• Meta backed Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI.
• OpenAI's new monitoring tool caused major service outage.
• Worm-inspired AI startup Liquid raised $250M valuation.

Advertise in The Neuron here.

New data reveals how people actually use AI (and why adoption is still so low)

Ever wondered what people are actually using AI assistants for? Between Anthropic (maker of Claude)'s new research paper and a new report from Goldman Sachs, we finally have some concrete data on how AI is being used in the real world—and why most companies still aren't using it.

Let's start with the numbers: Only 6.1% of US companies are currently using AI (up slightly from 5.9% last quarter). But where it IS being used, the impact is significant—academic studies show a 23% boost in productivity, while companies report gains closer to 30%.

The adoption story gets more interesting when you break it down:

• Large companies (250+ employees) lead with 10% adoption.
• Finance and insurance firms show the fastest growth.
• Small/mid-sized business adoption has doubled over past year.

Meanwhile, Anthropic’s new Clio system analyzed millions of Claude conversations to show what people are actually doing with AI.

Top use cases:

• Web/mobile app development (10%+ of all conversations).
• Writing assistance and content creation (7-10%).
• Research and analysis tasks (6-8%).
• Business strategy and operations (6%).
• Teaching and educational assistance (7%+).

Keep in mind, this is actual data from real Claude users—survey size = 1M conversations.

Full list of most common use-cases.

Interesting note: The heavy skew toward development tasks (23.8% total) suggests we're still early in the adoption curve, since developers only make up about 2.5% of the workforce.

Clio also found thousands of fascinating niche use cases, too:

• Dream interpretation and analysis.
• Soccer match analysis.
• Disaster preparedness planning.
• Dungeons & Dragons game mastering (this is awesome).
• Transportation system optimization.

And of course, counting how many r's are in “strawberry” (to track AI progress). For more on what they found, check out this video.

Our take: We now know how many companies are using AI, and at least some of what people are using AI to do. Now let’s focus on what we SHOULD be using AI for.

Research from Ethan Mollick suggests that AI is most valuable for non-technical tasks like generating high volumes of ideas, translating between perspectives, and assisting experts who can quickly spot errors. The sectors seeing the biggest gains—finance and insurance—align perfectly with these use cases.

But Mollick also warns against using AI for learning new concepts, high-accuracy tasks, or when “the struggle is the point.” As large companies plan major AI rollouts in the next 6 months, the winners might be those who understand not just how to use AI, but when not to.

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Prompt Tip of the Day

Created by Michael Hewing—very cool framework, sir!

Check out this visual framework that breaks down prompt engineering into four key blocks:

1. Roles/audience: Define the AI's persona and who you're creating content for.
2. Context/references: Provide background info and relevant sources to improve accuracy.
3. Goals/tasks: Break down your objective into clear, sequential steps.
4. Output/tonality: Specify format, length, style and attributes (like formal vs casual).

This structure helps you think through each aspect of your prompts systematically, whether you're working on business tasks, creative projects, or technical problems.

You can use the same structure to plan out your Projects, too: define project role and audience in custom instructions, upload key files and docs as context, organize specific tasks into separate chat threads, and set consistent output formats and style guides across your project.

Treats To Try.

1. *Attention eliminates your biggest sales roadblocks by breaking through language barriers, turning calls into case studies, and making every rep your best rep yet. See how → here.
2. Grok 2 has begun rolling out to everyone as part of xAI’s Grok for everyone push—it processes real-time information from X to answer your questions with citations, generates images, and analyzes posts in your feed—here’s a sample explanation of those weird mystery drones ppl keep seeing on the east coast.
3. AnimateAI turns your story ideas into animated videos by generating consistent characters, storyboards, and full video scenes that match your vision (free to try).
4. NotebookLM helps you understand any document by letting you upload files, ask questions with cited answers, and create audio summaries you can talk to—and now there’s NotebookLM Plus, with 5x more usage limits + more features.
5. Pitch Perfect - VC Pitch helps you practice fundraising pitches with simulated VCs and get instant feedback on your deck.
6. Agora is a product search engine that aggregates items from different online stores (totally free).
7. Patchwork from Midjourney lets you create and visualize fictional worlds on an infinite canvas where you can collaborate with others to add characters, places, and stories through text and images.

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

*This is sponsored content. Advertise in The Neuron here.

Around the Horn.

Not sure how credible this is, but pretty good guesses! We imagine 3-4 of these 5 are spot on, if not all.

• Meta backed Musk's lawsuit to block OpenAI's for-profit conversion by writing a letter to California's Attorney General, which OpenAI countered by releasing Musk's past communications.
• OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, who recently accused the company of copyright violations in ChatGPT's training data, was found dead in his San Francisco apartment at age 26.
• Liquid AI raised $250M in funding from chip company AMD to develop AI systems inspired by worm brain structures (called liquid foundation models).
• The reason ChatGPT stopped working for about 3 hours last week is because OpenAI installed a new monitoring tool that backfired—kinda like installing a new security camera system to watch their servers, and then the security system crashes everything.

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Monday Meme

A Cat's Commentary.