WhatsApp is more popular than Slack, Teams and Telegram combined. WhatsApp has something like 2-3 billion users worldwide

WhatsApp vs Slack + Teams is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison though.

Living in Japan has made me realize how different cultures can be — even down to the apps and services people use. It honestly surprises me, and now I kind of want to try WhatsApp too.

Honestly Whatsapp is nothing special. It works well, just like many other chat apps nowadays. The interest is that in some large parts of the world, everyone uses it already.

The only thing it's that creating bots for whatsapp it's not as easy as for telegram and it cost money. Actually that is the business plan for whatsapp making money from whatsapp business

Interesting. I’m an engineer, so how easy it is to use and how much it costs both matter a lot to me.

A lot of such cases. Claude itself had (has?) fewer users than Perplexity, let alone Meta AI, Gemini or ChatGPT

no they definitely did not have fewer users than Perplexity xD

Late last year is not the timeline you want. Anthropic’s hockey stick happened earlier this year.

I use Claude. I use Codex. I've never heard of or used Meta AI. Nor do I have a Facebook account. Never have, never will.

I am also a software developer. So while the numbers of "people" that use one AI or another may be higher than either of these, it's not a useful metric for myself.

That's fine. I'm not making a value judgement about which LLMs you should use, if any.

I'm only pushing back against someone thinking "oh HN talks about Claude a lot, therefore Claude must be extremely popular". The information bubble is a real problem.

I’m aware of how long ago late 2025 was.

Anthropic’s revenue in Q1 2026 has skyrocketed.

It's probably true that Anthropic's revenue is booming. But we need massive grains of salt:

a) they are private and revenue numbers for private companies are hopelessly unreliable, and

b) they are planning an IPO, so there's an extra incentive to big up the numbers. Anthropic always brings up ARR, which is very gameable when the year hasn't ended yet

You’re right that time will tell the end story.

It's Android app is 18th place in Denmark right now. Someone must have heard about it.

Talk about a bubble. No one outside of programmers know what the heck is Claude. In Asia, ChatGPT and Gemini dominates LLM usage, followed by Perplexity.

I suspect we're underestimating the number of users Deepseek has in Asia.

Microsoft released a report with some numbers on Deepseek adoption globally. They say it's got ~90% market share in China, and is growing in popularity across Africa.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/top...

Bears look smart, bulls do things

Let's see a bull open a very complicated garbage dumpster in a national park. Maybe bears are actually smart and not just looking smart?

> Said one park ranger, "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."

I think they are probably referring to marketplace bears and bulls.

It's a horrendous example.

Bears are the same thing as bulls. Just the opposite.

You can look like a degenerate wallstreetbets gambler, being a bull, buying puts.

You can equally look like a degenerate wallstreetbets gambler, being a gay bear, shorting the stock.

The "beauty" of our modern stock market, is it provides both sides the avenue to lose stupid amounts of money.

I would think that bears are much smarter than bulls?

Gotta crush the competition

The typography in Maggie Appleton's blog is unparalleled

https://maggieappleton.com/

Favorite! Both aesthetics and content!

I suspect the average excel spreadsheet has fewer bugs than the average custom in-house enterprise software

My dream world is we apply time zone logic to every other unit of measurement.

1 metre can be 100cm or 200cm depending on the season and your location

My nightmare world would be one where we apply "everything else" logic to time.

1 kilosecond: about 17 minutes

1 megasecond: about 12 days

1 gigasecond: about 32 years

"Oh man, it's been a hot megasecond since we last spoke!" Said everyone, in my worst nightmares.

please nobody tell this person about milliseconds

It depends on whether you're making the breakfast, or someone else is making your breakfast.

Light breakfasts are popular if you have to make it yourself

At least some of the comments here are likely AI-generated

Most people nowadays are not vaccinated against smallpox anymore