Alex Vacca Profile picture
Jun 18 13 tweets 4 min read Read on X
BREAKING: MIT just completed the first brain scan study of ChatGPT users & the results are terrifying.

Turns out, AI isn't making us more productive. It's making us cognitively bankrupt.

Here's what 4 months of data revealed:

(hint: we've been measuring productivity all wrong) Image
83.3% of ChatGPT users couldn't quote from essays they wrote minutes earlier.

Let that sink in.

You write something, hit save, and your brain has already forgotten it because ChatGPT did the thinking. Image
Brain scans revealed the damage: neural connections collapsed from 79 to just 42.

That's a 47% reduction in brain connectivity.

If your computer lost half its processing power, you'd call it broken. That's what's happening to ChatGPT users' brains. Image
Teachers didn't know which essays used AI, but they could feel something was wrong.

"Soulless."
"Empty with regard to content."
"Close to perfect language while failing to give personal insights."

The human brain can detect cognitive debt even when it can't name it. Image
Here's the terrifying part: When researchers forced ChatGPT users to write without AI, they performed worse than people who never used AI at all.

It's not just dependency. It's cognitive atrophy.

Like a muscle that's forgotten how to work.
The MIT team used EEG brain scans on 54 participants for 4 months.

They tracked alpha waves (creative processing), beta waves (active thinking), and neural connectivity patterns.

This isn't opinion. It's measurable brain damage from AI overuse.
The productivity paradox nobody talks about:

Yes, ChatGPT makes you 60% faster at completing tasks.

But it reduces the "germane cognitive load" needed for actual learning by 32%.

You're trading long-term brain capacity for short-term speed.
Companies celebrating AI productivity gains are unknowingly creating cognitively weaker teams.

Employees become dependent on tools they can't live without, and less capable of independent thinking.

Many recent studies underscore the same problem, including the one by Microsoft: Image
MIT researchers call this "cognitive debt" - like technical debt, but for your brain.

Every shortcut you take with AI creates interest payments in lost thinking ability.

And just like financial debt, the bill comes due eventually.

But there's good news... Image
Because session 4 of the study revealed something interesting:

People with strong cognitive baselines showed HIGHER neural connectivity when using AI than chronic users.

But chronic AI users forced to work without it? They performed worse than people who never used AI at all.
The solution isn't to ban AI. It's to use it strategically.

The choice is yours:
Build cognitive debt and become an AI dependent.
Or build cognitive strength and become an AI multiplier.

The first brain scan study of AI users just showed us the stakes.

Choose wisely. Image
Thanks for reading!

I'm Alex, COO at ColdIQ. Built a $4.5M ARR business in under 2 years.

Started with two founders doing everything.

Now we're a remote team across 10 countries, helping 200+ businesses scale through outbound systems. Image
RT the first tweet if you found this thread valuable.

Follow me @itsalexvacca for more threads on outbound and GTM strategy, AI-powered sales systems, and how to build profitable businesses that don't depend on you.

I share what worked (and what didn't) in real time.

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More from @itsalexvacca

Sep 30
8 Google engineers wrote the paper that every AI company now uses as their bible. OpenAI built GPT on it, Anthropic built Claude on it, and Meta built LLaMA on it.

Every LLM worth billions uses this paper's transformer architecture as the foundation...
Before 2017, teaching computers human language was torture.
AI would read text like humans reading through a keyhole - one word at a time.

They were slow, forgot context, and choked on long passages.
Then 8 researchers decided to flip things up... Image
They published an 8-page paper titled "Attention Is All You Need"

The idea was simple: Instead of reading word by word, why not look at everything at once? Like how you can glance at a page and immediately see which words relate to each other.

They called it a Transformer.
Read 16 tweets
Sep 25
A Swedish non-profit operates the DNS billions of internet users depend on from Cold War bunkers.

They've had 100% uptime for 20+ years & they developed the invisible signatures that protect domains from hackers.

How they do it is interesting... Image
Without these signatures, hackers can hijack your DNS requests.

Which means that when you visit a website, you can be redirected to a fake site that looks same.

It's known as DNS poisoning & hackers just need to intercept your DNS request & send back a fake IP address to do it. Image
Enter DNSSEC - the cryptographic signatures I mentioned earlier...

Every DNS response now gets a mathematical signature that proves it came from the real server.

If someone tries to inject a fake response, your computer detects the missing signature and blocks it. Image
Read 14 tweets
Sep 14
Three German brothers emailed eBay in 1999: "Let us run Germany for you."

eBay ignored them. So they cloned eBay, called it Alando, and made it so big that 100 days later eBay had to buy it for $43 million.

But what happened next was even more interesting... Image
The brothers - Marc, Oliver, and Alexander Samwer - turned this into a formula:

> Find successful US startups that hadn't expanded to Europe.
> Copy them exactly.
> Scale faster than the originals could expand.
> Sell it back to them or dominate.

They did this 100+ times. Image
The wildest was Airbnb. Brian Chesky flew to Berlin to meet their clone "Wimdu."

He walked into a converted factory with hundreds of people at desks. Each had two monitors: on the left, Wimdu on the right.

Copying every pixel change in real-time. Airbnb.com
Read 8 tweets
Sep 10
Everyone thinks Apple is losing the AI race.

But Apple made their Neural Engine 60x more powerful.
Its M4 chip processes AI inputs 2X faster than rivals.

And they're quietly using the picks and shovel strategy used by Levi's during the California Gold Rush.

Thread Image
Image
Let's first go back to 1849.

A news headline about California having a lot of gold broke out.

Hundreds and thousands of people rushed to California digging for gold.

But most of them died or went completely broke.

However, there was a guy named Levi Strauss...
Levi Strauss noticed that the real money wasn't in mining gold.

It was in selling the tools every miner desperately needed.

So he started selling the picks, shovels, and pants to these miners.
(Levi's still has the logo that spoke to these miners)

But this doesn't end here... Image
Read 24 tweets
Sep 9
Everyone's freaking out about Microsoft's deal with Nebius for $19.4 billion.

Two years ago, the same company was sanctioned and delisted from Nasdaq.

The founder fled from Russia with 1,300 engineers after condemning Putin's war.

Here's the wild story:
Microsoft's deal sent Nebius from $64 to $90 in hours.

$19.4 billion through 2031. That's 13x what Nebius made in all of 2024.

Microsoft had no choice though. They'd just lost their main GPU supplier to OpenAI... Image
But before we get to Microsoft's mess, you need to first meet Arkady Volozh, Yandex founder turned Nebius' CEO.

1989, working at a Soviet pipeline institute, he starts building search algorithms. Launches Yandex in 1997.

By 2021 he'd built something that made Google nervous... Image
Read 21 tweets
Sep 7
Pentagon can't operate without it.
Netflix can't stream without it.
And banks can't trade without it.

Yet most people have never heard of Akamai.

How a $11 billion company operating on a 25-year-old mathematical equation secures 2 trillion of your interactions 🧵 Image
In 2024 alone, Akamai blocked 311 billion web attacks (that's 850 million attacks per day)

But the irony is that the Israeli commando who co-founded Akamai was the first victim to be stabbed on the 9/11 flight.

While Danny Lewin was dying, his algorithm was being tested... Image
After the 9/11 attacks, news sites started crashing.

Billions of people wanted to know what was happening and flooded these websites.

However, few websites which worked on Akamai's math stayed online.

But how does the math running 30% of the internet actually work? Image
Read 17 tweets

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