mysummit.school - AI for Managers Blog

A year and a half ago, I wrote a note on my personal blog about something I was noticing in my colleagues’ work and in my own: the more you trust AI, the less often you ask yourself “is this actually right?” I was drawing on a Microsoft study at the time – it showed that trust in AI suppresses critical evaluation of the answers it produces. The argument felt strong to me, but it had an obvious flaw: correlation, not causation.

In February 2026, Anthropic researchers Judy Shen and Alex Tamkin published an experiment that closed that gap. Randomized control. Concrete data. And a conclusion that, I think, most people who’ve read about it have misunderstood.

Because this isn’t a story about AI making us dumber. It’s a story about how exactly we use it.

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup that has become one of the industry’s leading players in just two years. In April 2026 DeepSeek released V4 – a generation of models that competes with GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6 on quality while costing 10–50 times less.

GigaChat is a generative AI model from Sber – Russia’s largest bank and technology group. Its defining feature is that it’s a genuinely Russian-language model, trained on Russian data with a deep understanding of cultural context, slang, and the realities of the Russian language. And it works without a VPN.

YandexGPT is a family of generative language models from Yandex, available through Alice, Yandex Browser, the Yandex Cloud API, and other ecosystem services. By February 2026, Yandex introduced the new Alice AI model family, which together with YandexGPT forms a powerful platform for working with the Russian language.

Grok by Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI (formerly xAI) is an AI system that stands out from competitors (ChatGPT, Claude) by skipping heavy content filters and giving direct, real-time access to X (Twitter) data. In June 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI, creating SpaceXAI – a company spanning rocketry, the Starlink satellite network, and AI. Grok has outgrown its “chatbot” label and become a full agent ecosystem: the latest model, Grok 4.5 (June 2026, 1.5 trillion parameters), ranks in the top 6 worldwide on our benchmark.

Gemini is Google’s generative AI ecosystem, which by February 2026 has become a key tool for companies deeply integrated with Google services. Its main advantage is seamless integration with Google Workspace (Docs, Sheets, Gmail, Drive) and instant access to real-time data through Google Search.

By mid-2026 the AI-tool market has grown specialized: ChatGPT’s grip has loosened, and professionals work with a “stack” of several models rather than a single one. Perplexity has carved out the niche of a smart navigator in an ocean of information – and over the past year it has grown from a search box into a browser and a working assistant.

Anthropic ships Claude updates almost every two weeks. Behind the version numbers, what matters to a manager is what actually changes in the work. Three key events happened by the summer of 2026. On May 28, the new flagship Claude Opus 4.8 shipped – its strength is reliability: it judges its own work more honestly and is less likely to deliver a confident but wrong result. On June 30, Claude Sonnet 5 arrived – the new default model for Free and Pro users. And Fable 5, after being taken offline at the demand of US authorities, returned on July 1 – Anthropic hardened the safeguards, and the model is stable and available again. A context window of 1 million tokens has long been available to all users at no extra cost.

By 2026, calling ChatGPT just a “chatbot” feels off. It’s a working platform with several models, search, deep research, an agent mode, image generation, and Codex for development. The Sora video platform, previously part of the ecosystem, was retired as a consumer product in April 2026. And precisely because of that, newcomers find it harder to grasp the main thing: what among all of this does an ordinary manager actually need, and what still matters only to power users and tech teams.