Sam Altman told a Sequoia Capital audience that older people use ChatGPT like Google, millennials use it as a life advisor, and college students use it as an operating system. He’s not wrong about the college students. He’s wrong about who else is doing it. The data doesn’t support the generational frame Altman’s taxonomy is intuitive. Younger people grew up with these tools. Of course they’d go deeper. But the Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey tells a different story. Developers with 10-19 years of experience were among the heaviest AI adopters, consistently reported strong productivity gains, and were simultaneously the least likely cohort to highly trust AI output. That combination is the whole story. A Qlik survey found mid-career professionals, not Gen Z, emerging as AI’s most active power users.…