Why I keep opening another AI.
I caught myself using ChatGPT instead of Neeos because Neeos was slow. So I measured it.
On October 18th I admitted something to myself: I'd been opening another AI app because Neeos was slower. If the person who built it does that, everyone does. Speed isn't a nice-to-have. It's the reason people leave.
The measurement
On my own phone, across 191 successful sends, the first words of an answer arrived in a typical 4.8 seconds. For the slow tenth of messages it was 13.1 seconds or more. The phone itself added less than a tenth of a second. Nearly all of the wait was the server and the AI model.
Two caveats, because they matter: this is one person's data, mine, not the average across everyone, and it was taken before any fix.
The target
For ordinary questions, I want the first words to appear in well under two seconds.
What's being tried
- A fast path for simple questions that don't need heavy thinking.
- A “thinking ladder”, where Neeos uses more effort only when a question deserves it.
- A version where words appear first and the richer, interactive part follows.
These are in progress, and the speed settings aren't switched on for the public app yet. The next update waits on whether the numbers on my phone really move. I'll tell you what the measurement says, including if it says no.
Written October 21, 2026 from the build log, and dated to when this happened.