Its data was already used to train AI, maybe they could have sold it to the big AI companies? I am guessing its too late for that. All they have is their previous name and user fondness.
But now with the usage fallen, maybe they could train their own coding models to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, sort of like a hybrid of their previous forum + AI. AI solutions that work will get locked as "Accepted" by stack overflow like before via user vote.
I would suspect her phone first before looking for a physical device. An android phone is particularly vulnerable to being backdoored by cyber criminals that you can hire. Also any other computer or laptop in the house can similarly be compromised.
After that, the wifi thing is easy to check as you mentioned, but a dedicated listening device can also have a build in LTE radio with a SIM card. There is no upper limit on sophistication, even a completely passive device without external power is possible if the hostile actor has the money.[1]
The frontier of how good models are also shifts and will remain ahead of local models unless we hit some dead end limitation in the algorithms themselves. A ceiling so to speak on how good LLM can get before the law of diminishing returns starts to apply.
I think it would be the opposite and we are all in for a rude awakening. If you have tried playing with Opus 4.6 you would know what I am talking about.
Generative AI has failed to replace SaaS so far...It has disrupted plenty of other lower verticals in writing, proof reading, translation, graphics design, tutorials, searching case law etc. Unless the progress stops, you can't assume LLM efficacy has hit a ceiling.
Agents, properly setup can partially accomplish what you described already.
Their competitor is Google, which has already baked AI into search and allows you to talk to Gemini separately as well. Google already makes a hundred billion a year from text search and won't stop a free Gemini which adds value to their search. What makes you say that?
Also Deepseek and Alibaba would love to capture OpenAI users.
Large software platforms with their own ecosystems will be spared this fate. Mostly because AI can only create small and trivial apps and further model improvement in context size or otherwise may not be forthcoming so easily.
So large software platforms, think Jira/Confluence, MS Teams, SAP etc are not affected. But AI will definitely eat the solo dev SaaS, especially those handling trivial use cases.
1. The Steam engine and later ICE engines that started and sustained the industrial revolution and the modern world.
2. Electricity (generation, control), this led to the telegraph (our first internet), radio, and of-course electrical switching components that form basis of modern semiconductors.