Good morning 👋 to anyone who’s ever lost Wi-Fi and suddenly rediscovered books, nature, or even your family. Yesterday, thousands of coders faced their own unplanned break when Claude went offline, forcing them back to primitive methods, like actual thinking. For devs who’ve grown used to AI doing the heavy lifting, it felt less like a temporary outage and more like getting tossed into the Stone Age.
🎧 Spotify users joined together to sell their data to AI. Over 10k users pooled their listening histories and sold the dataset to AI devs for $55k. After splitting the pot, each walked away with ~$5 in crypto. Spotify is flipping out, claiming this violates terms. But the “Unwrapped” collective argues that if Spotify gets to decide who can sell your data, it’s not really yours at all. Welcome to the front lines of user rights versus Big Tech, with decentralized AI caught in the crossfire.
🎈 Oracle’s stock jumped 40% yesterday on news of a $300B AI deal with OpenAI. For a few minutes, Larry Ellison was the richest man on the planet. Ellison’s fortune surged by $89 billion, lifting his net worth to $383B and briefly pushing him past Musk. Oracle, long known mostly for boring databases and corporate software, is suddenly getting Nvidia-level hype as Wall Street bets big on its AI ambitions.
🧦A guy in his laundry room has built a search engine to rival Google. Using cheap hardware, AI, and servers humming next to a pile of dirty socks, Ryan Pearce launched “Searcha Page,” a privacy-focused engine already indexing over 2B pages. The last startup to take on Google hit a $20B valuation, and they didn’t even use fabric softener.
🎥 AI is building its empire on the backs of YouTube creators. Over 15 million videos got scraped and stuffed into massive datasets to train AI video generators. Most creators assumed YouTube’s terms protected them, but tech giants insist it’s all fair use. Now original videos have to compete against synthetic clones that sometimes outperform the real thing. Creators might need to learn how to beat themselves at their own game.
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🍽️ Big Tech’s free content buffet is ending (sort of). A new licensing standard called RSL lets websites charge AI companies each time bots scrape their content. Think of it like embedding invoices directly into the internet. Publishers can bill per crawl, per reference, or even per inference, turning web scraping into a pay-to-play transaction. Good luck collecting though, since bots have ignored robots.txt forever. But sure, send an invoice.
🦠 Could AI’s next big leap be grown in a lab? Researchers at Rice University got a $2 million grant to build computers powered by living microbes instead of silicon chips. These tiny organisms naturally trade chemical signals, adapt fast, and just might outcompute silicon. Imagine if your next computer came with feeding instructions.
fun stats
the CEO of Anthropic said that AI would be writing 90% of code by now 💾 Still waiting…
[Futurism]
