This week at the end of the world

According to a May report by Enders and the Professional Publishers Association, media groups were “losing visibility and value as their content is used but not rewarded”, with about half reporting a search traffic decline over the past year.

Publishers race to counter ‘Google Zero’ threat as AI changes search engines

The publisher of Rolling Stone and The Hollywood Reporter has sued Google, alleging that the AI summaries that appear atop search results are illegally using its reporting and depressing online traffic...

Rolling Stone Publisher Sues Google Over AI Summaries (WSJ)

The scaling benefits of pre-training — that initial process of teaching AI models using massive datasets, which is the sole domain of foundation models — has slowed down... the early benefits of hyperscaled foundational models have hit diminishing returns, and attention has turned to post-training and reinforcement learning as sources of future progress. If you want to make a better AI coding tool, you’re better off working on fine-tuning and interface design rather than spending another few billion dollars worth in server time on pre-training. As the success of Anthropic’s Claude Code shows, foundation model companies are quite good at these other fields too — but it’s not as durable an advantage as it used to be. 

In short, the competitive landscape of AI is changing in ways that undermine the advantages of the biggest AI labs. Instead of a race for an all-powerful AGI that could match or exceed human abilities across all cognitive tasks, the immediate future looks like a flurry of discrete businesses: software development, enterprise data management, image generation and so on.

TechCrunch: How the AI boom could leave AI’s biggest companies behind

In June, Cloudflare... announced a set of tools for tracking AI scraping and plans to build a “marketplace” that would allow sites to set prices for “accessing and taking their content to ingest into these systems.” This week, a group of online organizations and websites — including Reddit, Medium, Quora, and Cloudflare competitor Fastly — announced the RSL standard, short for Really Simply Licensing... 

The idea is simple... anyone who hosts content will be able to indicate not just whether the content can be scraped but how it should be attributed and, crucially, how much they want to charge for its use, either individually or as part of a coordinated group. ... Combined with the ability to use services like Cloudflare and Fastly to more effectively block AI firms, though, it does mark the beginning of a potentially major change. For most websites, AI crawling has so far been a net negative, and there isn’t much to lose by shutting it down (with the exception of Google, which crawls for its Search and AI products using the same tools).

The AI-Scraping Free-for-All Is Coming to an End (NYMag.com)