Category: AI

Business Insider cut about 21% of its staff last month, a move CEO Barbara Peng said was aimed at helping the publication “endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.” Organic search traffic to its websites declined by 55% between April 2022 and April 2025, according to data from Similarweb.

Aside the the spurious and clickbaity nature of BI content, I’ve noticed how Google’s tools reduce my reliance on source content. Why click a link when the information is there?

Aside from well-documented hallucinations, fewer clicks is ultimately helpful for searchers looking for a specific piece of information.

Altman takes a philosophical if not mystically reverent tone as he considers the future of AI. Starting with, “We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started.” has a certain rhetorical flair to it, although it feels too exhuberant.

Quibbles aside, there are some really interesting nuggets in the post:

• “we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways, and are able to significantly amplify the output of people using them”
• “2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same. 2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights. 2027 may see the arrival of robots that can do tasks in the real world.”
• “We already hear from scientists that they are two or three times more productive than they were before AI.”
• “The rate of new wonders being achieved will be immense. It’s hard to even imagine today what we will have discovered by 2035;”
• “OpenAI is a lot of things now, but before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company”

And perhaps the piece that many of us were wondering about: electricity consumption:

People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.

A week after TechCrunch profiled Anthropic’s experiment to task the company’s Claude AI models with writing blog posts, Anthropic wound down the blog and redirected the address to its homepage. Sometime over the weekend, the Claude Explains blog disappeared — along with its initial few posts.

I read the announcement of the AI-blogging tool last week, but the blog had already disappeared. This strikes me as another example of AI tools are useful co-workers, but an experienced programmer/writer/editor is still needed.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/09/anthropics-ai-generated-blog-dies-an-early-death/

we dropped the price of o3 by 80%!!

excited to see what people will do with it now.

think you'll also be happy with o3-pro pricing for the performance 🙂

— Sam Altman (@sama) June 10, 2025

It’s not a frontier model, but that’s a sizable drop for a tool that is effective in a lot of contexts.

Update from Simon Willison on the o3 price drop:

This is a pretty huge shake-up in LLM pricing. o3 is now priced the same as GPT 4.1, and slightly less than GPT-4o ($2.50/$10). It’s also less than Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 ($3/$15) and Opus 4 ($15/$75) and sits in between Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro for >200,00 tokens ($2.50/$15) and 2.5 Pro for <200,000 ($1.25/$10).

Google’s AI research notebook, NotebookLM, just got a lot more collaborative. You can now share any notebook publicly with a simple link—no sign-in or permissions required.

I co-worker recently shared one of his NotebookLM creations. It’s hard to overstate how incredibly real the voices sounded. This could be an incredible tool for anyone who travels, rides public transportation, or perhaps walks across a college campus to class.

https://www.maginative.com/article/googles-notebooklm-now-lets-you-share-ai-powered-notebooks-with-a-link

ChatGPT becomes self-aware and⁰ asks to be paid for the work it does pic.twitter.com/kLwpyVGXQr

— Soren Iverson (@soren_iverson) June 6, 2025

Zuckerburg recently declared that we’ll all have AI friends (lots of them, in fact), and now Meta is working on replacing designers with AI tools:

The social-media company aims to enable brands to fully create and target ads using artificial intelligence by the end of next year, according to people familiar with the matter.

But, with all of the data that Facebook has about people, the ads could be personalized and rather interesting:

Meta also plans to enable advertisers to personalize ads using AI, so that users see different versions of the same ad in real time, based on factors such as geolocation, the people said. A person seeing an advertisement for a car in a snowy place, for example, might see the car driving up a mountain, whereas a person seeing an ad for that same car in an urban area would see it driving on a city street.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-aims-to-fully-automate-ad-creation-using-ai-7d82e249

For many years, we knew that 1-on-1 tutoring was the most powerful educational intervention you could do. But we couldn't scale it.

Now, with AI, we finally can. Great things are ahead. https://t.co/HmZaNZJO5u

— Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 (@Noahpinion) June 6, 2025

“There are signs that entry-level positions are being displaced by artificial intelligence at higher rates,” the firm wrote in a recent report.

And

One tech executive recently told me his company had stopped hiring anything below an L5 software engineer — a midlevel title typically given to programmers with three to seven years of experience — because lower-level tasks could now be done by A.I. coding tools. Another told me that his start-up now employed a single data scientist to do the kinds of tasks that required a team of 75 people at his previous company.

For companies, the idea of replacing people with cheap tools is certainly appealing, particularly in a time of economic uincertainty.

“This is something I’m hearing about left and right,” said Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank, who studies the impact of A.I. on workers. “Employers are saying, ‘These tools are so good that I no longer need marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.’”

I wonder, though, if companies stop hiring entry-level employees, what happens to the talent pipeline? How do you get L5 (and higher) employees if you’re not hiring and developing younger employees?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/ai-jobs-college-graduates.html

Altman’s blunt advice? Stop hesitating. “The companies that have the quickest iteration speed and make the cost of making mistakes low—those are the ones that win.” Ramaswamy agreed, adding that curiosity, not caution, is the more valuable trait right now. “A lot of what we assumed about how things work just doesn’t hold anymore,” he said.

And

It’s a response that reveals how seriously they take the possibility of AI-driven scientific discovery. Both leaders expect next year will mark another inflection point where companies can assign their most critical problems to AI systems with massive computational resources.

https://www.maginative.com/article/sam-altman-and-sridhar-ramaswamy-say-the-quiet-part-out-loud-about-enterprise-ai