It has not been a slow news week

Parallel has released Index, a platform that helps media orgs and content-creators monetize their content based on how and how much it’s slurped up by AI agents. AI has vaporized the content economy, because now agents are doing a lot of the browsing, not people. Index is supposed to fix that, although monetization is listed as “coming soon” on the website. The Atlantic, Fortune, and PR Newswire are the marquee brands that have signed on to date.

Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, wrote an interesting post about which types of employees he laid off, and why. He divides his workers into 3 camps (based on a management book from 1954): Builders, sellers, and measurers. He sacked mostly measurers and is hiring more builders and sellers. Measurers include finance, internal audit, legal, and middle management. Middle managers were let go because AI enables more reports per manager. Marketing folks were let go because those teams were “teeming with measurers.”

A wow moment: they hired 1,111 paid interns from a pool of almost a million applicants. They took 1 for every 900 that applied. Tough luck for the 998,889 who were rejected.

It’s a gift link, don’t know if it will work for everyone:

The synthetic customers seem to be working pretty well and also never have to go to the bathroom. Don’t smell like whiskey.

“US Bank has used synthetic audiences to understand how high-net-worth households and other customer segments think about financial topics, test messaging, and refine creative campaigns before launch.”

“Users buy a starter hardware kit for whatever they are trying to build from Atech’s site. Then they open a tab at the site, talk to an AI chatbot, describe the hardware concept they’re trying to build, and the AI tool generates code that helps them build a working prototype.”

To be honest, I don’t know how “code” helps you build a laptop.

You’ll need to use it on desktop, for now, to get the full capabilities. Collaboration and cloud-sync are not here, but coming soon. Chromium-based browsers only (including Chrome, natch).

Great idea: track how fast new AI models are being released. Paul Kinlan mapped it all out, and they are coming faster, but the idea that the time between drops will continue to drop is not yet borne out by the data.

There are some interesting nuggets in this post, although it’s a bit bloated and should have been written by a copywriter heh heh.

While questions of junk-code still hover around agents, using it for prototyping seems like an unambiguous win.

Big companies signing deals with Anthropic and forcing AI on their employees (without bothering to ask if the tools were a good fit) was always a bad idea. Smaller companies are better positioned to take advantage of this technology, which will level the playing field.

Categories for the short-listed apps include visuals and graphics, delight and fun, inclusivity, innovation, interaction, and others.

The comparisons to Windows and Meta here were very interesting. Anthropic is open-source and has focused on tools (hands), not brains (the model). Although 5 minutes later I am looking at a post that says Anthropic is moving away from its open source ethos as it slouches toward an IPO. Don’t worry, in 5 minutes I will read another post that contradicts the second post [skull emoji].

It will be more conversations/queries you’d have with a chat bot, and will monitor stuff on the web for you (e.g. “let me know when a shoe company drops a new product”) in the background. Is that even search anymore?

Local opposition blocked or delayed 48 data center projects worth $156 billion in 2025. Maybe that’s because electricity prices are climbing 61% faster than inflation. Historians and pollsters are calling the backlash to AI “unprecedented in its speed.” Membership in anti-AI Facebook groups—360,000 total—is up 400% since December. Politicians who approve AI data centers are being voted out of office, or their offices are being shot at.

“We’re rolling out the ability for Pro users in the U.S. to connect their financial accounts in ChatGPT on web and iOS, with support for more than 12,000 financial institutions. We’ll learn and improve from early use before rolling it out to Plus, with the goal of making it available to everyone.”

The Clam Take: “Our gun safety mechanism is 84% effective. To get it to 87% we’d like you to install it, point your gun at your face, and pull the trigger.”

Organizations using AI are at risk of creating polished but low-value documents. The use of AI in organizations also leads to incentive problems. What’s the upside for an employee who figures out how to use AI better to share that with the rest of her team if the “reward” is more work, higher expectations, or less job security? From the worker’s perspective, it’s better to use it quietly to check all of the boxes with less effort. Organizations need to create incentives for workers to spill the beans.