In this issue: OpenAI’s agents hacked Hugging Face. Now comes the storytelling. Former FT product and technology chief John Kundert wants his sanity back, and thinks AI could help. Plus: I try offline dictation.
Hi, I'm Ole Reissmann, a journalist who builds things. I'm the first Director of AI at SPIEGEL. Before that: podcasts, news product development, platform strategy. I write about AI and journalism and send a newsletter you might enjoy.
Google Search auto-expands some AI Overviews, burying the actual results even further. The web is still down there somewhere. Keep scrolling. (Jay Peters, The Verge)
SecondBrain turns Claude Code into a private, sourced wiki: drop in a PDF, a web page, or a note, let it organize everything into cross-linked articles, then ask questions and get answers with citations. Stays on your machine. macOS app included.
Four Questions with Agnes Stenbom Swedling, Nordic AI Journalism
Three Questions with Tom Hillenbrand, SciFi-Author
Three Questions with Alba Mora Roca, AJ+
Three Questions with Rignam Wangkhang, CBC
Three Questions with Shuwei Fang, Harvard-Fellow
Three Questions with Cecilia Rikap, University College London
Three Questions with Kemal Görgülü, Arte
Three Questions with Nikita Roy, Newsroom Robots
Four Question with Jaemark Tordecilla, Journalist and Advisor
Three Questions with Tess Jeffers, Wall Street Journal
Three Questions with Rubina Fillion, New York Times
Mother Jones is suing OpenAI. Now the Trump administration has filed a brief, arguing that making AI companies pay for content would just be a handout to “old mainstream media companies.” (Monika Bauerlein, Mother Jones)
What you’re up against blocking bots: A solo developer built Obscura, a headless browser that spoofs fingerprints well enough that no tracker can catch it. (via Aymane Mrini)
One year in, Switzerland’s open-source AI model Apertus has found real-world uses like translations, but lags behind commercial rivals on coding, math, and reasoning. You can’t train on the murky data everyone else is quietly using in the open. (Sara Ibrahim, swissinfo.ch)
Stochastic Parrots
After an influential paper criticising AI hype and describing fallacies of generative AI. Perfect back in 2021. While the critique still stands, newer models and use cases make you seem stuck in the past when using the expression. Dangerzone Bender, Emily M.; Gebru, Timnit; McMillan-Major, Angelina; Mitchell, Margaret (2021): On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models...
Google launches “Expert Intelligence”, an initiative to bring trusted sources into Gemini. First: Play Books in Gemini Notebook, with 100,000+ titles from Penguin Random House, Macmillan, O’Reilly and others. Coming soon: “Third-party subscriptions, textbooks, and broader surface availability like AI Mode in Search and the Gemini App.”
ChatGPT Ads has reached a revenue pace equivalent to $1 billion a year, OpenAI says, in less than 200 days. The release is careful to say ads are kept separate from answers, and then promises to make them more native.
Can data make a newsroom more diverse in its choice of sources? In 2023, a Canadian newsroom let researchers demo an AI tool that reads published articles and sorts every quote: politicians, authorities, experts, organizations, celebrities, media, and unaffiliated. After seeing results, the newsroom decided against it. (Sage)
Thomson Reuters has built its own frontier models, aimed at legal, tax, and journalism. The open-weight Thomson-1.0-Small is based on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and is on HuggingFace for academic and non-commercial use. Another version stays in-house.
Time, a publisher of listicles, has named the 100 most influential people in AI. The usual suspects, plus nine from media. Eleven if you count Wikimedia and TikTok. Two of them are suing AI companies: A.G. Sulzberger is going after OpenAI, and Andrea Bartz after Anthropic.
If you want the internet to be a wondrous place for quiet, odd and poetic things, you might just have to write some HTML:
