FLUX.1 Kontext: The Black Forest image machine has new features. Images can now serve as input and be manipulated.

After 6 years in hiding, Venture Capitalist Mary Meeker is back with one of her famous trend reports. This time on AI. 340 pages of statistics.

But AI isn’t creative, isn’t funny, isn’t surprising! Always just average, everything’s been done before. That’s kind of true – but here comes a paper saying: You can actually train LLMs to be creative too. It’s called Creative Preference Optimization.

The OpenAI-suing New York Times is entering into a multi-year partnership with Amazon, with content appearing on Alexa and going into AI training. (Jaspreet Singh, Reuters)

Good Tape transcription: How Denmark’s Zetland build an AI tool that brings in $3 million in annual recurring revenue. (Clare Spencer, Generative AI in the Newsroom)

Chatbot alert: Advance Digital and NJ.com launch AI-powered Politics Election Hub for New Jersey’s governor’s race 2025. (via David Cohn)

LLM journalism tool advisor: Tired of figuring out how to use AI in journalism? Joe Amditis has collected tools and prompts and built a practical interface.

Business Insider is laying off 21 percent of its workforce, announces CEO Barbara Peng. She sees the industry at a “crossroads” and wants to become less dependent on SEO traffic and affiliate links. Instead, a live journalism events business is supposed to launch. And of course: “we are going all-in on AI.” The union is not thrilled.

Google’s Veo 3 can spit out videos that are seconds long and look deceptively real like US television, at least at first glance. (Ethan Mollick, LinkedIn)

The Chicago Sun-Times published summer book recommendations – written by AI. A third of the titles don’t actually exist. NPR’s Elizabeth Blair has the full story on what happened.

Okay, this is slick PR, but: Anthropic got Rick Rubin to do some visual code experiments based on Lao Tzu for the Claude release. Translation: with Claude access, you can vibe-code pretty animations.

If only it were just a tool – but instead Claude 4 sometimes shows a stubborn mind of its own, complete with blackmail and snitching. Simon Willison read through the official documentation.

ChatGPT stifles idea diversity in brainstorming, a recent study says. Heads up though: researchers were looking at ChatGPT 3.5, which dropped in November 2022 and has since been discontinued.

The Pulitzer Prize is once again highlighting investigations that use AI – but we’re talking “regular” AI here, not ChatGPT. NiemanLab has the details.

Everything’s happening at once: Google’s showing off the future of search at I/O, Karen Hao’s book “Empire of AI” is out, and Anthropic is releasing Claude 4.