Three years ago Buzzfeed embraced AI, using it to generate articles and quiz responses. Turns out, nobody wants that. The company posted a loss of $57.3 million in 2025 and its stock dropped to just $0.70. But CEO Jonah Peretti is still planning to bring “new AI apps” to market. 🤦
Now users in Canada, New Zealand, and India can access Chrome’s built-in Gemini AI assistant, which has added support for more than 50 languages, including Spanish, French, Hindi, and Chinese.
Along with answering questions about what’s on your screen, Gemini in Chrome can help you do things like send messages in Gmail, create a table comparing products in your tabs, and remix images you see online.
Jeremy Wacksman on affordability, AI in listings, and the future of real estate.
The former Complexly owner lets loose on YouTube, AI, and why he turned his educational company into a nonprofit.
In an article for Techdirt, Wayback Machine director Mark Graham raises concerns about the impact of publications preventing the site from archiving their content due to AI scraping:
What concerns me most is the unintended consequence of these blocks. When libraries are blocked from archiving the web, the public loses access to history. Journalists lose tools for accountability. Researchers lose evidence. The web becomes more fragile and more fragmented, and history becomes easier to rewrite.
Beyond part one’s exposure of affiliate revenue hijacking, MegaLag digs into Honey’s “extortion” by adding limited-use “friends and family” type discounts and lying to the store owners about never removing codes for unaffiliated businesses while trying to sign them up as partners.
Other misdeeds described include marketing Honey’s for-adult-use-only browser extension to kids in partnership with channels like Mr Beast, who encouraged kids to install it everywhere they could, while collecting data on everyone who installed its extension, even if they never signed up. And despite a cease-and-desist from PayPal’s lawyers, this series isn’t over yet.
For its 100th anniversary, The New Yorker put its entire magazine archive online. (For paid subscribers, anyway.) You can browse by issue, but the NYer is also using AI to make it easier to search for subjects and topics, and to summarize each article so you know what you’re getting into before you accidentally sign up for a million words about elevators. But honestly, read the elevator story. It rules.
[The New Yorker]
CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar on how ChatGPT became an “existential moment” for Stack Overflow.
It’ll cost $19.90 a month, though. Subscribers get access to top AI models and agents meant to streamline web surfing. When we tried it in October, Neon didn’t live up to the hype, though neither did other AI browsers. They’re cybersecurity nightmares, too.
I hadn’t heard about Lu Heng before today, and I doubt you had either. But he apparently owns 10 million African IP addresses, which he leases out for profit, creating a financial asset out of what was intended to be basic infrastructure. Classy!
[The Wall Street Journal]
Amazon’s lawsuit against Perplexity has blown the doors open on the great AI browser fight.
The browser is now better at blocking “fingerprinters” that gather information about your system to ID you, even after clearing cookies or using private browsing. Mozilla says the improvements almost halve the number of Firefox users tracked by fingerprinting, preventing websites from obtaining details about hardware specifications, touchscreen support, and dock or taskbar dimensions.
The inventor of the World Wide Web on why he’s still optimistic about the future of the internet.
