IEEE Spectrum distilled Stanford University‘s 2025 AI Index report. All 400+ pages of it.
Here are the highlights: 12 graphs that explain AI’s current landscape.
What surprised me the most was the last graph. The majority of the global survey respondents did not feel threatened by AI.
While 60 percent of respondents from 32 countries believe that AI will change how they do their jobs, only 36 percent expected to be replaced.
Its CEO proposed a strategy many SEO teams would consider heresy: reduce reliance on search traffic.
He’s set up a membership program for instance, which currently has more than 2,000 paying subscribers. He’s thinking about other formats that should be resilient to AI, like book publishing and an app. And he’s not giving up hope.
All that makes sense. The path forward reminds me of AOP's Richard Reeves interview with The Drum.
Publisher independence begins with moving away from a single-source approach:
The ad market is simply too capricious to be relied upon as a sole source of funding. Display advertising may still be the largest revenue driver, but its total share has shrunk significantly, with subscriptions now nipping at its heels at nearly a third of premium publishers’ revenues.
What about subscriptions? This model will eventually reach saturation. For stability, look to diversified, complementary revenue streams:
With many publishers pursuing advertising and subscription models in tandem, we’re also seeing the ways the two complement one another. When you no longer have to extract maximum value from every fly-by-night visitor dropped by a search engine, you can take a quality-over-quantity approach. A core, loyal, cultivated audience is ideal for direct deals and private marketplaces, cutting out the programmatic bloat that can make many corners of the web unnavigable.
Here's the rest of the article.
For Gen Z, yes. Gen Zers are 60% of new sign ups according to data shared with Business Insider:
Part of the reason young people are hanging out on old social platforms is that there's nowhere new to go. The tech industry is evolving at a slower pace than it was in the 2000s, and there's less room for disruption. Big Tech has a stranglehold on how we socialize. That leaves Gen Z to pick up the scraps left by the early online millennials and attempt to craft them into something relevant. They love Pinterest (founded in 2010) and Snapchat (2011), and they're trying out digital point-and-shoot cameras and flip phones for an early-2000s aesthetic — and learning the valuable lesson that sometimes we look better when blurrier. More Gen Zers and millennials are signing up for Yahoo. Napster, surprising many people with its continued existence, just sold for $207 million. The trend is fueled by nostalgia for Y2K aesthetics and a longing for a time when people could make mistakes on the internet and move past them.
Tumblr also benefits from TikTok's near-ban and platform politics backlash:
Tumblr seems to be a refuge for people searching for new social sites. In January, people launched communities on Tumblr to post and preserve their favorite TikTok videos. Meanwhile, progressives mad at Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk for going full MAGA and are ditching Facebook and X as punishment.
I do find myself increasingly nostalgic for the older internet. The one with less algorithm and more human curation. Less influencing, more "this could be interesting." Good to know Gen Z is feeling it too.
Tressie McMillan Cottom's NYT piece reframes AI with a biological metaphor that sticks:
A.I. is a parasite. It attaches itself to a robust learning ecosystem and speeds up some parts of the decision process. The parasite and the host can peacefully coexist as long as the parasite does not starve its host. The political problem with A.I.'s hype is that its most compelling use case is starving the host — fewer teachers, fewer degrees, fewer workers, fewer healthy information environments.
NYT's food vertical found the right ingredients for a post-cookbook world, Bloomberg reports.
One ingredient: the right talent. NYT Cooking’s YouTube channel features contributions from chef and cookbook author Claire Saffitz. The chef’s croissant video hit 5.1M views—proof that the appetite for quality culinary content remains strong when done right. NYT also brought over two staffers from Buzzfeed’s Tasty.
Another ingredient: authenticity.
... the videos the Times produces are “more intimate” than the polished cooking shows on the Food Network. The team wants to make the chefs seem human and doesn’t necessarily edit out mistakes, such as a burnt dish.
Add a thoughtfully designed app that serves personalized recommendations into the mix.
By Q4 last year, NYT added 350K digital subscribers, reaching 10.82 million total. Nearly half (5.44 million) were bundle subscribers with access to News, Games, and Cooking.
“Bundle and multiproduct subscribers now make up approximately 48% of our total subscribers, well along the path to exceeding 50% by the end of next year,” New York Times Chief Executive Officer Meredith Kopit Levien said on the company’s latest earnings call in February.
What content works well in LLMs?
To answer the question, Kevin Indig analyzed 7,000+ citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews. What's starting to emerge are patterns anyone wanting to remain visible online should take note: