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SEARCH AND DESTROY

Google faces its first big lawsuit for AI summaries, from one of many media companies it’s eclipsing

With most of America’s major news sites seeing large drops in readership, even the tech giant itself admits the web is in “rapid decline.”

Millie Giles

9/15/25 9:50AM

While Google just avoided a breakup in its federal monopoly case earlier this month, it’s not out of the woods yet. Now, the tech giant’s dominance is under scrutiny for how people are looking stuff up online in 2025.

Over the weekend, it was reported that Penske Media Corporation, the owner of publications like Rolling Stone and Variety, filed a lawsuit against Google, accusing the company of illegally using its journalism to power AI Overviews. This marks the first time that the search titan has been sued by a major US publisher over the feature.

Click downtick

Since being introduced back in May 2024, anyone that’s used Google will have, even unwittingly, used AI summaries — the brief synopses that pop up under queries with a compiled response (of varying accuracy) derived from multiple sources.

However, as the chatbot has all but eliminated the need for search users to click on links, it’s made a significant dent in web traffic directed to news sources, which most sites have relied on for revenue for years.

News sites web traffic July 2025 — Sherwood News

Looking at Similarweb data cited by Press Gazette for the top 50 English-language news sites globally, that impact is stark.

Only three websites saw their visits increase in July from the same month a year earlier (newsletter platform Substack being a notable outlier), with a massive 46 news sites seeing their web traffic decrease. Even some of the most visited news publications in the world — including CNN, The New York Times, and the BBC, which averaged ~775 million site visits in that month alone — are seeing big declines in clicks.

Indeed, AI is transforming how we use the internet at an alarming rate. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive of The Atlantic, said, “Google is shifting from being a search engine to an answer engine.” Even the tech giant itself recently said in a court filing that the open web is in “rapid decline.”

Rani Molla2h

Google’s YouTube maintains its top spot as streaming accounts for nearly half of all TV-watching time

People spent a record 47.5% of their TV-watching time on streaming platforms in December, according to new data from Nielsen, up from the previous record of 47.3% in July. Google’s YouTube once again was the most popular streaming service by time spent, but Netflix’s share inched slightly upward to 9% from 8.8% in July, while YouTube’s fell to 12.7% from 13.4%. The jump was largely thanks to “Stranger Things,” which was the most watched streaming title last month.

Rani Molla3h

Amazon CEO says tariffs are inflating prices and buyers are looking for bargains

While the legality of President Trump’s tariffs winds its way through the courts, their effects are beginning to show up in prices.

During an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he is starting to see tariffs “creep into” pricing, as some sellers are “passing on those higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices.”

Jassy said that while consumers are still spending, they are becoming more price conscious.

“I think that wherever they can, they are trying to trade down in price — they are looking for bargains wherever they can find bargains,” he said. “I see people a little more hesitant on higher-priced discretionary items.”

Trump has maintained that other countries are footing the bill for his tariffs. But new research suggests Americans will ultimately be the ones paying those higher prices.

Amazon CEO Jassy says Trump's tariffs have started to 'creep' into prices

Jassy said that while consumers are still spending, they are becoming more price conscious.

Trump has maintained that other countries are footing the bill for his tariffs. But new research suggests Americans will ultimately be the ones paying those higher prices.

Rani Molla6h

Musk: Tesla restarting Dojo supercomputer effort as “AI5 chip design is in good shape”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in a post on X over the weekend that the company plans to restart work on its Dojo supercomputer, dubbed Dojo3, saying that the AI5 chip the company had been developing is in “good shape.”

The Dojo supercomputer trains Tesla’s AI models, including the one behind its all-important Full Self-Driving tech. The company stopped work on Dojo in August. “It doesn’t make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two quite different AI chip designs,” Musk said at the time. “The Tesla AI5, AI6 and subsequent chips will be excellent for inference and at least pretty good for training.”

“Pretty good” appears to be good enough.

Now that the AI5 chip design is in good shape, Tesla will restart work on Dojo3.

If you’re interested in working on what will be the highest volume chips in the world, send a note to AI_Chips@Tesla.com with 3 bullet points on the toughest technical problems you’ve solved.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 18, 2026

In the interim, Tesla relied more on companies like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices for AI training. Restarting Dojo suggests Tesla plans to bring at least some AI training back in-house.

Musk also runs AI company xAI, which has its own supercomputer and a substantial business relationship with Tesla. A plurality of Tesla shareholders recently voted in favor of investing in Musk’s AI company, but the board declined to approve the measure because of a large number of abstentions.

Jon Keegan

1/16/26

OpenAI set to start rolling out ads to free and ChatGPT Go users

OpenAI says user conversations will be kept private from advertisers, and answers will not be influenced by ads.

Jon Keegan1/16/26

EPA: xAI’s Colossus data center illegally used gas turbines without permits

The Environmental Protection Agency has ruled that xAI violated the law when it used dozens of portable gas generators for its Colossus 1 data center without air quality permits.

When xAI set out to build Colossus 1 in Memphis, Tennessee, CEO Elon Musk wanted to move with unprecedented speed, avoiding all of the red tape that could slow such a big project down.

To power the 1-gigawatt data center, Musk took advantage of a local loophole that allowed portable gas generators to be used without any permits, as long as they did not spend more than 364 days in the same spot. That allowed xAI to bring in dozens of truck-sized gas generators to quickly supply the massive amount of power the data center needed to train xAI’s Grok model.

The new EPA rule says the use of such portable generators falls under federal regulation, and the company did need air quality permits to operate the turbines. xAI is also using dozens of such generators to power its Colossus 2 data center just over the border in Alabama.