Hi! There's an upside to everything… including the cancelation of your own show. "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert," which CBS announced in July would be put to a halt after almost 10 years on air, won the Emmy award for Outstanding Talk Series for the first time. Today we're exploring: |
- Search and destroy: Google is facing its first lawsuit from a news publisher for AI summaries.
- Blind box: Could Kodak's retro toy cameras save its struggling business?
- Burnin' up: OpenAI's insane cash burn, in context.
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Google faces its first big lawsuit for AI summaries, from one of many media companies it's eclipsing |
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. At the weekend, it was reported that Penske Media Corporation, the owner of publications such as "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. |
Since being introduced back in May 2024, anyone that's used Google will have, even unwittingly, used AI summaries — the 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. |
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 NYTimes, 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 WSJ, 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 admitted that the open web is in "rapid decline," per a recent court filing. |
Kodak's new bet is the blind-box boom as it faces doubts over its survival |
Kodak just had its own (brief) Kodak moment. Last week, the 133-year-old film icon, once so dominant that its name stood for a memory worth capturing — released a $29.99 retro digital camera, which sold out within days. The new palm-sized "Charmera" comes in a blind box — meaning you won't know which of the seven '80s-inspired designs you get until you open it — tapping into younger consumers' love of all things retro and mystery-fueled. And that's a rare win for the company. Last month, Kodak reported a $26 million net loss for Q2, reversing a profit a year earlier, warning that looming debt raises "substantial doubt" about its ability to keep operating. Shares tumbled as much as 25%, though Kodak later clarified it has no plans to shut down or file for bankruptcy. |
In its heyday, Kodak was everywhere: in the 1970s, it commanded 90% of US film sales and 85% of camera sales, with revenues peaking at nearly $16 billion in 1996. Ironically, the company that invented the world's first digital camera in 1975 missed the wave decades later. Executives feared a digital pivot would undercut Kodak's lucrative film business, and kept doubling down on printing instead. As consumers shifted to digital cameras and then smartphones, film demand collapsed. Kodak was dropped from the Dow Jones Index in 2004 after 74 years, filed for bankruptcy in 2012, and now generates just ~$1 billion in annual revenue, a fraction of its peak. |
Since re-emerging as a smaller firm, Kodak has tested everything — from crypto to pharma — over the past decade to stay relevant. Its latest move is tapping into the blind-box boom: just this year, Pop Mart's viral Labubu doll helped catapult the toy maker into a $44 billion juggernaut, while cult hits like Sonny Angel figurines and even Duolingo's blind-box owl collectibles show how far the craze has spread. |
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The U.S. stock market has performed very well overall in the past five years. But nearly 41% of individual stocks are down in the same timeframe.1 |
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OpenAI doesn't have the cash to pay Oracle $300 billion |
There's a playbook in Silicon Valley: raise some money; build something people want; raise a lot more money; burn it in the pursuit of growth. The core of this strategy is to swap money for time by acquiring talent, companies, infrastructure, and technologies, all in the pursuit of leapfrogging your competition in the burgeoning field you're disrupting. Then, if you're successful in ascending to the top; kick back, up your prices, and rake in the billions. From Uber to Amazon, Tesla to Facebook, this game plan has worked time and time again. Jokes on late night talk shows about companies losing money year after year, or paying a billion dollars for then-boutique apps like Instagram, have become unfunny fast, as big tech has swallowed advertising, apparel, and everything in between. But no company has ever burned as much money as OpenAI is planning to. In the last few weeks, major deals with Broadcom and Oracle have thrown into sharp relief just how insane OpenAI's ambitions are. The Oracle deal alone is worth $300 billion over five years starting in 2027. OpenAI does not have that kind of cash. | Per The Information, OpenAI is planning on burning $115 billion through 2029. Given that the company "only" raised $40 billion earlier this year — and $64 billion in its lifetime to date, per Pitchbook data — it's fair to assume that OpenAI will have to dip into the capital markets again, to raise another $50-75 billion to fund its spending splurge. But can it do that without using the stock market? |
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- The 77th Primetime Emmys saw some history-making wins, but it was also the first awards show to pledge cash incentives for short speeches, addressing Hollywood's problem with verbose victors.
- OpenAI just released a research paper based on 1.58 million messages from ChatGPT users from May 2024 to July 2025. Turns out, people mostly turned to the chatbot for "practical guidance."
- Labu-bust? The cooling craze for Labubu dolls has wiped some ~$13 billion from Pop Mart's market cap since the share price peaked in late August.
- Mentions of "tariffs" on earnings calls dropped 21% in the latest quarter compared with the first quarter of 2025, per FactSet analysis.
- Record slayer: "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle" stormed the box office with ~$70 million in North American ticket sales over the weekend — the biggest ever debut for an anime movie in the region.
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Off the charts: Which American city saw its visitor numbers drop every single month in 2025 compared with the year before? [Answer below]. |
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