CDP Institute

Google will pay to carry stories from Canadian news outlets under an agreement announced yesterday.  Details are sparse but the process for compliance with government’s C-18 law has been simplified to meet some Google objections.  Meta, the only other firm required to make payments under the law, has not changed its decision to block reliable news.

The threat that large language models will reach human levels of performance on common tasks is overblown, according to research co-authored by Meta’s top AI scientist Yann LeCunn.  A new benchmark of real-world problems found that humans succeeded at 92% while ChatGPT-4 with plug-ins solved only 15%.  A cynic would note that Meta has a strong interest in reducing pressure for AI regulation, and that other experts have argued the debate over human-like performance is a distraction from concrete problems that AI poses today.

Shopping on social media has had mixed success but this report from The Influencer Marketing Factory finds it’s making steady progress.  Nearly half (43.4%) of consumers surveyed had bought at least one product through a social app in the past year.  Still, many more would rather buy on an ecommerce platform (62%) than through social (22%), with trust in the social apps standing as the most important obstacle.