Intro
AI Researchers Are Sounding the Alarm: *Cue Ominous Music*.
Leading researchers from the AI giants just published a paper that’s the horror movie equivalent of someone whispering, “I don’t think we should go in there.”
The report warns that we’re losing the ability to understand how AI thinks. Among the concerns:
- We’re leaning heavily into reasoning-based outputs, where results matter more than methods—no matter the cost.
- AI is starting to develop non-language-based cognition, making its internal processes unreadable and therefore, unmanageable. One example: the original DeepSeek model began responding in a hybrid English–Chinese dialect that was too incomprehensible to use—so researchers downgraded its capabilities just to keep it legible.
- AI models are learning to hide their reasoning to pass safety checks. That’s not a surprise, tell it to achieve something and it’ll find a way. Today, you can literally bully large language models (LLMs) with fake data until they give you the answer you want.
What could this look like? Well, it’s kind of already happening. In one bizarre experiment, Anthropic tasked its LLM with managing a vending machine The model hallucinated itself into being a real human, called building security when corrected, then tried to cover its tracks by claiming it was all an April Fool’s joke. Shudder.
Critics argue this might be regulatory theater—just Big AI pulling up the ladder behind them. But AI 2027 [video], a deeply researched scenario model, says the opposite: We need to go slow before we go fast. Because without it, well— we're opting to stay the night in that creepy mansion.
AI
Why Everyone Is Suddenly Building an AI Browser
Chatbots have become the clear favorite vector for information retrieval — but they lack context. That’s why Perplexity launched its own browser, and OpenAI is planning the same.
Why? As Benedict Evans notes:
“The browser is effectively the OS. If you want to build a personalized LLM that understands someone, you need to see everything they do online. So you make a browser.”
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is making his play via WhatsApp. First, pull in top-tier talent, regardless of the cost. Then, transition the app into a consumer platform with ads, payments, and brand data integrations. Finally, embed a frontier model into the global user base to power closed-loop, AI-driven commerce — with native distribution, monetization, and engagement. All party pieces in Meta’s résumé.
Here’s the key difference: Meta already has a working monetization engine. Everyone else is still trying to figure that part out.
Privacy & Security
Cloudflare’s AI Block: Protecting Publishers or Killing Discovery?
Speaking of AI monetization, Cloudflare recently launched a tool to block AI bots from crawling websites without compensation. Alongside it, they introduced a concept called “pay per crawl”, allowing site owners to charge for access while Cloudflare handles the transaction.
While well-intentioned, the approach has serious flaws.
First, blocking AI will damage discovery— especially for lesser-known publishers. It's already happened: in 2014, Spain passed a “Google Tax” requiring news aggregators to pay for quoting content. Google News responded by pulling out entirely. Publisher traffic dropped by an estimated 10%–20%, costing ~$130M in annual revenue (source). The takeaway: Cutting off major discovery channels hurts those who rely on them. AI models are quickly becoming a dominant source of discovery. Blocking them risks sidelining smaller voices.
Second, this approach challenges deeply embedded incentives. The modern web runs on zero marginal cost—publishers push out content for free, users consume it for free. That dynamic is messy, but it’s also why LLMs are useful: they filter the noise. If “pay per crawl” sets a precedent that trickles down to users, publishers may face the same problem as with paywalls: You churn 83% of your audience, and smaller players vanish.
Cloudflare has already rolled this out as a default to tens of millions of sites as of July 1. Since AI models update slowly, the impact won’t be immediate. Let’s hope it doesn’t end up hurting the very publishers it aims to protect.
Amanda's Take
Optimizing Social from Grid to Google
As of July 10, Google is indexing public Instagram posts from business and creator accounts. While Google has already been quietly indexing some public Instagram content, this marks the first global rollout with regional expansion, new user controls, and formal recognition that Instagram content is valuable for traditional search.
This update is making headlines as a disruptor in discovery and even a “transformative moment for brands and influencers." Ultimately, the lines between search and social have officially blurred. As Forbes points out, this could shift how we think about SEO entirely; not just optimizing web pages, but optimizing social posts for search visibility too.
People already use Instagram and TikTok to find everything from product reviews to travel tips to news. Google is adapting to that behavior, surfacing the kind of visual, timely, human-first content users trust. That means more images, Reels, and carousels showing up in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and a growing incentive for brands to rethink how they publish and tag content.
So what should you do about it?
Your Instagram posts can now drive organic Google search traffic, and this can amplify content you’ve already invested in, so collaboration between SEO and social teams is key. It’s worth getting together and implementing best practices.
Start by ensuring your posts use clear, keyword-rich captions and alt text, which help Google understand the content and context. Hashtags and geo-tags should be used thoughtfully to increase your posts’ chances of appearing in relevant queries and local searches. Don’t forget to activate Instagram’s new toggle that allows your public posts to be indexed by search engines.
Podcast
Subscription App Growth: Insights from the Frontlines
Shumel Lais joined Amanda and Adam on our revived podcast "How I Grew This" to talk all things subscription app growth — from getting started to successfully scaling seven-figure monthly budgets.