This edition covers OpenAI’s response to GPT-5 feedback with a partial model selector and a 140,000-word context window, Drew Breunig on how long contexts fail and how to fix them, John Willshire’s seven key questions for working with AI, MIT Press’s survey of 6,000 authors on LLM training, Reddit blocking the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Neil Perkin on using AI for scenario planning, and a personal case study on using AI to size and map the UK publishing industry.

Recently I’ve been doing some research on the size and scope of the UK book and journal publishing industry, based on data from Companies House. This research is a preparatory step towards building a database of companies, highly relevant for my work as an independent consultant and as policy advisor for the Independent Publishers Guild, which represents over 600 book and journal publishers of all sizes. The other trade body, the Publishers Association lists 168 members at the time of writing, particularly larger, corporate publishers—though there is some overlap between the two organisations’ memberships. The UK publishing sector is world leading, representing over £7 billion of revenue, and it represents the bulk of my client base. So it’s worth understanding.

As AI capabilities expand, so does the gap between what’s technically possible and what’s useful and meaningful. Many of the links this week address the same question: where does human perspective add value?

This edition covers fresh data on student AI use and ChatGPT’s new Socratic Study Mode, NotebookLM’s new multilingual audio and video overviews, Adobe’s Firefly-powered Photoshop upgrades, content licensing deals from Gannett/Perplexity and Johns Hopkins University Press with benchmark pricing for academic books, Neil Perkin on where AI still falls short, fresh research on the scale of “Shadow AI” use in workplaces, and Ethan Mollick on the “Bitter Lesson” and outcome-trained AI in messy organisations.

It’s been a significant week of contrasting AI developments on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, the administration moved swiftly toward a more deregulated environment, signalling its preference for Silicon Valley-friendly policies on AI training and licensing. Europe, meanwhile, saw new releases emphasising transparency, environmental responsibility and public benefit, underlining a growing divergence in approaches and creating important challenges and opportunities for global publishers.

This edition covers ChatGPT’s new Agent mode and what it could automate for publishers, Matt Webb on governance lessons from Anthropic’s vending-machine experiment, a WeTransfer terms-of-service flap, NotebookLM’s new pre-curated notebooks of licensed and public-domain content, Dave Morris on AI in his writing practice, Anthropic’s Claude for Education partnerships, Condé Nast and Hearst signing Amazon Rufus licensing deals, the launch of Latam-GPT, and research on how AI is shaping the words we use.

This edition covers Doug Shapiro’s media-trends slide deck and the questions it poses for any creative business, fresh Cambridge University Press polling on public support for AI training payments, an EU antitrust complaint against Google’s AI Overviews and grim data on news click-throughs, OpenAI and partners providing AI training to 400,000 US teachers, hidden prompts being inserted in academic papers to game AI reviewers, Bloomberg on the “tiny teams” era and Anthropic’s Project Vend experiment as a counterpoint, and research showing managers using AI to make decisions about their direct reports.

Happy Friday—though I’m writing this the day before on the way back from a great day at the Publishers Licensing Services Conference in London. The agenda and other speakers were superb, offering plenty of food for thought. It was also great to meet Helen King, whose PubTech Radar newsletter I’ve really enjoyed recently (do sign up for it!) Connecting with Helen via Bluesky commentary on the conference felt nostalgically like the Twitter backchannel at publishing events in the early 2010s. Thanks to PLS and the IPG for the invitation to speak.