🗞️In this edition

• Sponsored: Picsart—AI-powered image editing quickly and at scale

• Publishers push back with RSL for AI

• Workflow Wednesday #36 ‘Competitive Edge’

• Stability AI pushes into enterprise audio

• In other AI news –

  • ByteDance debuts Seedream 4.0 to rival DeepMind image models

  • Anchor’s co-founders launch Oboe, an AI-powered learning app

  • Ex-Google X team raises $6M for “second brain” AI startup

  • YouTube expands multi-language dubbing to all creators

• 4 must-try AI tools

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Publishers unite behind open licensing model to charge AI companies

♨️News – Some of the internet’s biggest publishers, including Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, and Quora, are backing a new licensing standard called Really Simple Licensing (RSL). The open standard allows websites to outline terms for how AI companies can use their content and how they should pay for it. 

👨‍💻Fast facts –

• RSL expands on the long-standing robots.txt protocol by adding licensing and payment rules.

• Publishers can choose from models such as subscriptions, pay-per-crawl fees, or pay-per-inference fees.

• The RSL Collective, led by Eckart Walther and Doug Leeds, is behind the effort.

• Early supporters include Reddit, Yahoo, Medium, Quora, People Inc., O’Reilly, wikiHow, and Ziff Davis.

• The system relies on AI companies agreeing to comply, which remains uncertain.

🤓OpenTools POV –  RSL reflects publishers’ growing push to set the terms for AI training data. Its success will depend on whether major AI players participate, but it marks an important step toward a shared framework for licensing online content.

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This Week in Workflow Wednesday #36: Competitive Edge

This Week in Workflow Wednesday: Competitive Edge

 Workflow 1: Out-Research Your Competition with Perplexity
Why waste hours Googling when Perplexity can hand you a competitive intel brief in minutes?

Step 1: Name your rival
Type in the company you want to track — pricing, features, customer praise and complaints all come back in a clean digest.

Step 2: Dig for weakness
Follow up with prompts that surface user frustrations from G2, Reddit, and X so you know exactly where to outshine them.

And here’s the kicker: we share the exact prompts and a simple template to flip this research into a strategy that…We break it all down in this week’s issue, along with 2 other AI workflows.

Stability AI introduces Stable Audio 2.5 with advanced creative audio tools

☕News – Stability AI has introduced Stable Audio 2.5, a new model built specifically for enterprise audio generation. The update delivers higher-quality results at much faster speeds while giving companies the tools to create and manage custom audio identities at scale.

👨‍💻Fast facts –

• Cuts generation time from 50 steps to just eight, producing three-minute tracks in under two seconds on H100 GPUs.

• Introduces audio inpainting for editing and extending existing audio with more control.

• Uses a new ARC training method that improves quality without heavy computational costs.

• Provides enterprise options including fine-tuning on brand datasets, licensed training data and multiple deployment setups.

• Launches in partnership with sound branding agency Amp, part of WPP, to bring custom solutions to global brands.

🤓OpenTools POV – The release signals how audio is becoming a central part of enterprise AI strategy. Stability AI is betting that sound identity, once overlooked, will be as critical as visuals in shaping brand engagement.

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📢 What else is happening?

• ByteDance unveils new AI image model to rival Google DeepMind’s ‘Nano Banana’ // ByteDance claims that Seedream 4.0 beat Gemini 2.5 bb Flash Image for image generation and editing on its internal evaluation benchmark

• After selling to Spotify, Anchor’s co-founders are back with Oboe, an AI-powered app for learning // The co-founders who sold their last startup Anchor to Spotify are launching their next project: Oboe, an AI-powered educational app that enables anyone to create lightweight, flexible learning courses on nearly any topic they choose, simply by entering a prompt

• Ex-Google X trio wants their AI to be your second brain  and they just raised $6M to make it happen // Three former Google X scientists aim to give you a second brain virtually, not in the sci-fi or chip-in-your-head sense, but through an AI-powered app that gains context by listening to everything you say in the background

• YouTube’s multi-language audio feature for dubbing videos rolls out to all creators // Now, millions of YouTubers can add dubbing to their videos in different languages, helping them reach a wider global audience

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