Google now pays more than 400 publications to license their articles for experimental AI features in Google News, including AI story previews and custom audio briefings. The deal terms are undisclosed, and the pilot pays a flat licensing fee rather than per use in AI answers.

• The pilot has grown to over 400 publications, including CNN, the Financial Times, Axios and Forbes, plus US local papers like the Texas Tribune and Post and Courier.
• Licensed content feeds AI-generated story previews on Google News publisher pages, which carry a note saying the copy "may include mistakes."
• Google says the pilot does not pay based on how much content feeds an AI answer; that per-use model belongs to a separate programme covering AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini.

Fish Audio’s open-source voice-generation models now serve over 8 million users and deliver $21 million in ARR. The startup secured $52 million in seed funding to expand its expressive, steerable voice APIs for both creators and enterprises, while streamlining takedowns after consent disputes. It plans to launch new audio-understanding and speech-to-speech models later this year.

• Fish Audio raised $52M in seed funding while already generating $21M ARR from 8 million users—unusually mature metrics for a seed-stage company.
• The startup automated voice takedowns (under 3 minutes via sample or contract) after facing unauthorized upload disputes, betting that consent and fair licensing build trust with creators.
• Its open-source Fish Speech release hit 31,000+ GitHub stars, but the newest S2.1 Pro model is locked behind a paid API, marking a shift from open-source to monetized enterprise offerings.
• It plans to expand into audio-understanding and speech-to-speech models to compete with ElevenLabs, WellSaid, and Speechify on fine-grained control and cheaper training costs.

This roundup covers Amazon’s new Fire TV interface revamp, Getty Images’ licensing deal with OpenAI, and Higgsfield’s enterprise marketing agents built on NVIDIA. It also highlights deeper discussions on design taste, UX soft skills, Apple’s potential design shift, and the value of creative judgment and non-linear careers.

• Getty went from suing AI companies to licensing them, putting its image library directly into ChatGPT
• Higgsfield claims 78% of Fortune 500 companies use its platform and it made a 95-minute film in 14 days for under $500K, though unaudited
• Amazon's Fire TV redesign aims to make the platform itself (not individual apps) the primary content discovery hub, following Google TV/Roku/webOS
• As AI makes production cheap, curatorial judgment and taste (organizational and individual) become the scarce, valuable skill

Chandra OCR 2, a 4 billion-parameter model from Datalab, outperforms GPT-4o and Gemini on AllenAI’s olmOCR benchmark and a 90-language test while halving the model size. It preserves layout, reads complex tables and math notation, converts diagrams to Mermaid, and runs at two pages per second on an NVIDIA H100. The code is Apache 2.0 but the model weights use an OpenRAIL-M license with commercial restrictions.

• Chandra OCR 2 scores 85.9% on olmOCR vs GPT-4o's 69.9%, while cutting model size from 9B to 4B parameters and hitting ~2 pages/sec on an H100
• Multilingual performance beats Gemini 2.5 Flash and GPT-5 Mini, with 40-46 point gains on scripts like Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu over Chandra 1
• Weights carry an OpenRAIL-M license requiring a paid commercial license once a company exceeds $2M in funding or revenue, despite Apache 2.0 code
• Handwriting recognition remains weak, dropping to ~50.4% accuracy on complex forms despite strong printed-text and table/math handling