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My favorite day trip outside of Los Angeles requires a $22 train ride
My favorite California day trip is Ventura, a city off the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner route. This coastal spot has great thrift shops and calm beaches.
Quercus Quire brings science and song to Sonoma County elementary students
For 40 years, the all-volunteer Quercus Quire has visited elementary school classrooms in Sonoma County to deliver age-appropriate science and nature lessons through song and dance.
I run a forward-deployed engineer club. Here's how to land the job.
The founder of the first forward-deployed engineer association explains why FDE jobs are growing, what the role requires, and the latest hiring trend.
Fort Lauderdale HR firm acquires Lutz company
Engage PEO acquired Lutz-based ASM PEO, its 10th such deal since 2022.
Earth has new mini-moon – but it won’t be around for long | BBC Sky at Night Magazine
Earth has acquired a new mini-moon known as 2026 QQ8. How it was discovered and how long it will last in Earth orbit.
Xavier's Richard Pitino, Pozzato, Westry on win over Eastern Michigan
Xavier overcame a slow start to beat Eastern Michigan, 76-53, at Cintas Center Friday, Nov. 6.
Watch Elder linebacker Brayden Tepe sack Springboro’s Max Miller
Elder linebacker Brayden Tepe sacks Springboro’s Max Miller in the Week 12 playoff game on Friday, Nov. 6.
Enquirer announces Nov. 6 athlete of the week winners
Cincinnati Enquirer readers made their choices for the Nov. 6 Beacon Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine Athletes of the Week.
Dropbox Plans to Acquire Tigris Data, Unveils DBX Agent Cloud
Planned acquisition will accelerate Dropbox’s expansion into AI infrastructure for companies and developers; new AI capabilities have already rolled out to more than 70,000 teams SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 6, 2026– Dropbox, Inc. has announced plans to acquire Tigris Data Inc., a globally distributed object storage platform built for AI workloads, to accelerate its expansion into AI […]
Amazon buys Loudoun property for $100M, plans data center
Amazon has spent nearly $100 million to acquire a 23-acre property in Loudoun County where it plans to build a 100-foot-tall data center.
Bengals rule out one player for Sunday's game in Madrid
Safety Kyle Dugger is the only player the Bengals ruled out for Sunday's game in Madrid.
Whoa, I Missed It! Disney Starts Licensing the Household Silver, When IP Backfires, and More Big Content Moves
(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) Over these last few months, the entertainment business story landscape revolved around Skydance (and their merger) and Netflix (and their leadership shakeup). I don’t even want to scan my archives to see how many times I wrote about just those two companies over the last six months or so, let alone how many times they demanded their own article. Oh, how I long for June, when I could avoid them and write about other mergers and acquisitions (Comcast and NBCUniversal; Fox buying Roku). Well, not really, but you know what I mean. That focus on just two companies meant I ignored a lot of fun and, more importantly, important stories. So, it’s also time for another “Whoa, I Missed It” article. These are stories I wish I had written about, but aren’t exactly current events anymore. And there are a lot of them! Fifteen stories in all, including a very important merger that I didn’t write about, my word of warning about the IP deluge, how “genre” TV is making a big comeback, Netflix’s latest smart acquisition (and a licensing divorce), Disney and HBO’s recent TV show buys (and what they say about reboots on TV), a big cable merger, Amazon’s new bundle, social media censorship, and a lot more. Subscribe Most Important Story of the Week - Buy, Sell or Hold the Latest Content Development and Licensing in 2026!!! Content is king. I’ve written that before, and I believe in it now more than ever. If I had to quantify it, and I have, I put it at about 50% of the fate of any given media company, be they streamer, network, bundler, studio or social platform. This is a hits-driven business, and, as I like to do about every so often, it’s time to check in on the latest content moves. These content shifts on their own aren’t usually enough to be the “most important story” of a week, but if you add them up, you can see the content landscape shifting. The stories also fell into two natural buckets: licensing deals and IP moves. Plus, I’ll offer my “buy, sell or hold” rating for whether I think the deal is smart for a given side. Let’s dive right in. Disney Starts Licensing the Household Silver Disney is starting to license their core brands to Netflix. Quietly, over the last couple of years, Disney had rented some 20th Century [Fox] shows and films to Netflix, but until now, the core brands had escaped that fate. Now? At least some Pixar films will make it to Disney (including Elio) and some Disney+ Originals (like Percy Jackson and the Olympians). Here’s my rating for each company: Disney: Sell. One is tempted to say Disney has started licensing the “crown jewels”, but I don’t think we see that yet. I’d call this the “family silver” instead, which isn’t quite as valuable. That said, Disney’s new CEO clearly is focused on shoring up the company’s profitability, and that means licensing deals, even at the expense of Disney+ exclusivity. This could also help bring eyeballs to Percy Jackson for the upcoming season, a similar benefit to “dual casting” this show, which I also think Disney should do. Still, in the long run, I’d protect the core brands more. Netflix: Buy. This is a smart move, assuming the price is right, and I’d bet it is. (Netflix’s content licensing teams are some of the best in the industry.) Of course, this is another data point that Netflix is moving away from making their own films and relying on licensing instead. That has downsides—they’ll always end up renting—but if you’re buying Disney content, that’s a good move. Prime Video Buys More Live Events Amazon’s Prime Video/MGM Studios keeps purchasing live events, including the Emmys (which I wrote about here) and some regional sporting rights. These bolster their NFL, NBA and Academy of Country Music Awards licensing deals. My theory here is that Prime Video knows that they can sell the advertising for more on live events than on their massive acquired/original inventory of shows and films. (As I’ve been showing with Reelgood’s data, they have a LOT more shows and films than other streamers.) Advertisers want live, engaged viewers, since they’re a lot more likely to be real. Prime Video: Hold. I like Amazon’s focus on live events, but it remains tough to evaluate this company, er, business unit, since we don’t know anything about their financials. Yes, Amazon’s CEO recently released a very carefully worded statement about Prime Video, claiming profitability, but we don’t know by how much by when. (It’s also not audited by third parties, so we have to take it with another grain of salt.) Plus, given that Amazon increased the price of the Emmys by about a third, they also likely overpaid. (Maybe that’s why they’re barely profitable, allegedly.) But also, I think they know they need to dominate live TV, and that’s a smart strategy! So I’m torn, but lean towards calling this a smart move. The Emmys: Definitely sell! I mentioned this in my “Streaming Bonus Content” article, but I really, really, really, really do NOT like this move for the Emmys. Chasing short term dollars over long term awareness is not a smart move. To reach the widest audience, the “dual-cast” format—meaning broadcast and streaming—just reaches more people. Skydance Takes Its Animation Back This is the story that made me want to write a “let’s catch up on content” column in the first place. Specifically, Skydance and Netflix have ended their animated film output deal. It’s not huge, since really, what film has Skydance Animation made that’s broken out? But strategically, it shows you how Skydance is positioning their company. Skydance Animation: Hold. Again, I still need to see Skydance Animation put out a hit or two before I can judge this as a smart move. The other worry for Skydance is they have a lot of overlapping animation houses now, and that’s going to end at some point. Still, if John Lasseter can regain his animation mojo—and his track record has been mixed at Skydance, ignoring his other issues—this could be a powerful point for Paramount. Netflix: Hold (put your films in theaters). Right now, with the Dan Lin upheaval and Peter Rice coming in, we don’t really know what Netflix’s plans for theaters versus straight-to-streaming films are. So I need to see what new films (if any) they buy/rent/produce to replace the Skydance flicks, but it will probably be a smarter investment of capital, since the straight-to-streaming films have just failed to break out, outside of one major example. Theaters: Buy! They do look like they’re gonna end up with more inventory based on the Skydance move, and now Netflix putting four to five films in theaters per year. For example, Netflix confirmed that KPop Demon Hunters 2 will come to theaters, and that’s going to be a smash. Disney+’s Reboot Future So those were the major licensing news stories, and now we get to the IP-related updates. Obviously, I’m generally pro-IP in content development. But that’s not some iron law; not all IP hits equally. Get ready for Entertainment Nuance Guy. And let’s start with a big worry. Scanning the news stories, Disney has three reboots on their lineup between ABC, Hulu and Disney+: Coach (on ABC), The X-Files and Glee. So are reboots as immune to failure as IP? We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out about… Why I’m skeptical about some upcoming genre and IP plays… How Skydance’s merger closing unlocked Paramount and HBO… The focus on “genre” across the streamers and studios… Some big creators leave Netflix… Netflix’s horror TV show licensing play (and what they should have done instead)… A huge merger that I didn’t write about... Whether or not we’ll see a major film tax credit… Amazon’s new megabundle of streamers… And (somehow) more… ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
Fox completes acquisition of streaming giant Roku
Fox announced the completion of its deal to acquire streaming platform Roku, which the company expects will expand opportunities to serve audiences and partners.
Baltimore officially acquires Jacoby Brissett
Cardinals QB Jacoby Brissett was traded to the Ravens Friday with multiple Day 3 picks involved
Woodside Health acquires The Hills Medical Portfolio in West Lake Hills
Woodside Health acquired The Hills Medical Portfolio, a two-building healthcare real estate property on Bee Cave Road in West Lake Hills.
Tribal leaders scramble as OMB sets Friday afternoon deadline for grant-rule consultations
Tribal leaders and Native advocacy organizations face a 2 p.m. ET deadline Friday to register for consultations on federal grant changes that Native organizations warn could disrupt funding across Indian Country. The proposed revisions to Title 2 of the Code of Federal Regulations would change rules governing administrative requirements, cost principles and audits for federal […]
Contributor: Health Care’s Next Transformation Won’t Be About Technology. It Will Be About How We Operate
Why artificial intelligence in health care falls short today and how implementing technology in health care requires integrated workflows to cut costs and improve outcomes.
Penn Entertainment, Wynn see Texas casino opening after midterm upsets
Legalizing casinos in Texas requires a constitutional amendment and a statewide vote after Dan Patrick lost his lieutenant governor seat
Enhanced Group Bets on Live Entertainment With Deal for 77% Stake in DEAG
Enhanced Group (NYSE:ENHA) has agreed to acquire an approximately 77% stake in European live entertainment company DEAG in an all-stock transaction, a move CEO and Co-Founder Maximilian Martin said will broaden Enhanced’s business beyond sports and consumer health products. DEAG shareholders will r
Ryder grows its FMS business with East Coast acquisition
Ryder System (NYSE: R) has acquired Efficiency Enterprises, a company with a business model similar to what Ryder does in its Fleet Management Systems
Ryder grows its FMS business with East Coast acquisition
Ryder System (NYSE: R) has acquired Efficiency Enterprises, a company with a business model similar to what Ryder does in its Fleet Management Systems (FMS) unit. Ryder, in a prepared statement, described Efficiency Enterprises as “a regional provider of fleet management, maintenance, and leasing solutions for trucks, trailers, and material handling equipment.” Those services line […] The post Ryder grows its FMS business with East Coast acquisition appeared first on FreightWaves.
Square Enix accidentally botches a Nier: Automata update, balloons required file size from 50GB to 366GB on PC
"Do you think games are silly little things?" feels like a very on-the-nose question now.
Fox Sports Insider Predicts Chiefs Will Acquire Colts WR
As the trade deadline looms, analysts link Indianapolis playmaker Josh Downs to Kansas City, potentially providing Patrick Mahomes the sure-handed target needed to revitalize a struggling receiving corps.
Keeping Hoosiers covered is essential for access to health care
As new HIP requirements take effect, we want to ensure the process is clear and workable.
Sylvamo Announces Plans to Sell Europe Business
MEMPHIS, Tenn., November 06, 2026--Sylvamo (NYSE: SLVM) is entering into a put option agreement with Midas Atlantic Partners, in partnership with The Najafi Companies, for a binding offer to acquire the company’s Europe business, including its uncoated freesheet paper mills in Saillat, France, and Nymolla, Sweden, as well as its forestry and supporting business operations.
Burnham to force employers to publish salaries on job ads in latest government ‘small fix’
Prime minister said his government would bring in legal requirement for companies to say what they pay when listing new jobs
GTA 6 piracy "a fact of life," says Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick
Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick called piracy “a fact of life” ahead of GTA 6’s November 19 launch, saying the company would use legal and technical measures if it becomes a serious problem. Reported PS5 firmware requirements could prevent the game from running on publicly jailbroken consoles, though neither Rockstar nor Sony has confirmed those requirements.
Oregon sues Trump administration over Medicaid work requirements
Oregon has sued the Trump administration over changes to Medicaid that the Oregon Health Authority warned could impact around 600,000 Oregonians.
D51 students explore health care careers at St. Mary’s Hospital
Dozens of local high school students got a hands-on look at health care careers, including opportunities that do not require a four-year degree
Enhanced Group Acquires Controlling Interest in German Promoter DEAG
Enhanced Group has acquired a controlling 77% interest in German concert promoter DEAG.
USDA revising cost-share requirements for Dairy Business Innovation
MADISON, Wis. (WKOW) — The U.S. Department of Agriculture is revising cost-share requirements for the Dairy Business Innovation Initiatives program after discussions with the four DBI centers and dairy industry
Washington voters pass initiative to ban transgender girls in girls’ sports
The first of its kind in Washington state, the initiative requires all girls looking to participate in sports to undergo medical testing — through a genital exam, a hormone test or a chromosome test — before being able to participate on a girls school sports team.
A new financial era requires an updated system
Dean of SC Johnson College, Andrew Karolyi, spoke about three levers for financial system change at the UN Global Compact Leaders Summit in New York City.
Medicus Pharma proposes $135M SkinJect spinout through SPAC business combination
Medicus Pharma CEO Dr Raza Bokhari joined Steve Darling from Proactive to discuss a proposed transaction involving the company's wholly owned subsidiary, SkinJect, which has entered into a non-binding letter of intent with an undisclosed special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) for a potential business combination. The proposed transaction contemplates a US$135 million pre-money enterprise valuation for SkinJect, alongside a concurrent equity financing intended to support the company's SKNJCT-005 clinical study in patients with Gorlin syndrome and preparations for a potential New Drug Application (NDA). Bokhari told Proactive that the proposed deal is designed to establish SkinJect as a separately listed company focused on advancing its dermatology and rare-disease development program. Under the proposed structure, the SPAC would acquire 100% of SkinJect in exchange for newly issued common shares in the combined company. Medicus Pharma intends to retain majority economic and voting ownership, allowing existing Medicus shareholders to maintain significant participation in SkinJect's potential future value. The separation would also provide SkinJect with a dedicated financing platform to fund its clinical development activities, particularly the SKNJCT-005 study targeting Gorlin syndrome, a rare genetic condition associated with the development of multiple basal cell carcinomas. The concurrent financing is expected to support the clinical program and the work required to prepare and potentially submit a New Drug Application, subject to successful development and regulatory progress. Final ownership percentages have not yet been determined. These will depend on negotiations surrounding the definitive transaction agreement and the combined company's capitalization, including retained SPAC cash, public and sponsor shares, warrants and other potentially dilutive securities. Medicus said the proposed transaction remains subject to the completion of definitive documentation and other customary conditions. The planned spinout represents a strategic step in Medicus Pharma's efforts to give SkinJect a dedicated corporate and financial structure, while allowing the parent company to retain majority participation as the dermatology program advances towards its next clinical and regulatory milestones. #proactiveinvestors #nasdaq #mdcx #tsxv #mdcx #pharma #SkinJect #Biotechnology #Healthcare #RareDisease #GorlinSyndrome #Dermatology #SPAC #ClinicalTrials #DrugDevelopment #NDA #Biopharmaceuticals
ENHA: A 77% DEAG stake builds a global sports and live-entertainment platform
An all-stock deal would give the acquirer a 77% stake in DEAG, pairing sports IP and telehealth with a live-event and ticketing platform. Combined 2027E revenue is ~$670 million; closing is expected in Q1 2027, subject to conditions.Original document: Enhanced Group Inc. [ENHA] Press release — Nov…
Last session tonight to weigh in on Heights Business District plan
Current business district proposal would allow buildings up to six stories and zero parking as incentives for developers The latest proposal for the Heights Business District offers “public benefit incentives,” which are conditional bonuses for developers. Developers can build up to six stories if they offer a public plaza, a public amenity, or first-and-second floor active commercial use. Developers will have no requirement to build parking spaces if they offer 60% ground-floor active commercial use, or if they preserve a historical facade. Those incentives and other parts of the plans will be discussed tonight, Nov. 5, when the Heights Neighborhood
Public health experts demand tighter global restrictions on fireworks
Fireworks pose an underestimated danger to public health and require stronger regulations and sustained public education campaigns to help prevent devastating, yet entirely avoidable injuries, warn US experts in The BMJ today.
When papers become currency: a Chinese debate about trust in science
Last Saturday, 31 October, I went to the University of Hong Kong’s Beijing Centre for its Talent Forum. It was the fourth stop in the series this year, following events in Shanghai’s Zhangjiang, Shenzhen’s Qianhai, and on HKU’s main campus. The programme covered a remarkable distance in one afternoon. HKU’s Xiao-Jing Wang discussed computational neuroscience, intelligence, and the prefrontal cortex—before even delivering his inaugural public lecture to students back in Hong Kong. His colleague Bing Zhang took us from the Big Bang to artificial intelligence. Tsinghua’s Xue Lan asked how AI might reshape the institutional infrastructure underpinning higher education. There were lively panels featuring industry leaders from JD.com, Xiaomi, Haier—and Kaiser Y Kuo on the closing panel discussing innovation and international connections. I cannot pretend to have followed every detail of the brain models or the astrophysics. The talk that stayed with me was closer to something we have covered before: Zhou Zhonghe 周忠和 on papers, evaluation, and scientific trust. Zhou is a palaeontologist, an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and an international member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is also editor-in-chief of The Intellectual (知识分子), China’s leading science commentary platform. His subject was uncomfortable enough for a room full of successful academics: what happens when the system for recognising good science starts rewarding something else? Part of my interest came from our sister newsletter, The East is Read, which covered the controversy around “Geng Tongxue” in May. A PhD dropout from Beihang University, Geng has publicly challenged papers by prominent researchers through detailed online allegations of manipulated images and fabricated data. At Tongji University, an investigation into a challenged Nature paper found academic misconduct, and the dean of its life sciences school was removed. The affair brought doubts about academic integrity well beyond laboratories and university committees. How could someone outside the established hierarchy spot problems in papers that had passed through prestigious journals and institutions? And what, exactly, had all that prestige guaranteed? Zhou approached these questions through two essays published in July by The Intellectual: one by Wang Xiaodong, director of the National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing, and a response by Wang Liming, of Shanghai’s Shangsi Institute of Natural Sciences. Both began with the controversy over Geng. Their arguments deserve a wider audience, so I want to put parts of them alongside what Zhou said on Saturday. Wang Xiaodong’s starting point is evolution. A research system selects for the behaviour it rewards. Grants, jobs, journals, talent programmes, and prizes collectively determine which scientists prosper and which practices get passed down from advisors to students. “Whatever the system rewards is what it will evolve to produce,” he writes, citing the ancient Chinese saying: The King of Chu loved slender waists, and many in the palace starved to death. That is a more demanding diagnosis than saying there are dishonest people in science. Punishing a fraudster does not change the selective environment that made a particular kind of research profitable. His account also gives scientific success an awkward role in the story. As Zhou put it on Saturday, science became a victim of its own success. Once research became central to industry, national power, and economic growth, universities and laboratories expanded, and public money followed. That created an administrative need for rapid decisions: who should get the next grant, the next laboratory, the next appointment? The difficulty is that the true value of a discovery may take years or decades of testing and building to become clear. Resource allocation cannot wait that long. Publication counts, journal prestige, impact factors, and citations therefore become convenient ways to make an instant judgement. “The real problem is not that these indicators have no value,” Wang Xiaodong writes, “but that they are trying to answer a question that only time can answer.” Telling administrators simply to stop counting papers will never be enough. They still have budgets to distribute and appointments to make. Something has to replace the shortcut. Zhou described the consequences inside publishing. Papers acquire ever more requirements: a complete story, polished presentation, extensive datasets, and accessibility to readers beyond the immediate field. Individually, those demands sound reasonable. Together, he warned, they produce formulaic “eight-legged” papers 八股文 and rigid reviewing, while genuinely original or non-consensus work struggles to get past journal editors—some of whom wield immense gatekeeping power despite having limited laboratory experience themselves. Meanwhile, the demands for sprawling, “complete” narratives have fuelled a wider replication crisis. Wang Xiaodong uses a mahjong metaphor to describe the result: put the complex papers published by the exact same lab over several years side by side, and they often look like “Thirteen Orphans” (十三不靠)—every tile completely unrelated to the next, and none of them reproducible by outsiders. Zhou also spoke frankly as an editor who has trouble finding reviewers. Everyone wants someone else to review their work; qualified senior researchers have little time to return the favour. The labour is anonymous, unpaid, and brings almost no institutional recognition, so it increasingly gets passed down to postdocs and graduate students. And while anonymity protects reviewers from rank and personal favours, hyper-specialisation means an author’s most qualified reviewer is often a direct competitor, shielded from accountability. The protection and the problem coexist. Wang Liming takes the argument a step further. The decisive change, in his essay, is the instant conversion of academic honour into material resources. Once a paper can be cashed in for funding, a job, students, commercial investment, or even a company valuation, scientists are alienated from their work: they must keep minting this “research currency” to keep their teams alive. He is careful not to romanticise the past. The old world of gentleman scientists—financially independent figures like Boyle and Darwin who needed nothing from external funders—was also a closed club that excluded people without inherited wealth, women, and much of humanity outside the West. Professional science allowed ordinary people, himself included, to become researchers. Nobody should want to undo that. The problem, in his account, is an exchange system that becomes too uniform and too difficult to correct. His most pointed Chinese example is the “hat” (帽子): the prestigious talent designation that brings continuing access to money, laboratory space, students, and institutional influence. “If papers are the circulating currency of the research system, then a ‘hat’ is a bond that pays interest over the long term,” he writes. A paper at least requires another round of peer review. A title in the Chinese context can lock in a judgement made years ago and turn it into permanent status rent, regardless of whether its holder is still doing good science. Here, official institutions hire, organise, and evaluate scientists. Unlike honours awarded by autonomous academic communities in the West, a Chinese “hat” blends non-scientist administrative power with state authority. Once granted, it turns a past judgement into permanent status rent that is nearly impossible to revoke—because taking a hat off would imply that official authority erred in putting it on. Both Wangs see China as experiencing, at compressed speed, pressures present across global science. Research expansion, rising investment, publication growth, and elaborate evaluation metrics arrived in China within two or three decades rather than two or three centuries. Zhou agreed with that international framing—noting that recent US White House science policy documents and the new president of the US National Academy of Sciences, a fellow palaeontologist who recently visited Zhou’s institute in Beijing, have raised strikingly similar warnings about consensus-bound peer review, short-term project grants, and the replication crisis. Still, Zhou emphasised that China’s traditional hierarchy, personal networks (guanxi), and the ethos that “a good scholar becomes an official” (学而优则仕) amplify those pressures at home. So what would change things? Here Zhou’s tone differed from the call for a revolution in scientific trust in Wang Xiaodong’s essay. As an evolutionary biologist, Zhou favoured patchwork repair (修修补补). Living systems survive through accumulated adjustments; dramatic mutations are usually fatal. Science cannot return to a small, slow-moving pastoral era, especially after the successive accelerations of professionalisation after the Second World War, the internet, and now artificial intelligence. But it can alter the local environment in which researchers work. He pointed to domestic experiments designed to support unconventional research and diversify funding, including Tencent’s New Cornerstone Investigator Program, the Xplorer Prize, and the Future Science Prize. He also mentioned participating in reviews for “major non-consensus projects” under the National Natural Science Foundation of China. One guiding principle he recalled was wonderfully direct: “Failure is allowed; corruption is not” (允许失败，不允许腐败). That distinction would mean quite a lot if taken seriously. An honest attempt that fails should not have to disguise itself as a success to survive an assessment. Wang Liming’s essay adds a sharp caveat to the optimism about new domestic funders. Multiple organisations do not automatically produce multiple ways of judging science. If the same pool of senior domestic scientists makes the decisions through the same two-round review procedures, it is still “fake diversity.” He argues for three distinct kinds of money: broad baseline funding governed by fair procedures; patient funding for questions that take ten years; and non-consensus funding based on individual taste, deliberately empowering a few genuine experts to make biased, contrarian bets on eccentric ideas that would inevitably be averaged out by a committee. Replacing one monopoly with another achieves little; a healthy ecosystem needs variance. Zhou’s proposals for publishing were similarly concrete: strip papers of their resource-allocation burden and return them to recording discoveries and establishing priority; separate dissemination from evaluation, as eLife and Peer Community In do; adopt more modular “micro-publications” and real-name endorsements; recognize the labour of editors and reviewers; and give replication work proper credit rather than treating it as an unpublishable dead end. AI makes every part of this debate more urgent—and Zhou wove it throughout his talk. In his own preparation, he used AI to survey the declining influence of academic monographs, noting how tools are already changing how scholars gather information. More fundamentally, he placed AI as the latest great acceleration in scientific history: just as the internet sped up the pace of research and tightened external resource pressures, AI is compressing the cycle again. In the essays Zhou cited, AI cuts both ways. Wang Xiaodong expects large language models to erase much of the English-writing disadvantage long faced by Chinese scientists, further swelling the flood of papers coming out of Chinese labs. Wang Liming sees AI accelerating both ends of the trust crisis: it lowers the cost of paper mills and fabricated images just as quickly as it lowers the cost of automated image forensics, data auditing, and code reproduction. “Whoever builds the verification layer wins,” Wang Liming writes. His proposed alternative to the static, packaged “story paper” is a continuously versioned “unit of discovery” containing a falsifiable claim, raw data, analysis code, experimental parameters, and an ongoing log of independent checks—where negative results and failed replications are recorded rather than buried. Zhou ended his keynote by bringing AI back to the question of scientific honour and credit. Citing a recent Intellectual discussion on “What AI Means for Mathematics” featuring Fields Medalist Deng Yu 邓煜—at a moment when AI is already batch-solving mathematical conjectures, as HKU Vice-President Lin Chen noted in his opening remarks—Zhou agreed that human researchers must remain the principal agents: AI is a tool that frees scientists from tedious calculation to think about deeper, messier real-world problems. Yet that partnership creates a thorny new evaluation problem. When a breakthrough is made with AI, what is the human contribution and what is the machine’s? And since AI models distil centuries of accumulated human scholarship, is it right that the credit and value flow so heavily to the private AI companies building the tools? The old struggle over how to assign scientific honour is acquiring a whole new layer. What I took away was a serious discussion of how science can remain trustworthy as its scale, incentives, and tools change. These were scientists with real standing inside China’s system questioning how that standing is produced, and proposing changes that would affect their own institutions and peers. That made the afternoon at HKU’s Beijing Centre worthwhile. At the close, Wang Feng, Director of Communications and Public Affairs at HKU, said the value of the forum series—which heads to Hangzhou in December and cities like Chengdu early next year—would lie in the real cooperation it helped bring about. The university has plenty to celebrate: this week it topped the QS Asia rankings for a second consecutive year, alongside its 11th-place position in the QS World University Rankings 2027. For me, bringing this debate to an audience beyond the people who review papers and allocate grants was a useful contribution. Share [ The East is Read PhD dropout’s exposé forces an academic fraud reckoning in China A former doctoral student turned blogger has shaken China’s academic establishment by publicly accusing prominent university scholars of fabricating data and manipulating papers, triggering investigations at several leading institutions and drawing rare attention from state media… Read more 5 months ago · 43 likes · 8 comments · Yuxuan JIA ](https://www.eastisread.com/p/phd-dropouts-expose-forces-an-academic?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=47580)
Voters approved two sex-based school sports measures, defeated one measure on medical procedures for transgender minors; three remain uncalled
Voters in five states decided six ballot measures related to sex-based sports eligibility and medical procedures for transgender minors in 2026. Here are the results and what they mean. As of 2:15 PM EST on Nov. 4, of the four measures to establish sex-based requirements for school sports, two passed, and two were not called […]
Fireworks are an underestimated danger to public health, warn experts
Fireworks pose an underestimated danger to public health and require stronger regulations and sustained public education campaigns to help prevent devastating yet entirely avoidable injuries, warn U.S. ...
‘Opportunities are endless’: Hornets Sports and Entertainment team up with developers to acquire the old Epicentre
Queen City Quarter, formerly known as the Epicentre has been acquired by a group of development partners including Hornets Sports and Entertainment.
‘Opportunities are endless’: Hornets Sports and Entertainment team up with developers for the old Epicentre
Queen City Quarter, formerly known as the Epicentre has been acquired by a group of development partners including Hornets Sports and Entertainment.
‘Opportunities are endless’: Hornets Sports and Entertainment team up with developers for the old Epicentre
Queen City Quarter, formerly known as the Epicentre has been acquired by a group of development partners including Hornets Sports and Entertainment.
Pennsylvania health officials confirm a sixth measles-related death
Pennsylvania health officials are still investigating a seventh death reported by Franklin County’s coroner last month.
Accendra Health could be delisted by NYSE
Accendra Health is at risk of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after failing to meet the exchange’s financial requirements.
Accendra Health could be delisted by NYSE
Accendra Health is at risk of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after failing to meet the exchange’s financial requirements.
Ravens reportedly acquire QB Jacoby Brissett from Cardinals to make up for Lamar Jackson, Tyler Huntley injuries
Let’s figure out Alex Vesia’s contract in free agency
Alex Vesia was a fixture in the Dodgers bullpen for the last six seasons, after getting acquired from the Miami Marlins ahead of the 2021 season. So much so that his 367 games pitched are 13th-most in Dodgers history, and seventh-most among relievers in franchise history. Now, Vesia is one of nine Dodgers free agents, […]
If Israeli politics were rational, Arab parties would now be holding all the cards
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AFGHS co-signatory countries ask health care users to help fill the financing gap
Hundreds of thousands of Ugandans living with HIV on antiretrovirals could be targeted for user fees or community health insurance schemes requiring modest premium payments, according to the April 2026 version of the country’s America First Global Health Strategy implementation narrative.1 As part of the “sustainable financing for the private not for profit sector” strategy, 491 facilities will be targeted for a phased introduction of user fees and scale up of community health insurance programs.2 In the Ugandan context, PNFP facilities include faith-based hospitals and other health facilities, US missionary organizations and centers of excellence—services that are often co-located at government facilities but run with additional financial and technical resources. 402,000 people—or about 28 percent of the total Ugandan adult PLHIV population on treatment—get ART from the private not for profit sector. The selected facilities provide the majority of ART and prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT) services. The plan doesn’t give the total number of clients served by the 491 facilities, so it is not possible to give a precise number. But the majority of 402,000 is a figure in the hundreds of thousands—hence the estimate I’m using.3 The April draft of the Ugandan implementation plan narrative is the only one I’ve been able to review. But the government of Uganda is not alone in turning to health care users to help fill the financing gaps caused by the abrupt withdrawal of US funds. In July 2025, the Government of Liberia introduced user fees for previously free services including “registration, accommodation, patient feeding, hospitalization, and a wide range of surgical and diagnostic procedures.”4 Earlier that year, Liberia rolled out a revolving drug fund designed to stabilize drug supplies by “allowing patients to pay a small fee for standardized, quality medications,” according to a Ministry of Health press release.5 (Both of these approaches had been proposed in the National Health Policy 2022-2031; media coverage explicitly connects the launch with the US foreign aid cuts.) The health financing strategies proposed by Uganda and established in Liberia are qualitatively different from user fees officially adopted by specific health facilities to cover funding shortfalls caused by the new US approach.6 The latter is a stopgap, adhoc change. The former is a national governmental adoption of policies that pass costs on to health care users, despite evidence that such approaches can exacerbate inequities and leave deficits unfilled. Two countries does not make a pattern, but they do point to urgent questions: Have other countries, including Liberia, included user fees or community health insurance schemes in their implementation plans? If so, do any of these narratives have what Uganda’s lacks: a fall-back plan in place in case these strategies for sustainable health systems fail to deliver—as they have before? I wonder if you think about it Subscribe Predictable pitfalls Both community-based health insurance and user fees are as old as the hills. And after decades of people climbing up these hills, duking it out, climbing back down—neither strategy has shown the results the Ugandan implementation plan is counting on. This is, in fact, a hill some folks are willing to die on. (You knew I’d get there, right?) In November 2025, an African-led team of health system experts published a paper directed at low- and middle income country governments trying to figure out how to create self-sustaining health systems. The money wasn’t coming back. It had been more than nine months since the season of freezing, waivering and wood-chippering; two months since AFGHS tumbled into the world touting co-financing requirements and reductions in future US government health aid. Governments were looking for strategies for sustainable, self-financed health systems, the authors wrote. For countries considering user fees and community health insurance to fill the financing gaps, they had a simple message: Don’t. On user fees, the paper states: “Reliance on user fees is ultimately a regressive and inequitable approach. It places a disproportionate burden on the poor and undermines health system goals of equity and financial protection. […] There is overwhelming evidence that user fees mobilise very limited resources for the public health sector, making it an inefficient mechanism for revenue mobilisation.” On community health insurance: “Attempting to shift the burden of funding previously donor-funded services, such as HIV care and management, and TB treatment, onto contributory schemes would exacerbate their fragility and fail to protect the population.”7 The WHO says that community-based health insurance “cannot be expected to provide a major source of funding or coverage,” and noted that most schemes offer only moderate benefit to individuals paying into them, and exclude the poorest segment of the population.8 And yet, the US-Ugandan implementation plan says that community health insurance is “the central pillar of this [PNFP] sustainability strategy” and that this approach that will generate “pre-paid pooled funding at facility and community level [that] improves financial risk protection for households, reduces catastrophic out-of-pocket expenditure, and generates structured, transparent revenue streams that can progressively absorb recurrent costs including health worker salaries.” Unfortunately, Uganda’s own history suggests the pillar might not be able to bear this weight. Ugandans Have Been to this Rodeo Before—and Some Want Their Money Back Uganda introduced its first community health insurance scheme in 1996 with support from international donors.9 Thirty years later, somewhere between 0.2 and 0.3 percent of the population is covered by CHI; just over 1 percent has any kind of health insurance.10 User fees were universally introduced in 1993 as a condition of a World Bank loan.11 They were abandoned in 2001, and in 2004—the year I moved to Uganda to watch the free HIV program get underway—a definitive study found that the fees did not improve health systems and outcomes.12 In 2004, most clinics and hospitals had ‘free’ and ‘fee for service’ options for getting care.13 The fee for service, or “cash and carry” programs had often been established in the years prior to PEPFAR and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. People who could afford to paid for the drugs, often at facilities in the private-not-for-profit (PNFP) sector. When free drugs arrived, some people who’d been paying kept on doing so, perhaps because of shorter wait times, greater confidentiality, convenience or other factors. But in the year that I spent visiting the same clinics around the country week after week—including a “center of excellence” that maintained separate days for cash and carry clients and those accessing free ARVs—lots of people who had been paying tried to switch to the free option. They’d paid because they had no other choice. They’d sold pieces of family land, begged family members for loans, bought pills by the week, and sometimes by the day. Or they were just cash-strapped, like most of us, and wanted the funds for other things. 14 Twenty-two years later, this hasn’t changed. Ugandans pay out of pocket for 30-40 percent of their health care costs, leading one paper to declare that “falling ill is more than a health crisis. It is a financial emergency.”15 One recent study found that up to 48.5 percent of households dealing with tuberculosis sold something, took out a loan or dug into savings to defray the costs of TB care—which is supposed to be universally free.16 The Ugandan implementation plan does anticipate challenges. It proposes a phased approach, with 187 facilities introducing user contribution systems in Year 1, 152 in Year 2, and 153 in Year 3. Willingness to pay and feasibility studies will precede roll out; fees will be tiered by region, and a waiver system is proposed to ensure that no one has to pay who is unable to. Moreover, the plan provides for quarterly reviews of epidemiological data to “ensure that user contributions do not compromise epidemic control gains, ART continuity for the client cohort, TB case management, or PMTCT services.” Alt text: A screenshot of a table included in the implementation plan narrative that is the subject of this stack. It’s got a fetching pink bar at the top. It uses the abbreviation “CHI” which is Community Health Insurance, and FBO which is Faith Based Organizations, and it details the number of facilities that will implement user fees with waivers and community health insurance schemes over the five years of the agreement. As I said in the footnote, this is a super interesting document with a lot of other rich material. Tell me what you see—and what you would have focused on. And if you’ve seen something like this, or anything else that strikes you, in another implementation plan, tell me that too. You can use the Substack message platform or try me on Signal at @endaplague_again.25 (because @mercoonfan was, weirdly, taken). But the plan doesn’t fully explain what will happen if this approach doesn’t work out. Yes, progress will be monitored, and corrective action triggered. However, there is no specified funding replacement if premium and fee revenue prove inadequate. Instead, the authors write, “Currently, COEs serve a total client cohort of over 180,000 across 28 facilities. In the initial years, the U.S. Government (USG) will provide financial support for clients; over time, user fees generated by COEs will become the primary source of funding for sustaining their services.” Failure does not really seem to be an option. Health insurance schemes are more acceptable to the Ugandan population than user fees. Members of Parliament and civil society traveled to Ethiopia to see how that country’s scheme worked. In a follow up report, a veteran civil society group recommended allowing the “health insurance ecosystem to grow organically and [to] keep reviewing the law and regulations as this growth takes root.”17 One study found that more than three-quarters of Ugandans were willing to join a health insurance program.18 However, coverage of community-based health insurance is minimal, as is coverage of any kind of insurance—including private plans.19 A national health insurance scheme bill has been stalled for several years and presently sits with President Yoweri Museveni.20 Community-based health insurance scheme that do exist are expanding in number, but losing enrollees. Between 2022 and 2026, the number of community-based health financing schemes across the country increased by 42 percent, while the number of people enrolled decreased by nearly 11 percent.21 None of this means that community-based health insurance should not happen in Uganda—or that people do not want insurance. It doesn’t even mean that user fees and waivers won’t ever work. But there is highly relevant evidence from Uganda and the surrounding region that it is quite optimistic to describe community health insurance and user fees as central supports for sustainable financing in any sector of the health system. And now for the best-case scenario In the best-case scenario22, the Ugandan approach does exactly what it sets out to do, and so does the Liberian fee structure and revolving pharmacy fund—though I’ve not confirmed that these are in the MoU. In one best-case scenario, Uganda is an outlier, and user fees and community health insurance are not recurrent pillars of self-sustaining financing in other countries’ implementation plans. In another best-case scenario, all countries that include these strategies enjoy success beyond anyone’s evidence-informed wildest dreams: reliable funding generated by health care users fees, great health care outcomes for everyone, no exacerbation of inequities, no crippling household debt. No sold land, repurposed school tuition or high-interest loans. In the best-case scenario, not one of the hundreds of thousands of Ugandans living with HIV receiving antiretrovirals from 491 PNFP facilities misses a refill or leaves care because of user fees or community health insurance premiums. This is the best-case scenario for these people for their own health, and for their families. It is also the best-case scenario if Uganda wants to stay on the path to eliminating HIV as a public health threat. According to the country’s most recent data, 96.5 percent of people living with HIV on antiretrovirals are virologically suppressed. Epidemic control depends ensuring that 95% of people living with HIV know their status, 95 percent of those individuals are on ART, and 95% of those individuals are virologically suppressed. Uganda is still struggling with the first “95"—a frankly abysmal 85.3 percent. If HIV epidemic control and the attendant prevention of new infections, avoidable suffering and premature death matter, the country cannot afford to lose any clients who are currently in care.23 As I write this a couple hours before the polls close for the US elections in the city I live in, I say with soul-deep sincerity: I am rooting for the best-case scenario. I think it’s safe to say that we all are.24 I think it’s also safe to say that if the US and co-signatory governments have inked plans that lead to successful expansion of community health insurance and strategic use of user fees, we all would like to know, now, so that we don’t miss the opportunity to celebrate when success happens. The implementation plan narratives have to enter the public domain. They are the fullest expression of a strategy co-created by two governments. There are assumptions and details that people living in the US and co-signatory countries need to understand that are not available in the MoUs or, to date, in the Congressional Notifications. Some of these details can help other countries that are, as I write this, still working on implementation plans. Others, like a solid count of how many other countries have plans for expanding user fees or health insurance, are important for regional and global health architecture reform initiatives. No matter how this election night turns out, there will be a slew of new Congressional member orientations, briefings and talking points papers in the next few months. Release of implementation narratives should be a bullet point in every context that AFGHS is discussed. These documents can be redacted so that procurement sensitive information isn’t disclosed. There is much more historical precedent for sharing such documents than there is for relying on user fees to fill health financing gaps. Let’s look at the information together so we can hope for the best and prepare for, you know, the other thing. Alt text: A substack first: a bicep selfie! It’s my arm - peachy-white skin, black shirt (flannel, notch neck, too hot for this appallingly balmy November weather, if you’re wondering) and a sticker that says I VOTED 2026. Beige letters on red for I voted. Beige on blue for 2026. You bet I did.25 In your wildest dreams. Subscribe 1 This is a really, really rich 95 page document. There are fascinating ideas and detailed plans in it. It is all worth reading AND I have, in this post, highlighted an instance of content that could pose challenges and certainly posits success of strategies that haven’t worked before. I would love to hear what readers’ see that’s interesting and should be lifted up as something to check for in other implementation plans. I will also shortly be adding a static page to the substack site where implementation plan documents will live. I will put the url into this footnote and it will also be there on emilybass.substack.com by the end of the week. Uganda Implementation Narrative Section 4 April 22 2026 Draft 1.51MB ∙ PDF file Download Download 2 User fees are costs charged for visits, labs, medicines or other health services, usually at the time they are provided. Community health insurance, or community-based health insurance, is what the World Health Organization calls “micro insurance,” which is health insurance targeted at low-income people. 3 As usual (by which I mean always), please prove me wrong. 4 https://smartnewsliberia.com/liberias-ministry-of-health-announces-2025-hospital-service-fees-for-public-facilities/?utm 5 https://moh.gov.lr/news/2025/grand-cape-mount-leaders-residents-embrace-new-community-pharmacy-program/?utm 6 https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/09/hiv-usaid-pepfar-africa-foreign-aid-cuts-mission-hospitals/?utm 7 https://gh.bmj.com/content/10/11/e021270 8 https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/community-based-health-insurance-CBHI 9 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2827475/ 10 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10861328/#b3-jpmph-23-110 11 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC527704/ 12 Same citation as the footnote 2 - the article is called “Learning from failed health care reform in Uganda.” To which I say: If only. If. Only. 13 There is a whole taxonomy of user fees to be aware of, if not commit to memory. Out of pocket costs are everything that someone pays for themselves. In this Stack, user fees are planned and policy-supported out of pocket costs. There are also out of pocket costs that people pay to buy drugs or receive tests or health care assessments that would be free if the drugs were on the shelves, or the machines or kits were available, or the staff were on site. A user fee is usually designed to be modest, pegged to willingness to pay, and may be waiveable at the point of care for anyone who is unable to do so. The costs for things that would otherwise be free are whatever the market will bear and people either have to pay them or go without. Out of pocket costs for services and stuff that aren’t available in public facilities are different again from bribes or unofficial fees that some health workers may impose, even though most are indefatigable, tireless and tired, and devoted to their clients. 14 For the record—which really is these footnotes—I would give a whole stack of fridge magnets for a systematic analysis of the economic and social impact of the Mass Unemployment Event in AFGHS countries among the very people who used to be able to afford and cover user fees, both for themselves and vast family networks. Locally employed USAID technical staff, house cleaners, caregivers, drivers and technicians were financial anchors for cousins, friends, friends’ children, friends’ childrens’ cousins, teachers, pastors, neighbors and so many other kinds of kin. Aid recipients lost direct funding; many other people who had not been aid recipients, but parts of the elaborate care webs that function as safety nets for so many people, lost crucial support too. And that’s even before we get to the people who worked at the hotels and restaurants and bars where people employed by the US and its implementing partners used to spend disposable income. Those businesses have lost revenue; those folks have lost jobs. It will be some time coming—and someone will have to fund this work—but I do hope it happens. And I hope, as usual, to be proven wrong. 15 https://eprcug.org/blog/how-out-of-pocket-healthcare-costs-keep-driving-ugandans-into-poverty/ 16 Another straight-to-the-point journal article title. Households experiencing catastrophic costs due to tuberculosis in Uganda: magnitude and cost drivers. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32938411 17 https://www.cehurd.org/download/technical-policy-brief-on-community-health-insurance-scheme/?wpdmdl=13661&refresh=6ae9122f5d4ed1793659439 18 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10125197/ 19 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10861328/#b3-jpmph-23-110 20 https://ugandapost.news/uganda-to-make-health-insurance-mandatory-by-2026/ 21 https://shu.org.ug/download/235 22 With a nod, tip of the stack hat, and wag of the Mercoon tail to a deeply valued reader who told me that I have a tendency to speculate about the worst-case scenarios a little too much of the time. 23 https://news.mak.ac.ug/2026/10/uphia-2025-shows-ugandas-hiv-status-awareness-gap-despite-strong-treatment-outcomes/ As you’ll see in the next footnote, I’ve already written a subSubstack on another topic, so I will be brief with regard to the study referenced in this article. The Uganda Population-Based HIV Impact Assessment, or UPHIA, will never happen in this way again. For more than a decade, PHIAs have been supported by the US government as a way to generate accurate estimates of country progress on key HIV indicators. They are a holdover from the PEPFAR program that was laser focused on ensuring US taxpayer dollars subsidized progress in pandemic control. There may be other population-level surveys and the data may even be publicly released, as the entire set of FY2026 MER data have not. But PHIAs will never happen again. If you’re wondering whether the estimates of HIV progress at country level might get less reliable….you’re not alone. 24 Ooh baby, I hate “we” in almost all forms. But sometimes I go there, when I am looking for company, which I am. Because this Stack moves into the somewhat-uncharted territory of assessing what the implementation plan narratives may suggest about co-signatory countries’ roles and responsibilities to the people living within their borders. The MoUs, specimen and data sharing agreements were templates. Countries’ answers fit into pre-specified questions that did not include, “how are you going to fill financing gaps and stabilize your health system as this plan unfolds?” In contrast, the implementation narratives are open form—the product of co-creation between the two governments. Co-creation can mean lots of things, but nothing leads me to believe that implementation plans are ghost-written by the US government, or that contents were imposed by the US counterparts. Instead, I think the parts of the plans that read like country government initiatives are endorsed, if not initiated by, those governments. For instance, the Ugandan implementation plan narrative describes plans for revenue-generation through fees charged for equipment calibration, repair and maintenance provided through Uganda’s National Equipment Calibration Laboratory, and laboratory accreditation through the Uganda National Accreditation Service (UGANAS), targeting private sector, PNFP, research and academic clients. That’s super specific and also quite ambitious. It doesn’t read like an American idea. There’s also a provision for solar panels, and other stuff that feels country owned and driven. This is where it gets interesting. If co-creation is the case, then both the US and co-signatory governments are accountable for the contents and the outcomes. Most discourse about AFGHS to date has focused on the decisions that America has made, or demanded that other countries make. The AFGHS architects have monopolized the hot seat. As they should, in so many ways. America absolutely created the conditions under which countries needed to come up with health financing strategies to fill unanticipated, catastrophic funding gaps. And with not-too-long a lens, we can look back and see that America is also on the hook for its role in the Bretton Woods institutions that made user fees and health system fiscal austerity conditions of loans during the era of structural adjustment. But in the here and now, it is not at all clear to me that the US is requiring Uganda or any other country to implement specific approaches to sustainable financing. Instead, it is as the authors of that paper up in footnote 6 suggest: African governments have agency. As implementation plans roll out—whether or not the narratives are shared—it will be important to understand what this agency looks like and what it means for people, including the poorest of the poor. And it will be important to figure out how to talk about it safely, respectfully and critically in places other than the literal and metaphorical footnotes. 25 This week’s song is “Once upon a time” by the Moody Blues. (I know, this is gonna be a weird, largely banger-free end of 2026 playlist. HMU with requests.) AND please do watch the video and appreciate the truly amazing opening sequence—a drum kit wasteland, a coupla plastic bags, a bit of sand. Sort of like the hill where fiscal austerity policies that put costs on health care users might go to perish. But then there’s a lady with amazing hair. It’s worth it.
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We also cover image generation, interactive interfaces, advertising, education, and public unease about AI: Alex Kantrowitz: OpenAI has analyzed ChatGPT’s search volume and compared it with Google’s. What did you find? Adam Fry: ChatGPT has been growing quite quickly. ChatGPT’s volume of search-like queries is now roughly one-fifth the volume of queries of Google. It’s a pretty amazing statistic when you think about it, mainly because we started just about a year and a half ago. It’s hard to remember this, but ChatGPT at a time didn’t have any up-to-date information. You’d ask a question, it would say something like, “It’s past my training date,” and nobody had any idea what that meant. You’re saying ChatGPT’s search volume is one-fifth of Google’s. Bing’s share of the search market is around 5%. Does that make you multiple times larger than Bing? To say that more directly, ChatGPT has gone from one billion to 1.2 in just the last two months. That’s roughly 100 million users in 30 days, and another 100 million in another 30 days. The growth is just going big, and we’re staying very focused on how fast ChatGPT is growing. What counts as a search? I might have 20 prompts back and forth in a ChatGPT conversation. Does each one count as a query? Story continues below… A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR Move upmarket without a rebuild Moving upmarket means saying yes to what enterprise buyers ask for first: SSO, directory sync, and audit logs. WorkOS gives you all three, so your team keeps building the product instead of the checklist. Get enterprise-ready. Continued from above…. Adam Fry: What people came to ChatGPT for to start, if you go back about two years, is really writing help and coding help. Those wouldn’t be things that you really search for. What we’ve seen over the last year is people have grown into all these other topics. Things like you’re looking up a person or people or a place or a thing, and it requires up-to-date information. That’s a key element. Another big part is finance questions or health questions, where you really want to make sure it’s up-to-date information that’s quite factual, and we’ll do a web search for those questions. It’s basically anything that a user would have traditionally gone to a traditional search engine for, but is now deciding to go to ChatGPT for. Does each conversation with a search embedded count as one search, or does every question that requires a web search count? Every time you ask a question and go search the web, that’s a search. You used to work at Google. How would you say the nature of search is changing? One of the things that people really love about ChatGPT is this personalization and this understanding of the broader journey. If you look in the past, people would go for a Q&A box, and you’d ask a one-off question, like how tall is the Eiffel Tower. But there’s so much context in our lives around, “Maybe I’m taking a trip to Paris.” It’s actually helpful for ChatGPT to respond, “Here’s how tall the Eiffel Tower is, but I know you’re going on a trip to Paris.” It’s that ability for people to actually maintain context over time that has led them to start using ChatGPT in this way. You’ve also announced 250 million weekly active users of voice input, including dictation and conversations with voice mode. We are at 250 million weekly active users. What’s amazing about this is, if you look at those 250 million, what we’re seeing is it’s actually also incremental to the product. It’s no longer just a novelty. People aren’t just trying out voice. We’re seeing them use voice input day to day in their daily life, and it’s grown so quickly. Those 250 million users are using voice input, and that could just be a quick question or a long conversation. We’re seeing both behaviors. We’re seeing people just not want to type. You just hold it and start talking to it, or it turns into a longer conversation where people just sit with it. The big reason for this is the frontier capabilities of our models that we’ve shipped. We shipped what we call GPT Live 1, and then we shipped GPT Live 1.1. The big change with this is that it’s much more natural to speak with. It’s something we call backchanneling and interruptibility. Mhhhm… What you just did there is what the model does, because it’s really good at having a bidirectional conversation. That push to the frontier—we were the first to really release this at scale—has made it so much more natural for people to chat. That’s still only about 20% of the user base. From the outside, that looks small. Why is it exciting from the inside? It’s very exciting for a few reasons. We see from the data that when people start using voice, they stay around using voice. One of the things, transparently, we can do a better job of is bringing more people into discovering it. We see that the number of people who discover it could be a lot higher. But once they do, it’s a really new way for people to interact with AI. We’ve made a lot of improvements to it too, where we’re just going to see the number go up. You have background mode, so now by default, if you close the app, it’ll show, “Hey, the conversation’s still going.” If you want to walk around the house or you’re putting away the groceries, you can still have a chat. That kind of continuity has also changed how much people use it. Dots launched on September 29 and is about a month old. How’s it doing? It’s doing great. We talk to people about their Dot, and the first thing that everyone says is, “I love my Dot.” One of the reasons we’re seeing this is the proactivity, its ability to reach out to you and figure out things. The biggest use case I see all the time is, “Did I forget something today that I was supposed to do?” You can just say to your Dot, “Remind me of things at the end of the day that I may have forgotten. Somebody emailed me or messaged me,” and it’ll do that. This Dot changes the paradigm of the relationship with AI, where it’s actually helping you and giving you time back. You’re more conservative with permissions than some competitors. I tried to give my Dot my credit card, and it wouldn’t take it. With the creator of OpenClaw in-house, why are Dots’ permissions more limited? This is a space where we want to be very thoughtful and conservative because it’s a new space where you’re entrusting your Dot to take care of things on behalf of you that matter and are meaningful. We’ve just talked about how you go to this 1.2 billion user growth and asking questions. Now we’re asking people, “Can you ask ChatGPT or your Dot to help get things done?” But when you ask it to help get things done, it’s a whole new level of trust. We’ve built up a tremendous amount of trust in giving the right answers to your questions, and we want to make sure that when we build this new product, it has a high degree of trust. It’s a long game. We think this is going to be a new market for a very long time, and we want to make sure that we’re being this trusted player in the market to start. I initially thought Dots would be available on my $20 plan, then realized I had to spend $100 a month to get it. I upgraded, but I’d like to downgrade at some point…. We hope to keep earning your business and make the value good enough. It’s a really good point. ChatGPT’s goal more broadly, which I think is unique for us in the market, is we are focused on bringing intelligence to everyone safely across the entire world. For Dots in particular, there’s no difference. We don’t have anything to share tonight about the date of when Dots will go to a broader set of users. But you can rest assured we’re working very hard, and there are a couple things we have to get right. Over time we’re going to work on more efficient, agentic models that are able and capable of doing things for you. The first one is, right now we wanted to make sure that your Dot is actually really helpful. We started with some of our best models, but over time we’re going to work on more efficient, agentic models that are able and capable of doing things for you. The second thing is around proactivity. We’re still dialing in: How much do I message you to help you get things done? We can always play around with that to understand how much usage should a user use to have a successful Dot. We’re going to work on both, and our goal and ambition is to bring it out to all users. How much background computing does a Dot require? I’ve read estimates that serving a $100 subscriber might cost OpenAI $3,000 in compute, and mine seems to read every email that arrives. How often is it checking connected data sources? Right now, Dots are on the compute-heavier side, and this is one of the things we want to make sure that we can dial back over time. But the goal is to give you the best product. This is our premium, always-on personal assistant. Once we nail that, we’ll figure out how to dial back the compute needs. The thing we’re seeing also from our models, as we train frontier models, is just how—I can’t even keep up with how quickly we have a new model, and each new model is more efficient. If you looked at 6.1 Sol when it came out relative to Astra, much more efficient. I’m very excited about the next set of models we have coming too that’ll be even more efficient that we can use. Elon Musk said the cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue. Is efficiency the key to winning against competitors, or is there more to it? There are a couple of factors that go into it. One is the cost side, but the other is the revenue side. On ChatGPT and on our consumer business, we’ve been extremely proud of our ability to diversify different revenue streams in a way that’s growing really fast. To give you another stat, we announced several months back that we had passed 50 million subscriptions, and the number has grown considerably since then. On ads, within 200 days, we reached more than a billion in ARR, and that business is growing extremely quickly. We also have credits. Rather than paying for subscriptions, users can buy more credits. Between credits, subscriptions, and ads, I’m confident that the value of a Dot is going to be able to pay for itself. Elon has subscriptions too. This is clearly an expensive product to serve. One thing we continue to bet on at OpenAI and ChatGPT more broadly is that the models will continue to get much better and much cheaper, way faster than any of us think. If you look back at the historicals on it, it continues to be true. From what I’ve seen, I see no slowing down of that. What is Meta doing right with Muse? It has spent a lot of time atop the App Store charts. There are a couple of things they’ve done well. The first is people have been craving simplicity in their products. One of the things we have stated publicly as well is, at times AI products can be too complex. We’ve announced we’re merging ChatGPT’s Chat and Work. We’re making it much more simple in the products. You don’t have as many toggles or sliders between efforts and different model pickers. One of the things they’ve done well is this simplicity. You just go in and you can ask a question. You don’t have to think too much about what you’re doing. That’s one thing that seems to have resonated with users, which we also believe in. Second, there’s something really nice about being able to access your agent across many different channels. We just announced and launched Dots on iMessage. Whether you talk to your Dot on email or iMessage or within the ChatGPT app, the ubiquity in getting your assistant out there is going to be key. Those are two things that, if I had to be nice to our competitors, I would say were two big ones. So Alexandr Wang’s meme-tweeting strategy isn’t something you’re going to emulate? I have a different tweeting style. ChatGPT still asks me to choose between Chat and Work, even though some people call this technology AGI. Will that distinction go away? Couldn’t agree more. We have to solve this. Asking users to choose — we’ve heard repeatedly from all of our users it’s too much to understand. When should you go to Chat? When should you go to Work? It’s solvable. There’s real research to solve to make sure the models can understand what your intent is. Are you asking for a fast, quick reply? Are you asking me to go do a long agentic task? We’re going to solve it, and the plan is to bring Chat and Work together. So one interface will work out whether I’m asking for a conversation or a task. When? Coming soon. You told me the majority of ChatGPT’s 1.2 billion users are using image functionality. What are they doing? Today, 1.5 billion images are created per week. It’s hard to even wrap my head around that number. They’re doing a wide range of things. One of the most interesting things they’ve started to do is really use it for productivity use cases. The first thing it started with—I don’t know if you saw the ’80s trend, but it was quite fun. You could take a photo of yourself and say, “Put me and my family in ’80s outfits.” I did this for my family, and it was a really fun poster. But what we’re also seeing is businesses for their menus, or posters for birthdays. People are using it almost in a productivity-like fashion to create visual diagrams of what they would like to see. We’ve actually brought the latency down on images as well, so it’s gotten a lot faster. It went from a very high number of seconds to getting much faster. As it comes down even further, the number of images people are creating and the number of use cases is going to grow a lot. My feature request: When a restaurant makes a menu or sign, prompt it for more specificity so it doesn’t look like every other AI-generated restaurant sign. Or offer a shuffle button for a different style. I agree with the feedback, and we’ll take it to the team. I’m seeing ChatGPT generate little interactive interfaces within its answers. What’s the direction for Intelligent UI, and how are people using it? I am extremely excited about Intelligent UI. If you go back a couple years, these chat apps were all text, and now that’s changing. They’re going to be visuals. Intelligent UI and our first attempt at this with GPT-6 Intelligent UI is really just the beginning. As you go to the extreme, what you can imagine is, let’s say you’re using voice mode, and you just say, “Show me how offside works.” Immediately it should show you a visual diagram, and you say, “No, I don’t quite understand it.” It should just repopulate. That’s where the future of this technology goes. It’s almost like you’re talking to a canvas that will update and change. People are finding it helpful for a lot of things. My favorite one is—it’s hard to admit that I had no idea how hearts work. The last biology course I took was in high school. I just asked it, “How does the heart work?” and it instantly gave me a beautiful interactive diagram of where blood flows and how it goes through. I’m really, really bullish on this for learning in particular. You’ve described useful applications in finance, health, and learning, and ChatGPT has 1.2 billion users. If people are getting so much value, why is public polling on AI so negative? The reality with AI is it is going to change the nature of how work gets done. For a lot of people, that is something that can feel scary at times, and we’ve all felt that. But I remain confident that when people actually use the product and they use AI, it very quickly changes how they perceive it. We’re at 1.2 billion, but there are still a lot of people who haven’t used it. The more people use it, get familiar with it, how it can actually help you in your life, it’s going to feel a lot less scary. Big Technology is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thanks!! Subscribe
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