A24 bars Veo training, Midjourney sidesteps FDA, Comeau loses sales to LLMs

Sources

Quoting Josh W. Comeau simonwillison.net

I just launched my third course, Whimsical Animations, and so far, it’s on track to sell roughly ⅓ as many copies as a typical course launch. It’s a similar story with my two existing courses. Sales are down significantly from last year. There are likely a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest is AI. There’s sort of a double whammy with AI: Many people are wondering whether developer jobs will even exist in a few months, so they’re reluctant to spend time/money learning new dev skill…

Google DeepMind and A24 announce first-of-its-kind research partnership deepmind.google

A behind-the-scenes look at Midjourney’s medical scanner leaves many questions unanswered theverge.com

Midjourney has shown more of its futuristic medical scanner. It still hasn’t shown much proof it works. The AI startup, best known for generating images, released a behind-the-scenes video of its dunk-tank ultrasound scanner, which it plans to deploy in spas and hopes will transform medicine with cheap, detailed, radiation-free imaging. The nearly 20-minute tour […]

Anthropic wants to develop its own drugs theverge.com

Claude Science pulls fragmented scientific tools and datasets into a single environment for researchers, generating figures and visuals alongside analysis. Unveiled at Anthropic’s ‘AI for Science’ briefing, the workbench signals the coding-tools leader’s push into drug development as its next commercial frontier.

The only AI glossary you’ll need this year techcrunch.com

The evergreen reference defines the terms flooding AI coverage in 2026, from hallucinations to agentic workflows, aimed at readers trying to keep pace with jargon. It’s positioned as a single-stop guide covering both technical vocabulary and industry slang.

The browser wars aren’t about search anymore — here are the best alternatives to Chrome and Safari techcrunch.com

TechCrunch’s 2026 roundup surveys the alternative browsers gaining ground on Chrome and Safari, with the battleground shifting away from default search toward AI features and agentic browsing. The piece frames the resurgent competition as a fight for the next interface layer.

Teaching AI to run with the turbines technologyreview.com

A two-part package examines how AI is becoming a core operating layer in heavy industry, from wind-turbine control to process-management frameworks like Lean Six Sigma and BPM. The focus: infrastructure-heavy sectors where safety and continuity matter more than chatbots.

Achieving operational excellence with AI technologyreview.com

Frameworks like Lean Six Sigma and business process management (BPM) first gained traction because they promised clarity in the chaos—a structured way to bring order to messy, sprawling operations. Lean Six Sigma emphasized statistical rigor and quality control; BPM created end-to-end maps of how work should flow across departments. Both offered a repeatable way to…

Fable is back bensbites.com

Ben’s Bites flags the revival of Fable alongside a fresh Claude Sonnet release from Anthropic. Details are thin in the dispatch, but the pairing lands on the same day, giving builders both a returning creative tool and an updated mid-tier model to test.

(AINews) not much happened today latent.space

Two consecutive AINews issues shipped with the same verdict: nothing shipped worth breaking down. The second edition hints at ‘a quiet day before the storm,’ suggesting the newsletter expects bigger releases imminently after the mid-week lull.

(AINews) not much happened today latent.space

a quiet day before the storm.

References

The Cool Down — on Kane Parsons thecooldown.com

Kane Parsons, the 21-year-old director of A24’s Backrooms, called generative AI ‘a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot’ and said he would make the technology ‘disappear forever’ if he could.

LiveMint — A24 spokesperson Sophia Shin livemint.com

A24 defended the deal saying it would ‘rather have a seat at the table than on the sidelines,’ arguing the partnership lets the studio ‘dictate what tools get built for artists’ rather than have them imposed by Silicon Valley.

TheWrap — deal terms and Belsky/A24 Labs thewrap.com

The $75M non-exclusive research deal — Google’s first equity stake in a film studio — explicitly bars Google from training its models (including Veo) on A24’s film library, and is run through a 20-person A24 Labs unit led by former Adobe CPO Scott Belsky.

Soap Central — Art Directors Guild Local 800 soapcentral.com

ADG Local 800 accused filmmakers embracing AI storyboard tools of ‘turning their backs’ on collaborators and of relying on models ‘built by ingesting large swaths of copyrighted work’ without consent — a stance that directly implicates the A24/DeepMind storyboard generator.

PitchBook — market context pitchbook.com

Google’s $75M stake in A24 lands amid a 50% year-over-year jump in VC funding for AI content-creation startups, and sits at the same ~$3.5B valuation set by Thrive Capital’s 2024 round — a ‘modest check’ against Alphabet’s $175–185B 2026 capex.

Ngram — Hollywood AI deal comparison ngram.com

Unlike the Lionsgate–Runway deal, which trains a bespoke model on Lionsgate’s 20,000-title catalog (and reportedly hit ‘early snags’ because the library was too small), the A24 deal is structured around embedded researchers and workflow tools rather than IP training rights.

The BMJ editorial (Gennaro D’Anna) bmj.com

It is increasingly concerning when potentially transformative medical tools are introduced via cinematic AI-generated marketing videos rather than through strict scientific validation.

Business Insider (Matthew Davenport, Univ. of Michigan radiologist) businessinsider.com

Claims that the scanner is ‘as powerful as MRI’ are wildly unsubstantiated.

Radiology Business radiologybusiness.com

Midjourney is investing over $74M via a licensing deal with Butterfly Network to launch a whole-body ultrasound screening business, initially positioned as body-composition wellness rather than diagnostics.

Astral Codex Ten (Scott Alexander) astralcodexten.com

Ultrasound cannot see through bone or air, so ‘whole-body’ is a stretch — you’re missing the brain, lungs, and much of the bowel, which are exactly where you’d most want a screening tool.

SWIMED Substack (first-principles teardown) swimed.substack.com

The Gen 1 prototype currently requires ~20 minutes and has scanned only about 12 people; bridging to the marketed 60-second scan depends on unproven improvements in signal processing and full-waveform inversion reconstruction.

Wellfounded Health analysis wellfounded.health

By branding the device as ‘scanned, not screened’ wellness, Midjourney sidesteps FDA diagnostic clearance while generating thousands of incidental findings that patients have no clinical pathway to act on.

Salma Alam-Naylor — ‘Goodbye, forever, probably’ whitep4nth3r.com

AI is killing developer education… AI overviews are a war on the web that fragments communities and discourages developers from gathering in shared spaces to teach and learn.

Stackademic — ‘I’m done: Why AI killed the coding tutorial’ jp.sulat.com

Udemy reportedly laid off 10% of its staff as its stock dropped 85%, while Stack Overflow traffic has plunged 50% since the AI surge began.

EzyCourse — ‘Why Udemy Creators Are Frustrated’ ezycourse.com

Individual instructors saw their revenue share for marketplace sales drop to just 15% in January 2026, making the platform less sustainable for specialized content creators.

Nucamp — ‘The Junior Developer Hiring Crisis in 2026’ nucamp.co

Entry-level developer postings plummeted by approximately 67% between 2022 and 2026… actual hiring into these positions has dropped by 73% in the same period.

Medium (coders.stop) — ‘6 Moments When AI Coding Tools Made Things Catastrophically Worse’ medium.com

Comeau himself conducted a benchmark experiment using Gemini Pro 3… The result was described as a ‘trainwreck,’ as the AI repeatedly suggested incorrect CSS like display: contents, which introduced accessibility issues.

Stanford HAI — 2026 AI Index (Education chapter) hai.stanford.edu

Traditional four-year computer science enrollment at U.S. universities fell by 11% between 2024 and 2025, while AI-related graduate programs saw a 17% increase.