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Encyclopedia Britannica is suing OpenAI for allegedly misusing its reference materials to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models. The Chicago-based Britannica Group runs Britannica.com and Merriam-webster.com, the online version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Creator of the 250-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica, the company ended its print edition in 2012, survived Wikipedia, and has since focused on educational software and digital growth, including selling artificial intelligence agent software, according to The New York Times. Britannica had acquired Melingo AI in 2000, which offers “AI-powered solutions and naturallanguage processing” in multiple languages by leveraging artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, according to Britannica’s website. The Britannica Group alleges OpenAIwhich is backed by Microsoftused information from its encyclopedia and dictionary to train its AI chatbot ChatGPT. The problem is, OpenAI now automatically generates AI summaries of that content on its own platform, which is resulting in Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster’s own web traffic plummeting. The lawsuit was filed in a Manhattan court on Friday. “Our models empower innovation, and are trained on publicly available data and grounded in fair use,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Fast Company in an email statement. “ChatGPT helps enhance human creativity, advance scientific discovery and medical research, and enable hundreds of millions of people to improve their daily lives.” Fast Company has also reached out to the Britannica Group for comment. Since 2013, the Britannica Group, also known as Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., has not only survived, but is thriving. In 2024, it took the first steps to go public, filing a draft registration statement for an initial public offering at a valuation of around $1 billion, The New York Times and Yahoo Finance reported.
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E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. While active listings are rising year-over-year in most regional housing markets, a slight majority of markets are still below pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. Generally speaking, housing markets where inventory (i.e., active listings) has returned to pre-pandemic 2019 levels have experienced weaker home price growth (or outright declines) over the past 42 months. Conversely, housing markets where inventory remains far below pre-pandemic 2019 levels have, generally speaking, experienced more resilient home price growth over the past 42 months. Many of the softest housing markets, where homebuyers have gained the most leverage since the Pandemic Housing Boom ended, are located in Southern and Mountain West regions. Many of those areas were home to many of the nations top pandemic boomtowns, which experienced significant home price growth during the Pandemic Housing Boom, which stretched housing prices beyond local income levels. Once pandemic-fueled domestic migration slowed and mortgage rates spiked, markets like Punta Gorda, Florida, and Austin, Texas, faced challenges as they had to rely on local incomes to sustain frothy home prices. The housing market softening in these areas was further accelerated by the abundance of new home supply in the pipeline across the Sun Belt. When and where needed, builders are often willing to reduce prices or make other affordability adjustments to maintain sales. These adjustments in the new construction market also create a cooling effect on the resale market, as some buyers who might have opted for an existing home shift their focus to new homes where deals are available. In contrast, many Northeast and Midwest markets were less reliant on pandemic domestic migration and have less new home construction in progress. With lower exposure to that migration pullback demand shockand fewer homebuilders doing large incentivesactive inventory in these Midwest and Northeast regions has remained relatively tight. window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}); Although active inventory is rising year-over-year, much of the Midwest and Northeast remain below pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. In contrast, many parts of the Gulf Coast, including Tampa and Atlanta, and the Mountain West have ticked back above pre-pandemic 2019 inventory levels. Among major markets, home sellers in markets like Hartford and Chicago have retained more leverage/power. Among major markets, homebuyers in markets like Tampa, Denver, and Austin have gained more leverage/power. In total, 16 of the nations 50 largest metro area housing markets are entering the spring 2026 selling season with more active inventory than they had in pre-pandemic 2019. Those markets include San Antonio, TX; Denver, CO; Memphis, TN; Austin, TX; Orlando, FL; Dallas, TX; Seattle, WA; Tucson, AZ; Houston, TX; Nashville, TN; Tampa, FL; Phoenix, AZ; Oklahoma City, OK; Charlotte, NC; Salt Lake City, UT; and Las Vegas, NV. Here’s what Phillippe Lord, CEO of Meritage Homes, said on the company’s January 29, 2026 earnings call: In Q4, demand patterns were highly localized by market with a generally tougher selling environment nationwide. Across all regions, incentive utilization increased to get buyers off the fence. In our most favorable markets, Dallas, Houston, North and South Carolina, we maintained a strong absorption pace supported by resilient local economic conditions. Conversely, our teams faced lower demand and aggressive local competition in Austin, San Antonio, parts of Florida, Northern California and Colorado. We deliberately chose to hold our ground in these markets and accept lower sales volumes as we look to the spring selling season to work through our excess home inventory. That said, in some pockets of relatively higher-inventory markets (such as pockets of Dallas and even Cape Coral), some homebuilders have firmed up sales if theyve already made the necessary pricing and incentive adjustments to meet the market. As is always the case in real estate, at the ground and neighborhood level there can be a tremendous amount of nuance.
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E-Commerce
Digg is shutting downat least for now. Just two months after relaunching with an open beta, the once-influential social news site says it is pulling the plug while it reassesses its strategy. The announcement came from CEO Justin Mezzell in a message posted to the sites homepage. The relaunch has been scrapped, he wrote, and the company has decided to significantly downsize the Digg team. As the company figures out its next move, Mezzell said, Digg founder Kevin Rose will return to Digg on a full-time basis starting in April. The shutdown marks another twist in the long, uneven history of a platform that once helped define the early social web. Twenty-two years agolong before Reddit, YouTube, or Facebook were dominating peoples time onlineDigg was one of the hottest sites on the internet, pioneering the concept of users upvoting and downvoting the stories they liked and loathed the most. Today, though, the site has become an afterthought for many users. Rose was responsible for building Digg, in its heyday of 2008, to an estimated value of $160 million. A 2010 redesign was so unpopular, however, that the audience migrated over to Reddit (which offered a similar upvote/downvote functionality). Rose sold the company in 2012 for just $500,000. Last year, however, he and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian bought Digg back with plans to revive it. Backed by True Ventures (where Rose is a partner) and Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, the revived Digg said it would offer a human-centered experience. That has proven to be easier said than done. Mezzell, in his note, said the site was quickly overwhelmed by bots and AI when it relaunched as spammers looked to boost their SEO rankings based on Digg’s authority, which remains high with Google. “Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about,” he wrote. “The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us.” Mezzell’s comments seem to align with the “dead internet” theory that has been floating online for years. At its core, that line of thinking argues that the human-created content that powered the web in the 1990s and 2000s has been replaced with artificially created content. (The argument got another boost earlier this year with the debut of Moltbook, a social media site designed for AI agents instead of humans.) At the same time, Digg said it underestimated the loyalty users had built up with competing sites. Luring them back after they had been gone so long proved challenging, especially as the bots dominated the site. Despite banning tens of thousands of accounts and putting up additional defenses, Digg was unable to stop the onslaught. Rather than letting human users be duped by the bots, the company decided to pull the plug for now. “When you can’t trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you’re seeing are real, you’ve lost the foundation a community platform is built on,” Mezzell wrote. While insisting that it wasn’t going away permanently, Digg also acknowledged that it doesn’t really know where it’s going next and did not give any estimate for when it might be back. Admitting it had not yet found the right product-market fit, Digg said its existing Digg podcast will continue and Rose will hopefully help them find a way to assemble a site that can fend off bots and AI agents and stay true to that human-centric mission discussed when he bought back the site. The problem is: no one seems quite sure how to do that. “A small but determined team is stepping up to rebuild with a completely reimagined angle of attack,” Mezzell wrote. “Positioning Digg as simply an alternative to incumbents wasn’t imaginative enough. That’s a race we were never going to win. What comes next needs to be genuinely different . . . Ultimately, the internet needs a place where we can trust the content and the people behind it. We’re going to figure out how to build it.”
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E-Commerce
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