Meta Pays for News Again
Three years after walking away from publisher deals, Meta just signed multiyear agreements with CNN, Fox News, USA Today, and others. The catch? This time your eyeballs won’t see the articles in your feed. They’ll be summarized by an AI chatbot instead.
📰 The Rundown
📰 Meta Reverses Course, Signs AI Deals With Major News Publishers
➡️ The move: Meta announced multiyear licensing agreements with CNN, Fox News, Fox Sports, USA Today, People Inc., Le Monde, The Daily Caller, and The Washington Examiner. The deals grant Meta AI real-time access to publisher content for answering news questions. Financial terms remain undisclosed, but this marks Meta’s first major news compensation since it killed its Facebook News tab in 2024.
⚡ Why it matters: The company that spent two years dismantling its news business is now rebuilding it for AI. The bipartisan mix of CNN and Fox News suggests Meta learned from past accusations of political bias. More importantly, it signals that licensed news access is becoming table stakes for AI chatbots competing with Perplexity and ChatGPT.
🎯 Your takeaway: When you ask Meta AI about current events now, the answers pull from verified sources with links back to publishers. It’s a small win for accuracy in a sea of AI hallucinations.
🤝 Anthropic and Snowflake Ink $200 Million Enterprise AI Deal
➡️ The move: Anthropic and Snowflake announced a $200 million multi-year partnership to embed Claude directly into Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud. The deal reaches more than 12,600 global customers across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure. Claude will power Snowflake Intelligence, an enterprise agent that lets business users query structured and unstructured data using plain English.
⚡ Why it matters: This is the largest publicly disclosed AI model deal focused specifically on “agentic AI” in the enterprise. Snowflake reports greater than 90% accuracy on complex text-to-SQL tasks with Claude. For regulated industries like healthcare and financial services, the combination of frontier AI reasoning with Snowflake’s governance controls removes a major adoption barrier.
🎯 Your takeaway: If your company uses Snowflake, Claude-powered features are arriving soon. Start thinking about which business questions you’d ask if you could query all your data in plain language.
🌏 UN Warns AI Could Displace Millions of Asian Workers
➡️ The move: A new UN Development Programme report warns that AI adoption concentrated in wealthy nations could replicate 19th-century industrialization’s inequality. Women and young adults face the highest workplace exposure. Meanwhile, AI is projected to generate nearly $1 trillion in economic gains across Asia over the next decade, but those benefits remain concentrated in China, Singapore, and South Korea.
⚡ Why it matters: The gap between AI adopters and AI avoiders is becoming a geopolitical divide. Countries with limited infrastructure, skills, and computing power face both job displacement and exclusion from AI benefits. The report urges governments to invest in AI literacy and ethics frameworks before rolling out further.
🎯 Your takeaway: Individual professionals face the same dynamic as nations. The skills gap between AI-fluent workers and everyone else is widening. Your competitive advantage isn’t avoiding AI; it’s mastering it faster than your peers.
🔧 Tool Spotlight: Snowflake Intelligence
Snowflake Intelligence is an enterprise intelligence agent that lets business users analyze all their company data using natural language. Powered by Claude Sonnet 4.5, it converts plain English questions into SQL queries, retrieves answers from structured and unstructured data, and shows its reasoning.
What makes it different: Unlike chatbots that require you to paste data into a prompt, Snowflake Intelligence connects directly to your company’s data warehouse. Ask “Which customers churned last quarter and what did they have in common?” and it pulls the answer from your actual CRM and usage data. The 90%+ accuracy on complex queries means fewer hallucinations and more trustworthy answers.
Best for: Data analysts spending hours writing SQL, business leaders who need quick answers from company data, and any team that’s tired of waiting for reports.
Pricing: Available to Snowflake customers through Cortex AI. Pricing varies by usage and enterprise tier. Contact Snowflake for quotes.
👉 Try it: Visit snowflake.com/cortex to learn more or ask your data team about enabling Snowflake Intelligence.
✨ Try This Today: The AI Data Analyst
Most professionals never ask their data the questions that matter because they can’t write SQL. AI tools now let you query data in plain English.
The technique: Use an AI assistant to analyze a dataset you already have, using natural language instead of formulas or code.
How to do it:
1. Export a CSV from any tool you use (CRM, spreadsheet, project tracker)
2. Upload it to ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini
3. Ask questions in plain language:
- “Which customers have the highest lifetime value and what do they have in common?”
- “Show me trends in this data over the last 6 months”
- “What patterns do you see that I might be missing?”
4. Follow up conversationally: “Break that down by region” or “Why do you think that’s happening?”
5. Ask it to create a visualization or summary you can share
Example prompt: “I’m uploading our Q3 sales data. Analyze it like a business analyst would. Tell me the three most important insights and one thing we should investigate further.”
Why it works: You’re not learning a new tool. You’re having a conversation with your data. The AI handles the technical analysis while you focus on asking the right questions and making decisions.
Time required: 15 minutes with a dataset you already have access to.
✨ The Wire
🔗 Geoffrey Hinton told Business Insider he now expects Google to beat OpenAI in the AI race, praising Gemini 3 and Google’s custom chip strategy as decisive advantages. Business Insider
🔗 The New York Times filed a lawsuit against Perplexity demanding the AI search startup stop scraping its content until a formal licensing agreement is reached. TechCrunch
🔗 India leads the world in active generative AI use at 66.4%, with 89% of users calling AI useful and 78% reporting they’ve received some AI training, according to a new OECD-Cisco study. The Indian Express
Neural Notes — AI that amplifies your value, not replaces it.
