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Cloudflare, the tech platform that powers millions of websites representing about 20% of the internet, announced yesterday that it will by default block crawlers from AI companies from scraping content without permission. It’s a significant move as AI juggernauts like OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta have scrounged the corners of the internet for data to power their AI models, often depriving the websites of the traffic (and associated revenue) they would have otherwise gotten. Publishers like Conde Nast, TIME, The Associated Press and The Atlantic as well as tech companies like Pinterest and Quora have expressed their support for Cloudflare’s shift to permission-based crawling. The company also announced a partnership with an initiative called Pay Per Crawl that would allow website creators to get paid for their content.

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PEAK PERFORMANCE

Microsoft claims that its AI system, called “Microsoft AI Diagnostic Center,” can diagnose diseases four times more accurately than a group of experienced doctors at a significantly lower cost. That claim is based on an assessment of how correctly the AI tool was able to make a diagnosis on about 300 complex cases previously published in the New England Journal of Medicine in comparison to physicians. However, in the study doctors were asked not to use any additional tools to aid their diagnosis, which doesn’t reflect real world scenarios. Healthcare is a burgeoning use case for AI........

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