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New Rules, New Rivals, New Money
Here’s what’s happening in AI, July 2nd, 2025:
Midas AI Research
July 01, 2025
Our first newsletter…
New Rules, New Rivals, New Money
Your daily AI edge in five minutes or less.
Here’s what’s happening in AI, July 2nd, 2025:
🤖 Baidu’s open source bombshell
🥊 Meta’s master plan for superintelligence
🎯 Cloudflare just changed the AI content game
🚦 No money, no traffic - is AI about to pay for your content?
Baidu Goes Open Source with GPT-4 Power
Baidu just dropped Ernie 4.5, a massive family of open-source multimodal models ranging up to 424B parameters. They’re challenging GPT-4 directly… and outperforming closed models in key benchmarks. Paired with ErnieKit and FastDeploy, Baidu is making it easier than ever to run powerful models without OpenAI or Google.
Midas Take:
Firepower like this used to be locked behind APIs. Now it’s on GitHub.
Smaller Ernie models punch above their weight — test them on support or recommendations.
If China rallies around this stack, we may see the AI ecosystem split.
Zuck Goes Full Superintelligence Mode
Meta just launched Meta Superintelligence Labs and handed the keys to Alexandr Wang (ex-Scale AI) and Nat Friedman (ex-GitHub CEO). They’re consolidating all AI efforts, acquiring 49% of Scale, and ramping up spending to $68B in 2025… a direct challenge to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Midas Take:
This isn’t a moonshot — it’s a land grab.
Expect every Meta product to become AI-native by default.
Watch for SDK drops that open up new dev rails across their ecosystem.
Cloudflare Just Put a Toll Booth on AI Scrapers
With Pay Per Crawl, Cloudflare is letting publishers charge AI bots to scrape content. It’s in beta with Reddit, AP, and The Atlantic… and with Cloudflare powering 20% of the web, this could become the norm fast. The era of free for all scraping might be ending.
Midas Take:
Content-heavy brands may be sitting on a new income stream.
Your blog is now data IP… treat it like a digital asset.
Expect dashboards to price content access like ad inventory.
Adobe Quietly Launches the “AI SEO” of 2025
Adobe just slipped a powerful new tool into Experience Cloud: LLM Optimizer. It helps boost your brand’s visibility across AI powered platforms like chatbots, agents, and in app search. Paired with GenStudio’s new generative video tools, it signals a shift toward AI first marketing.
Midas Take:
The next SEO battle isn’t on Google… it’s in prompts.
If LLMs can’t see you, they can’t recommend you.
Run a search test across Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity… what shows up?
That’s your edge for July 2nd.
The AI landscape just tilted… new models, new money, and a new layer of internet infrastructure are forming under our feet.
We’re here to track it all.
Tomorrow’s edition drops early.
Make sure you're subscribed, share this with one smart friend, and keep building.
— The Midas AI Team