The Great AI Landgrab
· The Fluency Briefing
The Fluency Briefing
Your Guide to What's Happening in AI and Why It Matters to You
Saturday, July 4, 2026
Everyone's talking about AI replacing jobs, but here's the part nobody's connecting: the same week a beloved coding instructor reported his course sales dropped by two-thirds thanks to LLMs, Anthropic announced it wants to develop its own drugs, and world leaders started personally texting tech CEOs to lure data centers. The real story isn't that AI is changing things - it's that every player, from fanfic writers to heads of state, is scrambling to figure out which side of the table they're sitting on.
Today in AI:
- Macron and Modi Are Speed-Dialing Silicon Valley - France and India are competing for AI infrastructure investment, with leaders personally courting tech CEOs. Amazon committed $48 billion to India, while SoftBank pledged 75 billion euros for French data centers - and Macron apparently sealed parts of the deal over text messages. CNBC
- Midjourney Plays the 'You Do It Too' Card - Midjourney is asking a federal court to force Disney, Warner Bros., and Universal to reveal their own AI training practices. Translation: if the studios trained models on copyrighted data, Midjourney says their lawsuit is hypocritical. Engadget
- Fanfiction's AI Witch Hunt Gets Messy - An anonymous account launched a movement to detect AI-written fanfic on AO3, but the detection methods are unreliable and human writers are getting caught in the crossfire. Turns out, using em dashes doesn't make you a robot. The Verge
- Anthropic Wants to Make Its Own Medicine - Anthropic launched Claude Science, an AI workbench for researchers, and then dropped the bigger bombshell: it plans to develop drugs in-house. The company is betting that AI can compress years of pharmaceutical R&D into something much faster. The Verge
- Memory Prices Still Climbing, But the Ceiling Is in Sight - DRAM prices will rise 13-18% and NAND 10-15% in Q3 2026, according to TrendForce. That's still steep, but way down from the 60% spikes last quarter - consumers simply can't afford to keep paying more. Tom's Hardware
- AI Is Eating the Coding Education Market - Developer Josh Comeau shared that his latest course is selling roughly a third of what previous launches did. Other course creators report revenue drops of 50% or more, as learners turn to free LLM-powered tutoring that was trained on their content. Simon Willison
- AI Is Literally Changing How We Write English - The Guardian dug into how LLM-style language is bleeding into everyday writing, with linguists and novelists weighing in. The fun twist: most people can't reliably tell human and machine prose apart anymore. The Guardian
- TechCrunch Built the AI Dictionary You Actually Need - A regularly updated glossary breaks down terms like AGI, AI agents, RAG, and RLHF in plain English. If you've ever nodded along in a meeting while secretly confused, bookmark this one. TechCrunch
Today's Takeaway:
Three stories from this Saturday look unrelated - a coding instructor's tanking sales, fanfic communities hunting AI-generated prose, and Midjourney's legal counterpunch against Hollywood studios. But they're all the same fight: who owns creative output when AI can replicate it? Josh Comeau's course sales dropped by two-thirds because LLMs can now regurgitate his teaching for free, without compensation, as he told readers on his blog (via Simon Willison). Fanfic readers on AO3 are trying to purge AI-written stories but can't reliably tell human from machine, according to The Verge. And Midjourney is arguing in court that the very studios suing it are doing the exact same thing with copyrighted data (Engadget).
Here's the thread connecting all three: the old rules about who creates, who copies, and who gets paid are breaking down simultaneously at every level - from billion-dollar studios to hobbyist writers posting free stories online. We don't have new rules yet. We just have a lot of finger-pointing and unreliable detection tools. The federal court's decision in the Midjourney case could set a real precedent, but for now, the creative world is stuck in a messy middle period where everyone suspects everyone else of the thing they might also be doing.
🧠 AI Trivia - Test Your Knowledge
1. Who is credited with coining the term "Artificial Intelligence" in 1956? a) Alan Turing b) John McCarthy c) Marvin Minsky
2. Due to increasing AI demand, what percentage of global DRAM revenue is projected to be driven by AI servers by 2027? a) Approximately 15% b) Approximately 30% c) Approximately 50%
3. A Windows development guru recently demonstrated using a 19th-century Stirling Engine for auxiliary cooling on an AMD Threadripper system. What was the primary purpose of this unconventional setup? a) To achieve record-breaking CPU overclocking. b) To convert waste heat energy into mechanical motion. c) To drastically reduce the system's overall power consumption.
Answers at the bottom of the newsletter!
The Bottom Line
The Pattern: From world leaders texting billionaires to fanfic readers policing em dashes, every layer of society is being forced to renegotiate its relationship with AI - not in theory, but right now, this Saturday, in courtrooms and group chats and shrinking bank accounts.
Why It Matters: If you create anything - code, courses, stories, products - the economic ground beneath you is shifting. The people who figure out what AI can't replicate about their work will thrive. The ones who compete with it on output alone are already losing.
Your Move: Pick one thing you do that a language model could approximate, and ask yourself honestly: what do I add that it can't? That's the part worth doubling down on.
📝 Trivia Answers: 1) b - John McCarthy organized the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, where the term "Artificial Intelligence" was first formally introduced. | 2) c - The surge in AI demand, particularly for large language models and data centers, is expected to make AI servers account for a substantial portion of DRAM revenue. | 3) b - The demonstration aimed to showcase how waste heat from the CPU could spin the Stirling engine's flywheel, illustrating energy conversion rather than practical cooling.
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