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Get ready to pay 30% more on your bill this summer

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Spain has come to pay for consuming energy, marking a historic milestone of -10 euros per megawatt hour (MWh) on any given Sunday. Red Eléctrica data shows days where photovoltaic solar energy reaches more than 63% of the generation at times of maximum radiation, which is an undeniable success for our electrical system. And yet, this summer the electricity bill It will be almost 30% more expensive than last year. To understand how both things can be true at the same time, you have to understand what happens between the solar panel and your bill. The 41% you see and the 59% you don’t see. You look at the market price and think you understand your bill. You don’t understand her. That price—the one making the headlines, the one that hit negative numbers on Sunday—represents 41% of what you pay. The rest is a whole edifice of tolls, system charges and taxes that doesn’t appear on any headline but does appear on your bill each month. And here comes the most ironic trap of this entire story. The massive deployment of wind and solar achieved something that seemed impossible five years ago: moderating national inflation to 3.2%. An indisputable macroeconomic victory. However, that victory had a side effect that no one celebrated since by not exceeding the legal limit for price increases, the “deactivation clause” of the Government’s anti-crisis decree was automatically activated. The renewable shield worked so well that it disabled its own aids. From June 1, VAT on electricity and gas returns to 21%. During the day, renewable. At night, gas. And always, the invoice. During the day, Spain operates with almost free energy: an average at noon of just 1.65 euros per megawatt hour. The sun covers 67% of the demand for six hours in a row. The electrical system, in those hours, is an extraordinary machine. But as night falls, the story suddenly changes. Water covers only 21% of the demand. The wind, barely 13%. As Antonio Aceituno points outenergy market analyst at Tempos Energía, electricity at night costs 57% more than at midday. This is when the gas and coal plants have to be turned on again. And that nighttime lighting is what sets the tone for your receipt. With the arrival of summer, the equation worsens on all fronts. High temperatures reduce the efficiency of solar panels. Air conditioning triggers demand. The hydraulic shield gives way. And the geopolitical panorama is tightening from the outside: despite the pre-peace agreement between the United States and Iran to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, gas travels by ship and those LNG tankers They will not arrive in Europe before August. With European storage stagnant at 37%, Tempos Energía predicts that electricity in the third quarter moves between 82 and 86 euros per megawatt hour. If the pact fails, above 90. 35% more expensive than the previous summer. The market that moves 7% in one afternoon without anything happening. Behind the price of electricity there is another layer that almost no one explains: the European gas market – reference TTF – works, in practice, like a casino. As energy expert Joaquín Coronado describesis a machine designed to transfer volatility to the end consumer. In a single recent session, the index moved more than 7% intraday without any real event to justify it. Only speculation of financial funds. And here comes the paradox that Coronado points out precisely: more than 75% of the energy negotiated in Spain already goes through bilateral contracts, at an agreed price, outside the speculative market. Three out of every four megawatts, shielded. But that remaining 25%—the one that is played every day in the marginalist market—is what sets the price of your entire bill. The minority rules over the majority. Added to this is a dysfunction that comes from the factory in the system design: Spanish demand is inelastic. When electricity shows ridiculous prices at midday, consumers do not react by consuming more to take advantage of the bargain—because they have no real incentives to do so, no smart meters that facilitate it, nor rates that reward it in real time. By not absorbing this excess of cheap energy, agents from France and Portugal end up buying it to export it. And that export, due to the dynamics of European coupling, drags our prices up. We give away the energy and they return the European price to us. Incomplete success. Spain has achieved an indisputable structural feat. We have become a European pioneer by decoupling, for much of the day, our electrical system from the worst international whims of gas, gaining valuable energy independence. However, the transition does not end with installing solar panels. As long as the sector continues to be immersed in internal wars blaming each other, as long as the grid lacks a massive battery system to store megawatts at zero cost and as long as the tax structure continues to suffocate the family bill, cheap electricity will continue to be a mirage on the screens of the financial markets. We generate almost free light at midday, yes, but the labyrinth that that energy runs through until you turn on the plug in your house we will continue to pay at the European luxury price. Image | Unsplash 1 and 2 Xataka | Resolving Spain’s strange paradox: if we generate cheaper energy than ever, why doesn’t the bill go down as much?

From today you can pay with Bizum in stores, this is how it works

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Let’s tell you How Bizum payments work in stores physical. This is the long-awaited function with which the Spanish application begins to compete with the American Visa, Mastercard, Apple or Google to take over our mobile payments. The deployment of this function will be progressiveand it will be each banking entity that will decide when to implement it. So, the technology already works as of now, but since Bizum is implemented directly in your bank’s app, it will be up to you when to add the touch payments feature. How this feature works This new function is used to pay with Bizum at the establishments’ dataphones. Businesses will not have to change their POS terminals, since the financial institutions themselves will be the ones to enable this new function in the terminals they already have. All this so that the implementation of this function is quick and easy. Currently, when you pay with your mobile phone in a store, you open your wallet application, choose the card and bring your mobile phone closer to the POS. The NFC chip in your mobile phone and the dataphone establishes the link between them and that’s it, you’ve paid. Now, You can do this from your bank’s app without having to configure the mobile wallet app. In addition to this, An app called Bizum Pay is also going to start arrivingwhich will be like a Bizum wallet application with which to make the payment easier, just as if you did it with Google Pay or Apple Pay, and without having to enter your bank app. The Bizum system will have the same security guarantees as the rest of the mobile payment options. You’ll have to unlock your device to pay, so it’s safer than paying with a card that others can use. Bizum currently has 39 participating banking entitiesamong them the most important banks in Spain, but also many neobanks. Therefore, if you are going to pay for your mobile phone, you can do so with this Spanish alternative instead of resorting to the American ones. The way it works will be exactly the same. When can you pay with Bizum in a business When your bank wants. This is the quick answer. From now on, it will be up to each bank to implement this technology in their mobile applications for customers and in the POS terminals of businesses. Each bank will have its own rhythm, that is, it will arrive progressively. In any case, you will have to pay attention to notifications from your bank’s appthe one you already use to send money with Bizum, because that will be when you will be told when you can start using this. In Xataka Basics | Bizum in 2026: everything that changes (and what does not) in transfers with this system

one where Google, Amazon and Microsoft pay a toll so that we all have internet

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In March 2024, several countries in East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia began experiencing strange internet outages and massive slowdowns in digital services. The origin was not in a cyber attack or an electrical blackout, it was on a ship reached during an attack in the Red Sea that had accidentally dragged its anchor onto the seabed and damaged several undersea cables essential for global communications. Iran’s plan B. For decades, the Strait of Hormuz was seen as the great bottleneck energy of the planet, the route through which much of the world’s oil circulates. It happens that the war with the United States and Israel has made Iran discover something much more important: the Internet also circulates under those waters. As? Apparently, CNN told that Tehran has understood that the submarine cables that connect Europe, Asia and the Gulf are an infrastructure as strategic as oil tankers, and it wants to convert that geographical position into a new source of power. The idea that begins to emerge in Iranian discourse is very clear: if the world needs to pass data under Hormuz, large technology companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft or Meta should accept some kind of tolllicense or submission to Iranian rules. In other words, Hormuz would no longer be just a lever about global energybut also about the digital economy. The invisible cables. The great Iranian strategic discovery is born from an inconspicuous reality: almost all global traffic data depends on physical cables laid on the seabed. Banking payments, cloud services, military communications, streaming platforms, stock market operations and much of the artificial intelligence infrastructure pass through them. Some of these cables cross areas near Iranian waters, especially in the Persian Gulf. Although many of the international routes were designed to directly avoid Iranian territory, Tehran understands that proximity is enough to put pressure. The regime has understood that interrupting or threatening these corridors could generate enormous economic and psychological damage, even without firing a missile. The threat of submarine warfare. At this point it should be noted that Iran has not promised to sabotage cables directly, but it has launched deliberately ambiguous messages about possible interruptions or damages. Precisely this ambiguity is part of the strategy. The country has underwater drones, mini-submarines and capable naval forces to operate in the Gulfwhile its regional allies have already accidentally demonstrated in the Red Sea the enormous impact that a simple underwater incident. The real Western fear is not, therefore, a total internet blackout, but rather a chain of disruptions: financial delays, problems in data centers, degradation of business networks or difficulties in repairing critical infrastructure in the middle of a military crisis. In a world completely dependent on data, touching these cables means little less than touching the global economy. The inspiration of the Suez Canal. Tehran clearly looks to the Suez Canal as a model. Egypt has been monetizing for decades its strategic position by charging tolls and taking advantage of the passage of submarine cables between Europe and Asia. Iran wants to partially replicate that logic, although applied to a much more hostile and militarized environment. In fact, the media linked to the Revolutionary Guard they already talk about compulsory licenses, passage fees and exclusive rights for Iranian companies in charge of maintenance. Legally the scenario is complex and many operators will probably ignore the threats while US sanctions are in place, but the simple fact that Iran is openly raising this idea demonstrates how it has changed his strategic vision on Hormuz. The new discovered power. In short, and as we have already seen with crude oil, what is truly important is not whether Iran will one day manage to collect money from the big Western technology companies, but rather that it has discovered a new form of pressure global. For years, Tehran believed that its greatest weapon it was oil. Now you have understood that the world depends even more on invisible data flows that happen under the sea. That is possibly the great geopolitical transformation that Hormuz is currently revealing: a classic maritime strait is also becoming a critical point for the global digital economy. And that means that future international tensions will no longer revolve solely around the control of energy, that too, but also the control of the infrastructure that supports nothing more and nothing less than the internet. Image | Nara, Wikimedia, Collinpetty In Xataka | The war in Iran is doing something that not even Ryanair imagined: making 20 euro flights a relic of the past In Xataka | Dubai has come to the same conclusion as Russia. To protect your oil from drones there is something better than missiles: giant cages

“In five years, robots and AI will have to pay taxes for the middle and lower class”

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They say that the devil knows more because he is old than because he is a devil. Therefore, when it comes to have a vision of the future In the technological field, few voices have the weight of Bill Gates. After all, he was one of the avant-garde protagonists of the revolution that brought about the arrival of the personal computer into our lives. The co-founder of Microsoft gave an interview to the middle Australian Financial Review in which he presented his vision on the impact of AI on employment and warns of something that is already being debated in some political and technological circles: whether AI and robotics are going to reduce the need for laborHow will the subsistence of those who lose their jobs be guaranteed? Taxation of the future: robots that pay taxes. The millionaire exposes a concern that other technological billionaires like elon musk or Sam Altman have already expressed on numerous occasions. As Gates explained in his interview, the arrival of AI and robotics to industrial production will have a direct impact on millions of middle and lower class workers who you may lose your job without the option to return to one of the newly created jobs that are expected to replace current jobs. As Gates explained, “We have not yet reached the point where it is necessary to completely change tax structures, but we may do so within five years.” The businessman suggests that the solution could be to “shift the tax burden from labor, at least from medium or low-income workers, to capital, or specifically to the taxation of robots or artificial intelligence.” The millionaire’s proposal is that, if a robot or an algorithm occupies the position of a personthat machine should contribute financially, also replacing the employee in his tax obligations. Gates does not ask that innovation be stopped, but rather that the benefits of automation not remain solely in the hands of those who own the technology, but that the benefit of this advance be distributed to society as a whole. The debate, he insists, must occur now, before the displacement of workers is irreversible. On the verge of an inevitable transformation. The Microsoft founder acknowledges that the current focus is on the productivity offered by AI and robots, but points out that his real concern is how governments are going to manage the displacement of human workers from their jobs. It is not a question of if it will happen (something the millionaire takes for granted), but of when and with what speed. The International Monetary Fund has already warned that up to 40% of global jobs have some degree of exposure to AI, with a special impact on middle-class workers and administrative positions, much more susceptible to automation with AI. Gates argues that governments must begin to design fiscal policies adapted to an economy where a growing percentage of the work will not be done by a contributing employee, but will fall to automated systems. Most AI companies will fail. In his speech, the technology millionaire also left room to analyze the current scenario of technology companies participating in the AI ​​race, and he does so with a serious warning: “If you chose the right company, like Microsoft, Google or Apple, you will have done very well. But most AI companies will fail. It is difficult for a non-technical investor to distinguish which ones will prosper.” The businessman advises not to get carried away inflated valuations and bet on established names. The notice comes at a time of massive investment in AI projects, with prices that skyrocket the capitalization of these companies even before having demonstrated that their products They are really competitive. As in the Internet boom of the late 1990s with the dotcomwhen the dust settles only a few actors will still be standing. Global competition and monopoly risk. Beyond the impact on AI employment, Gates warned about geopolitical competition in the development of this technology in this kind of space race that we are living. “What we are seeing now is fierce competition.” China, for example, offers AI models for free, which puts pressure on other companies to set very low prices. “China offers free models and the rest of the companies offer very, very low prices. We would not want a single country or a single company to be the only one good at AI. But I do not see things going that way, at least for now,” said the millionaire in the face of the technological race for AI that the US and China are starring. In Xataka | While technology companies dispense with juniors to replace them with AI, IBM is doing the opposite: catching bargains Image | Flickr, amazon

It is called Anthropic and it is going to pay you 200,000 million, according to The Information

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Anthropic has agreed to pay Google about $200 billion over five years for more computing power, according to has published The Information. The figure would thus place the AI ​​startup as Google Cloud’s largest individual client, representing more than 40% of the backlog of earnings that Alphabet communicated to its investors last week. From commitment to commitment. A revenue backlog reflects contractual commitments already signed by a cloud provider’s customers. That Anthropic occupies more than 40% of Google Cloud says a lot about the extent to which the startup has become a structural piece of Alphabet’s business. There is also another nuance to highlight: that large AI companies like Anthropic or OpenAI still need the hyperscalers to continue growing, so in this sense, both Microsoft and Google can afford not to have the best AI models as long as they receive such an amount of income from offering such computing capacity. What the agreement consists of. According to they count In The Information, the pact, signed in April, includes massive capacity of TPUs (Google’s own AI chips), supplied in collaboration with Broadcom. However, this infrastructure will not be ready after 2027. Anthropic, for its part, not only works with Google hardware, since also uses Trainium chips from Amazon and Nvidia GPUs, playing its cards well to diversify suppliers and not depend on a single company that supplies computing capacity. The now classic circular financing. Alphabet has been investing in Anthropic for years: first it was $300 million in 2023, then another 2 billionafter 1 billion more in 2025. A few days ago we also discovered an investment of up to 40,000 million additional payments by Google, of which 10 billion would be disbursed immediately and the rest would be conditional on objectives met. In exchange, Google Cloud will provide an additional 5 gigawatts of computing capacity. This way, Google invests in Anthropic and Anthropic spends that money in Google. Is called circular financingand it is the key to how the foundations of AI are made of promises. According to account In the middle, the contracts signed between large cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud) and startups like Anthropic and OpenAI already add up to more than two billion dollars in committed backlogs. Hyperscalers invest in AI startups and AI startups spend that money on the infrastructure of those same hyperscalers. Anthropic can’t afford it… and yet they do it. Estimates suggest that Anthropic’s server costs could reach 20 billion dollars only in 2026. The company is not yet profitable, but demand for its model family Claude continues to grow strongly in the business segment, which forces it to secure long-term computing capacity before infrastructure shortages prevent it from doing so. The agreement with Google adds to another recent one with CoreWeave and the forecast of securing almost a gigawatt of additional capacity through Amazon chips before the end of the year. Almost symbiotic relationship. Alphabet is at a time of maximum competitive pressure in AI. Your cloud business grew by 36% last year, and Anthropic is one of its most intensive clients. Losing that relationship, or seeing it migrate to other providers like AWS, would be a significant blow. Furthermore, with an Anthropic valuation that Bloomberg situates around 800,000 million dollars, and with a possible IPO Before the year is out, Google’s accumulated stake in the company could become one of its most valuable financial assets. It is not just infrastructure: it is also a capital bet. Cover image | Wikimedia and Fortune Brainstorm Tech In Xataka | If at some point NVIDIA has to choose between giving its best chips to the US or China, its choice is very clear.

There are thousands of scientific articles that ask you to pay to read them. Sci-Bot has arrived to access them for free

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Scientific knowledge is supposedly something that nourishes all human beings to continue advancing, but the problem is that in many cases the articles that contain this knowledge are in tools that require a subscription to read them. This limitation in access to universal knowledge has led to the emergence of different platforms that bring together all these articles, such as Sci-Hubwhich now improves with his AI called Sci-Bot which promises to put an end to ChatGPT’s “hallucinations” in the scientific field. How it started. At the end of this same month of April, a message on networks published by Mushtaq Bilal began to go viral, and no wonder, since it gave a notice in which, ironically, it invited us to use a new Sci-Hub tool that allowed access to scientific advances for free. Something they do through the back door and that already it almost cost them closure forced by the famous ‘Pirate Bay’ But logically this publication had the opposite effect, going viral, and also revived the eternal debate about the paywalls in science they can block access to this knowledge. But now Sci-Hub’s new tool has arrived to change this (partly). A great library. To understand the magnitude of Sci-Bot, you must first look at the size of its brain, since since Elbakyan founded the web in 2011, Sci-Bot has become in a headache for scientific dissemination giants such as Elsevier or Springer, which are behind the publication of thousands of top-level articles. Here, according to the official data of the platform itselfSci-Hub hosts 88,343,822 research documents and books, so we are talking about 100 TB of human knowledge covering more than 95% of the publications of the main scientific publishers. And with free access and without going through the checkout, as happens on the websites of some of these publishers. The jewel in the crown. As Sci-Hub’s own page reveals, Sci-Bot is an AI that is designed to be able to search within the titanic database to select the most relevant studies and compose articulated responses. Its main attraction is that compared to generalist AIs like ChatGPT or Claude there are hardly any hallucinations, such as its creators pointed out in a scientific article in which tests were carried out in this sense. And this is something very important because I have been able to experience with my own eyes how AI invents bibliographical references or assigns research to authors who have nothing to do with it. But Sci-Bot, being anchored to a real database from which it draws the information, means that there are direct references to the original papers, allowing users to jump over the hated paywalls to access scientific evidence. Still needs improvement. At the moment it is starting in its alpha phase and that is why it has different limitations, such as that it can only answer one question at a time and does not maintain the thread of chained queries, even if they are on the same topic. But the truth is that it is quite promising to have access to the vast majority of human knowledge. They put obstacles in his way. Here, logically, the magazines have a lot to say, since they do not like having the articles freely available when they request a subscription to access them. This means that right now Sci-Bot has the most recent scientific articles as its blind spot, since due to the new and aggressive security measures implemented by large publishers in recent years to avoid scrapingthe database has some gaps in articles published in the most recent months. This makes the AI ​​unable to respond regarding the most recent evidence. But without a doubt we are facing an advance that began with the arrival of Sci-Hub with the promise of democratizing science, although through the back door by freely publishing articles that are actually ‘private’. And the only thing this will do is create a new front between open access and large publishers seeking financial returns. In Xataka | More and more media outlets are going over the paywall in Spain, the big question is whether there will be subscribers for everyone

We paid for the most expensive tomato in the last decade and farmers claim that they can’t pay the bills. They are right

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“I’d rather throw away the harvest than pay us 80 cents per kilo of tomatoes.” Almost a year ago, Riojan farmer Clara Sarramián gave an interview to Jaime Gumiel that still kicking. Above all, because it explains in a simple and accessible way the last five years of tractor units. And yet, no matter how much it is repeated, Sarramián’s speech and that of other farmers never ceases to surprise: “they wanted to pay me half as much as the previous year. I preferred to throw it away. If we all go through the hoop, we are going against ourselves,” he says. We have heard it many times, yes; but does it make sense? Are they right in their complaint? That is the first thing to clarify and the truth is that if we look at the data, it is difficult to say no. The origin-destination commercial margin of tomato reached in 2025 81.1% (second highest in a decade)according to data from the Observatory of the Junta de Andalucía. In fact, without leaving aside the case of the tomato, a 2020 study by the Institut Cerdà on the value chain pointed out that the total cost of tomatoes is €0.61/kg (labor 0.258; seeds 0.081; structure 0.078; fertilizers 0.059; others) compared to the €0.57/kg paid to the producer. And this is data from 2017: the situation has only worsened since the war in Ukraine. It doesn’t seem like the best business in the world. In fact, it seems like a pretty bad one. Above all, because although we have been developing regulations for years that allow us to limit the impact of these problems, they all end up in a dead letter. Furthermore, the external pressure (especially from Morocco for the tomato issue) is enormous. And many of the main market players play “double agents” because they are conglomerates with investments on both sides of the Strait. Why should we care? I imagine that the simplest data to understand how this impacts the consumer is this: we are paying for fresh tomatoes. the highest price in the last decade and, at the same time, the farmer who grows it in Spain affirms that it does not pay him to harvest it. And, anyway, as we have just seen, he is right. And, under these circumstances, why would they want to throw away the harvest? That is to say, it is worth paying below cost; But something will always be better than nothing, right? And that idea makes sense, but it ignores some important things. To begin with, that between 25 and 30% of agricultural costs They occur in collection, packaging, transportation and wholesale sales (with possible associated losses). If they are not collected, the farmer loses what he has already invested, yes. But it does not incur more costs that it cannot recover. Furthermore, as we have seen in situations like lemon either the bananaletting part of the harvest be lost prevents prices from collapsing. It is not an easy strategy to implement (because there are always people with incentives to sell as the price rises), but it is a rational strategy. Tick ​​tock Tick ​​tock All this happens in a very specific context: in June it begins the negotiation of the post-2027 CAP and that is what makes the key question not “why does Clara Sarramián throw away her tomatoes?” but “how do we ensure that one of the central industries of the Spanish economy (the only one that supports the emptied Spain) does not die in a matter of a few years?” Image | Rachel Clark In Xataka | We have a problem with pesticides in agriculture. And a bigger one with the panic they generate

The Spanish atmosphere has been loaded with fuel and now it’s time to pay the bill

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Spain has been chaining one temperature record after another for a week and the culprit, as we have been explaining, is a subtropical ridge that the country has maintained between five and ten degrees above normal. Nothing particularly surprising, nothing that hasn’t happened two dozen times in the last few years. For complete the déjà vuIn fact, the same number has dragged a disproportionate amount of Saharan dust for days. And now, it’s time to suffer the consequences. Never corner a DANA. As I said, we can describe the third week of April with three words: heat, stability and suspended dust. But starting on the 23rd the situation changes and a trough is becoming detached from the general circulation and It is going to be configured in the form of DANA. The party starts here. The synoptic configuration is clear: a DANA in the southwest with the ridge still strong in the east and very warm air between the two structures. We have the basic ingredients of convection. What can we expect? AEMET forecast stormy showers locally stronghail and very strong gusts of wind in almost the entire interior of the Peninsula. Today, the highest risk areas are the west and center of the peninsula (Extremadura, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León, western Andalusia), the Pyrenees and the Iberian System. If everything continues as it is, April will end up as the third warmest month on record and all that atmospheric energy will be channeled over the land. To put it in perspective: all this is going to cause average temperatures to drop more than 14 degrees in a matter of days. What does the heat have to do with the storm? Physicists use the Clausius-Clapeyron equation to explain that the atmosphere’s capacity to retain water vapor grows by approximately 7% for each degree of warming. The hotter, the more water vapor; more water vapor, (if the conditions are right) wilder storms. It is true that we are experiencing an unusual April… but the average temperature in Spain has risen 1.69 °C between 1961 and 2024 and heat waves last three days per decade. That is, the “outside the norm” in this case It means things are changing. and what we are going to experience (the passage from the 36 to the flood) is the new normal. Image | BenBaso | Xataka In Xataka | In two days, AEMET is clear that spring is suspended: an “early summer” arrives in Spain

ChatGPT enables pay per click ads. And with them the problem that destroyed the credibility of SEO is repeated.

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ChatGPT already charges advertisers for each click their responses generate. OpenAI has activated a cost-per-click (CPC) model of between $3 and $5 within its advertising platform, as it progresses DigiDayuntil now limited to large advertisers who paid for impressions. Why is it important. This marks the moment when ChatGPT stops being a neutral tool and becomes a system with direct economic interests in which answer appears first. And that leap has consequences for anyone who uses AI as a source of information. The context. OpenAI launched its advertising business a few months ago with a CPM model (pay per impressions) and with a minimum investment of $250,000. In that time, the price has dropped from $60 per 1,000 impressions to $25, and the minimum has been reduced to $50,000. The direction of the movement says a lot: OpenAI needs more advertisers and it needs them faster. Between the lines. A CPC of 3-5 dollars is equivalent, in effective CPM, to figures much higher than the market average. OpenAI is not looking for cheap volume: it wants to position itself as premium inventory, at the level of Google Search, where clicks are worth more because the user arrives with a clear intention, especially in certain types of searches: health insurance, urgent loans, lawyers specializing in traffic accidents, etc. The problem is that this intention premium still needs to be demonstrated. The inevitable conflict. The CPC model introduces a conflict that any content platform knows well: the best answer for the user and the answer for the payer are not always the same. It is not a problem exclusive to OpenAI or search engines. It is the fundamental contradiction of any business that combines information and advertising revenue, including the media, and that each actor manages with greater or lesser success depending on their size, reputation and incentives. Google has been navigating this conflict for 25 years with increasingly debated results. Let’s think about what a Google results page looked like in 2005 and what it is like today. It’s not even your only conflict of interest. OpenAI inherits that same conflict from day one, without the reputation cushion that gave Google margin for two decades, and at a time when the demand for transparency about how AI systems work is increasing. Yes, but. There are those who argue that the LLMs They are different because contextual conversation generates a more qualified intent than traditional search, which would justify the premium price and make the advertising presence more tolerable. It is possible. But the same thing was said about branded contentof the native advertising and SEO in its beginnings. If history tells us anything, it is that economic incentives end up winning over product design, not the other way around. In Xataka | AI already knew how to create images. OpenAI says it has found the missing piece with the new ChatGPT Images 2.0 Featured image | Xataka

pay young people for dating apps

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To desperate problems, desperate solutions. In full demographic debaclethe authorities of Kōchi (a prefecture in southern Japan) have decided to help their young people find a partner a peculiar shape: paying for their subscription to dating apps. The aid is only aimed at residents under 40 years old, cannot exceed 20,000 yen (110 euros) and is limited to a list of certified social networks, but it gives an idea of ​​the extent to which the Administration is determined to reverse the birth crisis that is clouding the future of the country. That it has focused the focus on apps is not a coincidence either. Help to flirt. Japan is not willing to sit idly by while its birth rate declines at a rate record speed and the country is moving deeper and deeper into a demographic catastrophe of unpredictable consequences. Over the last few years, the Japanese authorities have launched millionaire programs to activate their birth rate, which includes from numerous ‘baby checks’ to job improvements that facilitate conciliation. In few places, however, have they been as imaginative as in Kōchi Prefecture. There the Government has decided help your young to pay dating apps. “Helping singles”. Kōchi’s idea is as simple as it is shocking. a few days ago the prefecture announced a “subsidy program to cover app usage fees.” Said like this, it may not seem too interesting, but things change when you go down to detail. Its objective is very specific: to lend a hand to young people in the region who want to register on dating platforms and, ultimately, “to help singles who want to meet someone or get married.” With small print. The measure, of course, has fine print. Only Kōchi residents between 20 and 39 years old can apply and must prove that the app began to be used on April 1. In fact, the aid is designed to pay for subscriptions between April 2026 and March 2027. Its amount is also limited: in no case can it exceed 20,000 yen, about 110 euros. The curious thing is that Kōchi is not the first to use this trick. In the region of Miyazaki They also launched a similar program in 2025, although with an aid of only 10,000 yen per year, and in Tokyo they have even promoted a dating app focused on a very specific user profile: people looking for a stable partner. Is any application worth it? No. That is another of the peculiarities of the Kōchi initiative. The prefecture subsidizes only subscriptions to certain apps preselected, although among them is Tapple, a platform very popular among singles in Japan. Curiously, just a year ago it incorporated a function that allows its users to verify officially their marital status, which allows the rest of the people in the network to know if they are married or not. In the list from Kōchi also includes Pairs, D3 or Omiai, among others. A well-calibrated bet. That the Kōchi authorities have decided to bet on dating apps is no coincidence. A few years ago the Government carried out a survey in which, among other questions, he asked the Japanese how they had met their partners. A quarter (25%) of those who had gotten married acknowledged that they contacted their better half through dating apps, which makes them the great matchmaker in the country. 21% said they had met their spouse at work and 10% at a school. How much does it cost to flirt? It is also no coincidence that Kōchi has set its subsidy at 110 euros per year. “The current price of annual membership fees is just over 20,000 yen, so we set the amount to cover most of it,” explains an official to The Sankei Shimbun. Those who benefit from the measure will only have to cover the rest of the costs. In its efforts to make it as easy as possible for singles, the prefecture even has a specific program which helps those who move to Kōchi to look for a boyfriend or girlfriend. Again it may seem like a strange initiative, but in Japanese society only a tiny percentage of babies are born out of wedlock. If Kōchi (or any other region) wants more children, it first needs more couples. Goal: more babies. Although Japan is not the only country suffering the effects of demographic winter, the situation there is particularly worrying. Their multiple efforts to reactivate their birth rate do not seem to be giving results (unlike what seems to happen in South Korea) and in 2025 the country recorded its tenth consecutive year of decline, reaching a new historic floor. The outlook is so discouraging that Japan is moving at a minimum demographics I didn’t expect to see until the 2040s. Kōchi is no exception. Macrotrends shows that takes years losing inhabitants. Images | Kochi Prefecture Victoriano Izquierdo (Unsplash) In Xataka | Japan wanted to know what bothers its citizens most about tourism. The answer is extremely Japanese

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