4arXiv cs.AI (Artificial Intelligence)·
Empirical study finds ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini driving measurable traffic to academic library repositories
A preprint analyzes web analytics from August 2023 to October 2025 to quantify AI-mediated referral traffic to an academic library's institutional repository. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are identified as the primary platforms driving this traffic, with open-access theses and dissertations being the most commonly surfaced resources. The study finds that structured metadata and stable permalinks correlate with higher AI retrieval rates, suggesting that resource discoverability in AI ecosystems depends on metadata quality and open-access status.
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Controlled study finds mid-2025 LLMs poorly replicate expert literature searches in physics and cosmology
A controlled study evaluated eight expert-defined research projects in physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, comparing literature reviews performed by human experts against those by ChatGPT-4o, ChatGPT Deep Research, and Gemini. Human-AI reference overlap was below 6%, and 64% of AI-generated references had metadata errors (incorrect title, author, year, etc.), though only 3% were fully fabricated. A preliminary test of GPT-5.5 showed zero fabrications or metadata mismatches, suggesting significant improvement in the 2026 generation. The findings indicate mid-2025 models are complementary rather than substitutes for expert literature search, and require systematic verification.
Internet Traffic Driven By AI Tripled Last Year, Study Shows
Human Security's 2026 State of AI Traffic and Cyberthreat Benchmark Report, based on over 1 quadrillion internet interactions, found AI-driven traffic nearly tripled in 2025, with agentic browser-style traffic growing ~80x year-over-year (though still only 1.7% of AI-driven traffic by December). OpenAI accounted for ~69% of automated traffic, Meta 16%, and Anthropic 11%. The report also flags a 47% rise in malicious scraping and new security challenges as legitimate AI agents increasingly mimic historically suspicious bot behaviors like account creation and transaction completion.
Empirical study finds generative AI books flood Amazon self-publishing market, diluting revenue per title
A new arXiv paper analyzes 14,419 self-published genre-fiction books on Amazon from 2023–2026, using AI detection to measure the commercial impact of AI-generated content. Books with substantial AI text (>25%) grew to occupy a large catalog share and a growing fraction of sales and top-rank positions, even without disclosure. The market saw a 19.2x increase in selling books but only 8.9x revenue growth, meaning revenue per book fell — with human-authored books losing the most ground in high-AI-diffusion genres. The authors argue generative AI reshapes creative markets through scale rather than quality, with direct implications for copyright fair use doctrine.
OpenAI grants 100,000 academic researchers free access to ChatGPT advanced models
OpenAI is providing 100,000 academic researchers with free access to ChatGPT's most advanced AI models to support scientific research and discovery. The initiative is a direct product access program targeting the academic research community. It signals OpenAI's strategic push to embed its tools in scientific workflows and expand its user base in high-credibility institutional settings.
Gemini 3.5 Flash Launch, AI FDE Job Trends, AI Act Delays, and Agent-Driven Web Traffic
Google launched Gemini 3.5 Flash, a mid-tier multimodal mixture-of-experts model with improved agentic capabilities, visual understanding, and speed, priced at $1.50/$9.00 per million input/output tokens — three times the cost of its predecessor Gemini 3 Flash. The model supports up to 1M token context, adjustable reasoning levels, and thought preservation across multi-turn conversations, and tops the Artificial Analysis APEX-Agents-AA and MMMU-Pro benchmarks. The issue also covers Andrew Ng's commentary on the rise of AI Forward Deployed Engineers versus the broader AI Engineer role, plus news items on EU AI Act implementation delays and AI agents driving measurable online traffic shifts.
Data Points: Perplexity Computer expands, Google Aletheia math agent, DeepSeek chip strategy, Nvidia retrieval pipeline, Stargate cancellation
The Batch's weekly data points roundup covers five significant AI developments: Perplexity expanded its Computer agentic platform to desktop, mobile, and enterprise with new APIs and financial data tools; Google released Aletheia, a Gemini-based math research agent achieving 95.1% on IMO-Proof Bench Advanced (up from 65.7%); DeepSeek withheld pre-release access to its V4 model from Nvidia and AMD while giving domestic Chinese chipmakers early access; Nvidia's NeMo Retriever topped the ViDoRe v3 leaderboard using a ReACT-based agentic retrieval loop; and OpenAI and Oracle cancelled plans to expand the Abilene Stargate campus from 1.2 GW to 2.0 GW due to financing and reliability issues.
Accelerating Mathematical and Scientific Discovery with Gemini Deep Think
DeepMind published a blog post highlighting the research impact of Gemini Deep Think across mathematical and scientific domains. The post references multiple research papers demonstrating the model's growing utility in technical discovery workflows. This appears to be a capability showcase for DeepMind's extended-thinking variant of Gemini, positioning it as a tool for frontier scientific research.
OpenAI launches ChatGPT for Academic Researchers program with free Pro-level workspace access
OpenAI is offering faculty and postdoctoral researchers 12 months of complimentary ChatGPT Pro-level workspace access through a new program called ChatGPT for Academic Researchers. Each workspace supports up to five verified members from the same institution and includes business data protections. Applicants verify affiliation via SheerID and must submit a qualifying paper and research description. The program covers ChatGPT access only, not API credits.