ChatGPT only cites half the URLs it receives, Anthropic ends the flat-fee era, 74% of AI's value goes to 20% of companies, attempted assassination of Sam Altman, and more
Hi Cities Decoded community🙂
My podcast Mindful Notions [https://samhli.substack.com/] has been nominated for its first award. While I focus Cities Decoded on cities x AI, Mindful Notions looks at young professionals x AI.
If you have enjoyed listening to any of my conversations across either podcast, I would be so grateful for you to take a minute to vote for the podcast. Every vote counts towards a potential win!
Vote here: https://podlifeawards.com/vote/the-listeners-lobe-tgl20262 [https://podlifeawards.com/vote/the-listeners-lobe-tgl20262]
When prompted, paste this RSS link: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/2727113.rss [https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/2727113.rss]
Voting closes May 4th.
From one show in your feed to another, thank you for listening and watching. As always, more to come.
🔗 ChatGPT Cites Half the URLs It Retrieves, and Reddit Is 67.8% of the Rest [https://newsletter.ownlyagent.com/i/194470654/2-chatgpt-cites-half-the-urls-it-retrieves-and-reddit-is-678-of-the-rest]
Ahrefs analyzed 1.4 million ChatGPT prompts from February 2025 covering 47.1 million retrieved URLs and found ChatGPT cites only 49.98% of them. The citation rate varies sharply by source: Search results hit 88.46% (25.6M data points), News 12.01%, Reddit just 1.93% despite 16.2M retrievals, YouTube 0.51%, and Academia 0.40%. Reddit alone accounts for 67.8% of the entire non-cited pool, meaning ChatGPT pulls Reddit at scale but almost never credits it. On average, ChatGPT retrieves 16.57 cited and 16.58 non-cited URLs per prompt. Cited pages have a median age of about 500 days (1.3 years), while non-cited pages are overwhelmingly very young. Title relevance matters: cosine similarity between prompt and cited URL title averages 0.602 versus 0.484 for non-cited, and natural-language URL slugs get cited 89.78% of the time versus 81.11% for opaque slugs. (Read More [https://ahrefs.com/blog/why-chatgpt-cites-pages/])
🫖 TEA For Thought: “I guess almost 70% of the content is from Reddit. That is why Reddit’s CEO is so harsh on AI agent control.”
💸 Anthropic Ends the Flat-Fee Era [https://newsletter.ownlyagent.com/i/194361247/3-anthropic-ends-the-flat-fee-era]
Anthropic restructured enterprise pricing. Seat fees now cover platform access only. Claude, Claude Code, and Cowork usage is billed separately at standard API rates. The trigger: GPU rental costs climbed 48%, CoreWeave raised rates 20%, and API uptime dropped to 98.95% over 90 days (well below the 99.99% cloud standard). OpenAI, GitHub, and Windsurf have already made the same move. The subsidized-access era for heavy users is over industry-wide. (Read More [https://www.implicator.ai/anthropic-shifts-enterprise-billing-to-per-token-pricing-the-flat-fee-era-is-over/])
🫖 TEA For Thought: “The seat charge era might be over soon. Folks will be charged for the tokens they actually consume. More people will direct their work toward open-source, locally deployed models. Get some hardware ready before prices go even further up.”
📊 74% of AI’s Value Goes to 20% of Companies, and the Gap Is Widening [https://newsletter.ownlyagent.com/i/194257250/4-74-of-ais-value-goes-to-20-of-companies-and-the-gap-is-widening]
PwC surveyed 1,217 senior executives across 25 sectors. Finding: 74% of AI’s economic gains are captured by just 20% of organizations. The leaders are not deploying more tools. They are using AI to reinvent business models and pursue growth from industry convergence. They are 2.8x more likely to increase decisions made without human intervention, 2.6x more likely to report AI enables business model reinvention, and 1.7x more likely to have a Responsible AI framework. The divide is structural, not technological. (Read More [https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2026/pwc-2026-ai-performance-study.html])
🫖 TEA For Thought: “This is the inflection point. The gap between those who use AI and those who don’t is going to grow wider and wider.”
🧠 Sam Altman: Once You See AGI You Can’t Unsee It [https://newsletter.ownlyagent.com/i/194021189/4-sam-altman-once-you-see-agi-you-cant-unsee-it]
After someone threw a Molotov cocktail at his house at 3:45 AM, Sam Altman published a personal reflection on AI, OpenAI, and himself. He calls AI “the most powerful tool for expanding human capability and potential that anyone has ever seen” with “essentially uncapped” demand. He says fear and anxiety about AI is “justified” and that society needs resilience beyond just model alignment. He argues AI must be democratized: “It is not right that a few AI labs would make the most consequential decisions about the shape of our future.” On OpenAI’s drama, he attributes it to the “ring of power” dynamic and acknowledges being conflict-averse “caused great pain for me and OpenAI.” He is proud of resisting demands for “unilateral control” and delivering on the mission: “A lot of companies say they are going to change the world; we actually did.” (Read More [https://blog.samaltman.com/2279512])
🫖 TEA For Thought: “Once you see AGI you can’t unsee it.”
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samlicitiesdecoded.substack.com [https://samlicitiesdecoded.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]
