Hello!

We hope you had a great summer. Welcome to a new season of our newsletter "On the Net Today",  and with it, a few updates we’d like to share.

• First of all, the newsletter is now weekly. Instead of publishing every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, you’ll now receive it just once a week, on Fridays at 8 AM (EST). Why the change? After more than a year of publishing, and over 500 resources shared (all still available on our website), we feel it’s the right time to shift to a once-a-week format. In fact, many of you had already suggested this, and we think now is the perfect moment to make the adjustment.

• We’re also introducing a few new features. Starting today, each issue will include: 

  • A short interactive quiz related to the digital world

  • A recommendation from an expert in their field.

  • Three featured resources, plus a short list of other interesting links.

We hope you’ll enjoy these updates! As always, we’d love to hear your feedback, just drop us a message at [email protected].

Finally, we’re exploring the idea of publishing a compilation book organized by topic, featuring the best resources from On the Net Today. It would be available in both digital and print formats, and we’d love your opinion. Please take a moment to share your thoughts in this short survey:

Let's move on to the topics we've prepared for today. Thank you very much for your support!

• TIME presents the 100 most influential people in AI

• The Web Design Museum shows how the design of major websites has evolved

• Google launches a new AI image editing model in Gemini

• In brief

• Express Quiz

• Recommended by: Jeremy Caplan

TIME presents the 100 most influential people in AI

American magazine TIME has just published the third edition of its annual TIME100 AI list, presenting what it considers to be the 100 most influential people in the world in the field of artificial intelligence.

TIME Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs writes: “We launched this list in 2023, in the wake of OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT, the moment many became aware of AI’s potential to compete with and exceed the capabilities of humans. Our aim was to show how the direction AI travels will be determined not by machines but by people—innovators, advocates, artists, and everyone with a stake in the future of this technology.”

The 100 individuals chosen by TIME are classified into four major categories: leaders, innovators, shapers, and thinkers. The list includes executives from major AI-related companies, such as Sam Altman (OpenAI), Elon Musk (xAI), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), or Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), but also names like Pope Leo XIV or author Karen Hao, among many others.

The 2025 TIME100 AI issue includes a worldwide cover, featuring a photo illustration by artist and list-maker Refik Anadol. For the cover, TIME provided Anadol with more than 5,000 past TIME covers, allowing his AI to reimagine what the cover would look like for the TIME100 AI issue. The resulting abstract visualization represents the AI “dreaming” about a century of TIME’s visual history.

Links:

• 2025 TIME100 AI list

• TIME Reveals the 2025 TIME100 AI List of the World’s Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence – Press Release

• How We Chose the 2025 TIME100 AI

The Web Design Museum shows how the design of major websites has evolved

Do you want to discover how the design of the world's major websites has evolved over the years? Or what the first mobile applications looked like?

All of this is possible at the Web Design Museum, a digital space created in May 2017 to preserve the creative legacy of web designers and to show the history of online design to future generations.

The Web Design Museum is a project driven by its founder, Petr Kovář, who defines himself as a computer historian, and Ondřej Letocha, the project's programming lead.

The museum offers screenshots of websites, mobile applications, software, and various thematic exhibitions. 

Link:

• Web Design Museum

Google launches a new AI image editing model in Gemini

A new AI-powered image editing model has been available in Gemini (Google) for the past few days, which has sparked enormous interest among internet users due to its high capacity to modify, generate, merge, or restore photographs using simple text instructions.

This is Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, also known by the internal codename used by Google: Nano Banana.

According to Google, one of the distinctive elements of the improved image editing tool is that it allows users to maintain a character's appearance from an original image to the AI-edited one, with high visual coherence and realism in the results. "Our latest update is designed so that photos of your friends, family, and even pets always look like themselves, whether you're trying out a 1960s hairstyle or putting a tutu on your chihuahua," Google explained on its blog.

To edit images, simply upload them to the Gemini app (on mobile or computer) and tell it what you'd like to change. You can also combine photos to generate new images with elements contained in them.

The tool can be used free of charge for personal use but with a variable daily limit on images.

Google has stated that "all images created or edited in the Gemini app include a visible watermark, as well as our invisible digital watermark SynthID, to clearly show that they were generated with AI."

Links:

• Introducing Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, our state-of-the-art image model - Google Blog

• Gemini

In brief

• Discover Pips, the new logic game from The New York Times

• New words in the Cambridge Dictionary - AP

• McKinsey’s annual 92 book recommendations this year – McKinsey 

• The list of winners and finalists of the Online Journalism Awards 2025

• Eighty years of 'Animal Farm': Why we keep reading Orwell – El País

Express Quiz

The first advertising banner published on the internet appeared on hotwired.com, a website of WIRED magazine, on October 27, 1994.

You can find more information about this topic, including the answer, at the following links:

• Oct. 27, 1994: Web Gives Birth to Banner Ads - Wired

• A Brief History of Online Advertising - Hubspot

Recommended by: Jeremy Caplan

Why? I learn from Daniel Pink's practical wisdom in every post. His books, like "Drive" and "When" are also excellent, overflowing with interesting, unique insights. And now he's making great videos that are fun to watch and learn from.  

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That's all for today. See you in a week!