Good morning. It’s Thursday, June 12 — and June is giving sunscreen, delusion, and zero concept of boundaries. Whether you're melting in the sun or ghosting your responsibilities under the guise of “self-care,” we see you.

Wishing you a hydrated brain, a stable Wi-Fi connection, and five minutes of uninterrupted peace. You’ve earned this scroll. Let’s get into it.

Today’s stories:

• Renters rejoice: brokers now bill landlords

• OpenAI prints money. Anthropic watches

• GM reshuffles to dodge Mexico tariffs

• NYC slaps brakes on speedy e-bikes

• AI steals clicks. Publishers bleed out

• YouTubers now run a small country

• Smarter AI drops. Wallets whimper

• Outro helps ease off SSRIs gently

• Zuck builds dream team for AGI

• Space Airbnb is in the works

• Google offers buyouts

  and more…

Wall Street hit the brakes Wednesday, catching its breath after a solid run.

The Dow stayed flat, the S&P 500 dipped just under 0.3%, and the Nasdaq led the cooldown, down 0.5% — because tech always takes things personally.

Traders were chewing on a milder-than-expected inflation report and a fresh attempt by the U.S. and China to stop ghosting each other on trade.

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Google’s AI Just Killed the Internet Economy

Google’s new AI features — like AI Overviews and the freshly launched AI Mode — are sucking the life out of web traffic. Why click on links when a chatbot gives you a neat little answer up top? For publishers, this is hell. The link economy (you write, Google sends readers) is dying fast. HuffPost, WaPo, Business Insider — all bleeding traffic. Some are down 50% in three years. Business Insider just axed 21% of its staff. Journalism jobs are evaporating like ethics in tech. And here’s the kicker: Google’s AI is still trained on the very articles it’s replacing. Classic “thanks for your service, now get lost” energy. Meanwhile, Google’s riding high at a $2T+ valuation. But if content creators quit (or go paywall-happy), even the world’s best search engine might run out of stuff to search. AI still needs something to feed on. 

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GM drops $4B to bring cars back home. General Motors is dropping $4 billion to shift car production out of Mexico and into U.S. plants — mostly to dodge tariffs and keep prices from exploding. Wall Street liked the move: GM stock jumped before markets opened. This includes moving the Chevy Blazer and Equinox (currently made in Mexico) to Tennessee and Kansas by 2027. Also coming: more gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks at the Michigan plant that was supposed to go all-in on EVs… until nobody bought them. 

Google’s latest innovation: polite layoffs. Google just offered buyouts to U.S. employees across multiple departments — including Search, Ads, Engineering, and Marketing — as part of its latest “voluntary exit program.” Translation: if you’re not jazzed about your job, now’s your chance to leave quietly (and with a severance). The company hasn’t said how many people are affected. But after cutting 12,000 jobs in 2023, Google’s clearly still trimming fat — while also mandating more return-to-office for remote workers within 50 miles of an office. Cute.

YouTube creators built a $55B economy. YouTube dropped a new flex this week: its “creative ecosystem” supposedly added $55 billion to the U.S. economy and created 490,000 full-time jobs in 2024. That’s a $20B jump and 100K more jobs than two years ago. Not bad for an app once known for cat videos and conspiracy theories. The numbers include not just creators, but editors, managers, brand reps, and anyone else orbiting YouTube’s influencer sun. Even third-party platforms like Patreon and Linktree got counted in this economic victory lap. YouTube’s still the only platform giving creators a real paycheck (55% of ad revenue ain’t nothing), while TikTok keeps handing out nickels. Meanwhile, creators are still begging banks to treat them like actual businesses. Try getting a loan when your job title is “vibe curator.”

OpenAI hits $10B and counting. OpenAI just hit a $10 billion annual revenue run rate — almost double what it was pulling in last December. Apparently, slapping AI on everything really does pay. This number doesn’t even include licensing money from Microsoft or those juicy one-off deals. Just good ol’ ChatGPT subscriptions and API usage, pumped by 500 million weekly users and an internet obsessed with AI-generated everything. They’re now on track to hit $12.7 billion this year, up from losing $5 billion last year. Meanwhile, Anthropic is pacing behind with $3 billion and a handful of code bros. Cute.

Zuck Assembles AI Avengers

Mark Zuckerberg is apparently tired of Meta being mid in the AI race. So now he’s personally hosting brainy sleepovers in Lake Tahoe and Palo Alto to handpick talent for his new “superintelligence” team. Not creepy at all. He wants to beat everyone — OpenAI, Google, your mom — to artificial general intelligence (AGI), aka robots that can do all your work and still remind you to call your dentist. The team is top-secret, obviously, and yes, it’s being described with dramatic words like “audacious.” So while you’re figuring out how to unpair your Bluetooth speaker, Zuck’s trying to create a machine smarter than all of us. Cute.

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OpenAI drops O3-Pro, now with extra brain cells. OpenAI just rolled out o3-pro — their smartest model yet, apparently. It’s a juiced-up version of o3, the AI that “reasons” instead of just guessing vibes. Think less autocomplete, more math Olympiad. It replaces o1-pro for ChatGPT Pro and Team users starting Tuesday. Enterprise and Edu folks get it next week. Developers can already start poking at it via API — if they’re willing to cough up $20 per million input tokens and $80 per million output tokens. (That’s about $100 to get the thing to read and write a version of War and Peace.) Basically: It’s smarter, pricier, and ready to judge your code and calculus homework. Good luck.

Meet the astronauts training for the world’s first space hotel. NASA’s planning to retire the ISS by 2030 (RIP floating science lab), but don’t worry — Axiom Space is already on it. The Houston-based company is building Axiom Station, the first-ever commercial space station, because apparently space is open for business now. In the meantime, Axiom’s been sending private astronaut squads to the ISS since 2022 to train, do science, and take some truly next-level selfies. This Wednesday, they’re launching their fourth crew (AX-4), with four astronauts who’ve been training like overachievers for nearly a year. The crew will ride a shiny new SpaceX Dragon capsule, lifted into orbit by a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center. New capsule, same goal: prep for a time when NASA’s ISS is space junk and Axiom runs the orbital Airbnb.

New app helps you break up with antidepressants. Meet Outro: the new telehealth startup that’s basically Uber for getting off antidepressants. Now live in seven states, it offers personalized help for people who want to taper off SSRIs and SNRIs — without the nausea, dizziness, or “what is happening to my brain?” side effects. Instead of ghosting your meds cold turkey or getting zero help from your primary care doc, Outro pairs you with a clinician (starting at $125/month) for a slow, customized weaning plan. Weekly or monthly check-ins, guided by psychiatry-trained NPs, all supervised by actual psychiatrists. Old-school care with a startup twist. Founder Brandon Goode says they’re just getting started — expect tapering support for stimulants and benzos next year. Insurance isn’t accepted yet, but the demand is very real: over 11% of U.S. adults were on antidepressants in 2023. And lots of them don’t want to be forever.

New NYC Law Ends Broker Fee Madness for Tenants (Finally)

Starting Wednesday, renters in NYC can stop hemorrhaging cash on broker fees — unless they actually hired the broker themselves. Wild concept, we know. The new law, cutely named the FARE Act, makes it clear: whoever hires the broker pays the fee. So if a landlord brings in a broker to fill their vacant overpriced shoebox, they foot the bill. Not you, the exhausted tenant who just wanted four walls and maybe a window. No more paying $4,000 just for someone to unlock a door and say, “It gets great light.” Brokers who break the rules can get fined — $750 the first time, then it escalates fast. 

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NYC declares war on fast bikes. Mayor Eric Adams' administration has ordered Citi Bike’s gray e-bikes to cap their speed at 15 mph, citing an “emergency threat to life and property.” The move overrides Lyft’s proposal to add speedometers instead of enforcing a speed limit. The directive came from Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro, who has become a central enforcer of Adams’ more aggressive city policies. His letter to Lyft’s CEO criticized the company’s “lack of action” and claimed fast-moving e-bikes were stalling the city’s broader safety plans for bike lanes and micromobility.

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TikTok of the day: watch here

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