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Good morning,
This was one of those weeks where every major AI company dropped something at the same time. Meta launched a whole new model. Perplexity announced a competition that could fund your startup. And 80,000 people found out their jobs aren't coming back.
In today's issue:
Meta launched Muse Spark and it's free for everyone
The Week That Was: 3 things that mattered
Perplexity wants to give you $1M to build a company
Weekend Experiment: build a custom Bluesky feed in 10 minutes
Hit reply and tell me what you think. I read every one.
Here’s What to Do Next.
Costs are rising. Clients are paying slower. Hiring feels riskier than ever.
And every day brings another hit.
The Survival Hub gives you practical, in-the-trenches support to respond:
how to cut costs without breaking operations
how to stabilize cash flow
how to keep leads and clients from slipping
how to stay organized when everything feels reactive
Built for leaders navigating uncertainty.
Staying standing isn’t about doing more. It’s about knowing what to do next.
Meta built a new AI brain in 9 months flat
The Scoop: Meta released Muse Spark, its first model from Superintelligence Labs, and it's rolling out free to 3.9 billion users.
The details:
Built by Alexandr Wang's team in 9 months, codenamed "Avocado," the model accepts voice, text, and image input
Three modes: "Instant" (fast), "Thinking" (reasoning), and "Contemplating" (coming soon, designed to compete with GPT-5.4 Pro and Gemini Deep Think)
Currently US-only and free with no subscription required, available on meta.ai now and rolling out to WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger in coming weeks
Why it matters for you: You now have a free reasoning model from Meta that lives inside apps you already use. If you've been paying $20/month for ChatGPT just for basic questions, test Muse Spark this weekend. It might be enough.
📋 THE WEEK THAT WAS:
Three things from this week that actually mattered:
→ 80,000 tech workers lost jobs in Q1 2026. Almost half were directly attributed to AI automation. Customer support and content roles got hit hardest. As I told you back on March 13, these cuts are accelerating, not slowing down.
→ Anthropic blocked flat-rate Claude subscriptions from running AI agents. If you use Claude Pro with tools like OpenClaw, you now pay per-use. The free lunch for power users is over. Anthropic is protecting margins as agent usage explodes.
→ Google folded NotebookLM into Gemini. You can now manage notebooks and use Gemini chats as sources directly inside the main Gemini app. Paid tiers get it first. If you already use NotebookLM for research, this is a quality-of-life upgrade.
If you've been reading about AI agents all week but haven't built one yet.
You can describe what you need in plain English and it creates an agent that actually does the work: answers your phone, triages your inbox, fills out forms, books meetings. 5,000+ integrations
Perplexity wants to hand you $1M to build a company
The Scoop: Perplexity launched the Billion Dollar Build, an 8-week competition with $1M in funding and $1M in compute credits for the winner.
The details:
Teams use Perplexity Computer (their new autonomous AI agent) to build a company with a path to $1B
Finalists get up to $1M from the Perplexity Fund plus $1M in Computer credits
This is Perplexity betting big that their agent product can replace traditional software workflows for building businesses
Why it matters for you: You don't need to win. The real play is using the competition as a forcing function to build something you've been putting off. 8 weeks of structure plus free access to one of the best AI agents on the market. Even if you lose, you leave with a business.
🧪 WEEKEND EXPERIMENT:
One fun, low-stakes AI thing to try this weekend:
What it is: Bluesky just launched Attie, an AI assistant powered by Claude that lets you build custom social feeds using plain English.
Why it's worth 20 minutes: Instead of scrolling an algorithm someone else built, you describe what you want to see and Attie creates the feed. "Show me AI founders sharing what they're building" or "People talking about side projects under $1K."
How to start: Go to bsky.app, open Attie from the sidebar, and type: "Create a feed of people sharing AI projects they built this week." Watch it populate in real time.
No pressure. Just play.
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Until next week,
AI Insiders