Hey there,
I’m going to get into the roundup and my thoughts soon, but I need to tell you about something first:
20,000 people woke up this week with a job.
By Friday they were jobless.
Meta fired 8,000 of their own people. Microsoft handed out "voluntary" buyouts to another 8,750. Amazon already axed 30,000 earlier this year.
More than 92,000 tech workers have been fired in 2026 so far.
And while the bodies were still warm, every single one of these companies announced they're spending $650 BILLION on AI this year.
They didn't even wait a week.
OpenAI's own CEO Sam Altman called it "AI washing."
The guy building the thing that's replacing everyone is telling the world these companies are just using AI as an excuse to fire people they were going to fire anyway.
Fire humans. Blame the robots. Watch stock go up.
So while 20,000 people are updating their LinkedIn right now, smart people are getting paid every single week with almost no work.
How?
They joined beehiiv. All they’ve got to do is write a short email every week, and they get paid up to $4,000/mo just from people clicking.
Don't believe me? See for yourself:
Nobody's asking why Arnold Schwarzenegger has a newsletter.
They're too busy reading it.
Arnold Schwarzenegger. Codie Sanchez. Scott Galloway. Colin & Samir. Shaan Puri. Jay Shetty. They all figured out the same thing: owned audiences compound, rented ones disappear. beehiiv is where they built theirs.
30% off your first 3 months with code PLATFORM30. Start building today.
Ok. Back to the weekly roundup.
My rating scale: Built Different / Solid / Mid / Cope
DeepSeek V4: BUILT DIFFERENT (and Washington is furious)
China dropped DeepSeek V4 on Friday and it might be the most controversial AI release of the year.
Best open source agentic coding on the planet. World class reasoning. Running on Chinese chips because they're literally banned from buying Nvidia hardware.
So they got banned. Built around it. And shipped something that has American labs calling their lawyers and then calling the White House.
OpenAI and Anthropic have both accused DeepSeek of outright stealing their technology to build this.
The White House science office made a public statement about it.
And DeepSeek just uploaded the whole thing to the internet for free anyway.
GPT-5.5: SOLID
Dropped Thursday. Better reasoning, faster, cleaner tool use.
Honestly feels more like a patch than a moment. Not going to change your life but worth a test if you're a daily ChatGPT user.
I wrote an article on GBT 5.5 here if you want more info:
An AI published a peer-reviewed science paper: COPE (for humanity)
An AI system called AI Scientist ” wrote a paper, ran its own experiments, analyzed the results, and submitted it to a peer-reviewed journal.
It got accepted.
They withdrew it before publication. It was a workshop, not the main event. All true.
But an AI did science this week and a room full of human experts said it was good enough to publish.
Go touch some grass. While you still can.
Build something you own.
— Main Street AI
P.S. Forward this to one person who still thinks they're safe. You'd be doing them a favor.