Welcome to this week's edition of Overclocked!

This week, traffic is down (partly due to Google Zero), AI is up, and media jobs are on the chopping block. Let’s unpack Business Insider’s sweeping layoffs, test-drive Perplexity’s shiny new Lab, and scan the latest AI news developments ⬇️

In today’s newsletter ↓
📰 Business Insider cuts 21% of staff
🔬 Perplexity Lab’s impressive new tool
😵 Claude blackmails and tries much worse
⚖️ EU Council formally adopts landmark AI Act after final vote
🎯 Weekly Challenge — Build a live data mini‑app with Perplexity Labs

🔻 Why 21% of Business Insider’s Staff Had to Go

A leaked memo from CEO Barbara Peng reveals Business Insider (BI) is eliminating about 8 in 10 commerce reporters and slashing video, social, and copy‑desk teams, amounting to 21% of the newsroom.

Leadership blames an ad‑tech “poly‑crisis”: traffic from Facebook has fallen 42% YOY, Google’s new AI Overviews bury link cards, and Apple’s iOS tracking changes keep throttling programmatic yields. Commerce verticals once printing money on affiliate links now miss quarterly targets, so BI will pour resources into ticketed BI Live events and “fully embrace AI” for rote market copy.

💰 Ad Drought & Algorithm Whiplash

Meta’s pivot away from link sharing and toward AI-generated quick answers has trimmed referrer clicks by double digits, BI execs concede. Programmatic CPMs fell 18% YOY; direct‑sold banner packages cratered 27% as brands divert budgets to generative‑ad experiments. Even newsletter sponsorships—long BI’s hedge against algorithm chaos—are softening as advertisers test synthetic influencers.

🤖 The AI Substitution Effect

BI’s memo praises ChatGPT-assisted earnings recaps and auto‑generated market dashboards—tasks once handled by junior reporters. Editors privately worry about credibility after a May 22 audit surfaced 11 hallucinated ticker symbols and two duplicated quotes in AI‑drafted briefs. Yet speed wins: a Bloomberg scoop might post at 9:00 A.M.; BI can now deploy a summarized “What it means” explainer before 9:02.

📊 Events, AI, and New Revenue Experiments

Peng says BI will triple down on BI Live, a slate of C‑suite summits priced at $2,495 per seat, betting experiential revenue is algorithm‑proof. The company is also piloting an AI‑powered subscription tier that offers on‑demand executive summaries and voice briefings—think “Morning Brew, but spoken by ChatGPT.” Early focus groups like the convenience but balk at paywalls; monetization remains uncertain.

🌍 Ripple Effects for White‑Collar Work

• Precedent: Vox axed 20% of staff in March citing “LLM efficiencies.” BuzzFeed and Vice have already retooled toward events and creator studios.

• Investor Mood: Axel Springer forecasts AI could shave €100 M in editorial costs by 2027, reallocating savings to first‑party data offerings.

• Union Flashpoint: Writers Guild reps warn AI copy risks libel; laid‑off journalists weigh class actions over severance disparities.

Takeaway: As generative AI eats low‑margin content, media firms race toward premium experiences, research tools, and live events. The traditional copy grinder is officially an endangered species—unless it learns to prompt, parse, and pivot fast.

🔬 Perplexity Lab’s Impressive New Tool

Perplexity’s new Labs workspace transforms a single query into formatted reports, live spreadsheets, interactive dashboards, and deployable micro‑apps—all without writing a line of code.

🗂️ Prompt → Structured Output

Type “Compare EV tax credits in the EU & U.S.” and Labs generates a Markdown briefing, a CSV of incentives, and a chart‑ready JSON feed. Under the hood, Perplexity stitches retrieval‑augmented results into Apache Arrow tables, then routes them to built‑in renderers or third‑party viewers.

📊 Instant Dashboards

Flip to “Sheet” view for an Airtable‑like interface: adjust headings, filter columns, and press /viz to auto‑compile a Vega‑Lite bar or line chart. Startups are already embedding these dynamic visuals in investor decks and real‑time status pages.

🔗 Collaboration & Sharing

Labs lets you share interactive links that colleagues can view or edit—no login required. Inline commenting, version history, and export options (Excel, JSON, HTML) make it easy to collaborate and archive insights.

📈 Advanced Analytics

Use /analyze to run regression, clustering, or trend‑detection on any table. Labs then suggests statistical tests—t‑tests, ANOVA, k‑means—with code snippets you can copy to Jupyter notebooks or integrate into data pipelines.

🚀 Production‑Ready Micro‑Apps

Hit Export → App to package your work as a Cloudflare Worker endpoint. Incoming HTTP requests trigger real‑time reruns of your prompt, delivering up‑to‑date tables or charts on demand.

⚡ Why It Beats Copy‑Paste

Traditional research and spreadsheet wrangling involve manual curation, pivot tables, and script maintenance. Labs synchronizes data sources, refreshes computations with one edit, and packages everything into a reproducible app—no backend plumbing or API keys needed.

Bottom line: Perplexity Labs dissolves the boundary between Q&A, BI tooling, and low‑code application development, making it a powerful alternative to conventional SaaS dashboards.

The Weekly Scoop 🍦

🚀 US may use SpaceX satellites instead of making its own

⚖️ EU Council formally adopts landmark AI Act after final vote 

🤯 Claude goes berserk when threatened with a shutdown

💻 Google DeepMind debuts Gemini Flash—2× faster, cheaper inference

🎮 Apple launches gaming app for all new devices 

🔒 Nvidia unleashes next-gen tech at Taiwan AI conference

🎯 Weekly Challenge: Build a Live Data Mini‑App With Perplexity Labs

1. Pick a personal data set—fitness stats, grocery spend, local weather logs, or anything else you have data on.
   

2. Prompt Labs: “Generate a clean table of [data], suggest three insights, then create a line chart tracking trend X.”
   

3. Switch to ‘Sheet’ view and verify columns; tweak the prompt until sources and units look right.
   

4. Hit Export → App to spin a Cloudflare Worker with an auto‑refresh endpoint.
   

5. Bookmark the worker URL and check back in a week—did the trend match Labs’ prediction?

You’ve built a micro‑dashboard without touching code. Share your experience with friends—no screenshots required.

That's all for this week's Overclocked! Will AI dashboards make spreadsheets obsolete? And can media survive the copycat machine? Hit reply with your thoughts, we’d love to know how you’re feeling.

Zoe from Overclocked