🧠 Cheat code

You’ve got 0 referrals, just 3 away from earning a Hustle Essentials kit. Check out all of our prizes here.

Share your link: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=e2cb4d8771

👋 Good morning. Think you’ve finally scrubbed every embarrassing photo and video from your past off the internet? Time to start anew: The Ice Bucket Challenge is having a resurgence on social media. The challenge, which originally raised hundreds of millions for ALS research, is now using the hashtag #SpeakYourMIND to raise awareness (and money — $300k+ so far) for mental health issues.

🎧 On the pod: The AI tool to “cheat on everything” sounds like too much work, actually.

NEWS FLASH

🔋 Even Tesla has a side hustle: Musk’s EV company shared a lackluster earnings report this week — and that’s putting it nicely. Net income dropped to $409m from ~$1.4B last year, and revenues from its auto biz dove 20% — but one facet of the business is still thriving. The automaker’s energy generation and storage business, which houses Tesla’s Megapack and Powerwall battery systems, earned $2.73B in Q1, up 67% from 2024. While those numbers are looking good, the future of Tesla’s energy arm, which sources its battery cells from China, remains uncertain amid the Trump administration’s tariffs.

🧸 Everything is a movie now: Admittedly, toy movies often work — Barbie, Lego, Transformers, etc. But what about a movie about the place you’d go to buy them? Production studio Story Kitchen is working on a Toys ‘R’ Us movie that co-founders Dmitri M. Johnson and Mike Goldberg hope will “capture the spirit of adventure, creativity, and nostalgia” that the retailer represents, per Variety. If that seems odd, recall that in 2022, we really got Spirit Halloween: The Movie, in which a group of teens get trapped overnight in a Spirit Halloween store full of possessed animatronics.

💉 Eli Lilly & Co. is suing Mochi Health, Fella Health, Willow Health, and Henry Meds, alleging that the four telehealth providers are selling compounded versions of the active ingredient found in Zepbound, its weight loss drug, and Mounjaro, its diabetes medicine. Eli Lilly claims the platforms are diverting consumers away from its offerings and misleading patients by advertising personalized options when they’re really just marketing variations of its drugs, sometimes in forms (e.g., tablets, drops) that haven’t been studied.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

Craving a loaded potato skin? Too bad. The bankrupt TGI Fridays restaurant chain only has 85 locations left in the US, down from ~270 at the start of 2024 and 600 at its 2008 peak. It’s still kickin’, though, with a revamped menu targeting Gen Z customers dropping next month.
The European Union fined Apple and Meta ~$800m for violating antitrust rules, a first under the EU’s Digital Markets Act, created to keep Big Tech in check. Both companies have 60 days to comply before facing subsequent fines.
Autonomous trucking company Aurora Innovation is launching its first driverless truck this month. It will take its maiden voyage on I-45 between Dallas and Houston, and will be joined by additional vehicles as the company slowly expands its fleet.

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM

A pixelated, abstract DNA-like structure in pastel blue and pink hues on a background blending the same colors.

Could AI bring an end to brain disease?

RibbonFold, a new AI model, is shedding light on how certain brain proteins misfold, leading to diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

The tech was developed by researchers at the Changping Laboratory and Rice University.
Unlike Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold, RibbonFold specifically handles proteins that are complex or misshapen.

Researchers trained the AI model using existing data on amyloid structures before testing its abilities on examples it hadn’t seen before.

Did it work? Read on to find out.

THE BIG IDEA

A woman in glasses and a striped shirt interacts with a humanoid robot with digital blue eyes in a modern setting.

Turns out ‘cheating’ with AI kinda sucks

As the old adage goes, if you want something done right, you’ve gotta do it yourself. And that apparently applies to trying to “cheat” with AI.

As you may recall, 21-year-old Chungin “Roy” Lee was recently suspended from Columbia University for building Interview Coder, an AI app that did the coding portion of tech job interviews for him.

Lee claimed it had worked on Amazon and other companies, which he either rejected or which rescinded their offers upon learning about the tool.

Lee doubled down…

… and raised $5.3m in seed funding to build Cluely, an AI tool to help people “cheat on everything” — sort of. The company compares itself to tools like calculators and spellcheck, which no modern person considers cheating.

How it works:

Cluely reads screens and interprets audio, allowing it to feed users real-time advice or answers during virtual meetings, like interviews and sales calls.
It can’t be detected by keyloggers or software that can see your screen, so, presumably, others won’t know it’s in play.
It’s $0 to try a limited version or $20/month. Lee claims 80k people have downloaded the free version, while 700 are paid subscribers.

How is this helpful?

Lee told The Verge that Cluely could provide details about someone on a call as though you’d done 10 hours of research, and, in a conversation with 404 Media, seemed excited by the idea that you’d never have to memorize anything again — a real bummer for those who love pub trivia.

Lee also starred in an ad where he attempts to use Cluely — apparently installed in smart glasses despite being a desktop app? — to catfish a date into thinking he’s an older, successful software engineer.

It’s viral…

… but reviews are not good.

The Verge’s Victoria Song experienced numerous technical issues while Cluely failed to understand context and took a long time to respond.
Matthew Gault of 404 Media found answers to be generic ChatGPT output, which, again, took a while to generate.
Neither deemed it viable for real-time conversations.

AI is useful for many things — summarizing documents, taking notes, etc. — and there’s perhaps a future for Cluely, but much like Humane’s AI Pin and the Rabbit r1, it simply isn’t there yet.

The good news is that spending 10 minutes Googling someone before embarrassing yourself on a date is still free.

🔗

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

The amount of tree cover in Atlanta, Georgia.

That’s compared to 14.6% coverage in Tucson, Arizona, according to research from the Arbor Day Foundation, the US Forest Service, and forestry consultancy PlanIT Geo via The Washington Post.

Why should you care if you’re not a squirrel? Treeless neighborhoods get 8-11 degrees hotter than their green counterparts in the same city.

Considering the number of heat waves in the largest US cities has increased from three per year in the 1980s to six per year in the 2020s, that difference adds up.

Plus, research shows that trees can prevent hundreds of heat deaths every year, reduce the need for AC, boost happiness, and even regulate stress hormone levels.

AROUND THE WEB

📆 On this day: In 1982, actress Jane Fonda released her first workout video.

📈 That’s interesting: How a spreadsheet documenting rent hikes in the aftermath of two devastating wildfires went viral.

🗞️ Newsletter: Semafor Business delivers the policies, power brokers, and deals shaping Wall Street twice weekly to your inbox. Subscribe for free to join 60k+ execs.

📺 That’s cool: Browse random websites using this retro TV skin.

🐻‍❄️ Aww: So cuddly.

QUOTE OF NOTE

If you’ve ever disagreed with the Oscars’ selection of winners and losers, get ready to feel validated: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences only just started requiring that members watch all nominated movies before voting, one of several new rules it introduced this week, per The Guardian.

Surprised that wasn’t already a thing? So is everyone else. The news has sent the internet into a tizzy, with many online users expressing shock and questioning, as one X user rightfully did, the legitimacy of the Academy’s past decisions.

SHOWER THOUGHT

Every second of every day about 300 people are simultaneously spilling drinks all over the world. SOURCE

Today’s email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah and Sara Friedman, with help from Singdhi Sokpo and Hadley Deming.
Editing by: Ben “Available to play Geoffrey the Giraffe” Berkley.

Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.

Subscribe to our other newsletters
Expert insights: Masters in Marketing | Stay up-to-date on AI: Mindstream

Follow The Hustle on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram.