Good morning. Have you ever made money waiting in line for someone? Or made a couple hundred bucks as a business opening crowd-filler? Tell us your most interesting side hustle gigs and we’ll feature our favorites in Sunday’s newsletter. But please…keep it PG.
Markets: Stocks rose yesterday as investors continued to enjoy the pauses on the president’s steepest tariffs. With tech stocks rallying, the Magnificent Seven are living up to their name again. Nvidia became the third member of the group to turn positive for the year yesterday, buoyed by big investments from Saudi Arabia, as well as a loosening of US chip export curbs.
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You know when two friends are text flirting and you’re helping both of them craft their messages? Well, with both sides of the classroom now using AI, students and professors alike fear that higher education may be devolving into bot-to-bot interactions that teach students little more than how to use ChatGPT.
The freshmen from ChatGPT’s first year are about to be seniors. And while students adopted the tech fast and hard—nearly 90% of surveyed college kids were already using ChatGPT for homework help in January 2023, two months after launch, per OpenAI—educators held out for longer. But now, the percentage of college instructors who self-identify as frequent generative AI users has nearly doubled from 18% last year, the New York Times reported yesterday.
Everybody’s doin’ it, but many still believe it runs afoul of academic integrity, making the Wild West of AI in education wilder than ever:
After years of complaints about students using AI, sites like Rate My Professors are now rife with complaints that professors are using AI to write course material and give grades, which many students call hypocritical and a waste of their tuition.
One student transferred from Southern New Hampshire University after two professors used ChatGPT to “guide” their feedback on her assignments, which the school allowed, per the NYT.
On the other end, NYU students said their professor messed with their “learning styles” and asked for extensions when he worded his assignments so that AI models would fail to answer them, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education opinion piece that went viral this week.
Looking ahead…experts agree that students likely need to learn how to use AI for post-grad, but weaving AI into education is a tightrope walk that everyone’s still figuring out. With how it’s currently being wielded by undergraduates, “massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” an ethics professor told New York Magazine.—ML
After a year marked by firsts and fluctuations (re: interest rates, tech, banking), many investors could be craving a day-to-day that’s a little more…boring. Because in many of the above contexts, boring can be lovely.
Gainbride believes stable returns, low risk, and clear terms could start looking a lot more appealing than chasing the next breakout stock. And that’s led some to revisit an old-school financial tool: annuities.
While annuities were traditionally built for retirees, younger savers can also access non-tax-deferred annuities, which can be withdrawn before retirement. Modern annuities offer guaranteed returns, high yields over a fixed term, and no hidden fees—and investors can open one online.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments in birthright citizenship case. Today, the high court will consider oral arguments on President Trump’s executive order ending automatic citizenship for babies born in the US unless they have at least one parent who is a citizen. But the focus of the arguments won’t be the change to the government’s longstanding interpretation of the 14th Amendment, it will be on whether federal courts have the power to block the president’s directives nationwide. The court’s decision in the case could therefore reverberate far beyond immigration policy, as the Justice Department said 39 nationwide injunctions blocking various Trump policies have been issued so far this term. Some of President Biden’s and President Obama’s policies were also blocked by these types of judicial rulings.
Trump met with the president of Syria and made deals in Qatar. A day after saying he would end US sanctions on Syria, President Trump met in Saudi Arabia with President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who was formerly linked to Al Qaeda and whose forces toppled the Assad regime. It was the first meeting between the two countries’ presidents in 25 years, and Syria is looking to come out of isolation with its new leadership. Trump then traveled on to Qatar, where he announced $243.5 billion worth of deals, mostly focused on defense and aviation.
Databricks is buying database startup Neon for $1 billion. The data analytics company’s big purchase of the startup appears to be all about AI agents, autonomous bots that the tech world believes are about to be as ubiquitous as Stanley cups. “Pretty much every customer we have is super excited and wants to leverage agents,” Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told the Wall Street Journal, adding that to do what companies want, they need to be hooked up to databases, and that’s where Neon comes in. The company offers a cloud-based database platform, and Databricks is planning for that to connect with the data it stores for companies to help AI agents do their thing.—AR
Illustration: Morning Brew, Photos: Mattel / Warner Bros. Discovery
Sometimes you pivot so hard, you find yourself right back where you started. Ahead of Warner Bros. Discovery’s upfront yesterday, CEO and President David Zaslav said the company’s streaming service will change its name back to HBO Max after lopping off the “HBO” in 2023.
Besides testing the marketing team’s patience and giving the internet something to clown on (the company even made this meme before you could), the shift means something bigger. As Warner Bros. merged with Discovery in 2022, the company celebrated the addition of House Hunters-esque reality shows that would pad its library of prestige TV:
When he announced the shift to the name “Max” two years ago, Zaslav said the goal was to create the “broadest array of content available” and dethrone Netflix as the app for the whole family.
But it turns out My 600-lb Life didn’t win over viewers quite as much as the gritty hits that HBO is known for like The Last of Us and TheWhite Lotus.
Announcing the reversal yesterday, the company said it’s focusing on a quality over quantity approach going forward.
Looking ahead…This could be a sign of something even greater than streaming strategy shifts, as some analysts are taking it as a sign that the merger isn’t working out. They’re predicting another Comcast/SpinCo. type deal as a result.—MM
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A proposed model of the new Boeing Air Force One. The Washington Post/Getty Images
President Trump is considering using a luxury Boeing 747-8, gifted from Qatar, to serve as a temporary Air Force One, despite bipartisan concerns that it would pose security risks and cost a lot of time and money to militarize the aircraft for official use.
What happened to the usual Air Force One? Boeing, the supplier of presidential aircraft since the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, failed to meet last year’s deadline on a contract signed in 2018 to replace a pair of 35-year-old Boeing models overdue to be jettisoned. The issues Boeing has encountered so far are numerous:
Delays gaining security clearance for employees, along with turnover at the factory where the work was being done, disrupted the timeline.
One of Boeing’s suppliers went bankrupt, and the pandemic wreaked havoc on supply chains not long after the contract was signed.
Bottom line: Boeing has lost $2.5 billion on the deal and is responsible for any additional cost overruns (although a $96 billion deal for Qatar Airways to purchase 210 jets coincidentally announced yesterday will soften that blow). Despite a White House official saying that the new jets won’t be ready until 2029, Boeing is now promising to have Trump on new planes in 2027. Meanwhile, he is hoping to fly on the controversial gift from Qatar until they’re ready.—DL
It’s probably not the biggest thing to happen recently to the Chicago-born man formerly known as Cardinal Robert Prevost, but in addition to becoming the spiritual leader for the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics, Pope Leo XIV can now boast of having the bestselling non-sports trading card Topps has ever made.
A total of 133,535 of the cards, which were listed at $8.99 as part of a Topps line that commemorates major events, sold during the limited-time release from Thursday through Sunday.
That exceeds the 86,072 cards sold when LeBron James clinched more than 40,000 career points and the 113,777 cards snapped up to celebrate Victor Wembanyama’s NBA Rookie of the Year win.
While Leo XIV’s papacy is new, papal trading cards have been around longer than the baseball card collection you hoped would fund your retirement that’s currently gathering dust in your parents’ basement. In 1909, Chocolat Guerin-Boutron made a Pope Leo XIII card, and the Phillies brought out a Pope Francis rookie card in 2015 to mark his visit to Philadelphia, per Reuters.—AR
Ukraine and Russia are scheduled to hold peace talks in Turkey today, but even figuring out who would attend them has been contentious.
eToro soared nearly 29% following its Nasdaq debut, giving investors new hope for IPOs.
Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University who was arrested amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on foreign students, was released after a judge ruled that his detention was in violation of his constitutional rights to free speech and due process.
US drug overdose deaths dropped last year to their lowest level since 2019, per preliminary CDC data.
A judge resentenced the Menendez brothers, who were convicted of killing their parents in 1989, making them eligible to be released on parole.
Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen was forcibly removed from a hearing at which senators grilled Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Cohen was removed for protesting the war in Gaza and cuts to Medicaid.
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Today’s Word of the Day is: ubiquitous, meaning “existing or being everywhere at the same time.” Thanks to Michelle Passi from Louisville, KY, and the 90+ other readers who made the suggestion impossible to avoid. Submit another Word of the Day here.
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The Supreme Court will hear arguments in birthright citizenship case. Today, the high court will consider 
Trump met with the president of Syria and made deals in Qatar. A day after saying he would end US sanctions on Syria, President Trump 
Databricks is buying database startup Neon for $1 billion. The data analytics company’s big purchase of the startup appears to be all about 
Grow: It’s not summer without a hyacinth, which will grow perfectly in 
