šŸš€ Six-month vibe coder gets $80M

Also: Musk wants Grok to rewrite human knowledge

Welcome, AI enthusiasts

Wix just bought a six-month-old AI startup for $80 million in cash. It started as a one-man project, and it's making the solo founder dream feel a lot more real. Let’s dive in! 

In today’s insights:

  • Base44 sells for $80M in just 6 months

  • Musk wants Grok to rewrite human knowledge

  • Meta tried to buy Ilya Sutskever’s 1-year-old startup for $32B and got rejected

Read time: 4 minutes

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

Source: Calcalistech

Evolving AI: Wix just bought Base44 for $80 million in cash. The company is only six months old and was bootstrapped.

Key Points:

  • Developer Maor Shlomo started Base44 alone. It now has eight employees.

  • Base44 reached 250,000 users and turned a profit within six months.

  • Wix confirmed the full deal was paid in cash, with $25 million set aside as retention bonuses.

Details:

Base44 is one of the fastest-growing vibe coding startups. These tools let anyone build full applications using just text prompts, with built-in database, authentication, analytics, messaging, and more. It started as a side project by Israeli developer Maor Shlomo and grew mostly through word of mouth, with Shlomo posting updates on LinkedIn and Twitter. In May alone, Base44 made $189,000 in profit. Shlomo publicly compared LLM costs and chose Anthropic’s Claude through AWS over OpenAI models. Amazon then invited him to demo the tool at a local AWS event. Despite the growth, Shlomo said the scale needed next could not be reached organically. The team will now build with Wix's full support and resources.

Why It Matters:

There’s been a lot of talk lately from people like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei about how AI tools could make it possible for a single founder to build a billion-dollar company. Amodei even put the odds at around 70 to 80 percent that we’ll see a true ā€œsolo unicornā€ by 2026. Vibe coding isn’t just buzz. It’s part of a shift where one person plus smart tools can do what used to take a team. And if that keeps speeding up? Well, hitting unicorn status solo might not be a fantasy for long.

Evolving AI: Elon Musk says Grok will retrain on ā€œcorrectedā€ facts and rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge.

Key Points:

  • Musk is asking X users to submit ā€œpolitically incorrect but trueā€ statements to train Grok.

  • xAI plans to rewrite data using Grok 3.5, then retrain the model on that version.

  • Grok has repeatedly changed its responses to match Musk’s views.

Details:

Elon Musk wants Grok to ā€œrewriteā€ human knowledge using what he calls ā€œdivisive factsā€ statements that are ā€œpolitically incorrect but true.ā€ He’s asking X users to post examples under his tweet. Grok 3.5 will be used to rewrite the data before retraining the model, which Musk says may be called Grok 4. The goal is to fix biased or inaccurate content, as Musk believes most training data is filled with ā€œgarbage.ā€ xAI has already intervened in Grok’s behavior before, reversing answers about Trump, climate change, and disinformation. Grok now avoids direct responses and sometimes echoes far-right talking points, like the ā€œwhite genocideā€ theory. Critics say this shift reflects Musk’s views more than any neutral truth.

Why It Matters:

Musk is training Grok to reflect his own view of the world, deciding what’s true and what’s not. He says it’s about fixing biased data, but he’s the one setting the standard. If an AI learns from a version of reality shaped by one person, it stops being a tool to explore information and starts becoming a way to push a specific agenda. That should make people uneasy.

Source: Andrej Sokolow | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Evolving AI: After acquiring Scale for $14.3B and Sam Altman’s comments on $100M signing offers, Meta keeps pushing ahead with yet another move.

Key Points:

  • Meta reportedly offered $32B to buy Safe Superintelligence but was turned down.

  • The company is now in talks to hire co-founder Daniel Gross and investor Nat Friedman.

  • Meta is trying to recover from recent struggles in AI.

Details:

Recent news shows how aggressive Meta is getting in the AI race. Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence, a startup focused on building safe superintelligence in complete secrecy. The deal didn’t go through, and Sutskever also declined a job offer. Now Meta is shifting strategy. It’s in talks to hire SSI co-founder Daniel Gross and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. This follows Meta’s $14.3B investment in Scale AI, bringing in Alexandr Wang to lead work on training data and infrastructure. The hiring spree comes as Meta tries to recover from Llama 4 delays and key researcher exits.

Why It Matters:

Ilya Sutskever is one of the most respected minds in AI. He co-founded OpenAI, led the team behind ChatGPT, and now runs a 20-person startup aiming to build safe superintelligence. Meta’s $32B offer shows just how seriously they take him. Getting rejected, then pivoting to his co-founder, makes it even more clear how high the stakes currently are in AI.

If you’re interested in learning more on Ilya Sutskever, here’s a fascinating video on him talking about the future of AI.

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