Solo Builders

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. Why would an AI hedge fund sell every public stock it owned but keep its Anthropic stake? That question has been bouncing around my head for a week, and the answer tells you more about where AI money is heading than any earnings call this quarter. The fund is Situational Awareness, run by 25-year-old ex-OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, and after a brutal month it offloaded most of its public portfolio to Ken Griffin’s Citadel while holding every share of its roughly $5 billion Anthropic position. ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. OpenAI’s president just confirmed the company is building hardware — a “family of devices” for its AI chatbots — and most of the coverage is arguing about what the gadgets will look like. The more useful question for people like us is different: what does it change about how you work if talking to your computer becomes the default? ...

🎧 Prefer to listen? Your browser does not support the audio element. ByteDance is training an AI model with as many as 10 trillion parameters, and if you ship anything on top of AI APIs, this changes your economics even if you never send it a single request. For scale, that’s roughly three times bigger than Kimi K3, the largest Chinese model released so far, and it edges past most estimates of what Anthropic has in training. The Financial Times broke the story in August 2025, and the part I keep coming back to isn’t the parameter count. It’s what a third serious player does to the price of the tokens I buy every month. ...

OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman gave $25M to a pro-AI super PAC that’s now running ads in battleground states. Meanwhile, he’s consolidating power inside OpenAI as Altman’s second-in-command.

Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are being called ‘pervert glasses’ worldwide. Meta just patented a hardware kill switch. Here’s the privacy crisis and what it means for AI wearable builders.

OpenAI’s hardware push isn’t about better servers. It’s about who controls the next interface — and what that means for people who build with AI but don’t code.

Stop creating from scratch. Your existing blog posts contain weeks of social content, email sequences, and video scripts — if you know how to extract them.

Encore AI mines your top performers’ calls and trains AI agents to replicate them. The $30M raise signals a shift from AI-as-cost-cutting to AI-as-revenue-generation.

OpenAI spent $6.5B on Jony Ive’s hardware startup and just launched its own AI chip. The endgame isn’t developer tools — it’s AI for everyone.

AI detection is becoming a funded industry. Here’s what solo builders need to know about Pangram, the Druckenmiller incident, and how to stay on the right side of authenticity.