Vibe coding startup’s $80M speedrun

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Top AI minds have predicted AI will soon enable solo unicorn businesses — and a solo-bootstrapped vibe coding platform just provided some early evidence.

With Maor Shlomo’s Base44 going from zero to 250k users and an $80M acquisition in only six months, the AI-fueled entrepreneurship movement is just getting began.

P.S. — Our next live workshop is today at 4 PM EST. After the session, you’ll have the ability to confidently construct and run your personal automation agents using n8n! RSVP here. 

In today’s AI rundown:

• Solo-owned vibe coding startup sells for $80M

• OpenAI prepares for bioweapon risks

• The best way to construct a sensible AI orchestrator for projects

• Stanford study: What employees want from AI

• 4 latest AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

BASE44

💰 Solo-owned vibe coding startup sells for $80M

The Rundown: Developer Maor Shlomo just sold his vibe coding startup, Base44, to Wix for $80M in money, after bootstrapping it to 250k users and making monthly profits of $189,000 in only six months.

The main points:

• Shlomo said Base44 grew to 10k users inside three weeks via word-of-mouth, enabling non-programmers to construct apps with natural language prompts.

• The Israeli developer bootstrapped the corporate and is the one shareholder, together with his eight employees receiving $25M in bonuses as a part of the acquisition.

• Wix plans to integrate Base44 into its tools to assist users construct apps, with Shlomo calling the platform the “absolute best partner” to proceed scaling.

• Shlomo initially began Base44 as a side project and launched in January, quickly landing partnerships with major firms like eToro and Similarweb.

Why it matters: AI leaders like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have predicted AI advances could soon result in solo unicorn startups — and Base44’s sale is powerful proof of each the changing economics of software creation and the huge demand for the “vibe coding” movement that has been certainly one of the largest headlines of the AI wave.

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OPENAI

⚠️ OpenAI prepares for bioweapon risks

The Rundown: OpenAI just published a brand new blog detailing the protection measures being taken in preparation for the damaging thresholds for biological weapon creation that the corporate expects its next generation of models could reach.

The main points:

• OpenAI anticipates successors to its o3 reasoning model will trigger the “high risk” status under its preparedness framework for biological threats.

• Mitigations include training models to refuse harmful requests, deploying always-on systems to detect suspicious activity, and advanced red-teaming.

• The corporate can be planning a July biodefense summit with government researchers and NGOs to debate risks, countermeasures, and research.

• The move follows similar safety measures from Anthropic, which recently activated stricter protocols for its Claude 4 family release.

Why it matters: The identical capabilities that might unlock scientific breakthroughs can even enable some extremely dangerous stuff within the flawed hands — and this next step up in models will take the stakes to a serious latest level. While the extra safeguards and proactive moves are positive, we’re quickly about to enter very unknown territory.

AI TRAINING

🤖 The best way to construct a sensible AI orchestrator for projects

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn create an intelligent system that mechanically chooses between fast and powerful AI models based on task complexity, optimizing speed in your personal projects.

Step-by-step:

1. Get your OpenAI API key from the Platform dashboard

2. Install the OpenAI library: “!pip install openai” and arrange your client connection.

3. Test a basic API call to grasp the structure: “client.chat.completions.create(model=”o3″, messages=[…])”

4. Construct your orchestrator function that rates task complexity (0.0-1.0) and auto selects between GPT-4o (fast) and o3 (powerful) based in your threshold.

Pro tip: Adjust your threshold value, e.g., lower (0.3) for quality priority and better (0.7) for faster responses. You’ll be able to access the entire notebook here!

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On this cohort, you’ll learn:

• The tools and frameworks to search out clients and deliver top-notch services

• A six-month roadmap for growing a six-figure consultancy

• How alumni booked their first paying client in as little as three days

Enrollment ends June 27 — Click here to request access to The AI Consultancy Project.

AI RESEARCH

💼 Stanford study: What employees want from AI

The Rundown: Stanford surveyed 1,500 employees to map their AI automation desires, revealing critical mismatches between what employees want and what the tech industry is constructing, and finding employees prefer partnership over alternative for tasks.

The main points:

• The study revealed disconnects between desires and current AI development, with 41% of YC startups focused on areas employees considered low priority.

• The outcomes showed employees primarily need to automate low-value, repetitive jobs like scheduling and data entry to unlock time for more essential work.

• The researchers also created a “Human Agency Scale,” finding nearly half of occupations preferred equal human-AI partnership over full automation.

• Arts/media professionals show the strongest resistance to automation, with only 17% of creative tasks receiving positive rankings from employees.

Why it matters: Agents are set to play an enormous role in the longer term of labor, and insights into how employees portray AI collaboration and automation can go a good distance toward finding areas to unlock productivity. But because the tech surpasses humans in nearly every area, full-scale levels of automation may come whether it’s wanted or not.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🎥 V1 – Midjourney’s latest image-to-video model

• 🎨 Higgsfield Canvas – Image editing model with advanced inpainting features

• 🗣️ Google Search Live – Talk, listen, and explore in real time with AI Mode

• ⚙️ VibeCode – A mobile app that builds mobile apps

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 🧩 Harvey – Product Operations Manager

• 📢 xAI – Software Engineer, Ads

• ✈️ Shield AI – Operations Officer, Flight Test

• 💬 Grammarly – Customer Success Manager

📰 Every part else in AI today

Meta is in negotiations to rent AI investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross (also a co-founder of Ilya Sustkever’s SSI) to hitch Alexandr Wang’s superintelligence division.

OpenAI is reportedly planning to “cut back” its work with data startup Scale AI following its take care of Meta, joining Google, xAI, and Microsoft.

Perplexity launched latest video generation capabilities, enabling users to generate Veo 3 videos with audio on social media by tagging the @AskPerplexity account.

OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Record, a brand new feature allowing the assistant to capture, summarize, and transcribe audio from meetings and brainstorms.

Nvidia-backed SandboxAQ released SAIR, a dataset of 5.2M synthetic protein-drug molecules to coach AI models for drug discovery.

Mass General Brigham researchers developed AI-CAC, a tool that reads chest CT scans to quickly spot calcium deposits that indicate potential heart disease.

COMMUNITY

🎥 Join our next live workshop

Join our next workshop today at 4 PM EST with Dr. Alvaro Cintas, The Rundown’s AI professor. By the top of the workshop, you’ll have the ability to confidently construct and run your personal automation agents using n8n.

RSVP here. Not a member? Join The Rundown University on a 14-day free trial.

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team