Keeping The Solo Dream Alive

Plus: everything else that made this the craziest week in AI yet.

Author

Mark Chepelyuk
June 20, 2025

Hey everyone!

So... a solo developer just sold his six-month-old AI startup for $80 million.

In cash.

To put that in perspective, this guy made more money in half a year than most unicorns raise in their entire existence. And he did it (almost) alone, from his laptop, using AI to help non-programmers build apps.

Meanwhile, Sam Altman casually dropped that GPT-5 is coming this summer (finally!), MIT discovered that ChatGPT might be literally rewiring our brains in concerning ways, and the OpenAI-Microsoft partnership is apparently heading for the messiest corporate breakup since the Facebook founding drama.

Oh, and the Pentagon just handed OpenAI $200 million because apparently we're now living in a sci-fi movie.

If you're not paying attention to AI right now, you're missing the birth of an entirely new economic reality. The rules of business just got rewritten, and the early adopters are cashing checks.

This Week’s Big Stories

  • The Solo Unicorn Is Real

  • GPT-5 This Summer (Finally!)

  • Video Tools Explosion

  • Your Brain on AI (Spoiler: It's Not Good)

  • The OpenAI-Microsoft Breakup Drama

  • The Pentagon Goes All-In

Let’s get into it. 🚀

Image source: CTech

💰 The Solo Unicorn Is Real

Meet Maor Shlomo—the guy who just sold his 6 month old startup to WIX for $80M.

Key Details:

  • Shlomo's Base44 sold to Wix for $80M in cash after just six months

  • Bootstrapped the vibe-coding platform from zero to 250k users as a solo founder

  • Hit $189k in monthly profits before the acquisition

  • His eight employees are getting $25M in bonuses from the deal

  • Initially started as a side project in January, quickly landed partnerships with eToro and Similarweb

Why It Matters AI has fundamentally changed the economics of software creation. When one person can build something that generates $189k monthly and attracts a quarter million users in six months, we're watching traditional startup dynamics crumble in real time. The solo unicorn era is here, and it's moving at light speed.

Image source: OpenAI

🤖 GPT-5 This Summer (Finally!)

Sam Altman finally put a date on it, and the timeline is closer than you think.

Key Details:

  • OpenAI CEO confirms GPT-5 arriving "probably sometime this summer"

  • Plans to simplify the confusing model lineup back to straightforward progression (GPT-5, GPT-6)

  • Enhanced reasoning and agentic capabilities expected

  • Will unify different AI modes into one seamless experience

  • Users surprisingly willing to wait for great answers on complex problems

Why It Matters OpenAI admits their current product is "a whole mess" and they're getting back to basics. The future vision: a unified model that handles everything from quick questions to complex reasoning without making you choose between seventeen different variants. If they pull this off, we could see the ChatGPT moment all over again, but for the agent era.

🛠️ The AI Video Tool Explosion

This week was basically Christmas morning for AI tool enthusiasts. Everyone dropped something game-changing.

Key Details:

  • Midjourney V1: Finally enters video with 5-second clips that extend to 20 seconds, priced at just $10/month (25x cheaper than rivals)

  • ChatGPT Record Mode: Now records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings for Pro/Enterprise users on Mac

  • Google Search Live: Voice-powered AI that lets you have real-time conversations with Google's entire web index

  • Higgsfield Canvas: Pixel-perfect AI image editing with product placement capabilities—swap clothes, edit faces, place products

  • Claude Code MCP: Remote server support means no more local management, pull context directly from your tools

  • Tencent Hunyuan3D-2.1: Open-source 3D asset creation with lifelike textures and cinematic realism

Why It Matters We just hit the inflection point where AI tools stopped being demos and became genuinely useful products. When you can voice-chat with Google, edit images with pixel precision, and create 3D assets from text, the barrier to entry for creating professional-grade content just disappeared.

Source: MIT

🧠 Your Brain on AI (Spoiler: Bad News)

MIT just published a study that should make every ChatGPT user pause and think. Literally.

Key Details:

  • Study of 54 people found ChatGPT users showed dramatically weaker brain connectivity

  • 83% of ChatGPT users couldn't quote a single sentence from essays they'd written minutes earlier

  • Only 11% of brain-only writers had the same memory problems

  • Users who wrote first, then used ChatGPT for editing, actually showed increased brain connectivity

  • Researchers coined the term "cognitive debt" for borrowing against future cognitive capacity

Why It Matters This is the GPS effect for your brain. GPS dependency weakened our spatial memory, and now ChatGPT appears to be outsourcing our thinking itself. The solution: do the cognitive heavy lifting first, then use AI as a refinement tool. Think strength training—you can use a weight belt for heavy lifts, but if you wear it for every workout, your core will get weak because it’s never being engaged.

🇨🇳 China Just Ate Google's Lunch

Remember when everyone said Chinese AI was years behind? Yeah those days are over.

Key Details:

  • ByteDance's Seedance and MiniMax's Hailuo 02 just dethroned Google's Veo 3 on major video benchmarks

  • A Chinese entrepreneur used AI avatars to generate $7M in sales during a 6-hour livestream, beating his human-hosted streams

  • MiniMax's M1 model can process 1M tokens and autonomously build Netflix clones from scratch

  • Their AI agent can build apps, run code, and create presentations completely autonomously

  • Over 100k digital humans now work China's $946B live commerce sector, cutting costs by 80%

Why It Matters While everyone focused on the OpenAI-Google rivalry, Chinese companies quietly built AI that's winning. When AI avatars can outsell human influencers and generate millions in revenue, we're witnessing a completely different economic reality that's already here.

Source: Jason Redmond via Getty Images

💔 The OpenAI-Microsoft Breakup Drama

The AI power couple might be heading for divorce court.

Key Details:

  • WSJ reports tensions "reaching a boiling point" over OpenAI's restructuring plans

  • OpenAI wants to become a public-benefit corporation but Microsoft won't budge on details

  • The $3B Windsurf acquisition has created major friction since it competes with GitHub Copilot

  • OpenAI considering "going nuclear" by reporting Microsoft to antitrust regulators

  • Eight months of restructuring talks with no resolution

Why It Matters We're watching a battle for the future of AI development. OpenAI wants independence to move fast and compete globally, while Microsoft wants to protect its $13+ billion investment. If this partnership implodes, it could reshape the entire AI landscape and potentially trigger a wave of new alliances and acquisitions.

🏛️ The Pentagon Goes All-In

The US government just made its biggest AI bet yet.

Key Details:

  • OpenAI secured $200M one-year contract with Department of Defense

  • First direct prime contract with US government for AI prototypes

  • Focus areas: administrative operations, healthcare, and cyber defense

  • Part of new "OpenAI for Government" initiative consolidating federal partnerships

  • Includes existing work with NASA, NIH, Air Force Research Lab, and Treasury

Why It Matters AI is now officially part of the military-industrial complex. OpenAI maintains restrictions on weapons design, but this represents a major shift for a company built on AI safety principles. Government contracts are notoriously lucrative and long-term—this could be the start of OpenAI becoming as dependent on government revenue as traditional defense contractors.

That’s it for this week’s upload! Tomorrow’s AI breakthroughs will be even bigger.

See you then 👋