🍭 Circular Deals and Self Driving Stars 🤩

Good morning.

My coffee just 404’d.
My to-do list forked itself
And yet somehow you and I are still the product.

Let’s dig in. 👇

🍭 What’s Cookin’:

• Nvidia open-sources a self-driving AI stack

• OpenAI’s Thrive deal turns wellbeing into an AI loop

• VCs start kingmaking baby AI winners

• Anthropic preps IPO and buys Bun for Claude Code

• ToolBox™

_ToolBox™
🧰 5 BRAND NEW AI LAUNCHES

📱 Superapp
→ An AI “full-stack engineer” for iOS that designs to Apple standards, writes Swift or React Native, and wires up Supabase for you.

🛠️ MeDo by Baidu
→ Uses agentic AI to build production-ready full-stack apps—frontend, backend, database, and integrations—in minutes at a fraction of usual cost.

📊 nao
→ An AI data IDE (built on VS Code) that sits on top of your warehouse so agents can work with your code, metadata, and business context in one place.

💬 Swytchcode
→ Turns your API docs into an interactive AI playground where developers can chat with the API, test calls, and generate workflows instantly.

⚙️ Turbotic Automation AI
→ Let an AI agent build automations just by chatting, so you can replace RPA scripts and glue tools with one conversational interface.

OpenAI
⭕ Circular Deals, Now With Private Equity Energy

The Bite: OpenAI is taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, an AI-focused roll-up backed by its own major investor, Thrive Capital.

Thrive buys up boring-but-profitable businesses (accounting, IT services, etc.) and injects OpenAI tech; OpenAI then sends its own engineers and researchers into those portfolio companies to wire in AI and boost efficiency.

If the experiment works, OpenAI gets paid twice: service fees now, a juiced-up equity position later.

Snacks:

• Thrive Holdings is owned by Thrive Capital, one of OpenAI’s biggest investors

• It operates like a private equity fund for AI, rolling up “AI-upgradable” companies in services sectors

• OpenAI staff embed directly inside those firms to build and deploy products

• OpenAI profits from both the work and any valuation lift in Thrive’s portfolio

• TechCrunch links this to OpenAI’s earlier CoreWeave deal, where OpenAI funded a customer that buys GPUs to sell compute back to… you guessed it → OpenAI

Why it Bites: This is Capitalism.exe, Chapter 3.

First we had OpenAI pouring money into infrastructure partners like CoreWeave and AMD so they could buy GPUs and resell compute back to OpenAI.

Now we’ve got an AI private equity loop where OpenAI invests in the owner (Thrive Holdings), powers the portfolio with its models, then benefits when those same companies grow because of OpenAI.

We already dragged these circular deals when they showed up in cloud and international JVs — this is the same pattern wired into actual workplaces.

The question isn’t “Is this legal?”

It’s…

“Are we funding real productivity or just building an worse models than Anthropic and Google, an AI index fund whose main output is higher valuations and very pretty pitch decks?

Steal This Prompt
📹 Steal This Prompt – 90s Japanese Cyber Fashion

A Midjourney prompt that drops you straight into a mid-90s Japanese cyber fashion shoot: glowing city blocks, wired accessories, and outfits that look like they were styled by a hacker DJ in Shibuya.

Use it to cook:

• High-energy lookbook covers for your brand or side project

• Retro–sci-fi character art for games, zines, or album drops

Workflow:

1. Click this link (Prompt)

2. Paste it into Midjourney and hook it up to your image model

3. Swap in your subject, outfit details, or reference photo

4. Watch it cook — think Neo meets Harajuku in a CRT-lit alley

🍭 Try the prompt on Snack Prompt 🍭

LocalAI
🚀 Thinkpilot

A local-first AI tool that turns convos from Intercom, tickets, and reviews into product insights—without sending your data to the cloud.

Plug in your own AI API key
Keep it private
And move fast.

_{Everything Else}
🧠 You Need to Know

💸 VCs Turn to ‘Kingmaking’ in Early AI Rounds

→ Top venture firms are backing select AI startups with unusually large early rounds to anoint perceived category leaders.

☁️ AWS Adds New Tools for Custom LLMs

→ AWS introduced serverless customization in SageMaker and new Bedrock fine-tuning options to simplify building tailored large language models.

📈 Anthropic Starts Formal IPO Prep

→ Anthropic hired Wilson Sonsini and is exploring fresh funding that could value the company above $300 billion ahead of a possible 2026 listing.

📰 WordPress Shows Telex AI Tool in Real Use

→ Automattic showcased its Telex coding assistant generating live WordPress blocks like pricing tools, store info, and logo carousels for production sites.

🧱 Anthropic Acquires Bun as Claude Code Scales

→ Anthropic is buying JavaScript runtime Bun after Claude Code hit a $1 billion run-rate, aiming to improve performance while keeping Bun open source.

_Nvidia
🚗 Nvidia Rekindles the Self-Driving Dreamc

The Bite: Nvidia just dropped a stack of open AI models and tools for autonomous driving.

Everything from perception to planning to full-blown simulation.

And it’s the first time in years the self-driving industry looks alive again.

Elon spent a decade trying to brute-force autonomy with Tesla hardware;
Nvidia may have just made it feel plug-and-play for everyone else.

Snacks:

• New open perception + driving models for AV researchers

• Fresh simulation tools that recreate messy real-world roads

• OEMs can train + test without building Tesla-scale infra

• A not-so-subtle “come build on our stack” to the entire auto industry

• Nvidia calling it a “platform,” which is CEO-speak for “please depend on us forever” 😆

Why it bites: This is Nvidia playing slightly-evil-genius chess while everyone else is still arguing over lane markings.

By open-sourcing the core models, they look like the good guy… but it also ensures every non-Tesla car ends up running on green GPU juice.

Tesla hoarded compute to build autonomy in-house;
Nvidia just handed everyone else a starter kit and said, “Go wild.”

If the future of driving becomes:
Tesla on Tesla, and the rest of the world on Nvidia.

Competition or a boss fight?