Oct 2, 2025 6 min read Daily Rundown

🛎️ Ex-OpenAI CTO Launches Tinker

Plus: Anker Wants Privacy, AI Cloud Empire

Good Morning, AI Enthusiasts!

The AI frontier keeps splitting in unexpected directions.

STARTUP

Ex-OpenAI CTO Makes a $12B Bet on Fine-Tuning at Scale

📌 What’s happening: Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines just unveiled Tinker, a cloud service that industrializes fine-tuning. Instead of forcing teams to spin up full retrains, Tinker applies LoRA adapters—tiny parameter layers—so developers can spin out task-specific models without duplicating a 70B-weight beast. Multiple teams can share the same backbone, error recovery is automated, and a “Cookbook” of pre-built workflows cuts setup from weeks to hours.

🧠 How this hits reality: If this scales, it flips the power dynamic. OpenAI and Anthropic still monetize access to frontier models, but Tinker makes open-source stacks commercially viable for anyone with a credit card. Fine-tuning at scale means startups, labs, even enterprises can deploy “good-enough” custom models without paying per-token taxes to closed platforms. Giants that rely on API lock-in suddenly look exposed.

🛎️ Key takeaway: If Tinker works, the moat isn’t model size, it’s who commoditizes customization.

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DATA

Anker Pays You to Play Thief

📌 What’s happening: Anker’s Eufy cameras ran a campaign literally paying users $2 a pop for clips of package and car thefts — real or staged. Users could even cosplay as thieves to generate “training” data. The company’s target: 40,000 clips to harden its AI’s ability to spot crime. The result? Hundreds of thousands of videos “donated,” an honor wall of top contributors, and one user boasting 200K+ uploads.

🧠 How this hits reality: This isn’t just quirky data crowdsourcing. It’s the industrialization of consumer surveillance into model fuel. Suddenly, your doorbell is a labeling shop, your kid’s baby monitor is a dataset, and your neighbors are unwitting actors. If this works, similar platforms like Amazon Ring and Google Nest, may be forced to pay for user-generated training data, or risk falling behind. But the privacy liabilities are radioactive, especially given Eufy’s past encryption scandal.

🛎️ Key takeaway: When security cameras pay you to play thief, the line between crime prevention and data farming collapses, and the surveillance economy just found its gig workers.

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CODING

Vercel Raises $300M at $9.3B to Turn Next.js into an AI Cloud Empire

📌 What’s happening: Vercel, the Next.js creator closed an oversubscribed F round led by Accel and GIC, plus a $300M secondary for insiders. Revenue surged 82% last year, users doubled, and the story has shifted from “frontend hosting” to “AI Cloud with v0 agents.”

🧠 How this hits reality: By owning the deploy button, Vercel converted developer habits into infrastructure lock-in. AWS ignored front-end devs; Vercel turned them into a moat. For AI-native app teams, switching costs are now sky-high as workflows, hosting, and agents already live under one roof.

🛎️ Key takeaway: The real moat isn’t GPUs. It’s the muscle memory of developers hitting deploy.

QUICK HITS

NBA partnered with AWS to launch an AI-powered platform that adds new stats, insights, and personalized features to enhance the global fan experience.
Knowledge platform Stravito launched AI Personas to let companies chat with consumer profiles and quickly extract insights.
Historian Jürgen Matthäus used AI to help identify Nazi soldier Jakobus Onnen as the gunman in a notorious Holocaust execution photo.
AI research startup Pathway claims its “Dragon Hatchling” AI mimics brain-like learning by updating neural connections, though unproven at scale.
Google replaced Assistant with Gemini for Home, launching new 2K smart cameras, a revamped app, and a $10 premium subscription to mark its AI-driven smart home shift.

TRENDING

Daily AI Launches

Everyday has launched a new tool that handles tasks across your favorite apps for you; simply describe what you need.
Verdent Deck has launched a platform where multiple, coordinated AI agents autonomously tackle complex coding tasks in parallel.
Cursor has released version 1.7, introducing new features like autocomplete for its agent, team rules, and shareable prompts via deeplinks.
Brave has launched Ask Brave, an interface that unifies AI chat and web search into a single, privacy-first conversation for grounded answers.

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