Happy Sunday. Quiet week on the model front, but a loud one on money. Four things worth your five minutes, then a bit on what's been on my mind. Let's get into it.
This week in tech + AI
Stripe bought OpenRouter for more than $7 billion. OpenRouter is the layer that sits between your app and the AI models and routes every request to whichever one makes sense. It was valued at $1.3 billion a few months ago (lol). A payments company just bought the tollbooth for AI traffic, and the boring middle of the stack is quietly turning out to be the most valuable part of it. Read more
A Chinese humanoid robot maker went public and jumped over 500% on day one. Unitree raised $904 million in its Shanghai IPO and ended its first day somewhere between a $53 and $66 billion valuation depending on who you ask. Robotics just got its first real public market moment and it happened in Shanghai, not New York. Read more
Nvidia is backing around $105 billion in financing for OpenAI's new Ohio data center. So the company selling the chips is also guaranteeing the credit that pays for the chips. What it means: some of the AI demand numbers you read are partly the same money moving in a circle. Not a crash signal (maybe it is), just something worth keeping in the back of your head the next time you see a huge capex headline. Read more
Higgsfield raised $400 million and quadrupled its valuation in eight months. The AI video startup is now worth $5.4 billion with roughly $700 million in annualized revenue, and most of that money now comes from enterprise clients rather than hobbyists. AI video stopped being a toy this year, and the bar for what a human creator or editor has to be good at is moving fast. Read more
On my mind
Two things I’ve been thinking about recently. First: Don’t be afraid to be a beginner. Social media has us thinking that everybody has everything figured out and that it’s not okay to be a beginner. That’s absolutely not true. I’d even argue the opposite: how often you let yourself be a beginner is one of the biggest predictors of how much you end up knowing and achieving. So keep trying and being a beginner until you find what you really like and then keep doing that, at least for as long as you still enjoy it.
Second, your interests and goals can CHANGE. And that is very normal. I hear pretty often from other content creators “I’d love to post about XYZ but it’s not my content”, and I always tell them that they can do whatever they want. Personal interests evolve and you shouldn’t force yourself to keep pursuing something if it doesn’t align with your goals anymore (ofc you shouldn’t drop out in the final year of your degree). But I think you get the idea.
The overarching theme here is to be open and curious and to never let social pressure or norms push you into a life you don’t actually enjoy or see long-term value in.
More from me
🎬 My latest content:
How I'd learn the math behind machine learning if I was starting from zero with detailed resources. Have a look
How I'm learning electronics and hardware from scratch, starting with an Arduino. Have a look
🔨 Tool of the week: Wispr Flow - clicking the Link supports me!
10x the context. Half the time.
Speak your prompts into ChatGPT or Claude and get detailed, paste-ready input that actually gives you useful output. Wispr Flow captures what you'd cut when typing. Free on Mac, Windows, and iPhone.
Have a great week,
Chris