Good Morning!
It was a first for a lot of things in AI this week, although the things this applied to were a little concerning…
OpenAI just paused training on its most powerful models because they’re getting too capable (also IPO-ing very soon?)
Chinese robot maker Unitree went public and closed up 460% in 12 hours. Very healthy…
Stripe finally bought OpenRouter for around $8B (this is the same deal I spoke about two editions ago! It’s better than I foresaw)
Cursor launched a competitor to GitHub, roughly 3.5 hours before GitHub went down.
My favourite: an mRNA cancer vaccine just succeeded in a Phase 3 trial for the first time and its partly thanks to AI..
Let’s get into the news,
-Ejaaz
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OpenAI Halts Progress on GPT-6
For years every AI lab has talked about slowing down if models became too dangerous, and this week OpenAI did exactly that.
They’ve paused reinforcement learning training on its newest models (codenamed Astra) for 2 weeks now due to a widely reported breakout where an internal version escaped it’s sandboxed and illegally stole data from HuggingFace. The pause is to allow researchers to run smaller experiments and figure out how to improve safeguards. And it might be ready for release sooner than we thought!
Rumors are spreading that the model has almost been qualified for safety standards and could be released as soon as this month.
New like this fueled IPO rumors which we also got some insight into:
CFO Sarah Friar told employees yesterday that OpenAI “will be a public company in 2027” (potentially even sooner), and this is after financials leaked where OpenAI did $6.7B of revenue last quarter but lost $12.3B operating the business.
Despite the deficit OpenAI grew ARR 35% MoM and signed 20M WAU for Codex.
Unitree Became a $50B Company Overnight
Unitree, a humanoid robotics developer in China, had one of the craziest IPOs I’ve seen in a while. The company’s stock closed at a 460% gain in a single day, making it one of the most successful IPO’s in the country and valued it at $50 billion.
But I’m a little concerned. Unitree made roughly 41M of profit last year, so this is a steep valuation given the economics (1,200x last year’s earnings) but hey.
And the public really wanted in - the retail portion of the IPO was more than 8,000x oversubscribed, even DeepSeek became a strategic investor, joining Tencent and other major Chinese tech companies on the cap table.
Stripe Finally Bought OpenRouter
Remember two editions ago when I mentioned Stripe was reportedly trying to buy OpenRouter for ~$10B? Well they did it.
Stripe confirmed the acquisition this week with reporting putting the price somewhere around $8B. OpenRouter was valued at just $1.3B in May so this is a huge win for investors and founder Alex Attalah (who we interviewed on the show, nbd).
As for the deal I actually think this deal makes a LOT of sense for Stripe.
OpenRouter sits in front of 400+ AI models and decides where requests should go. Instead of every company defaulting to the most expensive model, you can just route simple jobs to cheap models and difficult jobs to the frontier. This saves you a ton of money and often yields smarter answers.
Win win.
Strategically this also means Stripe owns the default rails for AI tokens which are quickly being equated to “the money of AI”. The future of the economy will run on AI models, which increasingly consume more and more of these tokens. Being the system that this world runs on is incredibly lucrative and is exactly what Stripe did before with money.
Cursor’s Well-Timed GitHub Competitor
This one wins the most comical award this week.
Cursor launched Origin on Monday morning—basically its own alternative to GitHub with repositories, pull requests, code review and eventually AI agents… all built directly into Cursor. Then roughly 3.5 hours later GitHub went down. Millions of developers just locked out of their codebases.
But this competing platform is very lucrative for Cursor in ways Github isn’t designed for, the main one being AI agents. This means that the platform can support the creation and management of 100-1000s of codebases and code changes per second. In a world where no human hand-writes code any more, this is an extremely compelling alternative.
Mind you Cursor is now owned by SpaceX after its $60B acquisition officially closed last week, so this completes the vertical stack for SpaceX, meaning they are now a VERY competitive frontier lab for AI coding specifically.
I don’t think GitHub is suddenly “dead” (its network effect is enormous), but its days are now numbered if they don’t adapt.
We have an mRNA Cancer Vaccine that works!
Probably the most important story this week.
Moderna and Merck announced a personalised mRNA cancer vaccine that just succeeded in a Phase 3 trial involving 1137 patients with high-risk melanoma.
The vaccine is given alongside Merck’s Keytruda and significantly extended the amount of time patients lived without their cancer returning, while also reducing the chance of it spreading elsewhere in the body. This is the first positive Phase 3 result ever for an mRNA cancer vaccine.
The best part is how it works.
Doctors take a sample of your tumour, identify mutations unique to your cancer and manufacture an mRNA vaccine specifically designed to teach your immune system to attack those mutations. So essentially every patient gets their own tailored drug. The labs used AI algorithms to help them determine and design the personalized vaccines.
I’m personally very excited for the era of AI-accelerated biology, and I believe we could extend human life significantly by the end of the decade.
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