🤯 AI or Just People? Bots, Scams & Apple’s Secret Container OS

Happy Friday the 13th!

Sommer arrived this week, and so did the art of me sweating profusely all over my keyboard since Air Conditioning is considered a mortal sin where I live.

The upside is that I am technically losing weight while I work…

Here’s this week’s Byte Newsletter.

The Byte’s Bits

🍏 Apple’s Secret Sauce? A Linux Container running on macOS

🤖 Microsoft-Backed AI Startup’s “Chatbot” Was Just 700 Humans in Disguise

💸 DIY Finance Automation That’ll Blow Your Mind

🧠 Build AI Agents with an AI Agent — Right Inside Your Code Editor

💸 AI Investment News

🍏 Apple’s Secret Sauce? A Linux Container running on macOS

The mostly yawn fest of the WWDC, or as Apple calls it, the Dub Dub DC. There is no really exciting news, except for the small announcement that sparked the entire development community. Apple containers.

Turns out Apple’s not just designing Vision Pro headsets and titanium MacBooks, it’s also quietly building a Linux-based container OS. Yes, Apple is stepping into the same infrastructure sandbox as Google and AWS… but with that unmistakable Cupertino twist.

• 🧱 Not for iPhones: This OS isn’t coming to your Mac it’s a bare-metal Linux distro purpose-built for container workloads on macOS.
• 🔐 Security & Speed: With minimal services and baked-in security features, it’s leaner and meaner than general-purpose Linux distros.
• 📉 No Vendor Lock-In: Apple is adhering to the Docker ethos and making it portable, meaning you can run this on other cloud platforms or even locally.

Apple building a cloud-native OS might sound bizarre, but it fits: it’s all about control, optimization, and let’s be honest, flexing on rivals who thought they owned Linux. Apple is also obsessed with security. By building their container distribution, they ensure that macOS is even more protected.

All my money invested in shiny Apple hardware might finally be paying off…

Read online

🤖 Microsoft-Backed AI Startup’s “Chatbot” Was Just 700 Humans in Disguise

In a plot twist worthy of HBO, Builder.ai, once a $1.5 billion darling of the AI world, has collapsed after it was revealed that their AI chatbot “Natasha” wasn’t AI at all. It was 700 real people pretending to be a chatbot. Cue the slow clap.

• 🧑‍💻 Manual Labor as AI Magic: Customers thought they were chatting with a sophisticated AI assistant that could build apps. In reality, engineers in India were doing the work behind the scenes, channeling their inner chatbot.
• 💸 $220M Revenue? Try $50M: Builder.ai claimed it made $220 million in 2024. Audits revealed that the actual number was closer to $50 million, prompting lenders to seize millions and causing the entire house of cards to collapse.
• 🏦 Bankrupt Across Three Countries: The company now owes $85 million to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and $30 million to Microsoft. They’ve filed for bankruptcy in the UK, India, and the U.S. That’s one way to scale globally.
• 🧼 AI-Washing in Full Effect: This is AI-washing at its finest, hyping up automation that doesn’t exist, to ride the VC wave.

Builder.ai’s downfall is a brutal reminder: sometimes the “AI revolution” is just a bunch of underpaid humans doing customer service in disguise.

So next time you're chatting with an AI Chatbot, it might just be someone on the other side of the planet typing back to you.

Read online

💸 DIY Finance Automation That’ll Blow Your Mind

Forget pricey budgeting apps, one techie supercharged his finances using n8n, an open-source automation tool that runs straight from a Raspberry Pi. The result? Automated tracking, alerts, and peace of mind — all without handing data to third parties.

🔐 Privacy-First Budgeting: Self-hosted setup means full control of your data, no third-party apps spying on your spending.

📬 Email → Excel Magic: Purchase confirmations and bank emails auto-log into categorized Google Sheets with tags and timestamps.

📅 Bill Reminders, Stress-Free: n8n scans a Google Sheet daily and pings you via Telegram or Slack when a bill is due (or late).

📉 Budget Watchdog: Get alerts if your spending nears category limits, plus weekly spending summaries right to your inbox.

Tired of financial chaos? Let n8n run your money game while you kick back. Total control, zero subscriptions.

Read online

🧠 Build AI Agents with an AI Agent Right Inside Your Code Editor

Forget passive tutorials and endless YouTube playlists. Mastra 101 drops you into a sci-fi-worthy setup: an AI agent teaching you how to build AI agents, all within your code editor (Cursor, Windsurf, or VS Code). It’s the most hands-on, minds-on way to learn how modern AI systems actually get built using the open-source Mastra TypeScript framework.

👨‍💻 Taught by an AI Agent: No boring videos. No external docs. Just a built-in AI guide walking you through every line of code, live in your dev environment.

🔧 Tools, Memory & MCP: Learn how to give your agents actual tools, short- and long-term memory, and the power to connect with external APIs all using the Model Context Protocol.

🧠 Zero Fluff, All Action: You won’t waste a minute. You’ll go from launching your first agent to integrating complex behaviors in a single flow.

🔥 This isn’t just a course — it’s a simulation of the future. Fire up your editor and start building with Mastra 101 now

What better way to learn how to build AI agents than from an actual AI Agent? This is becoming the movie Inception.

Build an Agent

💸 AI Investment News

Mergers, acquisitions, and funding rounds so far this month in the AI space. Needless to say, AI startups are still on the upswing with VCs.

• Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI for a 49% stake; CEO Alexandr Wang to lead Meta's superintelligence team. Wang is rumored to a receive a $10M cash salary per year.
• Perplexity AI raises $500M Series D, backed by Jeff Bezos and Nvidia, reaching a $14B valuation.
• Glean secures $150M Series F to expand its enterprise AI search platform at a $7.2B valuation.
• Meter raises $170M Series B to enhance AI-driven networking solutions, backed by Sam Altman and Microsoft.
• Gecko Robotics obtains $125M late-stage funding for AI-powered infrastructure inspection technologies.
• Laurel secures $100M Series C to develop AI-driven timekeeping tools for professional services.
• Horizon3.ai raises $100M Series D to scale its autonomous cybersecurity platform.
• Lovable anticipates funding round led by Accel, targeting a $1.5B valuation for its AI "vibe coding" platform.
• Moments Lab garners $24M Series B for AI-powered video editing tools aimed at media companies.
• Multiverse Computing receives €67M investment from the Spanish government for quantum-inspired AI solutions.

It's true. The Meta offers for the "superintelligence" team are actually insane.

If you work at the big AI labs, Zuck is personally negotiating $10M+/yr in cold hard liquid money.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

3:52 PM • Jun 11, 2025

13.6K Likes   471 Retweets  

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…That’s this week’s newsletter!

-Brian

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