ICYMI: Musk's TikTok, AI's future, films for founders

The past week has been wild! We're slowing things down on the content side to build some AI products, e.g. a tool for indie hackers to sanity check their ideas. Meanwhile, things are speeding up in the overall tech world. But more on that in a second…

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So last week Sam Altman dropped a viral blog post forecasting the imminent release of OpenAI's AI agent “Operator,” among other sci-fi-sounding tech that will shrink headcounts at startups. And in our opinion this uncertainty makes it the best time to become an indie hacker.

Speaking of uncertainty, not only is the TikTok ban scheduled to go into effect this week, but China might sell TikTok's U.S. operations to Elon Musk. As if that app weren't already chaotic enough as it was! So indie hackers relying on TikTok should be ready for some big changes.

Over in Paris, Marc Lou turned a single tweet into a massive indie hacker meetup. “I thought 10 people would join,” he said. “In the end, we were a group of 100+.”

But that's not even the biggest something-from-nothing story we found last week. A married couple apparently discovered a cave on their land and turned it into a $1,400-a-night Airbnb rental!

And finally, after we ran a survey and found that only 23% of indie hackers watched startup movies last year, our resident film buff made the case that this was a huge missed opportunity for founders and gave a rundown of dozens of startup movies to add some fuel to your fires.

That’s the scoop! Here’s to another week of creating, learning, and maybe even watching a founder movie or two.

—Channing

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