🧙🏼 Builder.ai 'forgot' the AI part

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Howdy wizards,

Welcome to the 356 new subscribers that joined last week.

In this edition:

• Claude gets a voice on mobile

• The collapse of the $1B startup builder‌.ai

• How OpenAI’s o3 model helps me with taxes

Close your 47 browser tabs—get caffeinated, comfortable and let’s unpack What’s brewing in AI.

DARIO’S PICKS

1. Builder.ai's house of cards

A Microsoft-backed company—builder‌.ai (valued at $1.5b)—filed for bankruptcy this week after getting caught in the most elaborate tech theater of 2025.

Their flagship "AI companion Natasha" that helped clients build apps was in reality Indian developers (frantically) coding behind the scenes.

They also had a very creative way of getting sales:

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ AI = Actually Indians? 😄

A company with hundreds of employees faking AI with human labor reveals a few things:

• Slapping AI on your pitch deck is apparently a proven way to unlock millions in valuation—and investments that come with minimal due diligence. Makes you wonder how many other Series A funded startups are currently cosplaying as AI companies.

• As great as AI is at coding, you can’t yet do an entire production ready app from a couple of prompts—else there would be no need to pull off this whole scheme.

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DARIO’S PICKS

2. Claude voice mode is here

Anthropic is rolling out voice mode for Claude on mobile. It will become available to English-speaking users over the next weeks.

The real story here is a combination of features, though: Claude already integrates with Google Workspace—so you’ll be able to converse with it having context from things like your Calendar, Gmail and Docs during your conversations.

The voice mode will use the Sonnet 4 model, have five different voices to choose from, as well as give you real-time transcription displayed while you chat.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Anthropic is fashionably late to the party, as ChatGPT and Gemini have been chatting out loud for ages already. The workspace integration looks cool—if I HAD to choose, I’d prefer an AI that reads my calendar over one that sounds like Scarlett Johansson. As Voice becomes table stakes, the big AI labs are racing to connect their products to your data.

UP CLOSE

Talk is cheap. In this mini-series I share first-hand how I’m personally using AI from week to week, as well as practical tips & tricks I discover and actually use.

How AI helped me do my taxes this year

In Norway, most small business owners handle their own accounting—it's pretty standard here. With solid accounting software and dedicated customer support, we typically manage fine without accountants most of the time. However—a lot of work happens in those final weeks before the yearly tax return deadline, when you have to reconcile a year's worth of invoices, receipts and expenses. I used ChatGPT’s o3-model as my co-pilot for this process and it saved me lots of time.

I tried something similar last year with GPT-4o, but it was significantly less useful. Now, with o3's improved image reading and reasoning capabilities, tasks that simply didn't work before just... work.

Here’s some of what I used ChatGPT for in my accounting this year:

• Planning. I had two days blocked for my year-end accounting. Instead of winging it, I dumped my entire business setup into ChatGPT—revenue channels, scattered subscriptions and expenses, freelancer payments, etc. Got back a clean timeline with everything sequenced properly.

• Legal questions (the obvious one). When I was unsure about certain tax rules, I asked ChatGPT very specific questions. o3's reasoning ability + web research + source citations really delivered. It saved me several back-and-forth emails that would have taken days to resolve.

• Currency conversion. o3 helped match Stripe payouts in USD with the NOK payment that landed in my Norwegian bank, calculated the historical spot rate for that date, and drafted balanced journal entries (sales income, Stripe fee, bank). I found it does historical FX rates accurately now:

  

  FX rates with sources—so you can double check

• Flagging business expenses. I sometimes have business expenses on a personal credit card—either accidentally or because I didn't have my business card on me at the time of purchase. I uploaded a transaction log in CSV to ChatGPT (don’t try this at home if you have sensitive data) and had it flag potential business expenses. It dissected each file carefully and caught almost everything. Hours saved.

• Turning things into PDFs. I typically document transactions by uploading PDFs, but occasionally I'll receive something in another format (like an email receipt, or invoice in Word format). o3 now handles these conversions seamlessly:

  

  One of o3’s latest capabilities…

• Putting all my tax-related stuff into a Project. As you work on a big task like this, you risk losing track of related chats. I put everything in a ChatGPT Project, which was helpful throughout the process. And I expect it will be very useful next year when I inevitably ask, "Wait, why am I NOT writing off my Spotify subscription as a business expense?" ChatGPT will remember that my rationale of "it keeps me productive" wasn't quite defensible enough, and that I actually agreed with that assessment.

DISCLAIMER: I still verify every output before applying anything—this is taxes, after all. But verifying information is significantly faster than starting from scratch.

Obviously, using ChatGPT for taxes requires extreme caution. I'm comfortable with this approach because my business is small, I have excellent accounting software, and I have access to professional support when needed. ChatGPT occasionally suggested questionable bookkeeping approaches that could have caused problems. For anything beyond straightforward questions, scrutinize the answers carefully and consult a professional when in doubt. I take absolutely no responsibility if you mess up.

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More stuff I’ve used AI for recently:

• Travel scheduling on the go

• How I use AI on my phone

• Why and how you should use o3 every day

• Running my one-person business with AI: part 1, part 2

• Meta Ads campaign with Claude and analysing & optimising the campaign

• Market sizing with Deep Research

• GPT-4o for graphic design

PS these articles are not prompts, tutorials nor workflows. They're writing meant to inspire a mindset of augmenting yourself with AI. The former will become outdated quickly, which is why I want you to see how I think when approaching a problem using AI—how to reflect on what you're trying to achieve and then let it help you—because that's the real unlock.

VERY IMPORTANT AI TRAINING

After my intense two-day accounting sprint, I'm sharing the playlist that kept me sane.

Trust me, nothing pairs better with tax forms than Todd Terje grooves and a touch of Radiohead existentialism.

Scientifically proven by my Auditory Research Division to increase both AI productivity and tax compliance by 57%.

Listen to whatplugin FM here

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