Base44, the vibe coding platform acquired by Wix for $80 million just one year ago, has started rolling out its own AI model to support users in creating apps with natural language. The move reflects growing concerns in AI circles about whether frontier models are best suited for all use cases and whether businesses built on third-party models are defensible long-term. Base44, based in the Bay Area, hopes its custom LLM will eventually outperform frontier models. According to its founder, Maor Shlomo, "training and owning the model as part of [our] entire stack allows us a lot more optimizations on latency, cost, and efficiency."
The company says the first iteration of its LLM, Base1, was developed and trained on a dataset generated from "tens of millions of real user interactions on the platform." This dataset will continue to grow, as will its rivals’. The bigger competition may not be vibe-coding startups at all but instead come from frontier AI labs that are getting closer to Base44’s home turf.
Jonathan Userovici, a general partner at VC firm Headline, noted that data is one of three key ingredients of defensibility for AI startups, alongside distribution and tech stack. He cautioned against underestimating frontier models, citing the example of the legal tech startup Harvey, which abandoned plans to train its own model. Userovici framed Base44’s move in a broader context, one in which inference costs have become a meaningful part of the equation.
Source: techcrunch
