The newsletter for the technically curious. Updates, tool reviews, and lay of the land from an exited founder turned investor and forever tinkerer.
Hey folks,
You can now buy credits on top of your ChatGPT plan to keep using Codex or Sora. You get 1000 credits for $40, and they have a shelf life of 12 months. For Codex, you can expect double the oomph from your Plus plan, but usage on Sora is complicated.
OpenAI has also signed a $38 billion agreement with AWS, launched a new feature called Company Knowledge and opened a private beta for AardVark, an agent that finds and fixes security bugs.
Also, Ilya Sutskever gave his testimony for the Musk vs Altman case last month, and it was made public recently. Ilya wrote a 52-page memo to the OpenAI board to dismiss Sam, thought of it for a year, and really didn’t wanna merge with Anthropic. Here’s the full transcript.
Udio, the music generation tool, has disabled downloads for users. It seems like a part of the deal to settle its lawsuit with Universal Music Group. UMG is also partnering with Stability AI for licensing deals. ps: you might’ve already seen AI music on YouTube, but it’s also on the Billboard charts now.
NotebookLM shipped some quality upgrades last week. It now uses the full 1M context of Gemini models, allowing 8x longer context window for documents and 6x longer chats. Plus, you can now give each notebook a goal like studying or research, or marketing assistant to tailor its responses. Also, Sundar Pichai shared that Gemini has over 650M monthly users now.
MCP servers create a security risk traditional controls weren’t built for. The cost? AI breaches average $4.5M. Without fine-grained authorization, they’re a centralized governance failure waiting to happen. Get the Zero Trust architecture blueprint that secures MCP properly. Download the free eBook.*
🌐 What I’m consuming
What if you don’t need MCP at all?
The end of cloud inference - everyday intelligence will live on the device you already own.
The secrets of Claude Code from the engineers who built it.
Did Codex really get worse over the last few weeks?
Inside the data centres that train A.I. and drain the electrical grid.
How we built OWL, the new architecture behind ChatGPT’s browser Atlas.
Quick recap on where we are with agents.
Al Engineering 101 with Chip Huyen - Have fun while building AI products as a company. (TLDR)
⚙️ Tools and demos
NewsBang - Your Smart News Partner. AI insights, tailored deep dives, and early indicators that move markets and policy.*
Firecrawl 2.5 - Comprehensive web data API for your AI products.
Perplexity Patents - AI-powered patent search for everyone.
Narrative - Cursor for professional video editors.
Devin can now control a computer and create screen recordings for review.
Conductor, an app to run multiple Claude Code agents, now also supports Codex.
Web Capture in MagicPath - Copy any functional web element from any website, import it into a canvas and edit it—visually or with AI.
🥣 Dev dish
Agent mail MCP - Gmail for your coding agents.
LLMTEXT.com - Turn any llms.txt into a dedicated MCP server.
Gemini Docs MCP server - local stdio server for searching and retrieving Google Gemini API docs.
💰 Who got that bag?
Applied Compute has $80M in funding, focusing on making specialised models with company data for enterprises.
Figma has acquired Weavy AI and is turning it into a new product, Figma Weave. Weavy is less than a year old and launched just four months ago. Its core product was the ability to make creative workflows by chaining multiple models for image gen, caption writers, animation/video gen, etc.
🍦 Afters
Learn how real AI applications are impacting education, marketing & startups at TechEquity’s Ai summit on 7-8 Nov. Ben’s Bites readers get 20% off with code BENSBITES20.*
Gemma models are no longer available in AI Studio (because someone used them to generate factually incorrect content about a US Senator).
Apple is reportedly working with Google to build a special Gemini model to power Siri, with expectations to get it live next March.
Design Arena has a new approach to ranking models called Micro Evals. Here’s the leaderboard.
That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋
Read about me and Ben’s Bites
📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth,
Thanks to today’s sponsors who made this newsletter possible :)
Cerbos, NewsBang, and Ai Summit.
Wanna partner with us? Last few slots left for the rest of the year.