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, thank you so much for the support - I got a lot of messages and will get back to everyone. I’m hosting a Ben’s Bites x Factory meetup in SF on Oct 8th (after OpenAI Dev Day). RSVP here.
So, what do we have from the past weekend…
xAI has a new model - Grok 4 Fast, and this one looks impressive. Eyeballing the benchmarks, it’s roughly as smart as Gemini 2.5 Pro, but at the price of Flash. For prompts <128k tokens, Grok 4 Fast is priced $0.20/$0.50 for input/output with a massive context window of 2M tokens.
I’m genuinely excited to test replacing Gemini 2.5 Flash with Grok 4 Fast for my API use. I’ve never felt that way for Grok. - Keshav
ps: rumours are that Gemini 3.0 Pro and Claude 4.5 Sonnet are launching soon. Maybe this week.
Google Chrome is getting a boatload of AI features (US first). That includes:
A Gemini sidebar - The current iteration allows you to ask questions with the context of your current tab. Google is promising automatic browsing, a summary from multiple tabs, search over your browsing history, and more coming soon to this sidebar.
AI mode in the address bar - Trigger a Perplexity-like search experience instantly.
Native scam protections, blocking spam notifications and password safety using Gemini Nano.
Notion is going all in on agents (who isn’t?). Their latest iteration of Notion AI is a personal agent that can do everything you can do in Notion, like create databases, search across pages, and execute workflows. Soon you can have more than one—with the coming release of custom agents.
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🌐 What I’m consuming
Next-gen work AI Agents + Assistant functionality, unveiled at Glean:LIVE. Register here to watch the virtual launch, which features live product demos, performance results, and new personalisations.*
Launch day lies—day two tells the truth. Naveen (Monologue’s maker) talks about the drop-off after the initial excitement vs a product that people adopt as their daily driver.
6-minute video of adding a heatmap activity feature with Droid - Factory’s CLI tool.
Why we built the Responses API. Worth reading if you’re still using the old completions API from OpenAI.
From managing people to managing AI with Julie Zhuo.
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⚙️ Tools and demos
Orchids - A full-stack engineer with state of the art UI capabilities.
X CRM - Get a list of people you follow on Twitter in a CRM like table and add notes using MCP.
Ray 3 by Luma Labs - HDR video generation with draft mode and annotation support.
MagicPath Libraries - A living doc that AI uses to design in your style, always synced with code.
Research a Person on Happenstance - Build a detailed profile about anyone.
Howie - Your personal secretary for managing your calendar like a world-class EA. ($6M seed raised)
Ambient - A daily briefing for CEOs who want to move fast.
Perplexity Email Assistant - Personal assistant for scheduling meetings, prioritising emails, and drafting replies for you.
🥣 Dev dish
tldraw SDK 4.0 - build infinite canvas apps for the web.
Vercel Agent for code reviews is now in public beta with $100 in free credits.
LLM gateway - Use any model, from any provider, with just one API (open source).
step.run by Inngest - Just wrap any REST API with step.run to add durability, automatic retries, and observability.
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💎 Underrated gems
Moondream 3 is a small vision model - It is better than GPT-5/Gemini/Claude when it comes to identifying elements in an image – not just simply pinpointing things but complex queries that require reasoning. If you’re building a browser use tool that relies on screenshots, check this out. It might reduce your costs by a big factor while improving accuracy.
Scale AI has built a new programming benchmark: SWE-Bench Pro. The general trend for performance is roughly the same when compared to past benchmarks, but this one measures longer, more complex software engineering tasks with a collection of public and private repos
🍦 Afters
Yohei is launching his fund II for backing generalist pre-seed AI ideas with ~$250k checks.
ElevenLabs is now valued at $6.6B in their latest employee tender offer.
Nvidia will invest $100B in OpenAI progressively in the form of 10GW of AI datacenters. The first GW will come online in late 2026.
That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋
📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth
You mentioned that Chrome was getting an AI sidebar (US) first. Firefox has had the AI sidebar for some time now for the entire world.