Group chats with AI
an extra dime for GPT and Grok
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,
While we’re all waiting for Gemini 3 (probably out when some of you are reading this 👀) , Grok 4.1 is out. It’s on top of LM Arena, has good creative writing and comes in two variants - thinking and non-thinking. There are no other “performance” benchmarks, but the model safety card mentions that Grok 4.1 has much higher levels of sycophancy (i.e. agreeing with the user) and deception than Grok 4. I tried some basic prompts, and it looks like a decent model, but I don’t feel like I’m getting something special to even consider using it regularly. (Like every Grok model tbh)
OpenAI made GPT-5.1 available in the API and shared some evals for it. On vibes, I’m seeing reports of the model being “extra eager”, similar to Claude Sonnet 3.7.
OpenAI is also piloting a group chat feature in ChatGPT in 4 countries: Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan. Poe, the AI chatbot from Quora, released the same feature with groups up to 200 members, including humans and multiple models.
Anthropic says it stopped a large-scale AI cyberattack (originating from China), open-sourced their eval for political bias, and launched a learning companion with the Govt. of Rwanda. Oh, and the Claude Code team released a pre-built plugin to make it better at frontend design.
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Inside Factory
Our CLI now supports all Skills - you can import from claude code, plugin support coming this week 😊
We support Hooks (which I’ve been experimenting with) too
We have 5.1, 5.1 Codex, and some of the newest models (with SOTA scores) coming out VERY soon
We’re building a new web product we’re excited to share soon for early access
We launched a $2k/mo plan, which isn’t as nuts as you’d expect - its actually a KILLER deal for small teams, and I can tell you that people have already signed up to it (one guys’s a solo dev!)
Want to be more technical? Come join the Factory Discord
🌐 What I’m consuming
The rise of Gamma from “dumbest idea I’ve heard” to $100M ARR. (Luckily, I didn’t think it was a dumb idea and wrote a check in 2022 as a a16z scout - who led their last round)
How we made sandboxed coding agents 10x faster to start.
The state of Chinese LLMs - supposedly frontier performance, supposedly huge shadow adoption, all under massive compute constraints.
How three YC startups built their companies with Claude Code.
Benchmarks should focus on agentic work and brittleness, and why this new one isn’t a good measure for hallucination.
⚙️ Tools and demos
Voice agents fail in noisy, multi-speaker environments. Speechmatics voice API doesn’t. Build with $200 free credits 👈*
ElevenLabs Image & Video - Generate visual content with the best models (like Veo, Sora and more, then add voices and sound effects in one place.
NotebookLM also has a Deep Research mode now, with support to bring your own sources.
React Grab - Select elements and edit with Cursor/Claude Code.
Researchoor - AI-powered social listicle builder.
Typeless - Convert spoken voice into polished writing.
🥣 Dev dish
git-worktree-runner by CodeRabbit - A CLI tool for managing git worktrees with ease.
ai-sdk-tools/ocr - Extract structured data from invoices & receipts with one line of code.
browser-tools - A tiny script that can do most of what chrome-devtools MCP can.
Oracle - bundle a prompt plus the right files and hand them to GPT-5 Pro when you’re stuck.
🧙 AI experts you can hire
ICYMI, we built a platform to hire the best AI experts for your projects. Here are a few of them:
If you’re a company needing AI projects built, you can post jobs and connect with the right people. We’ll be trialling a personalised matching service soon too.
🍦 Afters
Cloudflare has acquired Replicate, which gives developers an easy API to build on top of open-weights models (primarily media generation).
SIMA 2 from Google - Agent that plays, reasons, and learns with you in virtual 3D worlds.
Jeff Bezos is starting a new “AI for manufacturing” company with $6.2B of funding and himself as co-CEO.
OpenAI is allowing employees to donate equity to charity.
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 :)
Attio and Speechmatics.
Wanna partner with us? Last few slots left for the rest of the year.
cloudfare down for those going to replicate acqucatiom
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