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.¹¹⁵

So, what do we have from the past weekend…

xAI has a new model - Grok 4 Fast¹²⁸, 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 Chrome¹⁴⁴ 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 agents²¹⁴ (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 here¹⁴⁶ to watch the virtual launch, which features live product demos, performance results, and new personalisations.*

• Launch day lies¹⁰⁴—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 feature¹³⁸ with Droid - Factory’s CLI tool.

• Why we built the Responses API²¹³. Worth reading if you’re still using the old completions API from OpenAI.

• From managing people to managing AI³⁰⁷ with Julie Zhuo.

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⚙️ Tools and demos

• Orchids^358† - A full-stack engineer with state of the art UI capabilities.

• X CRM¹⁸⁰ - Get a list of people you follow on Twitter in a CRM like table and add notes using MCP.

• Ray 3 by Luma Labs¹²⁴ - HDR video generation with draft mode and annotation support.

• MagicPath Libraries²²⁸ - A living doc that AI uses to design in your style, always synced with code.

• Research a Person on Happenstance⁴³² - Build a detailed profile about anyone.

• Howie^410† - Your personal secretary for managing your calendar like a world-class EA. ($6M seed raised)

• Ambient⁴⁶¹ - A daily briefing for CEOs who want to move fast.

• Perplexity Email Assistant³⁷⁴ - Personal assistant for scheduling meetings, prioritising emails, and drafting replies for you.

🥣 Dev dish

• tldraw SDK 4.0¹⁸⁰ - build infinite canvas apps for the web.

• Vercel Agent¹²⁴ for code reviews is now in public beta with $100 in free credits.

• LLM gateway²⁰⁵ - Use any model, from any provider, with just one API (open source).

• step.run by Inngest^100† - Just wrap any REST API with step.run to add durability, automatic retries, and observability.

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💎 Underrated gems

1. Moondream 3 is a small vision model²²² - 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.

2. Scale AI has built a new programming benchmark: SWE-Bench Pro⁵⁰. 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 II¹⁴¹ for backing generalist pre-seed AI ideas with ~$250k checks.

• ElevenLabs⁸³ is now valued at $6.6B in their latest employee tender offer.

• Nvidia will invest $100B in OpenAI⁵⁷ 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. 👋

• Find me on X³², Linkedin³³, or Instagram³⁰

• Read about me³¹ and ben’s bites

📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth⁴¹