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 credits¹⁴⁴ 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 Codex⁷⁹, 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 AWS⁹⁹, launched a new feature called Company Knowledge³⁶⁹ and opened a private beta for AardVark¹¹⁷, 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 transcript⁴¹².

Udio⁷⁸, the music generation tool, has disabled downloads for users. It seems like a part of the deal to settle its lawsuit⁴³ with Universal Music Group. UMG is also partnering with Stability AI for licensing deals³⁴. ps: you might’ve already seen AI music on YouTube, but it’s also on the Billboard charts now¹⁹⁷.

NotebookLM²⁵⁵ shipped some quality upgrades last week²⁵⁵. 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 users⁵⁶ 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 eBook¹⁰⁷.*

🌐 What I’m consuming

• What if you don’t need MCP⁷⁴⁰ at all?

• The end of cloud inference²⁶⁹ - everyday intelligence will live on the device you already own.

• The secrets of Claude Code⁵¹⁴ from the engineers who built it.

• Did Codex really get worse¹⁷⁴ over the last few weeks?

• Inside the data centres that train A.I. and drain the electrical grid.¹⁵¹

• How we built OWL¹⁴⁹, the new architecture behind ChatGPT’s browser Atlas.

• Quick recap on where we are with agents.⁴⁹²

• Al Engineering 101 with Chip Huyen⁴⁴⁴ - Have fun while building AI products as a company. (TLDR⁴⁴⁴)

YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=qbvY0dQgSJ4⁴⁴⁴

⚙️ Tools and demos

• NewsBang - Your Smart News Partner¹⁹⁹. AI insights, tailored deep dives, and early indicators that move markets and policy.*

• Firecrawl 2.5¹³⁴ - Comprehensive web data API for your AI products.

• Perplexity Patents¹⁶⁰ - AI-powered patent search for everyone.

• Narrative²³⁸ - Cursor for professional video editors.

• Devin¹⁶⁴ can now control a computer and create screen recordings for review.

• Conductor¹⁴³, an app to run multiple Claude Code agents, now also supports Codex.

• Web Capture in MagicPath¹⁵⁷ - Copy any functional web element from any website, import it into a canvas and edit it—visually or with AI.

🥣 Dev dish

• Agent mail MCP¹³⁷ - Gmail for your coding agents.

• LLMTEXT.com⁹⁰ - Turn any llms.txt into a dedicated MCP server.

• Gemini Docs MCP server⁵⁴ - local stdio server for searching and retrieving Google Gemini API docs.

💰 Who got that bag?

• Applied Compute⁴⁴ has $80M in funding, focusing on making specialised models with company data for enterprises.

• Figma has acquired Weavy AI¹⁰⁸ and is turning it into a new product, Figma Weave. Weavy is less than a year old and launched just four months ago⁹⁴. 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 summit⁵² on 7-8 Nov. Ben’s Bites readers get 20% off with code BENSBITES20²⁸.*

• Gemma models are no longer available⁸¹ 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 Siri⁶⁴, with expectations to get it live next March.

• Design Arena has a new approach to ranking models called Micro Evals⁵⁰. Here’s the leaderboard⁷⁵.

That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋

• Find me on X²⁶, Linkedin²⁷, or Instagram²¹

• Read about me³⁰ and Ben’s Bites

• 📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth³¹,

Thanks to today’s sponsors who made this newsletter possible :)

Cerbos, NewsBang, and Ai Summit.

Wanna partner with us²⁶? Last few slots left for the rest of the year.