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,

GPT-5.1 is out⁹⁸—only in ChatGPT for now, API access is coming soon. We get two new models: GPT-5.1-Thinking and GPT-5.1-Instant (which can also think if needed, but just a little). The focus is on two things: vibes and safety, not smartness. OpenAI claims it has better vibes than 4o when chatting, and it’s safer than GPT-5. ChatGPT is also getting new default personalities that you can pick from. Here’s how they all respond⁶⁵⁰ to the same question¹⁷⁹.

This year, we have seen a bunch of research previews that generate navigational environments from images/prompts. Marble by World Labs²⁵² is another one on the list. It’s not interactive like some others, but it’s available to use as a product, and I’m really impressed by the quality.

Realistic video was one of the key trends in 2025 (a noticable improvement from 2024’s “still looks weird/fake” videos). We’ll see a lot of these realistic/interactive worlds next year with likely a lot more interest in VR headsets—Samsung just launched one couple weeks ago, Steam is also launching one for games next year.

- Keshav

ElevenLabs has a new speech-to-text model - Scribe v2¹⁶⁴. It’s better than Gemini 2.5 Flash in accuracy and latency. They also released an option to license Iconic Voices⁴⁹ (like Dr Maya Angelou and Sir Michael Caine). ElevenLabs is one of the few companies in the AI x Creatives space that’s not alienating the existing talent in their business.

Anthropic is also building data centres⁴⁵ now with a $50B investement, starting from Texas and New York. In the meantime, they are letting software engineers (who know nothing about robotics) teach robot dogs to play fetch¹⁰⁴.

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🌐 What I’m consuming

• Satya Nadella answers hard questions³⁶⁸ from Dwarkesh and Dylan Patel.

• AI adopters produced 39% more code merges¹⁹⁷, with no sign of a decrease in quality.

• AI glossary⁶¹⁰ - Simple definitions for key AI terms with visualisations.

• How to improve Claude’s frontend design⁴²⁰ outputs using Skills.

• Building a Character AI clone³⁵² with Google AI Studio in 50 minutes.

• Multi-agent systems can handle more complex tasks, but are they worth navigating dozens of moving parts and infra costs that add up fast? Yep, if you’ve got a guide to follow. The team at Galileo has compiled just that, proven tips to simplify the process, and they’re giving it away for free.⁵¹²*

⁵¹²

⚙️ Tools and demos

• CData Connect AI⁹⁶ – Connect any of your data sources to AI for real-time enterprise data connectivity with MCP to make AI work for you.*

• Deep Research in Gemini¹⁰⁷ now connects to your workspace account, letting you give it access to your Gmail, Drive and more. Both Google Ads & Google Analytics⁵⁸ are getting an AI advisor. Plus, Gemini Live⁴⁷ can now speak faster or use accents.

• Scribe Optimize¹⁶⁷ - See how work happens in your organisation, identify bottlenecks and get real steps to improve each workflow.

• Product Intelligence by Pylon⁹⁶ - Turn your customer feedback into a product strategy

• Delphi³⁰² - Create a digital version of you, just by being interviewed.

• LM Arena has a new Code Arena⁸⁰ to test how models plan, scaffold, debug, and build real web apps step-by-step. Try it here⁵⁶ or check out the leaderboard:

🥣 Dev dish

• A deep research demo¹⁵⁶ using Claude Agents SDK.

• pi⁹⁹ - A radically simple and opinionated coding agent with multi-model support. (disclaimer⁷⁴)

• captions.events^85† - An open-source template for broadcasting real-time transcripts.

• SWE-fficiency^46† - A new eval with 498 optimisation tasks to test if AI models can speed up real GitHub repos on real workloads.

💰 Who got that bag?

• Parallel AI¹⁴⁹ (the web search company by ex-Twitter CEO) raised a $100M series A.

• Wisdom AI¹³⁸ has raised a $50M Series A funding for its AI data analyst.

• Tavus has raised $40M⁵⁴ Series B for making PALS⁶⁰.

🍦 Afters

• NYT might still get their hands on 20M random ChatGPT chats¹⁷².

• Meta released an ASR model that covers 1600 languages⁶³ and an Ads recommendation model⁴⁹ inspired by LLM-scale techniques.

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

• Find me on X²³, Linkedin²³, or Instagram¹⁷

• Read about me²⁴ and Ben’s Bites

• 📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth¹⁵,

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

Airia, Galelio and Cdata.

Wanna partner with us¹⁶? Last few slots left for the rest of the year.