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, Happy Thanksgiving to those celebrating! Light edition today…

Classic move from OpenAI - dropping a data breach disclosure at 10pm the night before Turkey day. Brilliant PR timing.

OpenAI disclosed a Mixpanel security incident²⁹⁴ that exposed API user data - names, emails, user IDs, and location info. No ChatGPT data or API keys were compromised. OpenAI has terminated its Mixpanel use entirely (no shit!).

Meanwhile, OpenAI needs to raise at least $207 billion by 2030¹⁷⁶ [paywalled] to keep the lights on, according to HSBC. This is after their commitments to Oracle ($300B), Microsoft ($250B), and AWS ($38B) for cloud services. The FT called OpenAI “a money pit with a website on top.” 🫠

Anthropic dropped two bangers this week. First, Effective harnesses for long-running agents⁵¹³ - a deep dive into how they get Claude to work across multiple context windows without losing the plot. The key insight: use an initializer agent to set up the environment, then a coding agent that makes incremental progress and leaves clean artifacts for the next session. They built a Claude.ai clone this way.

[But Factory’s¹⁰ harness is better]

Second, Estimating AI productivity gains¹⁸⁷ - they analyzed 100K real Claude conversations and found AI reduces task completion time by ~80%. Extrapolating this, they estimate current AI could increase US labor productivity by 1.8% annually over the next decade - roughly doubling recent growth rates. The caveat: this doesn’t account for time humans spend validating outputs outside the chat window.

A little update from my portfolio:

San Francisco Compute¹³¹ - raised $40M at a $300M valuation - marketplace for AI computing capacity. (I’m an early investor) + they’re hiring¹⁴²

Plus some other investments have been on a tear recently;

• Gamma @ $2.5bn valuation - I invested as an a16z scout, they led the latest round.

• Supabase @ $5bn

• Scribe @ $1.3bn

My 2020/2021 fund is now over 4x / 36% IRR

Ben’s Bites Fund I is 2x / 39% IRR (2023-2025)

Ben’s Bites Fund II did its first close, and is still open to new LPs. Get in touch if you’re interested.

Here’s a few YC companies I’m looking at:

• Sourcebot¹¹⁵ - Self-hosted code search and AI Q&A for your entire codebase.

• Metorial¹⁵³ - Serverless MCP hosting with 600+ integrations. Deploy MCP servers in 3 clicks, instant observability.

• SF-Tensor⁵⁴ - Cross-cloud GPU orchestration that finds the cheapest hardware and auto-optimizes your training kernels.

• S2.dev¹⁰¹ - Serverless durable streams API. Like if Kafka and S3 had a baby - unlimited, real-time, bottomless storage.

• Hyperspell¹⁵² - Context and memory layer for AI agents.

• Crunched³⁶⁴ - AI analyst that works natively inside Excel.

🌐 What I’m consuming

• Ilya Sutskever – We’re moving from the age of scaling to the age of research⁴⁵⁹

• Jailbreaking Opus 4.5²⁸⁷

• I don’t care how well your “AI” works⁵²⁹ - a rant about AI product fatigue.

• High School Dropout to OpenAI Researcher³²⁰

⚙️ Tools and demos

• AskCodi¹³⁴ - Custom LLMs without training, accessible via OpenAI-compatible API

• Flux 2¹¹⁵ - image generation & editing model. Multi-reference. 4MP. Production-ready. Open weights.

• Gemini CLI Tips & Tricks ²²⁵

• Penpot¹⁷² - The open-source design tool for design and code collaboration (open-source Figma)

🥣 Dev dish

• Era¹²⁹ - Open-source local sandbox for AI agents. Run agents safely without cloud dependencies.

• Rubberduck⁸⁸ - Catch App Store rejection issues before Apple does

• Prime Intellect launched INTELLECT-3³⁰: Scaling RL to a 100B+ MoE model on our end-to-end stack

🍦 Afters

• Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus quietly acquired General Agents¹⁶³, an agentic AI startup founded by ex-DeepMind and OpenAI researchers. Their agent “Ace” can autonomously control computers and perform complex tasks. Project Prometheus has raised $6.2B and now has 100+ employees, all focused on AI for manufacturing - computers, cars, spacecraft. Bezos is back in operator mode.

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

• Find me on X³⁰, Linkedin³⁰, or Instagram²⁵

• Read about me²⁶ and Ben’s Bites

• 📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth²¹,

Wanna partner with us¹⁷? Last few slots left for the rest of the year.