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,

The Information reports Sam Altman declared “Code Red”⁴⁸⁰ inside OpenAI after Gemini 3’s success. Ads in ChatGPT will be delayed, with the same fate for products like Agents and Pulse. Personalisation, image generation and model behaviour will be the main focus. The report also claims that OpenAI will release a new reasoning model better than Gemini 3 next week.

DeepSeek’s new models, DeepSeek V3.2 base and Speciale⁶⁷, are impressive (and open) BUT not better than any of the other top models (GPT-5.1/Codex, Opus/Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 3). The Speciale version can get a gold medal in math olympiads, but it’s only good for proving theorems, it seems, and you can think of the base version as almost the same level as GPT-5 though you’ll see subpar results in both use cases: chat and coding.

FLUX models by Black Forest Labs were the original stable diffusion killer. With FLUX.2 family of image generation models¹⁴⁶, their next goal is Nano Banana and dozens of open models from China. FLUX.2 [dev] is the 32B open weights variant, better and 3x cheaper than the original Nano Banana (10x cheaper than Nano Banana Pro). BFL also raised a $300M Series B.⁴⁰

The leading video generation model swapped hands by a significant margin. Runway is the new leader with its latest Runway Gen 4.5 model²⁵², beating Google’s Veo 3. Kling, a close competitor, also released a new model, Kling O1⁶⁰, exclusively on Fal, so it’s not on the leaderboards yet.

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🌐 What I’m consuming

• The new alignment research blog³¹⁸ from OpenAI, live with its first⁵⁹ two⁴⁶ posts.

• On the consumption of AI-generated content⁴⁰⁵ at scale.

• Thoughts from building and shutting down a portable context layer²¹⁷ company.

• OpenAI’s lead under pressure¹⁷⁹ as rivals start to close the gap - FT

• Supermemory is state-of-the-art on LongMemEval¹⁷⁸ - a measure for reasoning, recollection and more across 100K+ tokens. (I’m an investor)

¹⁷⁸

⚙️ Tools and demos

• Concierge.ai²⁴⁹ - Engage & convert inbound website visitors into qualified leads with a custom AI answer engine trained on your brand & content.*

• Gemini Dynamic View - Paid users on Gemini can select this tool to get a visual one-pager website-like output on a certain topic. Here’s a sample⁶⁵³ of using it to catch up for Stranger Things S5.

• Duet²¹³ - Group ChatGPT for work (with MCP and a shared knowledge base).

• Rephrase²⁵⁹ - Fix grammar and format text instantly on Mac.

• Komposo¹⁸⁸ - Generate and edit designs, and export directly to code.

• Plok.sh¹⁴⁷ - Turn a GitHub repo into a blog. Not an AI tool, but this looks useful.

• TLDW⁴⁸¹ - Paste the link of an hour-long video and get the gist in 5-minute highlight reels.

⁴⁸¹

🥣 Dev dish

• osgrep¹⁴⁵ - open source, local semantic code search for Claude Code that works.

• WarpGrep by Morph⁷³ runs parallel tool calls as a context subagent to improve coding agent performance.

• Lux by OpenAGI⁶⁴ - Fast, cheap and better computer-use model in an SDK.

• vibeproxy¹⁵⁶ - Native macOS menu bar app to use your Claude/ChatGPT/Gemini subscriptions with AI coding tools.

🍦 Afters

• Valon is hiring Forward Deployed Engineers⁹⁷. $130K–$230K & equity, turning enterprise clients needs into code onsite. NYC/SF/Seattle + travel*

• Raindrop AI⁸⁷ (monitoring and A/B testing for AI apps) raised $15M seed.

• Telegram is operating a decentralised compute network⁶¹ for its AI features and making it open for others, too.

• OpenAI takes an ownership stake⁸⁶ in Thrive Holdings.

Thrive Holdings (initial round of $1B) acquires and holds legacy businesses like accounting & IT services and transforms them with AI/tech. OpenAI now has equity and will train models for tasks with company-specific data.

- from Sheel Mohnot’s tweet (@pitdesi²⁴)

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

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• Read about me²⁴ and Ben’s Bites

• 📷 thumbnail creds: @keshavatearth¹⁹,

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