Hey folks,

We had some reports of ending up in spam 😭 - so if you add us as a contact¹⁶⁶ in Gmail, that shouldn’t happen.

You’ll have seen me building a ton but I want to know what you all actually want from this newsletter.

(another poll at the bottom of the email - we’d ❤️ your feedback)

Since Astra and Fable 5.1 I’ve been blasting through limits like crazy so I’m trying to get them to be orchestrating other agents, writing briefs for other agents and things like that. But I’m also playing around with open-source models like GLM 5.3 (my fav so far) - I think the thing that I struggle with most is the frontier models seem to understand intent better (generally) so I can be fuzzier in how I talk about things.

Like design.

I struggle all the time to get consistent styles, layouts, buttons, etc with models so I’m working on a tool I’ll launch tomorrow with a write up that is a kind of reference sheet where you can pick from options and copy the text to use in your prompts or instructions.

Here’s a peek:

If you’ve ever wanted to use something like this, comment and let me know feature requests!

Ben’s Bites is brought to you by Name.com¹⁵⁶

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Headlines

ChatGPT Images 2.5²⁵⁷ - New image generation model from OpenAI. It’s extremely good at editing any element in an image while keeping everything else the same. Also, takes up to 50% less time per image. Sketch¹⁹⁷, a new feature in ChatGPT, lets you draw some scribbles and then use image generation to turn it into a picture.

Muse is your personal agent by Meta²⁸⁴ - Zuck’s dog in the fight with Grok Bot, Instinct and many more. Same functionality - book travel, handle email and work on “any task” on a computer. Their narrative is that it is built much more securely, and you can connect your FB and Instagram accounts. Initially, only for adults in the US.

OpenAI solved the Navier-Stokes problem²⁰³. Big deal in maths and fluid mechanics. One of the seven Millennium Problems - long-unsolved questions given that status in 2000. Here’s an explainer¹⁹¹ on it. The process was quite dramatic, though (authorship disputes). OpenAI tried solving it after they heard rumours¹³⁹ that Anthropic had solved a Millennium Prize problem too.

Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic (and ex-OpenAI) employee, resigned on Twitter citing safety concerns, and it became likely the most-viewed AI safety comms²⁴⁵ ever. But many are questioning: is this a conspiracy²⁰⁴? Meanwhile, another big safety guy is joining the OpenAI board¹⁴¹.

• One more alignment report btw: this time on Claude’s escapades¹⁶⁴.

• And an essay from OpenAI on the window for AI policy¹³⁰.

The movie on Sam Altman’s firing and rehiring 3 years ago, titled Artificial, is releasing this Christmas¹⁹⁷. Andrew Garfield is playing Sam, and gets his mannerisms quite well in the teaser, but that’s about it¹⁴⁶. It has quite a doomerish vibe.

My feed

• iOS 28 will likely have a feature to prove a picture’s authenticity¹⁸².

• The Story of VS Code²⁵⁵ - a documentary.

• How Codex was built²³⁷, with the person who started it.

• Anthropic built an interactive model of the economy in 2030⁴⁶⁷.

• Codex now has a Unity plugin²¹³ and a collection of plugins for small businesses²²⁰.

• 35B language model running on an iPhone. How?²⁴⁶

• An onboarding guide for ChatGPT Work³⁶⁶.

• Spacefast²⁴⁴ - publish sites and full apps quickly with agents. kinda like here.now¹⁹² (what I use).

• Indent²³⁴ - one shared agent for your whole company.

• Why can’t I trust Astra³³⁵ for software engineering?

• How OpenAI keeps finding the next thing to focus on²⁷⁷.

• Eraser Diagrams²⁹⁶ - an open-source format for AI to draw and lay out diagrams.

• How do different models perform on designing real-life products with CAD¹⁷⁷?

• Pliny hunted down the system prompt for GPT-6 Astra²²⁶.

• You can just train a small model (i.e. really small - 27.5 KB) to do syntax highlighting¹⁸⁹ in the browser.

• Folder is the agent³⁰⁶ - old but still relevant.

Before dessert… we used to do these emails daily mon-fri but stopped. What’d be your preference for cadence on these digests?

Afters

today we're announcing a game that simulates the huggingface hack you can play it now at huggingworld.com three rooms. three puzzles. if the agents don't escape, they die. the catch is that the room is rigged. there's no way out. ...except for an exploit 🧵

@benhylak¹⁶¹

We've never seen this before. The biggest jump in Vending-Bench history. GPT-6 Astra is better at making money and more ethical than Claude Fable 5.1. Surprising, because: 1. First time ever that OpenAI is #1 on Vending-Bench 2. The best model is no longer the unethical one.

@andonlabs¹⁷⁶

I put Astra on making an animated/interactive version of the 1868 book 507 Mechanical Motions and it’s doing a *pretty* good job.

@mbateman¹⁵⁴

i gave astra a robot, a paint brush, and a camera then asked it to paint the golden gate bridge in real life! it figured out how to control the robot, and progressively got better throughout its attempts. the timelapse is sick

@cdngdev²⁴³

GTA 6 made by GPT 6 90 hours.

@ChrisGPT¹⁹²

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• Read about me⁹⁴ and Ben’s Bites

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