Cowork’s New Home: Ben’s Bites

Hello everyone,

This week has been a bit quieter on the building front for me 😬; hand, foot, and mouth disease has made its way back into our household (a yearly occurrence with three little ones!). I’ve also been preparing for my talk at Stanford on the 28th—it’s exciting to be invited back!

While I’m in San Francisco that week, I’ll be joining the OpenAI Dev Day on the 29th to learn about what new features they might have planned. I suspect there will be some announcements today, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they roll out a personal agent soon, but that’s just my speculation.

For my upcoming Stanford talk, I’ve revisited the manual and course materials I struggled with for months. Thanks to my posts on Fridays, I now feel a lot more confident about the presentation. This time, I’ve created lessons I’m genuinely pleased with, which is a considerable improvement over my past attempts.

I’ll do my best to put together a post for tomorrow, but that will depend on how my schedule works out with the kids.

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Claude Cowork is merging with Claude Chat. You won’t have a separate tab for larger tasks anymore. All your connected apps, skills, and context will now be available seamlessly in a typical Claude.ai chat. Plus, it can keep functioning after you close your laptop. OpenAI is likely to follow suit soon, combining ChatGPT and ChatGPT Work.

In related news, Claude Artifacts is launching dedicated products for Docs and Slides, with Claude Design also moving into conversational formats. Is Anthropic attempting to take over G Suite and Office?

Claude Code is in the news regarding its latest experiment, which has been named Claude Mods. These mods alter how Claude Code behaves and appears, allowing you to ask Claude to generate these mods tailored to your workflow (while Claude executes, naturally).

The Gemini API has introduced two new Live models: 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking. These models handle video and audio inputs and produce audio outputs, making them ideal for real-time assistance scenarios. I tested these out in AI Studio for a brief while, and they performed without any issues. Compared to GPT-Live 1, 3.8 Live offers 7x the cost efficiency.

Introducing Jev: a new LLM killer model. Developed by TypeSafe AI, whose founder co-created ChatGPT, Jev doesn’t generate text in the same way as LLMs do. Instead, it calculates probabilities for potential answers. This is perfect for software that requires rapid decisions, such as determining the next API call, routing requests, or operating a trading bot, with inputs being 5x cheaper compared to 5.6 Luna and free output tokens with performance on par with 5.6 Terra for relevant tasks.

Union Alpha is a new stealth model accessible through OpenRouter, Cloudflare, and other providers. It reportedly outperforms 5.6 Sol on the DeepSWE benchmark at the cost of 5.6 Luna. There are rumors it could be a router, a GPT-6 variant (perhaps GPT-6 Luna??), or another GLM model (GLM-5.3-Flash was launched similarly). I had a positive initial interaction with it; it communicated well but later exposed all my api keys, and I’ve been encountering ‘provider errors’ since due to its overload.

Meta One is a new subscription service from Meta that includes additional AI features and tools across Muse, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

Factory has secured $200M at a valuation of $5B. To celebrate, I also updated my plugin for using Droid within the bb app. Whenever I need to create something ‘properly’—meaning I care about it being well-designed—I use Droid extensively. Recently, I’ve been using the open-source Droid Core models, as they are quick and perform comparably to frontier models in many cases.

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