BB Digest: Build apps with AI

Digest #528 → Subscribe | Upgrade to Pro

Hey folks, January is about to end and we’re still waiting for o3-mini (rumoured to launch today) and new Gemini models. All of them just keep waiting and then pile up the launches. No semblance of respect for my mental health 😩

We have a few upcoming workshops in February with text-to-app builders; Bolt, Replit, Create, Builder and a few more being confirmed. We’ll have them up on the site so you can register asap. (only available to pro community members)

If you are finally ready to start building projects with AI, now is the our time. We’re going to be gearing up for a ‘build month’ with a ton of resources, live sessions and discussions (in #build-apps channel).

To entice you further, use coupon “jan30offpro” for 30% off your first year of bb pro.

TLDR; inside today’s newsletter

• Microsoft made o1 free, Jack Dorsey’s AI agent and copyright rules

• Key points from Anthropic CEO’s essay

• a look at the chats in our community

• 5 new AI tools with Perplexity’s new integrations

• 5 posts on LinkedIn’s stance on AI bots and post-AGI world

• a word from Agree*

• to-do’s

Alright, let’s get to it!

 🔎 Trends & news

• Copilot’s Think Deeper mode (built with OpenAI’s o1) is now free for all users. Also, DeepSeek R1 is now on Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry and distilled flavours will soon come to Copilot+ PCs. They had to do something about the falling stock price, right?

• The US Copyright Office has a new 41-page report about AI. In short: using AI as part of your creative workflow doesn’t invalidate any resulting rights, but human authorship is still required.

• Jack Dorsey (of “bird” fame) just open-sourced Goose, an AI agent that can control your computer—aimed at dev tasks, but generalizable to more. I’m sniffing competition for OpenAI’s Operator.

• Improve team productivity by 20%+ with Mindstone's training for non-technical teams. Contextually relevant, real-world, practical examples that move the needle in their jobs today. Hybrid live demos and fully personalised self-serve for maximum impact. Companies/teams of 100+ people at a time.*

• OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Gov, a secure, locally hosted version of ChatGPT tailor-made for US government agencies. It’s basically an “Enterprise” style deployment that keeps data in-house.
  *sponsored

🗣️ Everyone’s talking about…

Dario Amodei’s new essay on Deepseek and chip export controls from the US. I am less interested in the latter part, but his explanation of Deepseek’s technical achievements is a must-read (and a hype check too). Here’s my go at the key points on the tech.

• DeepSeek V3 (the base model behind R1) came 7-10 months after US models and it cost less than US models. The cost reduction and performance increase, both are expected in this timeframe under the current landscape of the AI industry.

• A strong pre-trained model can be taught “reasoning” fairly easily. OpenAI o1 and Deepseek R1 are such reasoning models. The way this reasoning is taught (pure RL) seems scalable: more effort/compute → better reasoning. This is a breakthrough.

• This means we are going to spend much more, making these models wayyy smarter across many more fields (not just maths and coding) than we earlier could. Assuming we’d spend less and be satisfied with their current intelligence is a mistake.

Dario is sure that we will create AI models better than humans at all tasks. Even if that sounds ridiculous to you, the near-future trend is clear—there’s no wall in front of AI progress.

💬 Inside the community this week

Become pro to join us in building and learning together.

• The #build-apps channel is in full swing! We’ve got workshops lined up with Replit, Builder, Bolt and Create. (link)

• Robert's organizing a meetup in Bristol, UK (Feb 11th) to discuss AI tools for product-market fit. (link)

• Scott asked for tips to manage Claude's length limits. (link)

• Cam shared his “casual” way of using AI tools—speech in, text out. (link)

• Saurabh is looking for backend help with Next.js and Vapi’s API for a project. (link)

• Justin shared a workflow for planning and building apps using various AI tools. (link)

• Robert built a Slack summary tool following the steps in our blog (link)

Join the conversation, plus full access to courses and workshops by becoming a pro member today!

⚙️ Top new tools

• TLDR - Tech's most interesting news in just 5 minutes. No sports, politics, or weather and it's fun to read. Get it for free.*

• BulletPen - Helps turn your voice notes or rambles into polished writing.

• Real-Time by Fireflies AI - Capture notes and action items mid-call.

• Nowadays - Plan tailored company events with your custom preferences.

• Guse - Cursor for writing. Use AI to research, write, edit and share.

• Perplexity’s Enterprise plan now integrates with Crunchbase and Factset for deeper market research. The Pro plan also offers 500 queries to DeepSeek R1 without data privacy concerns.

More tools here →
*sponsored

 📜 Interesting posts

• LinkedIn banned two AI coworkers that were “open for work”. Only humans can spew nonsense on Linkedin.

• How to prepare for AGI according to Reid Hoffman.

• IBM’s AI consulting and software bookings crossed $5B in Q4 (up from $3B in Q3).

• No, I do not want AI to “polish” me. Agree with Jenny, the AI rewrite in Gmail (and any email tool tbh) sucks.

• I want my AI to get mad.

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📌 To-dos

1. Let us know if you have any tutorials or courses you want us to create—we’re always open to ideas.

That wraps things up for today! See you again on <day>. 👋

Ben