BB Digest: Floods from a Stargate

Digest #526 → Subscribe | Upgrade to Pro

Hey folks, quick question for you…

TLDR; inside today’s newsletter

• $500B for AI, Google x Samsung and a peek at Anthropic’s plans

• new content from us: enhance your writing process, LLM search and growth hacks

• Meetups we’re planning 👀 - let us know which city you’re in!

• A summary of community conversations (& app launches) this week

• 8 new AI tools including Zapier Agents and Perplexity’s API

• a new course from Anthropic, govt. AI projects and a couple interesting reads

Alright, let’s get to it!

 🔎 Trends & news

• Trump announced OpenAI’s Stargate project - Together with SoftBank, Oracle and Microsoft, they are planning to invest $500B (yes, half a trillion $$) to build infrastructure for AI. Elon says they don’t have the money but the first data centre is already being built. (more details)

• Gemini on Android can now use multiple extensions simultaneously and access more apps on your phone. Files access to Gemini live and the first iteration of Project Astra are soon, starting with Samsung s25 series. It also has two new models at #1 on LMSYS’s leaderboards - a new thinking model (o3-mini like benchmarks, 1M context length and tools use) and text to image with Imagen 3.

• Anthropic’s CEO gave us some feature updates - access to web (soon), voice output (eventually, not soon), image generation (not focusing on it rn), memory and Google is investing another $1B.

• Conveyor launched the first AI Agent for Customer Trust. Go beyond just sharing NDA-gated documents (like SOC 2) with customers or answering security questionnaires: it can execute every communications or coordination task in between. Perfect for B2B infosec teams sick of manual work. Learn more.*

• btw, the rumours are OpenAI’s computer using agent “Operator” is set to launch this week.
  *sponsored

👀 ICYMI: New stuff we’ve launched

• Putting your thoughts in writing for others to read is hard (ask me about it). Our latest tutorial helps you go from freeform thinking to clear writing with constructive feedback from AI along the way.

• LLMs don’t store the data they are trained but Search is a big area of focus for all LLM companies. We put together five ways you can use LLMs to search for information.

• AI is great for running playbooks that you know work but were just too time consuming/expensive for you before. From reactivating customers to creating viral clips, here are 5 growth hacks made easier with AI.

💬 Inside the community this week

• Chris shared an article about replacing a product team with AI sparking a discussion about the effectiveness of AI in software development and its limitations. (link)

• Justin shared the first app he built - A plywood cutting visualizer. (link)

• Matt asked about creating an LLM from consulting work. (link)

• Este made an app to help navigate LA properties during the clean up. (link)

• Ann asked about tools for creating photo-real videos. Suggestions included using Midjourney with Canva and Krea. (link)

• Matt asked about AI tools for sentiment analysis in sports. Suggestions included using browser extensions, Google Alerts, xAI API, and SerpApi. (link)

• Zara shared her thoughts on AI coding tools . (link)

• Jamie built an ‘emojify your sentence’ app (which I think is 🔥 ) (link)

• Mike shared an app he built to help manage Google Ads with a multi-lingual AI Assistant. (link)

• Nicholas shipped some text-based adventure games. (link)

• An interesting thread from several members on how they built their own web scrapers. (link)

• Mike asked the best way to train a bot on 500 podcast transcripts. (link)

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

⚙️ Top new tools

• Websim AI now supports multi-file projects with same speed of creation.*

• Spell by Spline - A model to generate 3D worlds, in early access now.

• Zapier Agents - Automate work across your apps without any coding.

• Shortwave v3 - AI email assistant that can reason about how to organize your inbox.

• Sonar by Perplexity - API offering that combines search and LLMs.

• Postman AI Agent Builder - Discover, test, and integrate APIs and LLMs to accelerate agent development.

• HAL leaderboard - The standardized, cost-aware, and third-party leaderboard for evaluating agents.

• Figma to Code to App - Turn your designs into functional full-stack applications with Lovable and Builder.

More tools here →
*i’m an investor

 📜 Interesting posts

• Anthropic and DeepLearning AI released a very short course (1.5 hrs) covering all the features in Anthropic’s API that are used to build the Computer Use mode for Claude. (Even if you’re non-technical I’d recommend just going through it to understand how frontier AI models & products work.)

• What would a world with AGI look like?

• Paul Schrader on AI: ‘Every film idea ChatGPT came up with was good’

• 26% of students ages 13-17 in survey are using ChatGPT for homework.

• Why AI progress is increasingly invisible.

• What are governments doing with AI?

  • India is launching an AI assistant for its vocational skills program with Meta and Sarvam AI.

  • UK is working on multiple AI projects for government efficiency.

  • Trump revoked Biden executive order on AI safety.

📌 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 next week. 👋

Ben