NEW from X

Good morning, afternoon, or evening! Happy Friday-Eve. In today’s digest, I’m covering the latest models from Elon’s AI company, xAI. But first… 

The headlines: 

🎧 After a turbulent redesign, Sonos is considering relaunching its old app. 

💬 Telegram is adding new ways for users to make money on the platform.

🤖 Anthropic has launched a new feature that makes prompting AI easier.

X, the platform that was once Twitter, has just launched Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini, the latest AI models from xAI. These models bring enhanced reasoning abilities and, for the first time, allow users to generate images directly within X. 

According to xAI, Grok-2 marks a significant upgrade from the previous Grok-1.5 model. Both Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini have been tested on a wide range of academic benchmarks, covering areas like reasoning, reading comprehension, math, science, and coding. 

The results have shown Grok-2 to be competitive with other advanced models, excelling in fields such as graduate-level science knowledge (GPQA), general knowledge (MMLU), and math competitions (MATH). Grok-2 also stands out in vision-based tasks, delivering top-tier performance in visual math reasoning (MathVista) and document-based question answering (DocVQA).

The new image generation feature is already sparking interest, mainly for its lack of guardrails—browse the site for a few minutes, and you’ll find any number of wacky generations, usually involving a politician. According to xAI, Grok-2 uses FLUX 1, an AI model built by German-based Black Forest Labs, a company that recently raised $31 million from the likes of AI6Z.

Despite the model’s advancements, many early testers noted that Grok-2 still has room for improvement, particularly in areas like code generation and news summaries, which had caused issues with the first version of Grok.

Developers will soon have access to Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini via an enterprise API, which is expected to roll out later this month. For those eager to try it out, Grok-2 is available in beta for Premium users on X.

I covered GigaBrain in yesterday’s product highlight. It’s like Perplexity but for organizing and extracting information from Reddit. Let’s dive into its tech stack: 

Gusto is an all-in-one platform for HR, payroll, and benefits. The GigaBrain team uses it to make employee onboarding easier. 

“Easy and reliable HR ops. Made our employee onboarding experience a breeze!”

Asana is one of the most popular project management tools on the market. The team uses it to organize their feature backlog. 

“Intuitive and streamlined tools that help our team organize Kanban boards and backlogs. Once you try Asana, you'll never want to go back to the complicated mess that is Jira.”

Lambdalabs is a GPU-cloud service built for developers working on AI. The folks at GigaBrain use it to streamline cloud training. 

“Streamline cloud training and inference. Better setup than Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.”

DEVELOPER TOOLS 

ShellMate is a lightweight, open-source app that makes you more productive in the Mac Terminal. It observes what you're doing and detects errors, suggests fixes, or even suggests the next command. 

SSOReady is an open-source API platform that devs can use in less than a day to implement SAML single-sign-on, which many companies require. 

PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS 

Sparkle uses AI to create a unique folder system and organize every new file (and all your old ones) into the right place.

LoomFlows helps you build and ship faster with visual feedback via Loom videos and annotated screenshots.