Ads in your chats - Ben's Bites
Ads in your chats
OpenAI made $20B in 2025
Jan 20, 2026
The newsletter for the technically curious. Updates, tool reviews, and lay of the land from an exited founder turned investor and forever tinkerer.
Hey folks,
ChatGPT will start running ads. It begins in a few weeks (starting with the US) and applies only to free and Go (the $8/mo plan) customers. Key terms → at the bottom of ChatGPT’s answers, don’t affect the answers, and no conversation/personal data shared with advertisers. OpenAI also released its 2025 revenue: $20B, more than 3x of 2024’s 6B. Just for comparison, Meta made $180B+, and Google made about $295B purely from ads in 2025. OpenAI is still tiny, but it has a massive space to grow into.
Claude Cowork is now available for Pro ($20/mo) customers as well. Download the desktop app to try.
Flux.2 [klein] is a small and fast image generation/editing model that you can fine-tune as well. This is great for companies that want a massive amount of images generated in a specific pattern, and Nano banana is too expensive for them.
Realism isn’t enough for voice AI—consumers expect more. Join the webinar Amplified 2026 on Jan 28 at 1 PM ET to get insights from Voices’ State of Voice report and see how voice AI leaders are redefining voice AI quality with professional voice talent. Save your seat today.*
🌐What I’m consuming
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Tldraw is not accepting PRs from external contributors anymore. Why? Most PRs take low-context issues and rush to write code, without fleshing out what the actual solution should be.
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A recap of the “filesystem vs database” debate for agent memory.
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How to write a good spec for AI agents.
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Agent skills, rules, subagents: explained.
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Agent psychosis: Are we going insane?
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AI models all have their favourite names for a spaceship pilot, a software developer, a New York woman and more.
⚙️ Tools and demos
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When accuracy really matters, use AI-powered experts. Scroll.ai automates knowledge workflows across documentation, RFPs, sales enablement, and more.*
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Learnfromlenny - A Twitter reply bot that answers your questions based on 320+ Lenny's Podcast transcripts.
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Ami - Run parallel coding agents from your computer without breaking your flow.
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FastRound - Helping founders fundraise. Enter your X username, and find investors who follow you and DM them. (example)
🥣 Dev Dish
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Open Responses - An open spec based on the OpenAI Responses API, but for building multi-provider interfaces.
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Openwork - An open-source take on Claude Cowork.
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opensync - Searchable history, markdown export, and eval-ready datasets from your opencode/claude-code sessions. (see demo)
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claude-config by Brian Lovin- A git repo as the source of truth for skills and settings. (here’s why)
🍦 Afters
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TranslateGemma from DeepMind - Open models in three sizes (4b, 12b, 27b) with support for 55 languages.
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GLM 4.7 Flash is a new open model from Z.AI - it’s a perfect alternative to GPT-OSS-20B if you want the model to be materially better at tool calling.
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New research from Anthropic Fellows defines a limit of “assistant-like” behaviour. As chats go on longer, models rapidly go beyond the limit into other personas. They also talk about a method to stop that from happening.
That’s it for today. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts. 👋
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