BB Digest: Elon comes clean

Hey folks, I’m hosting another office hour today, come and get help. And later today, we have a hands-on workshop with Create’s co-founder.

Tomorrow we have a Replit 101 session before the expert workshop on 3rd March.

TLDR; inside today’s newsletter

• xAI launches Grok 3, Veo 2 in Shorts

• Gemini gets an upgrade before ChatGPT

• A peek into our community

• 6 new AI tools including Perplexity Deep Research

• 5 interesting posts with a scoop on Claude’s next version

• to-do's

 🔎 Trends & news

• xAI’s Grok 3 finally sees the light. There are four models in the Grok 3 family: Grok 3, Grok 3 mini, Grok 3 reasoning and Grok 3 mini reasoning. Andrej Karpathy did a comprehensive vibe-check of Grok 3 and it does look like the “Smartest AI on Earth” (at least for now).

  • An early version of Grok 3 is now #1 on lmarena and it’s way ahead of the competition on popular benchmarks. Even Grok 3 mini gives other models tough competition.

  • The reasoning models (in beta) are undercooked but are already at o3-mini-high level. There’s a “Big Brain” toggle for these reasoning models to think longer before replying. The “thoughts” of these are partially revealed (just like o3-mini).

  • Wait, there’s more. Grok will also have a Deep Search agent. They dropped the “re”, it’s cleaner. Voice chat with Grok is also under work and a week away (to come with what sounds like Elon’s voice).

  • Grok 3 is rolling out in phases with all these features. X Premium+ users will get first access to it. A separate subscription called SuperGrok and API access are coming soon.

• Google’s video generation model Veo 2 is now available in YouTube Shorts. Creators in US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand can create short clips with Veo 2 and use them in their content.

• Concierge is the first connected AI Assistant that can read & write to your apps, in real-time. Talk to your Gmail, Jira, Notion, Slack, Linear, Confluence, HubSpot, Attio, Salesforce, Airtable like magic. Ask Concierge to review emails, summarize Slack, create Jira tickets, update a CRM, and more.*

• You can now ask Gemini about your past chats without needing to hunt it down. I don’t want to call it “unlimited memory” because it kinda searches through your chats to find a relevant one vs knowing it all. A similar feature in ChatGPT is likely coming soon.
  *sponsored

💬 Inside the community this week

Become pro to join us building and learning together.

• George is exploring building a Chief of Staff AI for small businesses. (link)

• Shahar noticed O3-mini inventing personal histories when answering questions. (link)

• Elliott shared his Grateful Dead Time Machine project. (link)

• Keshav tested Deep Research and Sora against a YouTube video. (link)

• Stephen shared a new Hugging Face course on AI agents. (link)

• Isaac asked for tools to create an animated video for a poem. (link)

• Mo inquired about Replit AI agent's effectiveness as app complexity grows. (link)

• Shahar asked for tips on getting LLMs to generate long-form content. (link)

• Cam liked our latest blog post on critical thinking and AI use. (link)

• Keshav shared an example of coding at different levels of abstraction using O1 Pro and Replit. (link)

• Sukaina shared a webinar about building custom AI solutions. (link)

• Adam announced Lovable's launch of visual editing. (link)

• Bryce asked for advice on building a CRM in Bolt with Supabase integration. (link)

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

⚙️ Top new tools

• Memex - Chat your ideas into code – the everything builder for your desktop. For extra free credits use code ‘BB’ = Build Boldly.*

• Perplexity Deep Research - Use reasoning AI and search to create detailed reports. Available to try for free.

• Nugget - Scale support effortlessly with AI-native, no-code platform.

• Supercharge Bolt - Free Chrome extension for Bolt for faster workflow, better prompting and smart token usage.

• Omniparser - A simple screen parsing tool for computer use agents.

• Assistant UI - Add a Chat UI to your apps instantly.

More tools here →
*sponsored

 📜 Interesting posts

• Install your Replit + Expo app on your iPhone in 15 minutes.

• New York Times goes all-in on internal AI tools use.

• Using Apple Shortcuts and AI to transcribe my handwriting.

• Anthropic’s next model is coming soon and it could be a hybrid.

• Mistral AI released Saba - A new 24B model custom-built for Arabic and Indian-origin languages.

📌 To-dos

That’s it for today. Feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts. 👋