el producto #320 🚀
el producto #320 🚀
Meta's GTP3 competitor & paid verified accounts, Klarna's US growth, Spotify's AI DJ, Waymo and the future of autonomous driving, Chat-GPT co-authored books, & more
Hey team,
Welcome to a new edition of el producto
🎰 The week in figures
$8.5B: Streaming services will spend ~$8.5B on sports rights across 17 major global markets in 2023 (+64% y/y)
$4.2B: Carbon-related startups raised $4.2B from VCs last year, a record-breaking total up from $3.6B in 2021
$150M: InDrive, the second most downloaded ride-sharing service globally, raised $150M; in 2022, the company grew gross revenue 88% in 2022, and expects to be profitable this year
$124M: London-based Carmoola has raised $124M to modernize the used car financing process; Carmoola provides buyers with a budget, allows them to have a free history check on the car, and enables them to make the payment instantly online and at the showroom in one minute
$104M: India-based FreshToHome has raised a $104M Series D led by Amazon to offer chemical-free food through its e-commerce platform
$100M: South Africa-based Planet42 has raised a $100M round to enable the underbanked community to buy cars through its rent-to-buy platform
$43M: Tome, a startup that utilizes generative AI to help users create pitch decks, raised a $43M Series B at a $300M valuation led by Lightspeed; according to a Forbes source, the startup is still pre-revenue
+200: By mid-February, ChatGPT authored or co-authored over 200 books sold through Amazon's Kindle e-book platform; the development has raised concerns among authors that low-quality AI books will squeeze human authors out of the market
160K: Artifact, the TikTok-like news reader built by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, has launched to the public with no sign-up required; the company says its waitlist included ~160K users
+71%: Klarna observed a 71% YoY increase in GMV in the U.S. in 2022, surpassing Germany as its largest market by revenue; the Swedish company's app reached more than 8M MAUs, up from 6M MAUs in Feb. 2022; Klarna has a total of 34M U.S. users
💰 Q4 results
Alibaba: revenue: $35.9B (+2% y/y), net income: $6.8B (+69% y/y), both metrics beat estimates, which initially sent the stock up 6%, but shares dropped intraday to down 1%
Block: net revenue: ~$4.7B (+14% y/y), gross profit: ~$1.7B (+40% y/y), net loss: -$114M; the company beat on revenue and gross profit, but missed on earnings; shares were up over 4% on Friday
Coinbase: total revenue: $629.1M (-75% y/y, but beat expectations), net loss: -$557M, trading volume: $145B (-73.5% y/y), the crypto exchange reported 8.8M MTUs for its FY2022, on par with expectations; shares are down 5.5% on the news
📰 What’s going on
Spotify launched an AI-generated DJ tool through the use of OpenAI’s technology and its acquisition of Sonatic; the DJ has an AI-generated voice and transitions from song to song based on a user’s listening history
Spotify has started testing token-enabled playlists that allow NFT holders to access select NFT communities' curated playlists by connecting their wallets; the test is limited to selected Android users in the U.S., U.K., New Zealand, Australia, and Germany
Meta is set to roll out a new subscription service that allows Facebook and Instagram users to verify their accounts. CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced "Meta Verified" as the tech giant pursues new sources of revenue
Meta plans to cut thousands of more jobs to consolidate and flatten the managerial hierarchy; some managers may get demoted to lower roles, while others may see their team sizes increase
3D renders and details of Apple’s upcoming iPhone 15 have leaked, featuring a slightly larger 6.2-inch display for the base model and a switch to a USB-C charging port
Apple is developing a 2nd-generation mixed reality headset, which will come in two higher-end and lower-end models, likely arriving in 2025
Pinduoduo-owned Temu surpassed Amazon to become the most downloaded app in the U.S.; Temu, an online retailer, was the top Q4 installed app; Temu's unusually low prices may have been made possible by avoiding the large markups that Western brands apply to cheaply produced products
AWS expanded its partnership with Hugging Face, an OpenAI competitor, and plans to incorporate the startup’s AI products into its cloud offerings; as part of the deal, Hugging Face will build the next version of its LLM, called BLOOM, on AWS
Amazon partnered with hearing aid provider Cochlear to make Fire TV the first smart TV device to stream sound directly into a hearing implant processor, using the Audio Streaming for Hearing Aids (ASHA) protocol
Netflix recently slashed subscription prices by as much as 50% in 30+ countries, including Yemen, Jordan, Iran, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Thailand
Google is opening up the Magic Eraser photo editing tool and other features to all Pixel owners and Google One subscribers; all users of the cloud storage subscription service will be able to use the AI-powered Magic Eraser to remove unwanted objects from images
TikTok parent company ByteDance announces new 'AI-based' edtech platform GeniusJoy, and is hiring in LA and Singapore
The European Commission is asking all members to uninstall TikTok by March 15; in November, TikTok admitted that personal user data could be accessed in its Chinese HQ
Coinbase launched Base, a Layer 2 (L2) network built on Optimism’s open-source OP Stack that offers a low-cost, accessible way for users to develop decentralized apps on L1s like Ethereum and Solana
Microsoft debuted a new Bing mobile app that features its popular AI chatbot; on Wednesday, certain users were granted access to the Bing AI beta for iOS and Android; the new mobile app lets users initiate chats to ask questions and interact with the search engine's chatbot from their phones
Microsoft partnered with blockchain infrastructure provider Ankr on a new node hosting service in Azure’s cloud marketplace; the service will allow Azure-hosted companies to utilize smart contracts and more
Microsoft and Nintendo agreed to a 10-year deal that will make Call of Duty games available on Nintendo systems, pending approval of Microsoft’s $68.7B Activision Blizzard acquisition
📚 Good reads
The startup’s guide to customer advocacy - how to get closer to your best customers, by First Round Review. Kalina Bryant, Asana’s first and former Head of Customer Advocacy, shares all things customer advocacy — and how it can get you closer to your top customers than ever before. She also tailors her advice specifically for the early-stage startup context, offering tips on how to get started and infuse the principles of customer advocacy into your everyday work
CA-based tech company Waymo is redefining the future of autonomous driving. Riding in an autonomous vehicle invites you to see the streets with fresh eyes, yet autonomous driving will probably never be something that’s “solved” all at once, but rather something that develops over time
How to use Chat-GPT for user research, by Nick Babich. Great ideas, but take them with a pich of salt - the most recent Chat-GPT training data is from September 2021
Career hype docs - a framework that anyone can use at any stage in their career, from beginners to folks in managerial positions, to reflect on your achievements and build a case for your next raise or promotion
How to be prepared for layoffs - timeless advice by Lenny Rachistky. What you can do today to avoid getting caught off guard in case layoffs come for you
Prioritizing home attributes based on guest interest. How Airbnb leverages ML to derive guest interest from unstructured text data and provide personalized recommendations to Hosts
Which European banking app is winning the race for customers? App Radar analysed how many downloads Europe’s top neobanks and legacy bank apps attracted between 2021 and the end of 2022 using data from the Google Play Store
🔮 Emerging trends
Meta joins GPT-3 rivalry
Meta Platforms is releasing its new LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) to researchers. Meta AI researchers developed a collection of LLaMA models, which they say can outperform OpenAI's GPT-3 even though they are smaller. A spokesperson said these new language models aren't being used in Meta's products, such as Instagram or Facebook. More:
According to Meta, the models are 7B to 65B parameters in size, smaller than GPT -3's 175B parameters
One of those models, LLaMA-13B, is 10x smaller than GPT-3 and outperforms it on "most benchmarks," according to project member Guillaume Lample
All the LLaMA models were trained using publicly available datasets such as Wikipedia and Common Crawl
Meta says it will make the models available to academic researchers on a "case-by-case basis"
By comparison, the models underlying OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's LaMDA are not publicly available
The researchers will be "affiliated with organizations in government, civil society, and academia; and industry research laboratories"
The request form to apply is available here. Meta is also sharing the full code and weights.
In a Facebook post this week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said large language models have demonstrated "a lot of promise in generating text, having conversations, summarizing written material and more complicated tasks like solving math theorems or predicting protein structures"
That’s all for today! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack
Angel
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