el producto #327 đ
Twitter generative AI plans, Quora chatbots, Using ChatGPT in PM work, Trial configurations to kick-start PLG, Building Airbnb categories with ML, WhatsApp multi-device mode & more
Hey team,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto!
đ° The week in figures
$270M: Clear Street, an independent prime broker providing investment banking services, raised a $270M Series B at a $2B valuation
$132M: ID.me, a Virginia-based identity verification startup, raised a $132M Series D; the company has 100M registered digital wallets on its platform
$112M: Altruist, a custodian and software builder for investment advisors, raised a $112M Series D
$100M: PhonePe, the Indian payments giant, raised another $100M, tacking it onto the $350M it just announced in a round that has grown to $750M
$100M: Alphasense, an AI-based market intelligence and search platform, raised a $100M Series D
650k: Lemon8, an Instagram-like app created by TikTok-maker ByteDance, has amassed 650K installs in the US over the past week and a half, and 17M downloads worldwide
-80%: Global VC crypto funding dropped ~80% y/y in Q1, from an ATH of ~$12.3B in Q1 2022 to ~$2.4B last quarter
đ° Whatâs going on
WhatsApp is now easier to use on multiple devices thanks to a new companion mode that lets you access your account across more than one smartphone
Meta open-sourced its Animated Drawings AI project, which uses AI to generate animations from user-submitted sketches and doodles
Amazon Web Services unveiled Bedrock, a suite of generative AI tools aimed at businesses and developers; using Bedrock, AWS customers can build chatbots, write and summarize text, and create and classify images using prompts
Speaking at MIT, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed his startup is not currently training GPT-5 and "won't for some time"
Twitter has purchased ~10K GPUs and is working on its own generative AI project; Twitter also reportedly hired at least two former DeepMind engineers
Twitter Blue subscribers can now compose tweets with up to 10K characters and utilize bold or italic fonts
Twitter has rebranded its feature that allows creators to charge for exclusive tweets and other content; Elon Musk announced âSubscriptions," which is similar to Twitter's previous "Super Followsâ feature for creator monetization; Subscriptions lets Twitter creators charge $2.99, $4.99, or $9.99 a month for exclusive content, such as subscriber-only chats in Twitter Spaces and special subscriber badges
ByteDance is attempting to attract Meta VR developers to move their apps away from Meta's platform over to its Pico headset by offering devs $15K-$20K per title
Substack rolled out its Twitter-like Notes product to all users after traffic to Substack was throttled by Twitter last week
Q&A site Quora is now allowing users to create their own chatbots; Quora users can now create the bots, based on their own prompts, to generate text in a particular style, format, and other factors; the bots will be based on Anthropic's Claude Instant chatbot and OpenAI's ChatGPT; examples of bots already created include poe.com/PirateBot, which talks like a pirate, and poe.com/emojis, which translates messages into emojis
Notion expanded its startup program, offering unlimited AI usage for free and a Startup in a Box with templates for different stages of company growth; Notion for Startups also allows networking with the startup community, early access to new features, office hours, and AMAs with the Notion Team
SenseTime, a China-based company konwn for its facial recognition tech, debuted a suite of new AI products, including an AI chatbot, an image-processing tool, a video-generation tool, and a service that renders 3D buildings
China-based ride-sharing service Didi announced plans to launch a 24/7 autonomous robotaxi service by 2025
đ Good reads
How to use ChatGPT in your PM work, by Lenny Rachitsky. Real-life examples (and actual prompts) of how PMs are already using ChatGPT day-to-day
A Total Addressable Market (TAM) Masterclass. Finance is often a black box for many PMs, and Tech CFO CJ Gustafson covers a topic many PMs and founders get lost in. The size of the TAM ultimately determines how much revenue a company can capture over time. A company canât âoutgrowâ its TAM, but rather will end up capturing some fraction (market share) of the TAM
Itâs all about trials. From reverse trials to paid pilot trials, benefits and drawbacks of each configuration. This post on activation flows for trials is pure gold, youâll have to return to it if youâre prototyping a product that counts on a product-led growth loop
The cost of craft - why itâs hard to do great work at scale? This post from George Kedenburg III - former Product designer at Meta and Instagram - itâs an essential peek into the tension between growth (and the abundance and complexification of features that inherently comes with it) and keeping the quality bar high for product design. The author touches upon the many facets of the problem, covering the somewhat conflicting incentives we sometimes create in product-driven organizations, the sometimes problematic role of metrics (and their impacts on bonuses), and much more
Building Airbnb categories with ML & human in the loop. An insightful article by Airbnb explaining how their ML Categorization works in detail
đź Emerging trends
The raise of generative AI
About a third of the AI companies featured in this year's Forbes AI 50 are using generative AI in some form, highlighting how much the technology has become embedded in the AI landscape
Details: Forbes released its fifth annual list of the "most promising privately-held companies" in AI this week, with a particular emphasis on generative AI. Both GA infrastructure and applications were cited as major trends, with companies like Midjourney, Anthropic, Inflection, Runway, and OpenAI chosen for this year's list
What the numbers say: Collectively, the 50 companies have secured $27.2B in total funding, led by Microsoft's $10B investment in ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Meanwhile, transformers, the type of neural network behind ChatGPT and other advanced text generators, captured the biggest revenue share in the market last year at 42%
What's next:Â Precedence Research estimates the global generative AI market size will grow from $10.8 billion in 2022Â to $118.06B by 2032
Thatâs all for today! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack
Angel
el producto is free, but if you enjoy reading it, you can support my work and buy me a coffee đ