el producto #367 🚀
Meta's AI future, Apple Vision Pro pre-orders, Notion Calendar app, Microsoft Copilot Pro, How to get OKRs right, Create your business formula, Build a writing habit, & more
Hey friends,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto!
🎰 The week in figures
$300M: Quantinuum, a quantum computing startup with many financial services institutions as customers, raised $300M at a $5B valuation
-25%: Twitch viewership is down 25% from its 2021 peak, with YouTube thought to be the main beneficiary of its decline
$20: Microsoft launches a Pro plan for Copilot, priced at $20 per user per month, giving customers access to Copilot GenAI features across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote
📰 What’s going on
TikTok is testing AI Song, a tool powered by the LLM Bloom that generates songs from text prompts and allows users to toggle the song's genre
X rolls out audio and video calling to Android following the October 2023 iOS launch; all users can receive calls but only Premium subscribers can place them
Mark Zuckerberg shared an update on the Meta’s AI initiatives, saying that the long-term goal is to build and open-source artificial general intelligence. Meta is also restructuring its AI efforts, bringing its Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) unit "closer together" with the GenAI research team to advance AI toward more human-like intelligence, he said:
Zuckerberg said it's now clear that building full general intelligence will be necessary for the next generation of AI products and services
Meta's future plans for AI will also require it to build a "massive compute infrastructure"
Highlighting Meta's investments in AI, he said that the company expects to end this year with 350,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs
These graphics cards used for AI training and inference reportedly cost around $30,000 apiece, amounting to billions of dollars
Including other non-Nvidia GPUs, Meta's compute infrastructure will reach nearly 600,000 GPUs
Instagram introduces nighttime nudges for teen accounts to limit their time on the app, which appears when teens spend >10 minutes on Instagram Reels or DMs late at night
Apple’s Vision Pro pre-orders started on Friday Jan. 19:
Apple has sold out of pre-orders on the same day it became available in the U.S. Within an hour of pre-orders opening, the shipping date for the headset was pushed from Feb. 2 to mid-March
The Vision Pro is positioned as a critical player in the wearable computing market, highlighting Apple's focus on this sector
Apple's Vision Pro could yield ~$1.4B in revenue in 2024, based on the projection of 400,000 units sold, compared to the $43.81B revenue generated from iPhone in Q4
Apple updates its guidelines to allow US developers to promote subscriptions on the web without using in-app purchases
Amazon rolls out a feature to create AI-generated images on second-generation Fire TV Stick 4K Max and Fire TV Omni QLED devices
LinkedIn has launched a new AI feature which helps people find jobs by grouping them into tailored categories. The new feature is designed to speed up the process of finding a job, and categorizes vacancies into filterable groups, like startups, enterprise or remote-first
Notion unveiled a new standalone Calendar app which operates independently, but is closely integrated into the Notion ecosystem. Notion recently appointed the inventor of Google Sheets as its new CTO, and with the launch of Calendar it clearly has Google Workspace in its sights
OpenAI forms a Collective Alignment team of researchers and engineers to create a system for collecting public input to ensure its AI models “align to the values of humanity”
Adobe adds beta AI audio editing tools in Premiere Pro, including labeling clips as dialogue, music, and more, and plans to roll out a dialogue clean-up tool
Samsung revealed its latest flagship Galaxy S24 smartphones, which are equipped with AI tools powered by Google's Gemini models. The AI features include photo editing, live phone call translation, voice recording transcription, web article summarization, and more. The lineup consists of the standard $800 Galaxy S24, the $1,000 Galaxy S24 Plus, and the $1,300 Galaxy S24 Ultra
Rabbit's $199 AI device R1 will use Perplexity AI's tech to answer user queries; the first 100,000 R1 buyers will get one year of Perplexity Pro for free. Check out their keynote if you haven’t seen it yet. Eventually, smartphone-integrated GPTs will catch-up, but this is a pretty powerful and interesting device until then!
Uber is shutting down alcohol delivery service Drizly, which had operated “independently within the Uber family” since its $1.1B acquisition three years ago
Reddit has drawn up plans for an IPO in March 2024, with a public filing in late February, the first major social media IPO since Pinterest's in 2019
Plex plans to launch a TV and movie rental marketplace next month, becoming a one-stop shop for media content
📚 Good reads
How to describe your business as an equation - and why you don’t fully understand your business until you can, by Lenny Rachitsky and Dan Hockenmaier. Expressing your business as a simple equation forces you to think about the inputs that drive your business, the outputs you want to prioritize, and how these variables interact. It provides a map for understanding which metrics you need to track, what factors drive the growth of your business, and where to assign your resources. Lenny and Dan share the theory and a bunch of practical examples. Here’s the case for a B2C subscription product (think Duolingo or Strava):
The experimentation layer, by Packy McCormick. It’s by being “free to experiment as creatively and irresponsibly as the society can bear” that we generate variance in ideas and approaches, where the occasional crazy thing finds it way to the mainstream and changes everything. An example could well be Rabbit’s AI device
Turning costs into profits, by Dan Rose. In the early 2000’s, Amazon was a rapidly scaling, low-margin, retail business. As a result, they had invested heavily in building out their own architecture to support their operation, which resulted in them having an extremely reliable and cost-effective datacenter. In on of the greatest strategic moves in modern history, Amazon found a way to flip this power-house (their biggest expense) into a revenue generating platform. This insight led to cloud infrastructure, and what now generates ~70% of Amazon’s profit
OKRs 101. Adam Fishman shares a short and nice practical guide to OKRs, including: why do we use them, where do people go wrong, how to do them right, and a template
How to write more, by Andrew Chen. I have few PM clients (coaching) that often ask me about how to build a writing habit, or how to find the time and motivation to start a publication like this one. Andrew Chen has been as been an inspiration to me and this newsletter for a while, and I find his advice on this topic spot-on, as usual
That’s all for this week. As usual, feel free to reach out and share your thoughts by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack
Thanks for your support!
Angel