el producto #385 🚀
Microsoft's AI announcements, Paid Alexa and Meta assistant, Use AI to improve prototyping, Build "work products" to get PM roles, Building trust, Instagram's no-edit ephemeral photos & more
Hey friends,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto!
🎰 The week in figures
$26B: Nvidia Q1 earnings exceeded expectations, with revenue reaching $26B against estimates of $24.65B. Nvidia's net income surged more than sevenfold to $14.88B in Q1, up from $2.04B a year earlier. The data center category, Nvidia's biggest business, includes sales of AI chips and components for large AI servers
$1B: Google invests nearly $350M in Walmart-owned Indian e-commerce startup Flipkart, as part of a ~$1B funding round led by Walmart, which invested $600M in 2023
$1B: AI data labelling startup Scale AI raised $1B at a ~$14B valuation, up from $7.3B in April 2021; a source says Scale AI had ~$700M in 2023 revenue
$500M: Revolut is arranging for employees to cash out up to $500M in a share sale that CEO Nik Storonsky believes will hit their 2021 valuation of $33B. And on the back of £1.7B in expected revenues, 40M customers, and a 45% markup from investor Schroder, it looks like they may get it
$300M: AI-powered language translation startup DeepL, where multiple of my ex-Booking colleagues work, doubled its valuation to $2B after raising $300M. Congrats!
📰 What’s going on
Truecaller partners with Microsoft to let its AI respond to calls in your own voice. Truecaller’s Assistant, available to paid users, will be able to replicate users’ voices in order to greet and respond to callers. This is in addition to the preset system-generated voice options available
Microsoft’s Build event 2024 concluded this week. Here’s some of the important announcements worth knowing about:
a Recall technology enabling users to find and remember whatever they might have seen on their PC
the ability for businesses to create custom AI agents
a new translation feature for the Edge browser
custom emojis for Microsoft Teams
a new AI-powered copy and paste feature
and external extensions for engineers to connect GitHub copilot to third party tools
Instagram is developing a new feature which allows users to send one, unedited photo that can be viewed once. It’s a nod to BeReal’s value proposition which is designed to encourage users to share unfiltered, authentic moments
Meta and Elon Musk’s xAI company are competing for a partnership with Character.ai. The AI chatbot startup is known for its virtual versions of celebrities and historical figures
Meta plans to introduce a paid version of its AI assistant. A premium "Meta AI" was mentioned in an internal company post
Google is planning to test ads in its AI overviews. Ads will have the opportunity to appear within the AI Overview in a section clearly labeled as ‘sponsored’ when they’re relevant to both the query and the information in the AI Overview
Google's new AI Overviews in its search engine have been generating false and inaccurate responses, according to user reports. Google rolled out the AI-generated summaries to U.S.-based searchers last week. Examples include incorrect advice on rattlesnake bites, errors about the number of U.S. presidents, falsely claiming former President Obama is Muslim, advising to use glue to keep cheese on pizza, and recommending users to eat at least one rock per day. Some answers have been pulled from Reddit posts and the satirical news site The Onion
Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, IBM, and 10 other companies commit to safe AI development at the AI Seoul Summit 2024, hosted by South Korea and the UK
Google's bid to acquire HubSpot could help it compete against Microsoft in the cloud applications market.Google parent Alphabet is making headway in its talks to acquire HubSpot, which has a current market value of $31B
Google Pay has broadened its "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) offerings, allowing users to link existing BNPL accounts or sign up for new ones directly within the app, adding more payment flexibility
Amazon plans to charge a monthly fee for an AI-upgraded version of Alexa. Generative AI technology will improve Alexa's conversational abilities to better compete with OpenAI's audible ChatGPT and Google's Gemini voice assistant
📚 Good reads
The feeling of being trusted. True leaders build their reputations around the feeling of being trusted, but earning the right to be trusted is an everyday commitment. And you do it through consistency in your decisions and follow-through actions. You need to establish a set of principles, and then not bother with telling people, but rather focus on showing them you can be predictably reliable in sticking to some operating system
Supercharging what's already working. One surefire way to figure out your AI strategy is to think about how you can supercharge the “constants”; the customer needs that never change. Once you figure out what the constants in your market/customer base are, then you can apply AI there. Any other area is a distraction
How Meta built Threads for the web in under 3 months. Meta software engineer Pascal Hartigsits down with Ally C. and Kevin C., two engineers on the Threads Web Team that delivered the basic version of Threads for web in just under 3 months
How to do price increase emails. A very useful piece by Rossie Hoggmascall, looking at the dos and don’ts, few examples, and a case study of Zwift
Integrating AI capabilities to increase your prototyping capacity. Cerys Hearsey gives you a deep and thorough understanding of how AI capabilities can be integrated to increase your organization’s general prototyping capacity
How to build “work Products” to get jobs. Aakash Gupta shares advice on how to stand out in a competitive PM job market by crafting tailored work products that showcase your skills and initiative. The three most effective types of work products are: "Get an Interview," "In Process," and "Specific Interview"
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