el producto #404 🚀
OpenAI mega-funding, Apple's 2D to 3D AI model, Microsoft's Copilot redesign and updates, Handling uncertainty, How to be strategic, Getting started with UGC, & more
Hi folks 👋
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto.
🎰 The week in figures
$4B: OpenAI has secured a $4B revolving line of credit, increasing its total liquidity to over $10B, following a recent funding round that valued the company at $157B. It may seem odd to want even more funding, having just raised $6.6B from major investors this week. But, while OpenAI brought in $300M in revenue last month, the company is projecting to lose about $5B this year. It turns out that growing at the speed of light is extremely expensive, so we’ll see if this new capital is enough to keep them afloat
$500M: Poolside, an “AI-powered software dev platform,” raised $500M
$267M: Zepz, the cross-border money transfer service formerly known as WorldRemit, raised an additional $267M of capital
$127M: Eon, founded by a team who previously sold their startup to Amazon, has emerged from stealth with a novel cloud infrastructure backup solution. They raised $127M across three funding rounds and achieved a $750M valuation. What’s even more impressive is that they only started operating 8 months ago
10M: Disney+ says over 10M h of content has been watched by users so far on its new Streams feature. Streams are live feeds of curated, continuous programming that allow subscribers to enjoy content without having to select individual titles. The company says that early indications show the launch of Streams is leading to an overall engagement uplift
73%: OpenAI is generating ~73% of its revenues from ChatGPT subscriptions and is less dependent on API revenues. The opposite is true for Anthropic, which is estimated to generate over ~85% of its revenues from its API products
📰 What’s going on
Apple’s AI team has developed Depth Pro, a cutting-edge model for generating precise 3D depth maps from single 2D images in just 0.3 seconds, without requiring traditional camera metadata. The system, detailed in the paper "Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second," offers a breakthrough in speed and accuracy. And even better — it’s open-source. With developers having free reign to use the model, expect to see more advancements in AR and autonomous vehicles
Meta has announced Movie Gen, a media-focused AI model that generates realistic video and audio clips, including targeted edits to existing footage. Capable of producing high-definition videos up to 16s long, Movie Gen can add objects or alter appearances in scenes and generate accompanying audio. The platform is not yet available for public use, but given the host of companies under Meta’s umbrella, we could be seeing this incorporated into the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp
Microsoft has given Copilot a redesign across mobile, web and desktop app. The UX is now more card-based and looks similar to the work of folks at Pi - a personalized AI assistant from which Microsoft hired a bunch of folks earlier this year, including DeepMind’s cofounder Mustafa Suleyman. A series of new Copilot products have also been announced, including:
Copilot voice, which allows uers to chat to their companion
Copilot Daily, which kicks off a user’s morning with a summary of news, weather, reminders and events
Copilot Vision, which can see everything you’re doing and chat to you about it in real time. It’s a little creepy but helpful for some use cases. Watch it here
Suleyman is optimistic about the role Copilot can play in people’s lives and says that he expects AI to foster a “calmer, more helpful and supportive era of technology, quite unlike anything we’ve seen before”.
Snap has launched a new footsteps feature which allows users to see exactly where they’ve been
Airtable has launched a major set of new AI capabilities. The updates include a new App Library which allows companies to create standardized AI-powered apps that can be customized across an organization. Apps can be created for things like OKR tracking or upcoming Product launches, and published in the library for other users across large organizations to use. The other new major feature is a new tool called HyberDB, which gives companies the ability to store hundreds of millions of records in a single table and then build apps on top of it. As Airtable gears up for its IPO, it’s clear that they’re doubling down on the enterprise market
Udemy gave instructors the chance to opt-out of training its generative AI models. After the deadline passed, instructors can no longer opt out… and some instructors aren’t happy, saying the changes weren’t communicated clearly enough. Removing training data from a large language model after it is ingested isn’t trivial, and the saga highlights just how important clear comms are if a product is using its users’ data to train proprietary models
Stripe has streamlined its API product release process to make it easier for engineers to understand what’s changing in each version and why. The new release cadence combines twice-yearly major updates with monthly feature enhancements
Europe's big banks, including BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, and Worldine, partnered to launch wero, a European payments network and digital wallet meant to challenge Visa and Mastercard's market dominance
📚 Good reads
How to get started with User Generated Content (UGC), by Elena Verna. The beauty of UGC is that it’s earned. You can’t buy this type of content—it has to come from your users, and that makes it competitively defensible. AI-generated content may flood the market, but UGC gives you niche, authentic, long-tail content that is much harder to replicate
How to be strategic. According to Dan Hockenmaier, there are 4 inputs to be great at strategic decisions: Intuition, Insight Generation, Solutioning, Synthesis. Intution is a key part of quick decision making because, as Dan puts it, “It’s machine that takes in questions and outputs good hypotheses as to their answer.” Simply, intuition is your operating algorithm that helps you make sense of things. Intuition can be developed by improving your understanding of the problem space at three levels of fidelity: (1) Who the customer is and what they actually care about, (2) The market/industry structure and trajectory, and (3) the network of ideas and knowledge inside your own company
The power (and importance) of forced decontextualization. Deb Liu explains how routines can blind us to the true nature of our possessions and surroundings, but disruptions offer opportunities for reevaluation and decluttering. Decontextualizing is a forcing function that we can apply to our homes (i.e tidying up and reorganizing), relationships (i.e reinvigorating from a rut), and to our work/careers
The saboteurs that threaten innovation, and how to handle them. Steve Blank lays out a guide for startup innovators — and how to avoid sabotage from incumbents. His advice includes:
The common ways incumbents kill innovation (from positioning the innovation as a risk to filing lawsuits)
The founder survival checklist (like developing an “under the radar” strategy and choosing your early market carefully)
While there’s no magic bullet to defend against every possible strike, this resource from Blank is an excellent primer to avoid getting caught on the back foot
“The unhinged application I used to get a job at a fast-growing startup.” Finn Lobsien shows that the best way to ensure your best shot at getting a job is to apply by just doing the job. Act as if you already got hired and produce something. It’s not easy, it’s not something you can do for every role you see on the market, but it can be effective
How to handle dynamic and uncertain situations. John Cutler shares a brief note on how to handle situations like the current macro climate in tech. Ultimately, it comes down to reducing the distance information must travel, increasing the frequency with which you exchange information, and be ready to handle messy information - distinguishing signal from noise
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