el producto #424 🚀

Practical applications of AI in a PM's week, Meta robots, Microsoft's quantum chips, Reddit paywalls, Using AI to create Personas and Journey Maps, Instagram's new features & more

Hi folks 👋

Welcome to a new edition of el producto

🎰 The week in figures

$1.5B: Bybit got hacked. Thieves made away with nearly $1.5B in ETH from one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges this week, crashing prices across the board. It’s believed to be among the largest crypto hacks in history

$1B: Robinhood reported a record $1B in Q4 revenue, marking a 115% increase from the previous year. This surge was largely driven by a 500% YoY increase in cryptocurrency transaction fees

400M users use ChatGPT every week

$305M: Together AI, a developer of a cloud platform to allow developers to build on open and custom AI models, raised $305M at a $3.3B valuation; a +160% jump from the $1.25B Together AI was valued at in March

$116M: HP bought the struggling AI Pin maker, Humane, for a measly $116M (a far cry from the $1B Humane was expecting). HP gave several Humane employees new jobs—some with up to a 70% pay increase. Many who worked with the AI Pin (ie. in QA, automation, and operations) were let go, indicating HP’s interest in acquiring developers who can build around existing AI systems, rather than build from the ground, up

$100M: AI search startup Genspark raises $100M. It aims to take on Google head-to-head in the search space, improving on their results via an AI model that gives users context on links before they click. The company already has 2M MAU. CEO Eric Jing is a veteran of Baidu’s AI smartphone and smart speaker unit, Xiaodu

$100M: Mercor, the AI-powered recruiting startup founded by three 21-year-old Thiel Fellows, has raised $100M Series B at a $2B valuation, an 8x jump from last year. The startup uses AI to automate hiring, offering resume screening, AI interviews, and payroll management. With demand from AI labs and an expanding global talent pool, Mercor's revenue has surged to a $75M ARR

2M: Meta has sold 2M pairs of its smart Ray-Bans. “A pair of eyeglasses will be the main digital platform addressing our daily needs,” said the CEO of Ray-Ban’s parent company

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📰 What’s going on

Instagram’s DMs are getting an upgrade with the launch of five new features. This includes a new music sharing capability that allows users to share 30-second clips of tracks and real time translation capabilities for up to 99 different languages

Meta has formed a new team to develop AI-assisted robots. The team—which will sit within Meta’s ‘Reality Labs’ division—will be led by Marc Whitten, ex-CEO of failed robotaxi firm, Cruise, and will develop humanoid robotics hardware, capable of completing household chores. Rather than build a Meta-branded ‘robot butler,’ Meta wants to develop “the underlying AI, sensors, and software for robots that will be manufactured and sold by a range of companies.” To achieve this, Meta is talking to robotics companies—including Unitree Robotics and Figure AI—about potential collaborations and plans to leverage the existing tech used in its Quest VR and Ray-Ban smart glasses

Reddit is planning to bring in paywalls for specific subreddits. CEO Steve Huffman says it's a “work in progress” but one of the “new, key features” for 2025

Microsoft has revealed the world’s first quantum chip—Majorana 1—that’s powered by a new material (called a topoconductor). It uses the principles of quantum mechanics to process information and perform calculations much faster than regular chips in regular computers can, taking us a step closer to developing quantum computers which can solve industrial-scale, real-world problems— e.g. unlocking discoveries in drugs or chemistry

Microsoft has unveiled Magma - a groundbreaking new multimodal AI model that integrates vision, language and action capabilities. Put simply, it can interact with both digital UIs and physical environments through robotics. It achieved a 57.2% accuracy rate on UI navigation tasks

Google is adding a new ‘suggested next steps’ feature to Meet powered by Gemini. It’s an extension of an existing feature called ‘Take Notes for Me’ that adds a checklist of “next step” items based on the call transcript designed to make it easier to follow up with actions after a meeting. At the same time, Google has also pulled Gemini capabilities out of the main Google iOS app in an attempt to drive up downloads of the standalone Gemini app

Perplexity is the latest company to offer a Deep Research product. And it’s called Deep Research too

Perplexity also launched an opensource version of Deepseek called R1 1776 that it says removes any topics that were previously censored by the Chinese Communist Party

xAI has released the third version of Grok which beats all other models across chatbot arena performance metrics. Aside from Grok’s very impressive performance, the product comes with a new logo design

OpenAI expects to get around 3/4ths of its data center capacity from SoftBank’s Stargate project by 2030, marking a significant move away from Microsoft. That’s despite Microsoft being OpenAI’s largest backer by far, with a $14B invested to date

Spotify, has partnered with AI voice generator start-up, ElevenLabs, to bring more AI-generated audiobooks to the platform, as it “recognizes the potential of digital voice-narration to grow and expand the audiobook market” (read: It wants to compete with the likes of Amazon and Audible in the audiobook market). Spotify already accepts AI-narrated audiobooks, after it partnered with Google Play Books over a year ago, so this new partnership will give authors an alternative way to get their work published in audio format. Authors can choose from a range of AI voices in over 29 languages, with the no-cost plan allowing them to record just 10 minutes, whereas a Pro subscription lets them record 8 hours, but it costs $99p/m

Mastercard has announced plans to phase out traditional 16-digit card numbers by 2030. Instead of a fixed 16-digit number, Mastercard will implement tokenization—a process where a unique, encrypted token replaces the actual card number. This shift aims to reduce fraud, improve UX, and align with the growing trend of tokenization and biometric authentication in payments

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📚 Good reads

The Deep Research problem. Ben Evans explores how LLMs excel at tasks that require probabilistic reasoning but struggle with deterministic data retrieval. The reliance on probabilistic questions can lead to inaccuracies in precise data reporting, but despite its limitations, AI can significantly reduce the time required for generating extensive reports (still, with human oversight)

How to use AI to craft personas and journey maps. Is it possible to use AI to help craft user personas and journey maps? UX Collective’s Kyle Soucy explains how it can enhance the process

Exploring the impact of AI on Product Leadership: 17 practical applications used in a normal week by Peter Yang

How to use AI to build and scale Product intuition, by Reforge. The landscape of Product Management is undergoing a significant transformation due to the rise of AI. Traditional skills and processes are becoming less relevant as AI automates core functions, including data analysis, market research, and execution tasks. As a result, product intuition—defined as the ability to synthesize insights, identify opportunities, and make informed decisions in ambiguous situations—has emerged as the new differentiator for success in the AI era

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That’s a wrap for this week! 🌟

I’d love to hear your thoughts—what stood out to you, and how are you thinking about integrating these insights into your product strategy? Reply to this email or drop a comment on Substack to share your take. And if you found this valuable, forward it to a fellow PM or product enthusiast who’d enjoy the read

See you next week! 👋

Angel