hi bud buds,
in 2016, spotify launched “wrapped” with a simple idea: automatically generate a “your top songs” playlist from your past year of listening data. it was a hit. by the following year, over 30 million people viewed their wrapped summaries.
today, wrapped has become a major cultural event. this year alone, over 200 million users opened it on launch day (7x from 2017 totals, and +20% yoy). every december, spotify turns its users into an army of unpaid brand ambassadors: spotify app downloads jump as much as 21% the week wrapped drops, and it’s one of instagram’s top annual drivers of stories worldwide.
it’s no surprise that the rest of big tech wants to recreate that magic. this week:
youtube launched youtube recap for the first time, a personalized rewind of your year on youtube
google photos released its 2025 recap (started 2024), with ai-generated highlights and shareable memory cards
amazon music released delivered 2025 (started 2024), a year-in-review with badges, stats, and animated share cards
apple rolled out its 2025 apple music replay (started 2019), with top songs, artists, trends, and new “loyalty/discovery” metrics
even my own company, a b2b saas platform, has experimented with a year-in-review. the business logic is strong: reminding users of the value they’ve accumulated over a longer time window helps counteract recency bias, where people only remember what the product did for them lately. wrapped-style features can meaningfully improve retention and reduce churn.
however, companies should be realistic about what these features are for. for most companies, wrapped-like features should be a retention play, not a virality lever. 99.9% of companies will never see spotify-level sharing of their wrapped features unless their product:
is tied to a user’s sense of identity
evokes nostalgia or personal memories
music is a deep part of our identities, highly emotional, and tightly intertwined with special memories. most consumer products don’t occupy that space in our hearts, and almost no b2b tools do. that’s why spotify wrapped goes viral every december, and why almost everyone else’s versions, no matter how well-designed, won’t
so yes: build your year-in-review. it’s a sharp business move. just know what game you’re playing: don’t optimize for virality; optimize for reminding users why they should stay.
have a great week, y’all. i love you.
— dj
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big news! huge!
deepseek released deepseek-v3.2 & deepseek-v3.2-speciale, fully free and open source models that match gpt-5 and gemini-3 pro on reasoning and math, with built-in tool use for stronger inference… another red flag for u.s. ai labs burning billions while chinese labs hit similar benchmarks at a fraction of the cost
personal faves
amazon is testing 30-minute deliveries in seattle and philadelphia, for $4 with prime or $14 without. would love to see them lean harder into competing with doordash and other delivery apps
tiktok released nearby feed in europe, surfacing public posts tagged in your area so users can discover local restaurants, events, and attractions
netflix released mobile-friendly version of red dead redemption. my favorite video game ever 🙂
nice job guys
amazon announced kiro, a fully autonomous coding agent that retains context across repos and pull requests, in order to triage bugs and tackle backlogs with minimal oversight
amazon announced ai factories, letting corporations and governments run aws-grade ai systems inside their own data centers to meet strict data-sovereignty requirements.
amazon announced devops agent, ai software that diagnoses outages, deduces likely causes using third-party tools, assigns tasks to agents, and drafts incident reports before engineers even respond
bytedance released ai voice assistant on zte phones, enabling voice-activated tasks like finding content and booking tickets
samsung announced z trifold, a foldable phone with two hinges that expands into a larger multitasking display
amazon released fire tv scene jumping, letting users skip to specific scenes in prime video by describing them to alexa
google released android 16 improvements, featuring ai summaries for long messages and group chats
waymo announced autonomous testing in philadelphia, expanding its vehicle testing to four u.s. cities
uber released robotaxi service in dallas with human safety operators
amazon announced kindle scribe colorsoft, featuring a lighter, thinner build and larger color displays for reading and note-taking
other llm news
mistral ai released mistral 3, an open-source model family optimized for document analysis, reasoning, and coding, aiming to outperform much larger closed models
runway announced gen 4.5, a high-definition video model with strong physics and motion understanding that now tops the video arena leaderboard
amazon announced nova forge, a model-training system that helps businesses build frontier-level custom models for their own ai workloads
nvidia announced alpamayo-r1, an open reasoning vision-language model for autonomous driving research that processes text + images together to help vehicles interpret their surroundings
idk tbh
kalshi released tokenized betting contracts, allowing users to trade tokenized wagers on solana, offering more anonymity and tapping more deeply into crypto markets. great product decision, but honestly kinda sad about how much prediction markets are increasing sports gambling… feels bad for society
discord released in-game item purchases, letting users buy game items directly inside discord… unclear to me why anyone would do this instead of just buying in-game?