hi bud buds,
last week was an ai bonanza for big tech companies like google, amazon, and reddit. they dropped a ton of major ai features, including:
a few weeks ago, i wrote that the winners of the ai revolution will follow a barbell distribution: mega tech companies on one end, tiny software startups on the other.
on the mega side, big tech will add ai to every surface of their platforms, using their existing / massive distribution to suffocate startups building horizontal tools. on the tiny side, small software teams will rapidly ship hyper-vertical tools that serve one niche insanely well.
perfect example: one of my good buddies (faang ml engineer) just teamed up with another faang engineer to build a vertical saas platform within the commercial real estate industry. i can see a clear path for them to build a solid product that throws off a few million in arr annually —and never require hiring more than five people along the way. imo, this is the future of tech.
and in the middle? mid-sized software companies with bloated teams are going to get squeezed into oblivion — too little power / distribution to compete with big tech, and too unfocused to compete with tiny specialists.
in this brave new world, we all must choose a side: megacorps or splinter cells.
love you bud buds, talk to you tomorrow
xxo,
dj
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last week’s product launches
aforementioned ai features from mega tech companies
google is adding agentic capabilities to gemini code assist, allowing it to deploy “agents” which can take multiple steps to accomplish complex programming tasks (e.g. create apps based on product specifications in google docs, or perform code transformations from one language to another)
google released ai mode in search, letting users ask complex questions about images. for example, you can take a picture of your bookshelf and ask for book recs based on what’s there. doesn’t chat gpt already do this?
youtube released an ai music-making tool for creators, enabling creators to generate music using natural language prompts
wordpress.com released an ai-powered website builder, enabling users to create websites via a chat interface. slick!
amazon released an upgraded ai video model (nova reel 1.1), capable generating up to two-minute videos
canva released canva ai, featuring an ai assistant that can create images according to your instructions
reddit upgraded reddit answers to utilize google gemini, improving the platform’s conversational ai search to provide better search relevance and quicker answers
other ai news
openai updates chatgpt to tailor responses based on past conversations. this feels very powerful as a consumer, and very impactful for openai as a business (would expect this to significantly increase switching costs over time)
anthropic released a $200 claude plan, with higher rate limits and priority access to the company’s newest ai models and features
openai may soon require organizations to complete id verification to access future ai models to… stop north korea from accessing ai…?
youtube expands likeness detection tech to detect deep fakes of public figures within video content
snapchat released sponsored ai lenses, enabling brands to create ai-generated lenses
bereal launched in-feed advertisements
to accelerate the death of an already dying social network
bye bye, love you,
dj
social networks doing monetizing things