hi bud buds,
last week, openai launched chatgpt agent — a tool that can control your entire computer. it can reads your files, use your apps, and write your emails.
a few interesting product details: it’s slow (15–30 minutes per task); it asks for permission before doing anything irreversible (like sending an email or booking an appointment); and it’s restricted from making financial transactions “for now”.
this is open ai’s third major “agentic” product bet:
deep research (feb ‘25) - produces deep, multi-source research and analysis
agent: combines both ^, and extends them across your whole desktop
🌶 honestly, i haven’t found much value in any of them yet… as a product manager, i occasionally try deep research for market research, but the results are too vague to be truly helpful (though i expect better prompting + model quality will eventually fix this). i never use operator — i just don’t have many structured, repeatable web tasks, which is what it’s optimized for. so i’m skeptical of agent — if i don’t use operator, why would i need the supercharged version?
in their launch materials, openai pitched a few use cases for agent:
review your calendar and brief you on upcoming client meetings
create a powerpoint deck based on competitor research
plan a date night by checking your google calendar and cross-referencing opentable
intuitively, these make sense — i do manual variations of all three of these activities today. rollout for chatgpt plus (~$20 monthly) users is rumored to begin this monday, so i’m excited to dogfood and share my findings with y’all.
are you a power user of operator, deep research, or agent? i would love to hear from you — how has it changed your workflows? what killer use cases am i missing?
have a great week, y’all. i love you.
- dj
last week’s biggest product releases
sick
slack released several ai enhancements: ai search, huddle transcriptions / summaries, channel + thread recaps, and a new “explain this message” feature. my company pays kapa.ai for similar functionality — feels inevitable that slack kills a bunch of these startups via its distribution advantage
tiktok added new songwriter tools, including a dedicated music tab in profiles for artists to show off their top tracks
openai’s new reasoning llm hit gold medal performance at the 2025 international math olympiad. one key insight: the model ran for 24 hours straight to solve problems. interesting product insight here:
right now ~100% of my ai use is “instant answer”
if performance improves significantly with longer turnaround times, i’m curious to see which parts (and what %) of our daily ai usage becomes “long turnaround”
moderately interesting
netflix included genai content in a show for the first time — a building collapse scene that reportedly finished “10x faster and at lower cost” than traditional vfx tools. sad to think about the impact this will have on vfx artists 😕
xai added ai companions to grok behind a paywall, including a goth anime girl (ayo? 👀 ). i wrote about falling in love with ai companions in a recent issue; tldr - i think the human race will survive…. barely.
roblox launched a new licensing platform to make it easier for ip holders (like netflix, sega, lionsgate) to partner with roblox creators on official game worlds + experiences
google rolling out an ai business-calling feature that can contact businesses on your behalf (e.g. to check hours or make reservations). i tried it recently to book a table from a seamless google maps entry point — worked very well; big fan 🙂
rivian launched a custom version of google maps in their vehicles: with rivian ui, a trip planner, and ev charge locations. previously, they used mapbox
apple news launched an “emoji game”, a new word / logic game, seemingly following ny times’ popular product strategy to bolster engagement / retention with daily puzzles and games
hmmmmmm
mistral added deep research mode to their ai chat, following similar moves from openai and anthropic. feels like mistral is firmly lagging behind other leading ai labs. per similarweb, mistral has ~7m monthly visitors (50% of anthropic, and 1% of openai)
facebook is testing a feature that adds links to potentially duplicative videos pointing users to the original, in order to disincentivize unoriginal content. not sure why they don’t just remove the duplicates instead…?
nextdoor dropped a redesign with local journalism and an ai tool called “faves” to surface local businesses. huge fan of any bets that support local journalism… but less bullish on the “faves” feature tbh. reminds me of an old yc video where dalton caldwell + michael seibel explain how “finding cool new places nearby” is a classic startup tar pit (it’s not a technology problem; your neighborhood just doesn’t have that many cool new places opening up that you don’t know about already)
twitch is testing vertical video to compete with tiktok + reels…. unless i’m missing something, they should just ship this? feels like a no-brainer / quintessential two-way door?
regulatory 😴
reddit launched age verification in the uk to comply with local regulations
roblox launched new trust and safety features, including:
selfie video-based age estimation to verify user ages
a chat system that limits messaging unless teens add each other as trusted connections
that’s it for this week; thanks for reading. if you enjoyed this issue, please consider sharing it with a friend so i can get insanely rich.
love, dj