hi bud buds,
back from ripping a spontaneous solo trip to japan last week. besides eating heinous amounts of soba and rice balls, my favorite part of japan is enjoying the magic of japanese design.
i love that every building you enter… every local product you use… feels so well crafted. rice ball wrappers??? perfectly engineered to keep your nori (seaweed) crisp until the exact moment you’re ready to enjoy. japanese design emphasizes minimalist, single-purpose products that execute on one jtbd extremely well.
bad week to be a rice ball!!!!!
this essentialist design philosophy stands in stark contrast to the trend i see in software, where ai is pushing us toward massive feature bloat over the next five years. as ai makes it 10x easier to ship features, companies will be tempted to ship 10x more. i see it internally at my own company — where extreme focus is being applied to execution velocity (perhaps at the expense of thoughtful, holistic design). the end result i foresee: cumbersome products with many features duct-taped together.
imo, this will only increase demand for designers and product managers, whose value will lie in refocusing products around critical workflows and making those user journeys extremely crisp (like nori?? see what i did there?)
for me, being in japan only strengthened that hypothesis. there’s just something so satisfying about using a well-crafted product—from crisp nori to crisp user journeys in software.
xoxo,
dj
last week’s product releases
sick
karat financial introduced a creator-focused business banking product with automated tax tools and 2–3% APY on checking—based on the idea that creators have complex taxes and keep more cash on hand. i’m extremely bullish on specialized financial products for the creator economy, as every gen alpha i interact with wants to be an influencer when they grow up
anthropic launched voice mode for claude. i’m bullish on voice becoming the primary medium for how we interact with llms over the long run
spotify launched improved podcast discovery features, including homepage recs and a feed for updates from podcasts you follow. soon: the ability for creators to recommend content and engage with fans in comments
youtube began testing google lens in shorts, letting users pause a short and use lens to identify objects in-frame. there’s a great potential monetization play in here (buy the purse in this ‘get ready with me’ vid) that i believe pinterest has also pursued (idk what to what degree of success)
discord launched orbs, a virtual reward system where users can watch ads to earn orbs, and redeem orbs for exclusive items. nice monetization play
google photos got a redesigned ai editor, featuring an ai tool called “reimagine” that uses natural language prompts to edit photos. tbh i won’t use this, but i will always stan google photos
perplexity launched perplexity labs, a tool for pro users to create reports, spreadsheets, and dashboards. super excited to try this out for work.
hmmmmmmmmmm okkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
microsoft started beta testing for copilot for gaming, to assist with game tips, recommendations, and achievements. kinda bearish on game tips and achievement use cases, but i’m very bullish on copilot for llms for content discovery (surfacing non-obvious matches between consumers and deep content catalogues)
hugging face announced two new humanoid robots. maybe i missed this but since when is hugging face doing robotics?? that feels like a big distraction from their core value prop. i would bet $10 they divest this line of business during the next ai winter
x debuted xchat, a new dm platform in beta with group chats, encryption, vanishing mode, file sharing, and passcode security. unclear to me what the business angle is—nothing here feels strong enough to pull users from whatsapp or signal. more likely an engagement or retention play for existing x users?
apple expanded self service repair to ipads, letting users fix select ipad models at home using official parts, tools, and guides. feels antithetical to apples’ brand of extremely opinionated consumer experiences. said another way, “uh yeah go figure it out” feels like the complete other end of the spectrum to a highly attentive, luxury experience at their in-store genius bars.
lol
tinder released tinder height preference setting, allowing paid subscribers to add height preferences to profiles. this is pure violence against my short kings and i won’t stand for it.
and neither can they ahhhhhhhhhhh hahahahameta finally launched the whatsapp ipad app, with support for group calls (up to 32 people), screen sharing, and ipad-specific features like multitasking and pencil support. this is an absolute gamechanger for asian grandparents
anduril and meta are building eagleeye, an xr device for the u.s. military, offering real-time battlefield intel as part of the sbmc next initiative. zuck really just leaning into his geopolitical menace era
google rolled out gemini email summary cards, automatically summarizing long english emails. bad day to be a long email!!!
llm news
deepseek released an updated r1 ai model with high performance across coding, math, and general knowledge. the model is more heavily censored on controversial topics, marking deepseek’s most restricted release yet
deepseek also released its r1 reasoning model on hugging face, a 685b parameter model under a permissive MIT license, meaning it can be used commercially
that’s it for this week. bye bye i love you all. hope you have a nice week.
love, dj