Reddit’s Anonymous AI Advantage and Gemini 2.0
Plus: How to write your own job description, OpenAI and Twitch’s losses, Google Docs’ 40 new templates
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Hi product people 👋, Rich Holmes here with the weekly briefing. Welcome to the 170+ new readers who joined us since last week!
This week, we take a look at Google's latest model, Gemini 2.0, and its new research tool that could be very useful for product teams, and why anonymity may be Reddit's greatest AI strength.
As well as this, we’ve got some practical tools you can use at work including a browser which promises to ditch cookie banners once and for all, an API-to-SDK startup and a new study which shows that Amazon’s RTO mandates may not have started a broader trend after all.
You can see some demos of some of the products in action along with some additional commentary from me on the YouTube version of the briefing and if you have any thoughts on anything we’ve covered this week, just leave a comment below.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
Key reads and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product this week:
Knowledge Series - How to use AI in spreadsheets to boost productivity
While most commentators are busy trying to figure out whether AI will replace engineers and creatives, there's one application of AI that's been quietly gaining traction in recent months: the humble spreadsheet. In this Knowledge Series tutorial, we’ll explore how you can augment your spreadsheets with AI to boost your productivity for use cases like identifying trends, data formatting, categorizing customer feedback with sentiment analysis and more. (Department of Product)
Case study - Why Slack’s engineers break stuff on purpose
Not only is it simply exciting to diverge from the usual job of fixing, it puts us in unique and realistic situations we would have never discovered if we had approached maintenance the traditional way, says Slack Engineer Sean Madden. (Slack Engineering)
Career planning - How to write your own job description (and invent your role)
Creating a new position for yourself—one that doesn't yet exist—sounds too good to be true. But many professionals have done it. In this article, Maven’s Wes Kao explains how. (Wes Kao Substack)
Strategy - How AI can open up new, untapped markets for SaaS products
AI-powered SaaS solutions are now tackling tasks previously deemed too complex for software, enabling companies to reduce labor costs in sales, marketing, customer service, operations, and finance. This transformation is not only increasing revenue per customer by up to 10x but also making previously "small" markets viable for VSaaS companies. (Andreessen Horowitz)
UX - Tools for conducting unmoderated usability testing
Unmoderated testing is a great way to get actionable insights from users quickly. In an unmoderated user test, there is no facilitator. Researchers set up questions and tasks in a special testing tool, and then participants complete those tasks asynchronously on their own. This collection of tools gives you some practical ways to do your own unmoderated testing. (NN Group)
New product features and innovation this week
Google has unveiled the latest iteration of Gemini - Gemini 2.0. It is described as a model built for the “agentic era” that many of us are expecting 2025 to be. One flagship feature that stands out is called Deep Research. It allows users to ask Gemini to perform research on a users behalf and but crucially, it uses what it learns throughout the research process to continuously evolve and refine its results. Once finished, the results can be exported into a Google Doc. You can watch it in action here.
Considering how frequently users append “Reddit” to their Google searches, it’s surprising that it’s taken Reddit this long, but the company has finally revealed a new AI powered search tool called Reddit Answers. Once a question is asked, curated summaries of relevant conversations and details across Reddit will appear, including links to related communities and posts.
One of Reddit’s biggest strategic advantages over its competitors is the quality of its content - and this is in part driven by the anonymous identities of its users. When users are anonymous, they tend to be more honest and this authenticity makes AI training more accurate, according to Richard Lachman, an associate professor at Toronto Met University.
Reddit previously signed a $200m+ licensing deal with Google to allow them to use Reddit to train its AI models. If users can get answers directly from Reddit through Reddit Answers, will they eventually bypass traditional search entirely?
Other AI updates
Grok has a new image generator that was briefly called Auora before Elon Musk confirmed that it would instead be bundled into Grok. It's pretty impressive at generating photorealistic images This week, xAI raised a fresh $6 billion funding round, and is reportedly working on a standalone app for Grok. Decoupling the Grok brand from X may prove to be a smart strategic move.
OpenAI’s 12 days of OpenAI is continuing with the release of Sora - its powerful generative AI video tool. The tool is available in most markets including the US - but not the EU or UK.
Yelp is rolling out new AI aggregated reviews which let users filter based on sentiment. It’s called Review Insights and it uses LLMs to allow users to filter reviews based on things like quality of its food, service, ambiance, wait time, and drinks. Even when a review doesn’t explicitly mention one of the topics, the LLM understands the context in the review to identify and surface the relevant topic and sentiment. This type of AI-powered filtering could be useful for other use cases, too. Definitely something for product design teams to think about.
In other news…
Databricks has launched a synthetic dataset API. The API is designed to help product teams and tech companies evaluate the performance of AI agents without having to rely on real world data, which can take a long time to produce. Early results are promising, with an overall 2x improvement in the agent’s ability to find relevant documents when trained on synthetic datasets.
A new startup called Stainless has raised $25 million for its product which allows product and engineering teams to transform APIs into functional SDKs. It is founded by an ex-stripe engineer and is already generating $1 million in annual recurring revenues. SDKs are like home recipe kits for engineers. Find out more here.
Google Docs has rolled out a collection of 40 new templates which should come in handy for product teams.
Tools you can use
Aloha is a browser which promises to ditch cookie browser banners. It doesn’t block them but instead uses a new feature called Cookie Consent Manager to save cookie preferences at the browser level.
Stackfix allows you to compare SaaS products in seconds. Ideal if you’re looking for new tools or vendors at work.
Bricks describes itself as “the AI spreadsheet we’ve all been waiting for”.
📈 Product data and trends to stay informed
OpenAI is reportedly losing $7 billion a year right now. Which is one of the reasons it announced a new $200 a month subscription for access to its latest models. But losses aren’t uncommon in tech startups; here’s a snapshot of losses incurred by some other tech companies for context.
Amazon's return to office mandates don't seem to have impacted the overall working patterns of US workers. Overall, the share of US companies that require people to be in the office full time declined slightly since last quarter. Will this trend continue into 2025? 68% of companies offer at least some flexibility in where people work.
Twitch is still losing viewers with live viewership down to 1.7 billion from a pandemic high of 2.4 billion.
Digital identity wallets are being rolled out in Europe. Privacy campaigners aren’t very happy about the idea of consolidating identity into one centralized app for fears it could hand too much control over to central governments. If they are eventually widely adopted, could digital ID wallets become the de facto authentication method for product teams?
Stability AI’s CEO says the startup is now focused on API licensing monetization and that the company has tripled its revenues as a result.
AI agents can now predict your behaviour with 85% accuracy. A study conducted by Deepmind and Stanford University conducted 2 hour interviews with 1,000 humans to understand their life experiences, beliefs and values. The 85% accuracy rates are much higher than the 70% associated with standard demographic modelling. The impact of this could be profound for use cases like conducting user / market research.
Other product news in brief
🧑⚖️Product liability lawsuits are being filed against AI product character.ai.
🪖OpenAI has a new customer: the US military
🚖Uber will need to fingerprint teen users in California for safety reasons
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