Microsoft Magma, Coinbase engineers go all-in on AI, new Claude features leak
Plus: A new tool from Google to plan your career. Should bug fixes always be prioritised? Linear's head of product says yes. Grok 3's logo designer speaks.
Hi everyone đ, a warm welcome to the 210+ new subscribers who joined us since last week!
Coming up in todayâs briefing, we take a look at a new groundbreaking multimodal model from Microsoft, as well as an update from Instagram that doubles down on its efforts to position itself as a GenZ messaging app.
We also look at how Coinbase managed to get all its engineers on board with an AI tool and what that means for the future of product development, some new features from Perplexity, and lessons on crafting high quality products from Linear's head of product.
Plus, an experimental new tool from Google that helps you visualize your skillsets to find your next role.
Enjoy the rest of your week!
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Key reads and resources for product teams
New from the Department of Product Substack this week:
Knowledge Series - How to build practical AI agents you can use at work
Build your own set of AI agents at work for product related tasks like conducting market research, analysing your competitors' tech stack, finding your next job and more.
Deep - How are companies using machine learning?
In this deep dive, Weâll take a look at how ML is powering new features at top companies like Snapchat, Uber, Airbnb and more. And - for the first time - how some companies are using ML to cut costs and unlock new revenue generating opportunities, too.
(Department of Product)
Perspectives - Will AI take programmerâs jobs?
In an interview between Dylan Patel (founder of SemiAnalysis) and Nathan Lambert (AI2 research scientist), they explore how AI is transforming software engineering, suggesting that while AI tools are rapidly improving at coding tasks, they won't replace programmers but rather shift their role to AI supervisors and domain experts. (YouTube)
UX - How to test and measure content in UX
The goal of content design is to reduce confusion and improve clarity. Yet often itâs difficult to pinpoint a problem as user feedback tends to be not specific enough. But: we can use a few simple techniques to assess how users understand and perceive content. (Smashing Magazine)
Career development - How to get hired when AI does the screening
Companies are increasingly using generative AI tools for recruitment and hiringâthink AI-assisted resume screens and AI-conducted interviews. Understanding how companies are leveraging AI for hiring is critical for landing your next job. (Harvard Business Review)
Process - How to use AI to craft personas and journey maps
Is it possible to use AI to help craft user personas and journey maps? UX Collectiveâs Kyle Soucy explains how it can enhance the process. (UX Collective)
New product features and innovation this week
Google is adding a new âsuggested next stepsâ feature to Meet powered by Gemini. Itâs an extension of an existing feature called Take Notes for Me that adds a checklist of next step items based on the call transcript designed to make it easier to follow up with actions after a meeting. At the same time, Google has also pulled Gemini capabilities out of the main Google iOS app in an attempt to drive up downloads of the standalone Gemini app. If youâve not tried the standalone Gemini app yet, itâs actually pretty impressive - particularly the live mode AI assistant which I sometimes speak to when Iâm bored.
And if youâre looking for a new role at the moment, this week, Google also unveiled a playful new tool called Career Dreamer. Powered by Gemini, itâs an interactive tool that crafts a visualisation of your career prospects based on your current experience and dreams for the future. See it in action here.
MeanwhileâŠ
Instagramâs DMs are getting an upgrade with the launch of five new features. This includes a new music sharing capability that allows users to share 30 second clips of tracks and real time translation capabilities for up to 99 different languages.
Microsoft has unveiled Magma - a groundbreaking new multimodal AI model that integrates vision, language and action capabilities. Put simply, it can interact with both digital UIs and physical environments through robotics. It achieved a 57.2% accuracy rate on UI navigation tasks.
Reddit is planning to bring in paywalls for specific subreddits. CEO Steve Huffman says it's a âwork in progressâ but one of the ânew, key featuresâ for 2025.
In other newsâŠ
Perplexity is the latest company to offer a Deep Research product. And it too is called Deep Research. Based on my experience, the results are pretty decent - and the exported PDFs look very nice. To give you a flavor of how well it works, I asked it to create a report on all of the essential new product releases from this week that product teams should know about and this is what it generated.
This week, Perplexity also launched an open source version of Deepseek called R1 1776 that it says removes any topics that were previously censored by the Chinese Communist Party.
xAI has released the third version of Grok which beats all other models across chatbot arena performance metrics. Aside from Grokâs very impressive performance, the product comes with a new logo design. The logoâs designer, Jon Vio, explained that the design is based on the concept of the singularity and draws inspiration from the âmystery and power of a black holeâ. An apt source of inspiration for folks who believe AI poses an existential threat to humanity.
Should bugs get prioritised above everything else?
Linearâs Head of Product says itâs an essential part of crafting a high quality product:
Tools you can use
Granola - an AI notepad for people in back to back meetings
Toolfinder - discover software, tools and explore integrations. Use natural language to find a new SaaS product in seconds.
Loveable - turn your idea into an app in seconds.
đ Product data and trends to stay informed
Coinbaseâs CEO says 100% of its engineering team have now onboarded to Cursor. This week, AI startup Codeium is in talks to raise more funding at an almost $3bn valuation. As the AI code generation market hots up, hereâs how some of the top companies compare:
Zillow has confirmed that it now routes over 100,000 users to products that were not built by engineers. Replit and other no code tools are making it much easier for non-engineers to build simple applications. Initially, micro-SaaS apps are vulnerable, but if the trend continues, major SaaS companies could be in trouble, too. If itâs simpler to build and maintain your own proprietary software, why bother spending money on a third party SaaS product?
Grok 3 is currently number one on the iPhone App Store. Deepseek shot to the top a few weeks back but quickly dropped to 22. With ChatGPT firmly in second place, itâll be interesting to see if Grok has any staying power.
Meta has sold 2 million pairs of its smart Ray-Bans. âA pair of eyeglasses will be the main digital platform addressing our daily needs,â said the CEO of Ray-Banâs parent company.
Maybe AI wonât replace humans after all. After becoming infamous for declaring how it had managed to offload lots of its customer service support to AI, Klarnaâs CEO seems to have done a u-turn. This week, he confirmed that heâs had an epiphany; that ânothing will be as valuable as humans!â.
Crunchbase says its new tool can predict a startupâs success rate with 95% accuracy.
The global speech and voice recognition market size is projected to grow from $9.4 billion in 2022 to $28.1 billion by 2027; it is expected to grow at a CAGR of 24.4% from 2022 to 2027. One startup that transforms call center agentsâ accents raised $65 million this week.
Other product news in brief
đȘŠ Humane, the AI pin, is shutting down and selling its assets to HP
đ OpenAIâs former CTO has finally revealed her secretive new startup called Thinking Machines
đ„œ Apple Intelligence may be coming to Vision Pro devices
đ§ Claude looks set to add new âextended thinkingâ features according to a new leak.
Paid subscribers get the full DoP Substack including: The Knowledge Series for sharpening their tech skills, AI tutorials for putting AI into practice at work and DoP Deep dive reports to learn from the worldâs top tech companies.
Excellent curation of super interesting reading - thanks.
Thank you for the HBR article recommendation. What an outstanding read.