Remember when BeReal had people excited? No, me either. But last year, there was interest in its reported 20 million daily active users were growing. (I’ll avoid discussion of how unreliable the numbers are, let’s use them as a comparison point.) A year later, it’s possibly a little higher at 25 million, or perhaps not, depending on who you read. Note: that number is global. US...
Wow. Meta just keeps rolling out the releases this year. This week Llama 2 expands with Llama 2 Long and rubs shoulders with ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo (not 4.0 to be clear) and Claude 2 in terms of context windows. Meanwhile, Jasper feels the heat and lowers its projections and internal valuation (to $1.2B). This, hot on the heels of OpenAI announcing a staggering internal valuation (of $90B) the other...
Hint: It’s probably not product announcements from INBOUND. For listeners to our podcast, and HubSpot partners like us, HubSpot’s annual INBOUND conference is a highlight of the year. But for the majority of HubSpot customers that we work with, most didn’t even know it was on. To them HubSpot is just one app amongst many – a single pond in a raging river of applications – that their...
Threads here and here.
Discussion here and here.
Sounds bad.
UPDATE: 02 Oct 2023: Looks like a software update with fix this.
Via a report in the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is looking to allow staff to sell shares at prices that value the company in the $80-90B mark. Note: there’s no intention for the company to go public. To put that in perspective, in Australia, there are only two companies who have a higher market cap. Put another way, OpenAI is valuing itself more than almost every company in Australia...
Perhaps not surprising that Amazon has invested heavily in Anthropic (makers of Claude).
Meanwhile ChatGPT releases another big update, rolling out voice and image capabilities.
What a year it has been so far, and it still feels like we’re just beginning.
From an interview with Kevin Systrom, when asked about Threads, he mentions he can see both a bear case and a bull case: The bear case: It’s more or less what exists elsewhere, and there’s not much differentiated value. While you can get lots of attention very quickly for competing with Elon Musk, that attention turns into real judgment when it either provides value or doesn’t...
Haven’t had a chance to see the new FineWoven cases in person yet, but what a terrible launch they’ve had – with a continuous stream of very bad reviews. Third party leather case vendors must be ecstatic. What a bumper year they’re about to have. UPDATE: Got a chance to see them in the Apple Store yesterday. My impressions: didn’t give me joy, but wasn’t as bad...
So much content to choose from… here’s a few I read everything from:
Newsletters I read (and pay for):
Stratechery (paying customer since July 2014)
Benedict Evans (paying customer for years)
Blogs I read:
Daring Fireball (John Gruber)
David C Baker
No Mercy No Malice (Scott Galloway)
People I follow:
Dare Obasanjo
Benedict Evans
Alex Hormozi
Have a guess how many smartphone brands there are globally (ie that have enough sales volume to be noticed). If you guessed 50, you’re only out by a factor of 5. There’s currently 250 or so global smartphone brands (as per this report from Counterpoint). I didn’t realise there were this many – I was surprised the number was so high. But even more surprising, turns out just...