el producto #446 🚀
Q2 earnings, LLMs for children, Claude's growth engine, Slack AI, Vibe-coding with Lovable, Building your AI copilot, How AI changes PM responsibilities & more
Hi friends 👋
Happy weekend, and welcome to a new edition of el producto
🎰 The week in figures
2.5B: ChatGPT users send 2.5B prompts a day (so far). And that's just ChatGPT—add in Claude, Gemini, Grok, and every other AI tool, and we're looking at usage that's starting to rival Google search territory
2B: Google's AI products saw massive growth with AI Overviews reaching 2B users, Gemini hitting 450M users, and AI Mode surpassing 100M users
$300M: Quavo, a provider of automated dispute management software for financial institutions, secured a $300M growth investment
$220M: Viva Finance, a fintech platform offering payroll-linked personal loans, landed $220M to expand access to credit across the U.S.
$160M: Xelix, which builds AI-powered accounts payable software for enterprises, raised $160M in Series B funding
$150M: Vanta, a trust management platform for security and compliance automation, raised $150M in Series D funding at $4.15B valuation
$110M: Reka AI, the LLM maker, raised a new $110M funding round valuing the company at over $1B. Reka — which comes from a handful of former Google and Meta researchers — aims to churn out foundation models more efficiently and quickly than their rivals, but they’ve also branched out into developing interfaces and customized AI apps for enterprise partners
$100M: Substack raised $100M in a Series C round, boosting its valuation to $1.1B. The funds aim to enhance creator tools amid a surge to over 5M paid subs
$100M: This week, Lovable officially became the fastest growing software company in history, reaching $100M in record time. Their CEO says that, incredibly, a massive 10% of the new websites created on the internet last month were built with Lovable
8%: Pew Research tracked 900 U.S. adults and found Google's AI summaries are creating “zero-click” searches where users click through to websites only 8% of the time (versus 15% without AI summaries) and are 10pp more likely to end their browsing session entirely
x4: xAI’s Grok app has seen its revenue roughly quadruple from around $100,000 per day to $419,000 in the wake of the launch of the new Grok 4 model
💰Q2 earnings
Alphabet beat Q2 earnings expectations, posting $96.43B in revenue and $2.31 in EPS, but surprised the market by hiking its 2025 capital expenditure forecast by $10B to $85B, citing soaring demand for its Cloud products. Revenue grew 14% YoY, with strong showings from Google Search ($54.19B), YouTube ads ($9.8B), and Cloud ($13.62B, up 31%). Despite rising AI infrastructure costs, net income jumped 20% to $28.2B. Its moonshot "Other Bets" brought in $373M but lost $1.25B
Next week:
Meta reports on July 30th
Microsoft reports on July 30th
Apple reports on July 31st
📰 What’s going on
Google launches Opal, a new service that allows users to “build, edit and share mini-AI apps using natural language.” Yes, Google is jumping on the vibe-coding bandwagon and Lovable has never had more competition
Google has launched a new AI-powered search feature that “groups links together in helpful ways” (called “Web Guide”) for those who have opted into its testing environment—Search Labs. Instead of presenting search results in a list, Web Guide will present several clusters of links, with each cluster focusing on a different part of the search query, so users can delve deeper into topics
YouTube Shorts launched new AI-powered creation tools for Shorts including a photo-to-video feature and generative effects, powered by Veo 2 technology
OpenAI is expected to release GPT-5 in August, and we could be just around the cornetr of a new cycle of AI model releases
Meta has refused to sign the EU’s new, voluntary Code of Practice, which was published earlier this month and is designed to help tech companies, like Meta, implement the processes and systems needed to comply with the EU’s AI Laws, which aim to regulate AI
xAI has announced its next model: “Baby Grok.” Although details are currently scarce, Baby Grok is reportedly going to be a child-friendly version of Grok that will deliver “safe and suitable” content, specifically for young children. It’s expected to be a simplified adaptation of Grok, with filters that parents can control to manage their children’s experience
Microsoft continues its aggressive push in AI by hiring top talent from Google DeepMind, with at least two dozen employees joining Mustafa Suleyman’s team in recent months to bolster its Copilot and Bing efforts. High-profile hires include Amar Subramanya, former VP of Engineering for Google’s Gemini Assistant, and Adam Sadovsky, a longtime leader at DeepMind. The move highlights intensifying competition among tech giants for AI expertise, with Meta offering $100M signing bonuses and Google spending $2.4B to acquire startup Windsurf
Amazon acquired AI startup Bee that makes a $50 wearable device which listens to conversations and creates reminders and to-do lists
The White House released the AI Action Plan, a massive 90-point AI roadmap for turning the U.S. into an AI superpower, broken into three main pillars.
Pillar 1: Accelerate AI Innovation (aka Let's build cool stuff)
Pillar 2: Build American AI Infrastructure (aka We need more power—literally)
Pillar 3: Lead in International AI Diplomacy and Security (aka Let's keep our edge now y'all)
Dia, the first AI browser, has a new Skills Library that lets you create custom "/" commands for instant AI tasks on any webpage (Perplexity’s Comet Browser is working on its own shortcuts that should roll out this week). I just started trying Dia for el producto editing 👀
Slack officially launched a bunch of new AI features in what it is calling “a new era of AI in Slack”. The updates include a new jargon translator to provide instant explanation for acronyms and project names, writing tools for Canvas, and enterprise search, which allows users to search across a company’s entire knowledge base from apps including Google Drive, Confluence, Teams, Salesforce, Asana, or Slack channels. I’ve had the chance to beta-test these features for a few weeks already, and AI Search is pretty slick
Claude Code just launched sub-agents, so you can create specialized coding agents (like a “code reviewer” or “test writer”) that each have their own context window and custom instructions. You can then automate different parts of your development workflow without cluttering your main conversation
GitHub has launched its new vibe coding app, Spark. It’s GitHub’s answer to competitors like Loveable, Replit and Figma Make, and it allows users to build personal vibe-coded apps in a few seconds. At first glance, this just appears to be a copycat app, but since Spark is built directly into the GitHub platform, it builds entire mini apps with fully functional backends, not just the frontend UI
📚 Good reads
How AI changes PM responsibilities. Reforge’s Brian Balfour shares how AI is reshaping the role of PMs by expanding problem and solution spaces, requiring revised prioritization frameworks, and accelerating market competition. It’s crucial to leverage AI as a discovery tool, not just an end goal
How Notion built their new MCP server. Notion’s hosted MCP server allows AI tools (like Cursor and Claude) to interact with Notion workspaces using natural language, skipping the need for complex API integrations. In this piece, their engineering teams explain how they built the second iteration of their product. Complement with this OpenAI guide to build MCP servers (easier than you may think!)
When agents attack: How AI reshapes marketplaces. AI-driven agents are flipping traditional marketplace models by collapsing purchase funnels, disrupting customer acquisition, and forcing operators to rethink strategies from discovery to supply integration. Casey Winters outlines how discovery, transactional, and supply agents will reshape the space, offering a playbook for founders to adapt
Build your personal AI copilot. Tal Raviv dives into creating a personalized AI assistant to boost productivity and long-term decision-making using projects, instructions, and knowledge onboarding. It covers practical steps from onboarding organizational docs to operationalizing AI prompts for automation and prototyping. Perfect for PMs looking to level up their workflows
How Claude is building a unique growth engine. Claude AI leverages user-created apps to drive scalable, viral growth through unique constraints and nested growth loops, offering a fresh model for AI-powered platforms. Product leaders can replicate this by focusing on constraints that foster innovation and sharing mechanics
How Carta’s AI agents save thousands of hours. First Round Review explains how Carta developed dynamic AI agents to automate complex accounting workflows, cutting reconciliation time from 11 mins to seconds and saving over 3,500 hrs monthly
How to build vibe coded apps with Lovable - a handy guide full of best practices from Lovable’s own designer
That’s a wrap for this week! 🌟
I’d love to hear your thoughts—what stood out to you, and how are you thinking about integrating these insights into your Product strategy? Reply to the email or drop a comment on Substack to share your take. And if you found this valuable, forward it to a fellow PM, Product enthusiast, startup founder or entrepreneur who’d enjoy the read
More next week! 👋
Angel