el producto #449 🚀
Apple robots and new iPhones, Building with GPT-5, Claude and Gemini get memory, AI design + prototyping resources, Strategic judgement, Google Flights gets AI upgrade & more
Hi friends 👋
Happy weekend, and welcome to a new edition of el producto
🎰 The week in figures
$34.5B: Perplexity, the SF AI Search firm, proposed a $34.5B acquisition of Chromefrom Google, planning to keep it open source and invest $3B. Perplexity's offer exceeds its $18B valuation
$1B: Lovable, the vibe coding startup, is on track to reach $1B in ARR within the next year. With a current valuation of $1.8B and monthly ARR growth of $8M, it aims for $250M in ARR by year-end
$850M: Sam Altman co-founded a brain-computer interface startup to rival Elon Musk's Neuralink. Potentially backed by OpenAI, Merge Labs aims to transform human-device interaction. It’s already expected to be valued at $850M
$500M: Cohere achieved a $6.8B valuation with a $500M raise. The company is focusing on enterprise AI, expanding rapidly, hiring top executives, and forming key partnerships
📰 What’s going on
Apple is expected to announce iPhone 17 with a larger screen, improved cameras, and an ultra-thin iPhone Air at their September event
Apple iOS 26 Beta 6 is coming with new ringtones, improved UI, and app speed enhancements
Apple just announced a push into the home robotics market with a desktop robot designed to behave like a helper with presence. It anchors a lineup that also includes a 6‑inch smart display running Charismatic OS and AI security cameras tuned for months‑long battery life. The ambition is simple: a home that feels coordinated, responsive, and calm, with Siri rebuilt to listen, remember, and follow through
Apple is also testing Siri for app operation via voice, releasing in spring 2026
Google released Gemma 3 270M, a tiny AI model you can train for specific tasks like analyzing customer feedback or extracting data from documents
Google is rolling out "Preferred Sources" in the U.S. and India, letting users customize their Top Stories in search. By starring favorite sites, users get tailored content
OpenAI updated ChatGPT with new GPT-5 mode options (Auto/Fast/Thinking), restored GPT-4o access, added model toggles for paid users, restricted GPT-4.5 to Pro subscribers, and set a new GPT-5 Thinking weekly rate limit of 3K messages a week
OpenAI invited a bunch of developers to take part in a hackathon and showcase what they were able to build with GPT-5. Here’s a selection of products that were built at the event
Anthropic expands Claude Sonnet 4's context window to 1M tokens, improving task performance, with premium charges over 200,000
Claude now remembers past conversations. The feature is rolling out to users on Max, Team and Enterprise subscription plans
Claude Code now teaches you coding by explaining its decisions step-by-step or pausing to let you write parts of the code yourself
Perplexity released a new update that adds video models to its Pro and Max plans. When combined with the Comet browser, these video models can perform full end-to-end tasks. In this example shared by one of Perplexity’s PMs, Tyler Tate, he shares how you could use the new video models to complete a task like posting a property listing online. It takes a static image of a property, creates a flyover video of it, and then shares it to LinkedIn
Google just rolled out Flight Deals, an AI-powered tool embedded in Google Flights that lets “flexible travelers” type natural language prompts — like “week-long winter trip with great food, nonstop only” — and instantly get curated flight options sorted by savings. It’s powered by a custom version of Gemini 2.5 that parses your vibe-and-budget based on your data & past interactions into real-time pricing matches
Google also added memories to Gemini chatbot. It’ll only be available now in Gemini 2.5 Pro in select countries, with plans to expand it to Gemini 2.5 Flash and other countries in the coming weeks
Meta attracted broad criticism for its recently uncovered AI policies that allowed its chatbots to flirt and hold sensual conversations with kids. Overtly sexual content was banned for youths, but many feel that the company was far too permissive regardless. Several senators have raised the specter of yet another investigation into the company
xAI is developing Grok 4.20, to rival GPT-5. Elon Musk hinted at a late August release, with enhanced app-building and multimodal processing for video and audio, aiming to improve speech nuance understanding
Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of xAI, has announced he’s leaving the company to continue his mission to develop “AI that’s safe and beneficial to humanity” by starting his own company: Babuschkin Ventures
Replit’s CEO says the company is having to evolve its monetisation strategy to accommodate AI agents. It is shifting from flat-fee pricing toward “effort-based pricing” pegged to how much computing power it took for an agent to complete a task. Running advanced agents is getting more expensive, especially for complex tasks
Linear has launched a new feature called “Product Intelligence”. It will assess new pieces of work, triage them, and make suggestions about which team should pick up the work. In other words, it does a big chunk of what many PMs might do
Vercel just dropped v0.app, and it's basically trying to make every PM, marketer, and designer into a software developer overnight. The company rebranded its v0.dev vibe-coding tool to v0.app with a bold promise: describe any app idea in a single prompt, and you'll get a complete working application—frontend, backend, copy, and logic included
Niantic enhances Meta Quest 3 with Spatial SDK v3.15 upgrades. Brings advanced mixed reality features like centimeter-accurate Visual Positioning System (VPS), and real-time physical environments using Meta's XR cameras
Stripe partners with Paradigm to create its own Layer 1 blockchain. Following its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure, Stripe launched a Stablecoin Business Account in 101 countries as of Feb 2025
StubHub, the ticket resale platform plans to go public in September after an April delay. It reported 10% revenue growth in Q1 with $2.08B gross merchandise sales. Previously, StubHub sought a $16.5B valuation amid strong competition from Ticketmaster
📚 Good reads
How 11 teams use AI prototyping tools to boost product discovery. Curious about AI prototyping? This piece shares real stories from product teams using tools like Lovable to test, iterate, and align—often in just hours. The article highlights practical wins, common pitfalls, and why speed and scrappy experimentation are unlocking better discovery for PMs everywhere
How to use MCP servers in your design workflows, by Figma blog. Paired with MCP servers, design systems become a productivity coefficient for AI-powered workflows, ensuring that AI agents produce relevant output and on brand
The death of technical analysis (and the rise of strategic judgment). Can (or rather, how will) AI change, or fundamentally transform data analysis from a technical craft to a strategic activity? Dan Hockenmaier and the team at Faire envision a framework where AI excels at the mechanical part - SQL queries, data manipulation, and visualisation - while humans remain essential for hypothesis formation and diagnosis
AI transforms the product manager role, but won’t replace it. Simone Basso explains how AI is speeding up classic PM tasks like research, strategy, and prototyping, making room for more focus on critical thinking and design. The future PM will be a multi-skilled “comb-shaped” individual, blending product, design, and analytics. Those who embrace AI will outpace those who don’t, especially as teams shift toward cross-functional individuals
AI PM learning paths. Aakash Gupta curates his top PM resources, making it easy to dive into AI Product Management. The article breaks down comprehensive guides for mastering AI PM skills, landing PM jobs, and building a solid foundation. Perfect for PMs wanting to level up in the AI space
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