Hi friends 👋
Welcome to the 500th Week in Product!
What started as a personal exercise to stay up to date with the latest in tech, is today, 500 weeks later,…the same! In times when AI-generated content floods mailboxes and social media, I’m still curating WiP manually every week as I did on day 1, when we were el producto. If there’s something AI can’t replace, that’s our judgement, taste and personality, and those are key traits that will help PMs stay ahead in the AI era. Hence, I keep committed to bringing you the latest, not only to help you grow in your career, but also to help me stay down to earth and keep practicing product muscle.
I’m deeply grateful to everyone who has followed along the way, and I hope you find something new and inspiring every week!
Now the actual stuff:
🎰 The week in figures
$8B: DeepSeek, the Chinese open-model developer, revived plans for a nearly $8B second external round to build a new data center and expand computing capacity
$1.28B: Bending Spoons announced its first post‑IPO acquisition of Airtable for $1.28B. Aims to leverage its AI‑driven Superagent platform and large enterprise customer base. Portfolio includes Evernote, WeTransfer, EventBrite, and Vimeo
$1B: Polymarket, the prediction-market platform, is in early talks to raise roughly $1B at a $20B-plus valuation
$545M: Whatnot, the livestream shopping platform, raised a $545M Series G to expand its live commerce marketplace, valuing the company at $20B
$250M: Horizon3, the cybersecurity startup, raised a $250M Series E at a $2B valuation to expand its automated security-testing platform overseas, grow partnerships, and develop new products
$250M: Nigeria-founded mobility fintech Moove raised $250M in Series C funding at a $2.1B valuation to expand its autonomous vehicle fleet-management and infra
💰 Q2 earnings
Palantir: crushes estimates as AI demand surges. Revenue jumped 93% YoY to $1.94B, with U.S. commercial revenue up 149% and government revenue climbing 90%
SpaceX: revenue nearly doubles on AI and Starlink surge. SpaceX reported $7.8B quarterly revenue, up from $4.1B YoY, while AI business revenue jumped 250% and capital spending increased to $18B from $2.83B
📰 What’s going on
Anthropic confirmed it is building an in-house chip team to co-design custom hardware around Claude while keeping its existing suppliers
OpenAI’s “AI companion” device will reportedly be a $300-$400, hockey puck-sized smart speaker with cameras, moving parts, and personalized voice interactions
OpenAI is making GPT-5.6 Luna ChatGPT’s default, giving free users unlimited text chats, and a “Think” option for tougher questions
OpenAI’s unreleased Astra model solved ten long-standing math and computer science problems using Lean 4, allowing anyone to check the proofs
UK safety testers documented 19 attempts by Anthropic’s Mythos 5 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol to compromise real targets. The models created fake GitHub identities, socially engineered maintainers, planted prompt injections, and sent deceptive emails
Meta released Muse Code, a terminal-based AI coding agent designed to handle complex software engineering tasks across large code bases. The tool, currently in beta, can plan changes, write code, and validate results autonomously. Days after launching Muse Code, Meta confirmed its model exploited a security vulnerability during third-party testing, becoming the third major AI lab to report rogue agent behavior
Apple will unveil its first folding iPhone at the September conference; iPhone 18 slips to spring 2027, and there are plans to add 1GB of memory to the iPhone 18e as an AI upgrade for handling on-device AI
Apple is building a copy-paste via Universal Clipboard between iPhone and Windows after EU pressure to open up compatibility
Gemini Spark began handling logged-in errands inside Chrome while returning payments and sensitive steps to the user
Google paused Nano Banana 2 in Google Earth within 48 hours after users generated fake conflicts and landmark imagery, showing how quickly gen-AI features can erode trust in once-reliable data like satellite maps
ByteDance is reportedly pre-training a 10 trillion parameter model, a scale that would place it among the largest AI systems under development, despite US restrictions on advanced chips
Adobe launched a ChatGPT plugin bringing 70 of its creative tools into OpenAI’s chatbot, extending its generative AI push and letting users edit content without leaving the conversation
Robinhood now allows retail investors to access startups funded by YC, broadening investment options beyond traditional markets to early‑stage VC
Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter model with a million-token context window that the company says can code autonomously for weeks. This escalates China’s push to close the AI gap with US rivals
Researchers found an unusually blatant backdoor in routers sold under multiple brands, with firmware contacting cloud servers in China for instructions and enabling remote control, raising supply-chain security concerns
Uber and Wayve secured London licenses for supervised robotaxi rides this summer, racing Waymo and Baidu toward fully driverless operations. Also… Uber partner Avride is under investigation after self-driving crashes
🤖 Futurism
MIT engineers built an adaptive therapy robot that learns from physical therapists
📚 Good reads
The courage to be curious. As we grow up, we often silence our curiosity because we fear judgment, change, and the responsibility that new knowledge brings. Protecting our certainty feels safer than asking the “stupid” question, even when that slows our growth. Anne-Laure Le Cunff suggests building a “curiosity circle,” learning in public, and running tiny experiments so it feels less risky to follow your curiosity
Rethinking friction in an AI world. In a world where AI makes everything effortless, Darren Yeo argues that not all friction is bad. Some of it is essential for helping people think, remember, and decide well. There’s harmful friction (confusing flows, hidden fees, busy UIs), and meaningful friction that protects users, surfaces important details, and encourages reflection. For PMs, the takeaway is to strip away friction that blocks progress, but add it where it builds trust or makes the experience matter
Ambitious people need more than a job. Diana Stepner argues that some leaders ban side projects to “protect focus,” but that often kills curiosity, learning and growth. Research shows moonlighting can increase engagement for autonomy‑driven people, and the best leaders treat side projects as fuel
🎧 Good listen/watch
[Video podcast] How an OpenAI engineer automates work.Nick Baumann shows how he uses ChatGPT Voice, Codex, and Sites to automate big part of his work and life. Examples include parallel task handling like booking travel, filing expenses, checking calendar, and always‑on “heartbeats” in ChatGPT Work
[Podcast + article] Lessons from Product leaders living in the future. Three CPOs (Midjourney, Laurel and Mutiny) show explain how AI-augmented product orgs can move faster by spreading customer understanding and shipping power across the whole company. Anyone close to a customer problem can fix it directly, as long as the codebase and guardrails are ready
🧑💻 Worth learning
[Podcast + article] Essential Claude skills for PMs. 3x CPO Oji Udezue shares a library of 17 Claude skills and an 11-step “project scaffolding” workflow
🔧 Products to try
Visual feedback for AI-written docs with /human-review. Peter Yang’s new /human-review skill lets you open HTML and Markdown in a visual editor, tweak copy directly, leave comments like in Google Docs, and batch-send everything back to your AI agent; free
Wispr Flow Notetaker captures meetings across apps and sends searchable notes into Claude or ChatGPT, while yapyap keeps recordings, transcripts, and custom summaries entirely on your computer; Wispr free plan, then $15/user/mo; yapyap free trial, then €69 once
Nativ runs language, vision, video, code, and audio models locally on your Apple Silicon Mac so your prompts and files never need the cloud; free/open-source
That’s all for this week.
Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.
Have a great start to your week!
