On product
- Sora is shutting down. Generation isn't a product
OpenAI closed the Sora app this week, seven months after launching it as a social network, and the API ends in September. What went wrong, and what it says about where generative video belongs.
2 min reads likes comments - Sora built a social network
OpenAI launched Sora 2 as a TikTok-style app where every video is generated. The model is impressive. I'm less sure a feed of generations gives people a reason to keep watching.
2 min reads likes comments - Describe the music you want
"Sad songs for a rainy drive" beats any genre taxonomy. Natural language is becoming the way people ask for music, and it changes what a music recommender has to understand.
2 min reads likes comments - GPT-4o hears you laugh
OpenAI and Google both showed real-time multimodal assistants this week. Speech as a native modality changes what a conversation with a model is, and latency turns out to be the feature.
2 min reads likes comments - ChatGPT is a product, not a model
A million people signed up in five days. The underlying model isn't new. What's new is the interface and the training to follow instructions, and that changes every software team.
2 min reads likes comments - You can't skim a song
Why music recommendation is a different problem from video or news recommendation: sequences, repetition, passive listening, and the difference between a skip and a mood.
2 min reads likes comments - Short video starts in India, which is exactly right
YouTube opened a beta of Shorts in India, where TikTok has been banned since June. Launch where the gap is, with the world's biggest music catalog behind you.
2 min reads likes comments - Reels is a clone. That's fine
Instagram launched Reels the day before the TikTok executive order. The format is a commodity now, and the question is whose recommender learns fastest.
2 min reads likes comments - What a face company does when nobody gathers
Three months into the pandemic, with no conferences on the calendar. What we're trying, what we decided not to build, and how it feels to run a startup whose market disappeared.
2 min reads likes comments - Video is the new floor
Two weeks into working from home, every interaction is a video call. What that does to expectations for video, and what's missing from the tools.
2 min reads likes comments - Musical.ly is now TikTok, as predicted
ByteDance merged Musical.ly into TikTok this week. A short follow-up to what I wrote in November, and what the feed tells you about the product.
2 min reads likes comments - Watch the recommendation engine, not the lip-sync
ByteDance is buying Musical.ly. It looks like a Chinese news company buying an American teen app. It's really a recommendation engine buying a global audience.
2 min reads likes comments - The camera is the new keyboard
Snap filed to go public and calls itself a camera company. The phrase sounds like marketing, but it describes a real shift in how people put things into computers.
2 min reads likes comments - Vine is dead. Short video isn't
Twitter is shutting down Vine. It didn't lose because six-second videos were a bad idea.
2 min reads likes comments - Pokémon Go is AR without the AR
The biggest augmented reality hit so far barely uses augmented reality. It's a map, built on years of data from another game.
2 min reads likes comments - Chatbots are this year's apps. Tay says slow down
Facebook opened Messenger to bots at F8, two weeks after Microsoft's Tay learned racism from Twitter in a day. Why I'm telling clients to wait.
2 min reads likes comments - Apple bets on human DJs. I'd bet on the skip button
Apple Music launched with Beats 1 and human curators. Three weeks later, Spotify ships Discover Weekly. Two theories of music discovery.
2 min reads likes comments - Google Photos gives away what I spent two years building
Unlimited storage and automatic face grouping, free. What happens to small companies when a platform ships their feature as a default.
2 min reads likes comments - Two years of 3D faces on a phone: what I got wrong
Leaving the selfie-to-3D-face app I helped build out of my thesis. The technology mostly worked. The rest is the interesting part.
2 min reads likes comments - Why my 3D faces look dead: the physics of skin
Our app gets the shape of your face right and still looks like a wax museum. Most of the problem turned out to be motion.
3 min reads likes comments