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ChatGPT's Canvas Is For All, Intent-Driven Design, Survival of Organisations in Tough Times and more

Infinity is expanding. Faster than we imagined.

Author

Charbel Zeaiter
December 12, 2024

OpenAI’s 12 Days of Christmas is onto its 4th day. What a drop! It’s going to be interesting to see how Claude & ChatGPT evolve. We’re going to cover a range of tools in Saturday’s workshop at Faster Zebra. Also, I was wondering why I’m seeing people wearing brown all of a sudden, and why I feel as though I need to improve my daily black/white alternating t-shirt style with chocolate brown - Pantone has decided their 2025 colour of the year.

Happy reading, would love to hear from you and learn if these newsletters are offering you value each day.

Yours in Wonder,
Charbel
Founder of Velvet Onion, Faster Zebra and more to come …

Today’s Highlights

  • AI: ChatGPT Canvas is Now Available To Everyone: Plus It Can Run Code

  • Design: UI Design to Meet User Intent

  • Science & Tech: Universe is Expanding Faster Than We Thought

  • Founding: How 4 Big SaaS Players Are Putting LLMs to Work 

  • Product: How To Keep Your Product Organisation Alive? : Struggle & Hustle Phases

  • Today’s AI image: Glancing at Growing Infinity

  • Quote for the day: Funny Truth About “Making”

AI

ChatGPT Canvas is Now Available To Everyone: Plus It Can Run Code

Day 4 of OpenAI’s “Shipmas” delivers a game-changer: Canvas gets a significant boost, turning ChatGPT’s split-screen feature into an even sharper tool for writing and coding.

All You Need To Know

  • Canvas graduates from Beta and opens to all. Even free-tier users can now access it. With seamless integration into GPT-4o, you can fire it up with a simple prompt—no need to manually switch models anymore.

  • Python support lands in Canvas. Run code directly within the tool, complete with live debugging capabilities.

  • Slick feedback features. ChatGPT can now pinpoint specific sections of your writing in Canvas, offering smooth and actionable critiques. Check out the demo to see it in action.

  • Custom GPTs step into the Canvas spotlight. Developers can now enable Canvas for their tailored GPTs, alongside options like DALL-E, the code interpreter, and web browsing.

Why it’s a big deal:

Canvas makes ChatGPT a more natural partner for writing and coding. By enabling code execution, OpenAI is closing the gap with competitors like Claude, which already offers similar functionality through its Artifacts feature.

The icing on the cake? Custom GPTs with Canvas support open up exciting possibilities for specialised coding and writing workflows.

Design

UI Design to Meet User Intent

The progression of user interfaces, especially in search, has reshaped how we interact with information.

From Ten Blue Links to Dynamic Experiences

  • What we had: In the early days, search was a sea of blue links, requiring users to manually gather and piece together information. This was functional but time-consuming.

  • What we have now: Search results are rich, interactive, and instantly gratifying, delivering context-sensitive answers—think match stats, stock trends, or recipes—right on the results page.

The Knowledge Graph Revolution

  • Before: Searches were about hunting down links. Want info on Marie Curie? You’d sift through pages.

  • After: Google’s Knowledge Graph introduced panels with concise bios, facts, and related details, streamlining context delivery and eliminating unnecessary clicks.

Today’s Contextual UIs: Smart, Adaptive, and Predictive

Search has evolved into a storyteller, providing curated experiences tailored to the query.

Look up a football match. See real-time scores, player stats, and tactical insights.

Search for a restaurant. Get photos, reviews, peak hours, and signature dishes in a glance.

Research a stock. Explore trends, earnings reports, and relevant news without leaving the page.

The “Spillover Effect”

People now expect the seamless adaptiveness of search interfaces everywhere. Whether it’s banking apps or project management tools, users want immediate, contextually relevant results tailored to their tasks.

What This Means for Design Across Industries

The shift to conversational interfaces: Tools are adopting natural, dialogue-driven interactions, making data analysis, task management, and more feel intuitive.

Immediacy and relevance: Users no longer want to learn how a system works—they expect the system to adapt to them.

The lesson here? In a world shaped by dynamic, context-aware interfaces, static designs are fast becoming relics.

It’s time for every digital product to think smarter, respond quicker, and meet users where they are.

Science & Tech

Universe is Expanding Faster Than We Thought

New observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed the universe is expanding about 8% quicker than earlier calculations suggested.

This difference, known as the Hubble tension, points to gaps in our understanding of cosmic physics.

What’s the Hubble Tension?

The term describes the mismatch between the universe’s current expansion rate (observed by telescopes like Hubble and Webb) and predictions based on the standard model of cosmology.

Instead of being caused by observational errors, this discrepancy could be the handiwork of dark energy and dark matter—the universe's most elusive players.

The Culprits: Dark Energy and More?

The acceleration of the universe’s expansion, observed since the 1990s, is attributed to dark energy, a mysterious force comprising 68% of the universe's energy.

It counteracts gravity, pushing galaxies apart. Speculation also swirls around “early dark energy,” quirky dark matter, or even primordial magnetic fields as possible contributors to the tension.

Looking Forward

Cosmologists like Marc Kamionkowski reckon we’ll need to get inventive to solve this puzzle, suggesting exotic ideas like fluctuating electron masses or as-yet-unknown particles.

With dark energy and dark matter keeping their secrets close, the hunt for answers is far from over.

The universe just got a bit more mysterious—and we're all along for the ride.

Founding

How 4 Big SaaS Players Are Putting LLMs to Work 

GenAI and LLMs have become an integral (perhaps indispensable) part of the SaaS industry. Here’s how 4 SaaS giants fused AI with their internal workflows-

Microsoft leverages Copilot and autonomous agents in sales, support, marketing, and HR, delivering impressive results: a 9.4% revenue boost per seller, 20% more deals closed, faster case resolutions (12%), higher Azure.com conversions (21.5%), and 42% better HR response accuracy.

Notion integrates Claude for AI-driven tools like autofill and Q&A, cutting search times by 35% for Osaka Gas, saving Remote.com 10 minutes per search, and letting dbt Labs save $35k annually by dropping other AI tools.

Gumroad uses Claude 3.5 Sonnet to improve support and development, achieving a 300% jump in feature releases, faster rollouts, and reduced engineer task switching.

Zoom’s AI Companion 2.0, powered by Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Perplexity, goes beyond meeting summaries, understanding workflows, tracking tasks, and providing richer call insights.

Product

How To Keep Your Product Organisation Alive? : Struggle & Hustle Phases 

At times, the business environment throws an overwhelming number of challenges at you and your product organisation. Here’s how to navigate through such complexities and still grow-

  1. Measure how much monetary value you harvest from your current processes.

  2. Spend more time understanding the core problem than searching a solution.

  3. Communicate more. And transparently. 

  4. Change is scary for everyone. So call it an experiment. 

  5. Don’t discuss “what feature to add”. Instead, ask “what outcome they (customers) desire.” 

Today’s AI Image

Glancing at Growing Infinity

Quote of the Day

Funny Truth About “Making”

"Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos."

Mary Shelley

What we’re working on

Velvet Onion & Friends

We’re in the process of rebranding Velvet Onion & Friends. Why? It’s an important stage in our evolution, and deepens the link between agency, product & education.

We’re at the final stages of planning for our pilot program. Working name is “99 Problems But A Pitch Ain’t One;” cute for internal projects, not sure it’s the name. Coming soon!

🧞Your wish is my command

Charbel

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