Today’s Highlights

• AI: OpenAI's Sora Video Model Leaked: Revealing 1080p 10-second clips

• Design: AI’s Penetration into the Web Design World: All For the Good

• Science & Tech: NASA's Dragonfly Mission: Searching for life on Saturn’s Moon

• Founding: How to Heroically Deal with a Disruption Raid in the Market?

• Product: “Dogfooding” for 10x-ing Product Quality

• Today’s AI image: Life Beyond Earth

• Quote for the day: A Courage Metaphor

AI

OpenAI's Sora Video Model Leaked: Revealing 1080p 10-second clips

"Sora PR Puppets", a protest group managed to leak OpenAI’s unreleased Sora video model onto Hugging Face, offering a sneak peek at some of the latest improvements.

Although it did stir up bit of a controversy over the company's early access practices.

All You Need To Know

The group accuses OpenAI of roping in hundreds of artists for unpaid testing, all while keeping a tight leash on content creation and sharing.

The leak briefly lingered on Hugging Face for a few hours, with users spotting OpenAI’s watermark on the generated clips before it was swiftly pulled down.

The leaked model churned out 1080p, 10-second clips much faster than the reported 10-minute rendering time.

Rumours swirl that OpenAI’s working on a new version of Sora to speed up those render times, possibly throwing in some extras like in-painting and image generation.

Why is this a big deal?

Sora has been keeping things under wraps—making this leak a rare glimpse into OpenAI's progress. The new features are impressive, but not revolutionary, and this slip-up could highlight some underlying friction with the creatives OpenAI relies on for testing.

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Also in AI

• Former Folks from Google, Meta and Stripe launched a New Startup: Plans to craft a cloud-based OS for AI agents

• Zoom Rebrands as “AI-first communications platform”

• Claude’s new feature “Styles” to Ease the Prompting Process: allows users to save and reuse preferred writing styles (like formal, concise, or custom tones)

• Uber Launches New Division to Tackle AI Data Labeling—Because Even Robots Need Labels

• Ethan Mollick on Getting the Best Out of AI: Suggests that any AI tool is an "infinitely patient coworker" that remembers nothing between sessions

• Over 50% of long English-language posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated

• Trump suggested creating an "AI Czar" position to oversee federal AI policy, with advice from people like Elon Musk

• OminiControl: Guides image generation with reference photos or depth maps

Design

AI’s Penetration into the Web Design World: All For the Good

AI is changing the web design game in big ways, giving productivity a serious boost while making space for even more creative flair.

AI as a Co-worker, Not a Replacement

AI won’t be taking your job (yet). It’s here to supplement human creativity, not compete with it. Think of it as an intern—great at tasks like generating drafts or improving workflows, but still needing a little human touch for the finishing details.

Design Gets Smarter

AI tools like Figma and Krea are transforming design. From speeding up content creation to generating custom visuals, AI is streamlining the process, leaving more room for creativity.

Tools like Relume and Adobe’s upcoming features are making quick work of designing web layouts and composites.

UX Research Just Got Smarter

AI is making UX research more efficient. It helps with things like analysing user feedback, predicting behaviours, and even running user interviews at scale. Tools like Strella and Attention Insight are taking user research to new heights.

Administrative Tasks, Streamlined

AI isn’t just about the creative side. In fact, creativity isn’t the core value that AI contributes. It’s our core ability.

AI can take up mundane tasks, like drafting emails or summarising long threads, and make them a whole lot quicker.

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Also in Design

• Firefox’s New Branding: Ideas around "Fox" and "Fire" themes

• Luma AI Updates Dream Machine: The Faster Photon Image Model

• Google Maps now highlights stairs in walking directions using blue icons

• Keep knowing your user more to perfect your design assets: The Importance of User Research in design

• Making Cognitive Biases Work in Your Favour through UX Design: Negativity bias, anchoring, and peak-end rule

• Modern Devices are Too Diverse for Accurately Responsive Design: Challenges in Creating Responsive Design

• Custom vs. Off-the-Shelf Design Systems: Choose efficiency with libraries or embrace flexibility with custom solutions

Science & Tech

NASA's Dragonfly Mission: Searching for life on Saturn’s Moon

Many of us are curious. Curious if there’s life in the rest of the endless expanse of the Universe. Life beyond the known 8 billion and Earthly flora-fauna. Well, NASA’s Dragonfly mission is a lot about exploring these curiosities.

All You Need To Know

NASA has teamed up with SpaceX for the Dragonfly mission, targeting Saturn's moon Titan. The mission will cost $3.35 billion, with SpaceX receiving $256.6 million to help launch it.

Dragonfly, a nuclear-powered rotorcraft the size of a Mars Rover, will fly across Titan, sampling its surface and analysing its composition.

Titan's Importance

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is the only known body in the solar system (besides Earth) with liquid on its surface. Its dense atmosphere and lakes of liquid methane and ethane make it a fascinating target for exploring the potential for life.

Scientific Goals

Dragonfly will investigate Titan's habitability, prebiotic chemistry, and search for signs of life, whether based on water or hydrocarbons. The spacecraft will travel between diverse sites, gathering samples over a two-and-a-half-year stay.

SpaceX is increasingly involved in NASA’s ambitious projects, including its work on the lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis III mission, which will send the first woman and the first person of colour to the moon by 2026.

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Also in Science & Tech

• China’s Plans to Establish Colonies on the Moon by 2025: Egg-shaped igloos and space rovers

• AI's future is heavily reliant on Nvidia: The demand for powerful supercomputers grows

• Rumours about Thinnest iPhone Yet: iPhone 17 Air

• Intel has received $7.9 billion to support semiconductor manufacturing expansion

• Researchers have discovered ways tumors evade chemotherapy, which may lead to better cancer treatments

Founding

How to Heroically Deal with a Disruption Raid in the Market

Once asleep markets are now constantly disrupted by waves of new tech innovations and advancements. 

What’s going wrong then? 

Companies face a great deal of difficulty keeping up with all the rage and rush. Here’s how to battle such anomalies:

1. The AND method

Consecutive waves hit. And you deal with each one as it arrives.

It’s quite high-risk since it’s a persistent juggle with design shifts, tech architecture reforms and GTM strategy tweaks.  

You keep reimagining your product. You try to adapt steadfastly to any and every new tech that emerges. 

Now this technique should be followed under three conditions:  

✓ When dealing with the first wave equips you to face upcoming waves. 

✓ When there is sufficient time to manage one wave of disruption before another hits. 

✓ If you succeed in the first wave, it turns out to be optimally advantageous for you for future such waves. 

For instance, the GenAI boom leads you to integrate some form of generative AI services in your SaaS product (to NOT lag behind) and build a strong brand reputation (to not lose to big players in GenAI).  

Here you created two valuable assets while dealing with a market disruption: A GenAI feature and a sturdy brand image. It’s undeniable that these would arm you enough to mess up with disruptions of this like in the future. 

2. The OR method 

One wave after another with a gap of less than a breath between two. What you do is foresee through the layers of chaos the final wave and concentrate your efforts upon that. 

There’s lower risk involved since working on a single forecasted problem doesn’t call for investing resources in bulk at once like it does when surviving tides, one after another. 

Now when to go for the “OR” method? 

✓ Disruption is too rapid, leaving insufficient time to scale or build enduring advantages.

✓ Future waves are already visible and clearly superior. 

If you want to get out of the multi-wave phase alive and healthy, scale your execution power (speed, quality and conquering the market) instead of building structures to source power. Because structures are not so cost-friendly and are built to serve longer-term purposes. 

So choose your way. Adapting through consecutive waves (AND) or committing to a single disruptive wave (OR).

Read more

Also in Founding

• Rox: Salesforce, but with a lot more AI

• A Content Culture: Encouraging employees to share insights, build personal brands, and integrate content creation into workflows

• Honest disagreement and passionate debates: That’s what creates a strong product culture

• Open Graph images get clicked at more: Leveraging OG images to improve Social media CTRs

Product

“Dogfooding” for 10x-ing Product Quality

The best way you can “walk in your customer’s shoes” is by becoming one. Better call it dogfooding.

Talk with customers and they might tell you things like “your website is slow and laggy” or “your AI Q&A feature is tricky.” 

But use the product and you’ll get to the core of these problems. Might turn out the website isn’t responsive enough especially on mobiles. 

And there’s way too many vaguely guided options surrounding the Q&A feature triggering the paradox of choice and making it difficult to use. Now you know specifically what issues need to be fixed. 

Dogfooding provides a raw experience of pain points felt by customers and if, how and to what extent your product solves them and adds value to their lives. 

Here’s why it always works: 

↳ You can figure out what itches your customers and what pleases your customers. With quite clarity.  

↳ When it comes to customer feedback, you don’t have to make guesses about what’s the actual problem that they face. You can empathise better as a fellow user than as a product maker. 

↳ When you use the product firsthand, you have the opportunity to detect and resolve some issues or mould the product a particular way long before it is sensed by your actual consumers.  

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Today’s AI Image

Life Beyond Earth

Quote of the Day

A Courage Metaphor

“A ship is safe in the harbour, but that’s not what ships are for.”

John A. Shedd

What we’re working on

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