been jamming on gpt 5 for a few hours & it’s absurdly good. the coding output is surgical, i generated a pile of music tools for our upcoming product. i also designed & built few dashboards extremely quickly too. the “no model roulette” thing is actually bigger than most ppl, esp avg ppl will clock… it collapses the ultimate meta decision that usually burns mental bandwidth every time before you even start interacting. major props to product & eng. consumer wise, chatgpt is basically “ai” for most ppl & that trajectory continues maybe even at a steeper curve with gpt 5.

one thing i personally always underestimated when building is how many new users enter a market all the time. new businesses spin up. new grads enter the workforce. new age cohorts come online or graduate to the next stage. we often obsess over converting existing users… like how do we get them to switch? but a good lever is also becoming the default for the ones who are just arriving on to the stage. they often have no loyalties, no baggage, & no real habits. they’re open for business.

for many of us every ai launch event now doubles as a product unveil & a personal live streamed threat assessment. – if you’re a founder, you’re tuning in to find out if your product just got obsoleted. – if you’re anyone else, you’re tuning in to see if your job, your skills, or your identity potentially just got deprecated. this is why every frame, every word, & every demo is pretty scrutinized in many ways. launches often feel like watching a bottom of the 9th w/ bases loaded, 2 outs, full count, down by 1.

emergent consensus with zero committee. borderline spiritual.

we critique because we care… not just about output, but the feedback loop itself. things are moving at lightspeed. not knocking anyone on the build. the eng product work seems solid particularly around coding. but we’ll see how it all stacks vs claude code soon enough. could surprise. could flop. that’s why we test.

okay i’ve seen enough. this launch felt like attending a funeral hosted by minimalists. they’re unveiling tech that should feel magical, real breakthroughs but the whole vibe was grayscale grief. the set design looked like if “mood disorder” got a bauhaus grant. even the storytelling arc… chart styles (??), then eulogy tributes, then closing on someone’s health battles… what exactly are we as the audience mourning? it feels like they’re trying to get you to pre install a therapist. potentially great products, sure. but the emotional tone was so damn doa. incredibly strange all around.

something about this feels a bit lifeless, i can’t quite put my finger on it.

had a convo the other morning where we were talking about how people keep saying there haven’t been real consumer social breakthroughs in a while. but that just feels wrong. what most miss is that we have created profound new social dynamics already… they just don’t look like the old ones (a feed or a profile or a public stage).. e.g. chatgpt is arguably the most malleable social entity ever created. this new paradigm on “social” has many more of these experience yet to come & they’ll likely weave in without notice in your life. this is something i think about a lot. when you’re evaluating things, you have to also often evolve the evaluation criteria because that also evolves with culture + tech.

genuinely high quality posts just aren’t surfacing anymore as x manipulates the algorithm once again. i’ve seen it across the board. the new ranking algo feels actively hostile to good content for some reason. it’s been especially obvious the past few days. fix one thing, leads to bad other things. i guess you can’t satisfy everyone but still. tragedy.

in few years you’ll play fallout with the premise: brooklyn 2035, & the opening scene is your grandma’s duplex turned to ash. the clerk at the deli remembers your favorite sandwich. the bandits in the park are your high school bullies. the mission: avenge your dog who died in the great NYCHA reactor meltdown of 2029. whole thing will be rendered via genie 3 + your entire life history + memory context of your ai.