Hating Product Managers, OnlyFans, ChatGPT, Blue Origin, and Sunscreen

Weekly Roundup of News in Technology, UX and AI

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Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:

• 🕹️ Tech Innovations

• 🖥️ Product Manager Hate

• 📱 OnlyFans

• 🤖 OpenAI

• 🚀 Blue Origin

• 🔎 Google I/O

• 🌐 ChatGPT

• 😎 Sunscreen

Podcast

Navigating Tech Innovations and Strategic Partnerships with Varag Gharibjanian

In this episode, I sit down with Varag Gharibjanian, the founding partner of Actuate, a boutique advisory firm. Varag shares his personal journey from an engineering background to pioneering in business strategy and technology partnerships, especially within AR/VR spaces. We delve into his early career challenges, significant milestones at major tech companies, and the lessons learned from merging technology with business. Varag also discusses the current trends in XR and AI technologies, providing insights into future developments. If you're interested in business strategy, the future of technology, or growing a business, you won't want to miss this discussion.

News and Useful Reads

Everybody Hates the Product Manager — Good

This post hit hard for me as a product manager. Everyone really does hate us—and for good reason. We often have to do the work that no one else wants to do or is able to do. And that puts us in positions that will inevitably frustrate certain people, whether it’s sales teams or executives or whoever else. But it has to be done.

PMs have the unfortunate role of being required to make decisions that are good for one part of the business but bad for another, having to communicate those decisions to people who will never understand or agree with them (due to their own role-based needs), and getting the privilege of accepting all the blame for making the wrong call.

I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty

This whole article was fascinating. I’ve never given much thought to the business of OnlyFans, but like the writer, it should be clear after running the numbers that there is no way the big creators on the platform could keep up without outsourcing. Which is terrible now, and will likely get worse (or change dramatically) with AI.

The existence of professional OnlyFans chatters wouldn’t have surprised me so much if I’d given just a few moments’ thought to the mathematical realities of the platform. OnlyFans has thrived by promising its reported 190 million users that they can have direct access to an estimated 2.1 million creators. It’s impossible for even a modestly popular creator to cope with the avalanche of messages they receive each day.

“I lost trust”: Why the OpenAI team in charge of safeguarding humanity imploded

If there is one thing you want when you’re creating technology that might destroy humanity, it is a group of people making sure that doesn’t happen. So it is concerning (a major understatement) that OpenAI’s superalignment team has imploded.

Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike announced their departures from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, on Tuesday. They were the leaders of the company’s superalignment team — the team tasked with ensuring that AI stays aligned with the goals of its makers, rather than acting unpredictably and harming humanity.

Blue Origin launches six tourists to the edge of space after nearly two-year hiatus

Even after one of the landing capsule parachute’s failed, the whole crew made it back safely to earth, which is good news.

Blue Origin’s tourism rocket has launched passengers to the edge of space for the first time in nearly two years, ending a hiatus prompted by a failed uncrewed test flight.

Google I/O 2024: everything announced

The tl/dr is that Google is adding AI to everything.

Google I/O just ended — and it was packed with AI announcements. As expected, the event focused heavily on Google’s Gemini AI models, along with the ways they’re being integrated into apps like Workspace and Chrome.

Opinion: The latest version of ChatGPT is creepy — and appealing

The opinions I’ve seen so far are summed up here: creep and appealing. The demo of the latest ChatGPT show the power of what it can do but also some disturbing potential and choices that the company has made.

Like its predecessors, GPT-4o is trained on enormous quantities of data to process queries, recognize patterns and deliver helpful responses. But what makes GPT-4o different from every other LLM to date is summed up in the unassuming little lowercase “o” dangling off the end of its name.

That “o” stands for “omni,” as in omnimodal, which means that GPT-4o can accept input in any combination of text, image or even audio, and can produce output that’s any combination of the same.

Other Interesting Finds

Other countries have better sunscreens. Here's why we can't get them in the U.S.

As we are getting ready to head into summer, don’t forget your sunscreen. But remember, like most things in America, ours is worse than the rest of the world because we make it harder for ourselves than it needs to be. The rest of the world has been using more advanced sunscreen, which could prevent millions of cases of skin cancer here, if we’d just let it through.

D'Ruiz said bemotrizinol could secure FDA approval by the end of 2025. If it does, he said, bemotrizinol would be the most vetted and safest sunscreen ingredient on the market, outperforming even the safety profiles of zinc oxide and titanium dioxide.