TikTok, Tech Regulations, DeepSeek, Freelance Jobs, and Craft
Weekly Review of News in Technology, UX and AI
Here’s the latest news, resources, and use cases from the world of product, UX, AI and technology. Let’s go:
🖼️ Digital Landscape
📱 TikTok Ban
🕴️ Tech Regulation
🔎 DeepSeek
🙏 AI Agents
🧑🏫 Freelance Jobs
🎨 Craft over Chores
Podcast
Redefining the Digital Landscape: JB Benjamin on Privacy, Blockchain, and the Future of Technology
In this episode of Product by Design, host Kyle sits down with JB Benjamin, the CEO and founder of multiple tech companies under the Akuma Engineering umbrella. JB shares his innovative journey in building products designed for a more equitable, decentralized, and privacy-focused digital future. From post-quantum encrypted messaging tools to Vox Alive's ad-free social media platform, JB dives deep into the philosophies and technologies driving his work. We discuss everything from post-quantum encryption to blockchain to Universal Basic Income. You won't want to miss this one.
News and Useful Reads
TikTok users anxiously await its return to US app stores
The TikTok outage lasted less than a day, and was clearly a stunt by the company and by President Trump to get attention. And while TikTok’s back, the vibe has definitely changed. It’s unclear what the future is, but it’s clear that social media companies are all at the mercy of Trump now.
TikTok still could not be downloaded from the Apple and Google app stores in the United States on Tuesday, trapped in legal purgatory by the two tech giants. U.S.President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday delaying the enforcement of a ban on the Chinese-owned popular short-video app by 75 days, the legality of which is unclear.
Welcome to the era of gangster tech regulation
Speaking of Trump, the tech oligarchy is about to get ramped up several notches. With all the biggest names in tech attending Trump’s inauguration and donating significant money, we’ll likely see more “favors” than ever before.
“First Buddy” Elon Musk spent at least a quarter of a billion dollars electing Donald Trump. Corporations and wealthy donors have sent half a billion more since he was elected. Amazon, Google, Uber, Microsoft, and Meta donated $1 million each to Trump’s inauguration, as did Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. (Joe Biden’s inauguration hardly received this kind of largesse.) “In the first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump said in December. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”
Open-source DeepSeek-R1 uses pure reinforcement learning to match OpenAI o1 — at 95% less cost
We talk a lot about American AI companies. But a Chinese startup just released a reasoning LLM that challenges the best that any company has to offer.
Based on the recently introduced DeepSeek V3 mixture-of-experts model, DeepSeek-R1 matches the performance of o1, OpenAI’s frontier reasoning LLM, across math, coding and reasoning tasks. The best part? It does this at a much more tempting cost, proving to be 90-95% more affordable than the latter.
OpenAI’s agent tool may be nearing release
One of the most interesting and game-changing applications of AI will be the use of agents: AI tools that can take control and intelligently work across platforms to fulfill requests.
OpenAI may be close to releasing an AI tool that can take control of your PC and perform actions on your behalf.
Most Jobs Now Are (and Will Be) Freelance Jobs
I’ve had this same observation and have shifted a lot of my work towards this idea—every job is freelance. Companies are hiring more and more contractors than I’ve ever seen. Even full-time work feels far more temporary than it was before.
Gone are the days when a full-time employee job was very stable.
Other Interesting Finds
Lesson Two: More Craft, Less Chores
The more we focus on what is most meaningful (at work and in our lives), the better we become at it. So we should shift away from constantly doing chores—things like answering emails—and toward more craft.
We tend to specialize at what we regularly do, and if you spend your time on deep work, it creates a gravitational pull towards more deep work. Likewise, getting really good at chores makes you the person who gets assigned more chores.