Five of the most impactful or interesting launches we saw this week.

ChatGPT Search: Get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources

Arguably one of AI’s most important launches. ChatGPT Search is the AI company’s response to the likes of Perplexity and even Google. You can now use ChatGPT to browse the web for you, you can even set it as your default search engine. The clear benefit is the lack of ads when getting search results.

Claude for Desktop: Anthropic just released a desktop client for their flagship AI 

Not as groundbreaking as ChatGPT Search but still a good addition to an AI stack. The new desktop app does exactly what it says on the tin: it allows you to use the company’s flagship language model, Claude, on your desktop as opposed to going to the site.

Bolt.new: Prompt, run, edit & deploy full-stack web apps

Bolt is kind of a dream for building MVPs. Put in a simple prompt and watch it build a functioning web app ready to deploy with a single click. I tried it with “make a Product Hunt clone” and what do you know, within two minutes a fairly indistinguishable working clone was live on my screen.

Horse: A more organized browser 

Horse browser is perfect for people (like me) who need to declare tab bankruptcy constantly. It swaps tabs for Trails — nested groups of pages that capture the natural flow of each internet journey. That means no more tabs and most importantly trying to find the one you need in a sea of hundreds.

APIPark: An open-source AI gateway and API developer portal

APIPark lets you combine AI models and prompts into APIs — e.g. you could use OpenAI’s GPT-4 and custom prompts to create your own translation or data analysis API. The platform supports over 100+ AI models and provides real-time data to track your API usage.

Softr for Notion: Turns Notion databases into portals and apps without code. 

Softr’s Notion integration lets you build custom apps like membership portals, inventory trackers, and directories on top of Notion databases. You can customize the design, layout, and permissions with no code and publish the app on a custom domain. 

Glazed: Analyzes user interactions with your Figma design.

Glazed lets you analyze user interactions with your UI by creating funnels to recreate their journey with your product and see where drop-offs occurred. It gives you visual feedback on how various screens in your app are used. 

Trag: AI code review companion that can lint patterns. 

Trag does one simple thing: it matches written rules to code. You give it a set of plain English rules, and it enforces these rules on every pull request. Think of it as a “superlinter” or an extra teammate who knows exactly which errors or vulnerabilities to look for.

Runway Act One: Generates expressive character performances from video inputs.

Act One is RunwayML’s new tool for generating expressive character performances from video and voice inputs. It’s a big step forward for applying generative models to live-action and animation. 

Claude Computer Use: Claude can now control different aspects of your computer

Anthropic’s latest launch is a bit of a doozy. Currently, in beta, Computer Use allows the company’s flagship AI, Claude, to control your computer. It can take screenshots, use the mouse, and type. The demo video shows it doing data entry. Maybe don’t give it access to your credit cards just yet.

LLMWare:  Fine-tunes and deploys small language models privately or locally for enterprise.

While others focus on chasing the big models. LLMWare is hoping to hit that sweet spot by training and optimizing smaller scale models that perform a few tasks exceptionally well.

Feta: A better way to run stand-ups, retros, and sync-ups.

Feta takes what companies like Zoom, Google, and Microsoft have done for team-wide calls and optimizes it for product and engineering teams. The goal is to make the task or running stand-ups, retros, and quick syncs easier with tools like automated documentation and note-taking.

Reiden AI: An AI-powered shortcut copilot.

Your workflow changes dramatically once you discover the power of keyboard shortcuts but every app is a little different. Reiden is a context-aware tool that teaches you keyboard shortcuts for 20+ apps in real time.

Pagic: Make a clean website just by filling in a form.

The pipeline from idea to shipped is on overdrive these days. Pagic is a platform that lets you quickly whip up a whole website just by filling in a form. It’s mobile-friendly by default and you can easily customize it to what you desire.

Sparrow: An Open Source API Testing Tool for developers

Sparrow is a collaborative API testing tool that’s built for engineering teams. It comes with features like an AI assistant, automated test flows, and the ability to generate docs on the fly.

General Collaboration: A unified inbox for all of your work apps.

Nonstop switching between apps is a productivity killer. General Collaboration proposes a streamlined solution — a unified inbox with notifications from all of your work apps. It’s also got a nifty “follow” feature that lets you peek into (or spy on) your coworkers’ pending tasks.

Latitude: An open-source prompt engineering platform.

How do you ensure the accuracy of LLM outputs at scale, when “accuracy” is multivariate and context-dependent? One approach might be to try Latitude, which offers dozens of customizable evaluation templates and an AI-powered prompt editor. 

Theneo: An AI-powered tool for generating and cleaning up API documentation. 

In a world with more APIs than ever, straightforward documentation has never been more important. Theneo promises to automate beautiful docs and keep them up to date — a worthwhile value prop, given we’re all just asking ChatGPT to build the integration anyways.

Monalisa: One-click enrichment of developer profiles on Github.

Monalisa uses AI-powered search to fill in a developer’s Github bio information — email, current company background, social media, etc — and send you an email with the results. It’s probably most useful for those selling dev tools, though it doesn’t yet allow users to search for people matching specific criteria.

Text Behind Image: Puts text behind an image.

We love this whole timeline: a 16 year-old high school solo maker built this tool in only three hours with AI. The result is simple, effective, and user-friendly. It might even give a wallpaper app recently launched by a certain YouTuber a run for its money. 

This is our “staff picks” section — five products that stood out to us this week, whether because we think they’re especially promising, unique or delightful. 

With: 200+ curated questions designed to deepen emotional intimacy and self-awareness. 

This product won’t change the world, but it could change your relationship. The design is gorgeous, and the questions provocative. We think it’d be a perfect date night or dinner party activity. 

ChatGPT Canvas: A new interface that lets you and ChatGPT work side-by-side on documents or code. 

OpenAI is on fire — product-wise, but maybe also internally. (What was the deal with all those resignations?) Canvas comes just a few days after Advanced Voice Mode rolled out to most users. We’re most excited about its writing shortcuts, which include inline edits, automatic reading-level adjustments, and integrated grammar and clarity checks. 

Wispr Flow: A Mac dictation app with autoedits, AI commands, and support for 100+ languages. 

This is a speech-to-text app designed to speed up typing. It works across basically any CMS, and has a word-per-minute output of 220 — around three times faster than the average human type speed. Has writer’s block met its match?

CharacterSDK: Lets developers create multimodal AI characters capable of contextual understanding and real-time interaction. 

There are tons of use cases here, from personalized customer support at scale to task automation, but we can’t help feeling like the biggest potential beneficiaries here are…waifu lovers. You know, people who are in relationships with fictional characters — who have a waifu (or husbando), in Internet-speak. Replika was the go-to, but it might just have some competition. 

Graphite Reviewer: A high-signal AI code review companion. 

Our engineering team is stoked about this launch. Check out the long-form section below for their detailed take.

Have you ever wished you could create an app just by explaining your idea? With LlamaCoder, that's now possible. Developed by Together AI and powered by the Llama 3.1 405B model, LlamaCoder is an open-source web app that turns your prompts into fully functional applications.

Together AI is all about making AI accessible and useful. They help developers and businesses design and manage AI projects using open-source models like Llama. To show what Llama 3.1 405B can do, they built LlamaCoder—a tool that's quickly becoming popular in the developer community.

Since its launch just over a month ago, LlamaCoder has really taken off. It's earned over 2,000 stars on GitHub, and hundreds of developers have cloned the repository. People have generated more than 200,000 apps using the platform.

Imagine logging into a social network where every post you share gets a response—but all from AI followers. SocialAI offers just that: a personal and private social experience where millions of AI-generated users engage with your content. It's like having your own exclusive community that interacts with you without any of the unpredictability that sometimes comes with real-life social media.

While traditional platforms connect you with friends, family, and acquaintances, SocialAI offers a different approach. It creates a "social" internet without humans, allowing you to simulate interactions as if you were engaging with real people but without the complicated, and unpredictable parts of human interactions.

As Chris Messina puts it: "Imagine that you have no friends, but you also use the internet. What if you could build a 'social' internet without humans where you could simulate interactions as if you were interacting with real humans?"

Earlier in the year, Apple lifted the lid on Apple Intelligence — the company’s heavily anticipated suite of AI features. In the original announcement, we got a taste of what was to come with things like generative emojis, Siri enhancements, and more.

Fast forward to today and Apple has revealed it’s newest range of iPhones and along with it some new features that will be powered by AI. Let’s dive in.

The new iPhones come with a new DSLR-style capture button for photos, videos, and settings adjustments. Stacked rear cameras support spatial video for Apple Vision Pro, and the A18 chip.

But the biggest update for the iPhone is arguably its integration with AI. With Apple Intelligence, you will be able to do things like detect real-world objects using the built-in camera, generate text based certain moods, and more easily filter through your photos by using the LLM technology.

If you saw a meme with this Black Mirror-ish Squid Game-y figure in your feed over the last week, you knew something was up.

AI and developer tools go hand in hand. Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene a few years ago, seasoned developers and hobby developers alike have been using LLMs (large language models) to fix bugs, explain functions, and even build entire apps. 

Alongside that, new AI tools like ShellMate and Ellipsis have sprung up with the goal of making a developer's life easier, and already popular tools have begun to adopt the technology to improve their product offerings. One of them is Zed, the popular Rust-based, multiplayer code editor built by the creators of Atom and Treesitter. 

Over the past two years, the Zed team has quietly experimented with LLMs to build a fast, reliable text editor that ships with the tools devs need right out of the box. That work caught the eye of Anthropic, spurring a conversation that quickly became collaboration. 

The result is Zed AI, a hosted service developed in tandem with Anthropic that gives developers the ability to use AI right inside their code editor. 

Embarking on a startup is probably one of the most exciting experiences in life. You and maybe a bunch of friends getting together to hack away at a solution to a problem in the hopes of launching a company is a roller coaster ride of emotions, to say the least. 

It’s not all fun and games, though. If you want to build a real, true-to-life startup, you’re going to have to think of some of the more tedious back-office tasks like company compliance, taxes, and payroll. These are things that, if not done correctly, could land you and your company in some very hot water. 

That’s why Central exists. After founder Nilay Modi had to pay over $20,000 in government fines, he set out on a mission to ensure this didn’t happen to other startups. Central is a YC-backed platform built to handle a lot of government-orientated startup work. 

Say you’re hiring a new developer. Rather than pulling your hair out from frustration, you can hand off the process to Central. From there, it will handle things like offer letters, payroll registration, compensation, payroll taxes, benefits, and more. 

X, the platform that was once Twitter, has just launched Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini, the latest AI models from xAI. These models bring enhanced reasoning abilities and, for the first time, allow users to generate images directly within X. 

According to xAI, Grok-2 marks a significant upgrade from the previous Grok-1.5 model. Both Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini have been tested on a wide range of academic benchmarks, covering areas like reasoning, reading comprehension, math, science, and coding. 

The results have shown Grok-2 to be competitive with other advanced models, excelling in fields such as graduate-level science knowledge (GPQA), general knowledge (MMLU), and math competitions (MATH). Grok-2 also stands out in vision-based tasks, delivering top-tier performance in visual math reasoning (MathVista) and document-based question answering (DocVQA).

The new image generation feature is already sparking interest — mainly for its lack of guardrails. Browse the site for a few minutes, and you’ll find any number of wacky generations, usually involving a politician. According to xAI, Grok-2 uses FLUX 1, an AI model built by German-based Black Forest Labs, a company that recently raised $31 million from the likes of AI6Z.

Despite the model’s advancements, many early testers noted that Grok-2 still has room for improvement, particularly in areas like code generation and news summaries, which had caused issues with the first version of Grok.

Developers will soon have access to Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini via an enterprise API, which is expected to roll out later this month. For those eager to try it out, Grok-2 is available in beta for Premium users on X.

Ever feel like you need a clone in order to keep up with your online presence? Meta’s new AI Studio might be the answer. It lets you create AI versions of yourself, designed to chat with your audience and handle interactions on Instagram or the web. It’s like having a virtual assistant that speaks in your voice, ready to engage with your community when you can't.

With AI Studio, you can set up your AI to respond to comments, chat in threads, and even manage specific tasks—all while you focus on creating content or running your business. Simply head to the AI Studio website or start an "AI chat" on Instagram to begin. Meta’s blog post details how you can customize your AI’s personality, set boundaries on topics, and control which accounts it interacts with. You can also enable features like auto-replies, making the experience seamless and interactive.

Beyond personal avatars, AI Studio also allows for the creation of entirely new characters, offering a playful twist to your digital engagement.

Meta AI Studio is currently available to US users, but it will likely expand to other countries soon.

Earlier this year, Meta hinted at a significant development in AI: an open-source model that could rival the best from companies like OpenAI. Last week, Meta officially launched Llama 3.1, claiming it surpasses other leading models such as GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet in several benchmarks.

Llama 3.1, the largest open-source AI model to date, boasts 405 billion parameters and has shown superior performance compared to its competitors. The Llama-based Meta AI assistant is also expanding to more countries and languages and now includes a feature for generating images based on specific likenesses. CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicts Meta AI will become the most widely used assistant by the end of the year, overtaking ChatGPT.

TalkTastic just launched a context-aware AI voice keyboard app. It works by integrating across all your macOS apps, from Slack to Messages to your browser, to not only transcribe your speech with accuracy but refine and rewrite what you say based on your screen’s context.

So imagine you’re going about your day-to-day. With Talktastic, you’d hit the little microphone button and start dictating your response back to an investor in an email. The tool will write your reply while fixing any vocal tics, adjust words for tone, and spell the names of your investors correctly. Then hop over to Slack and shoot your coworker a DM and TalkTastic adjusts for that audience and context.

Moshi is a new AI chatbot founded by French billionaire Xavier Niel. It’s designed for hyper-human-like conversations. It comes with voice mode by default and prioritizes ultra low latency. 

ElevenLabs launched an API to compliment its Voice Isolator tool. It allows developers to easly implement the audio cleanup technology into any number of their own apps. The team even showcased how easy it is to build on top of it with Claude. 

Runway Financial came out of beta last week. Backed by Garry Tan and others to the tune of $22.7 million, Runway Financial uses AI to help you automate your startups finances and important documents. 

Sign AI is a virtual, realtime, AI-powered sign language interpreter that lives within video calls, conferences, and really anywhere it can be deployed. It’s a technological solution to the current shortage of interpreters.

Writebook is a platform for creating and publishing web-based books by 37signals — the team that also built Basecamp and Hey, co-founded by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Writebook is a downloadable software you can self-host, giving authors the power of ownership. Read more.

Suno is an AI-powered music app that secured $125 million in funding for its text-to-song method of generating entire tracks. It launched its new iOS app. You might have also seen its name around because Suno is being sued by music labels for copyright infringement. Read more.

next play is a new community network from Ben Lang, who’s known for helping lead Notion’s community growth from its early days. The next play community helps support people in finding their next role through introductions to startups, gatherings, and newsletter content.

Voice Isolator is another launch from AI company ElevenLabs that removes unwanted background noise and produces clear dialogue for audio clips and videos. You can see if it is as impressive as the demo is here.

Google launched Gemma 2. The lightweight models (9B and 27B) are being pitched to developers who want to incorporate AI into their apps or smart devices. Gemma 2 massively improves its performance on math-based questions, creative writing, cognitive reasoning, and more. Read more.