Coming at you like a snowball

First Thing Monday, edition #120

Hey Readers,

This week's First Thing Monday comes to you from the wintery wonders of Canada. I’m here in Toronto on a mini-vacation with the fam. Throwing snowballs at each other like idiots. It’s cold, and great.

Anyway, here's some interesting stuff that passed my eyeballs in the last week or so.

• "There are no original ideas. But there are original executions."
  

• Open AI's new text-to-video model, Sora, can generate videos up to a minute long. Equal parts incredible and terrifying. And if you that was scary, you should see Billy Joel's new experiment with AI.
  

• A new age of UX: Evolving your design approach for AI products - this is great write-up from Intercom’s Molly Mahar into designing for AI.
  

• I love the story behind Duolingo's 5 second superbowl commercial. And how they used Figam as part of the creative process.
  

• For anyone updating their portfolio right now, Dan Mall has some great advice for you.
  

• I'm not proud of it, but I've started to enjoy the Tinderization of Slack, and found myself nodding along to this review.
  

• At what point does AI-powered personalization become creepy?
  

• "Use Arc Search, or Perplexity, or Poe, and it is clear that there is no platform coming to save journalism. And there are an increasingly large number of platforms who seem intent on killing it." - Scenes from a dying web, a bleak but unmissable read from Casey Newton.
  

• And finally, the article I've needed for a long time ... The Meaning of Every Heart Emoji.

Thanks friends. Keep warm. Or cool.

Ben