wgmatw: State of Consumer AI, Humanoid Robots, and Scaling Taste
What Got My Attention This Week, as a product leader
Here’s what got my attention this week — a short list of things I read and watched recently that felt worth pausing on, as a product leader.
Here we go.
1/ State of Consumer AI 2025: Hits, Misses, and What’s Next
This post by Olivia Moore and Justine Moore at Andreessen Horowitz was a nice read on consumer AI. Instead of just chasing after hype cycles and the capabilities of the latest models — a16z focused on on actual usage, repeat behavior, and where consumers seem to be spending meaningful time and money.
The core takeaway is that consumers are curating: They’re choosing fewer, more opinionated tools that solve very specific problems extremely well. Broad assistants are table stakes. Narrow, workflow-specific products are where increased signals for loyalty are showing up.
a16z frames AI maturity and differentiation as a clear product-design problem, not a model arms race. This may be a useful reminder as roadmaps keep filling up with ‘Generic AI everywhere,’ whether that makes sense for their customers, or not.
“The next generation of breakout AI products won’t be the most capable — they’ll be the most focused.”
The post also points to the potentially very large white space for founders building dedicated AI customer experiences as we go into an era of greater AI-driven distribution — referencing the success of apps like Gamma, Suno, and Eleven Labs.
”Model companies don’t have the intuition or, quite frankly, the attention and resources to be innovating outside their areas of core competency. Consumer founders may even be able to benefit from ChatGPT’s upcoming push on discovery and distribution for third-party apps.”
2/ Boston Dynamics Will Debut New Atlas Humanoid Robots at CES
The last time I attended CES, I was with a little company called Samsung. The floor was filled with Smart TVs, Smart Refrigerators, Smart Miscellaneous. It seemed like it was all Internet-of-Things hype, and fun prototypes like bendy screens, accompanied by an unnecessary amount of iPhone and Android covers. I remember a couple of cutesy robots, but I don’t remember any human-like C3P0 robots doing parkour.
At this upcoming 2026 CES, Hyundai — another South Korean giant — will remind us that their Boston Dynamics division has been working non-stop on building for a future where AI robots do all kinds of wild things. They’ll be showing off their next-gen Atlas humanoid robots. Some people will see this as a dream come true for the future of manufacturing and general-purpose, manual labor. Others will see this as an unpredictable nightmare of ‘Black Mirror’ proportions. The truth is somewhere in the middle. At any rate, Boston Dynamics is not asking for anyone’s permission.
The steady progress in AI-driven robotics is shaping how people imagine what ‘intelligent systems’ should be capable of.
“The new Atlas reflects advances in AI-driven perception, balance, and task execution.”
3/ Why Taste Matters in Product Management
Nickey Skarstad is a Director of Product Management at Duolingo, a company with a highly differentiated and memorable design and user experience. It’s no surprise that ‘taste’ matters at Duolingo.
“At Duolingo, we have a daily ritual that trains taste across the organization: product reviews with senior leaders (including the CEO!). Not quarterly show-and-tells. Or weekly design critiques. Daily.”
She recently joined Ben Erez and Marc Baselga on the Supra Insider podcast on an episode titled ‘Duolingo’s Secret Sauce.’
She describes product reviews not just as a way to gate features or align teams, but as a way to ‘scale taste’ — an open forum where anyone can watch senior leaders articulate what ‘good’ looks like and calibrate their own judgment faster.
Duolingo pairs that with ‘hot trash’ demos, a bi-weekly space where teams proudly show rough, early work so the organization can learn from experiments long before they’re polished.
“If you spend a few years building product at Duolingo, your product sense is going to be 10x better than if you work somewhere else—and this ritual is a big part of it.”
Bonus: AI Compliance and Regulation
This fortnightly monthly AI policy roundup by Simmons & Simmons shows how fast AI policy is turning into concrete expectations for product and UX teams, not just lawyers.
From federal moves in the US, to EU transparency codes and New York’s AI avatar disclosure law, ‘governance’ is quietly becoming part of the product spec.
If you’re shipping AI features, this is the kind of document you want bookmarked before you design something that collides with emerging rules on transparency, safety, and content labelling.
“The Code sets out high-level commitments and technical measures for providers and deployers of generative AI systems, aiming to enhance transparency, trust and accountability in the use of synthetic content across the EU.”
