The Habit
OpenAI ships video in Advanced Voice Mode, one day after Google demoed Project Astra.
The one-day gap between Google's demo and OpenAI's ship was real. The observation that watching a competitor finish a feature is the best forcing function for shipping your own remains the best productivity insight of the year.
Google showed off Project Astra on Wednesday — real-time camera, you hold up your phone, the model sees what you see and talks to you about it. It was, genuinely, cool.
OpenAI shipped the same thing Thursday.
Not announced. Shipped. Video and screen sharing in Advanced Voice Mode, just there, available, drop it in your pocket and go. They had demoed the capability back in May, with the big GPT-4o reveal, then the video part quietly didn't exist for seven months while the voice part worked fine. And then Google showed their version and suddenly the queue cleared.
The gap was one day.
There's a productivity insight buried in here, if you squint — something about how the best forcing function for shipping a half-finished feature is watching a competitor finish it first. Product managers have been paying consultants six figures to explain this for decades. Turns out you can get the same effect for free just by waiting for the other company to go on stage.
The right habit, apparently, is to watch what shipped yesterday and ship it today. No roadmap. No strategy deck. Just: they did the thing, now we do the thing.
It is an extremely stupid way to build software and it is producing, in real time, the most capable AI systems that have ever existed.
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