Today in tech: Fake videos and fake users
Tbh founder Nikita Bier is back with Gas, a new social app that de-throned TikTok and BeReal. Read more below.
But first... ⚡️ CAT NIPS ⚡️
- SecondFounder is a Kanban-style marketplace that helps you find co-founders and buy and sell side projects.
- For all the Arc Browser die-hard stans, this Boost Kit offers a collection of tools to change a website's theme and inject new features by copying & pasting code snippets.
- Lyft launched Parking to help you find and reserve the best parking spots around town.
- Designers, check out this free and open-source Figma plugin that lets you rename all your layers in one click.
“My first thought when I saw this thing was: Does this really exist?” one user commented on Movio’s launch. Same, Lucas, same.
Talking Photo lets you create portrait speaking videos that lip-sync to your own text or audio input.Should you raise before or after launch?
Relying on the Dream, Data, or something in between
Your agents stopped answering and started doing
Your agents call tools, write to databases and move money, so a wrong answer is now a wrong action, which is a considerably worse meeting. Arcjet runs policy before every LLM call, tool call, query and API request: prompt injection, sensitive data, bots, rate limits, spend quotas, and your own rules in Rego on top. It reads the OpenTelemetry you already emit, so switching it on is one environment variable, no code changes and nothing to deploy. Each check also reads the earlier steps in the same workflow, so an agent's tenth action gets judged against the first nine and not on its own. JavaScript, Python and Go SDKs all at 1.0, agent framework guards included, free tier to start on.
Daily Top Products
“A savant for understanding the psychology of 15 year olds” is the consensus we’ve been seeing on Twitter about maker Nikita Bier.
You might remember Bier as the founder of tbh, the anonymous social network for complimenting others, but also one of the fastest acquisitions – tbh got acquired by Meta (Facebook back then) 48 days after launch.
Gas, which dethroned TikTok and BeReal as the #1 social app on the App Store, goes by the same principles, inviting high schoolers to boost each other up by answering multiple-choice prompts like “always looks good in pictures.” Despite the app’s roll-out being limited to only a few US states so far, as of this morning, Gas is acquiring a whopping 30,000 users per hour who are answering a total of over 3M+ polls (yes, per hour).
Hyper-growth like that doesn’t just go unnoticed, especially when we’re talking competitors. Gas is reportedly battling a human trafficking hoax, which, according to the team’s initial investigations, seems to be linked to “many IPs originating from China.”
The consumer social space is notoriously tough to be in. BeReal’s recent success is proof of that. According to research from Sensor Tower, despite its high number of installs (14M in September alone), only 9% of Android users open the app daily, compared to an average of 30% for behemoths like Instagram and TikTok.
After a year of news of the ultra-wealthy trying to acquire social platforms, it’s refreshing to see a product wanting to bring positivity into the world. Let’s hope the big players take note.