🗞 What's New: Top takeaways from Sam Altman's "Reflections" blog

Sounds like big updates are ahead for OpenAI in 2025. Here's what else you'll find in this issue:

• Sam Altman reflects on the role of startup founders and developers in OpenAI's plans.
• CES 2025 brought personal supercomputers, new AI models, and everything in between. Here's what indie hackers need to know.
• 50K teams onboarded. Yana Welinder saw the AI wave coming, and timed her launch accordingly.

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dropped some big hints about what 2025 has in store for the company in a blog post published yesterday.

Amid his meditations on inner company turmoil, Sam summed up OpenAI's key predictions for the year ahead in an article entitled "Reflections."

Here are the key takeaways for indie hackers.

Read the full article →

CES 2025 kicked off Monday in Las Vegas, Nevada. Full of robots, electric vehicles, and smart home devices, it can be an overwhelming, gimmicky affair. But beneath the noise, there were plenty of exciting announcements for indie hackers.

From AI processors to creator tools, we've summarized what we think are the most important developments, starting with Nvidia's new supercomputer.

Read the full article →

While in her role managing user feedback, Yana Welinder experienced some of the pain points that product teams were facing firsthand. Seeing early potential for AI to solve these problems, she built Kraftful, and released it at the peak of AI hype. She also cofounded VC-Backed Moms, a nonprofit supporting over 500 founders.

In building Kraftful, every step was iterative. She and her team kept things lean, focusing only on features that directly improved usability or retention, based on what they learned from constantly talking with their users.

Read the full article →

Reason number 45,765,424 to avoid venture capital.

—@channingallen

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Katie Hignett, Michal Kankowski, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts.

—Channing