The Leaderboard // Connect the dots

Are designers about to be replaced by AI? I wouldn't worry about it, I mean one thing AI is no substitute for is good taste, you either got it or you don't. That's according to Sanjana, our Head of Content who gave her take about two new AI-powered design tools below. 

Blaze Designer and Polymet: Two AI-powered, no-code design tools.

Will AI design tools like Blaze and Polymet put human PMs, graphic designers, and other self-styled “creatives” out of business? I doubt it, though I’m not sure that’s the point of these tools anyway. They’re meant to provide templates for cash-trapped founders who can’t afford a designer — a starting point, not a destination. AI is still no substitute for good taste.

Advanced Voice Mode: Talk to GPT-4o in a more human way.

OpenAI is rolling out its Advanced Voice mode to all paying customers of ChatGPT this week. Advanced Voice mode leverages GPT-4o's audio input and output capabilities to understand emotional content when you talk to it. And the voice generation is strikingly human-like. GPT-4o is a big step forward for "multimodal" AI — AI that integrates text, images, and audio into a unified experience. As usual, OpenAI is setting the pace, here, but other AI labs and Open Source projects are working on multimodality, too (like Google's NotebookLM). I expect we'll see a lot of exciting progress in this space over the next few months.

NodeLand: An AI-powered mindmapping tool 

NodeLand is flipping the script on note-taking by turning your jotted thoughts into dynamic mind maps—it's like giving your ideas a playground where they can mingle. As these mind-mapping tools get snazzier, I’d argue it's becoming more important to dive in and really play with how we organize our thoughts. Sure, NodeLand’s AI assistant can help you understand and expand your notes, but if you let it do all the thinking, you might miss out on those "aha!" moments.