Tech event season is in full swing. This week, Stripe and Figma gathered thousands of people in downtown San Francisco for their respective conferences. I caught up with Figma CEO Dylan Field after his opening keynote at Config, where he announced the most significant product expansion in the company’s history. Below, you’ll find our chat about how he sees AI fitting into Figma after a rough start to integrating the technology last year, the new areas he’s targeting to grow the platform, and more. And keep reading for how Meta is turning up the heat on its AI team, my thoughts about this week’s OpenAI news, and more…“Design and craft are the differentiator”These days, it seems like Figma has the entire creative software industry in its sights.On Wednesday, CEO Dylan Field walked onstage in front of about 8,000 people at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to announce four new products: a ChatGPT-like prototyping tool, a website builder and hosting platform, an AI-branded ad tool that’s similar to Canva, and an Adobe Illustrator competitor.The last time I interviewed Field, he was resetting Figma’s internal culture after its $20 billion sale to Adobe was blocked. When we caught up after his keynote this week, I wanted to hear about his approach to expanding Figma’s suite of products ahead of its planned IPO (the latter of which he refused to talk about), how his new approach to integrating AI differs from last year’s approach that got Figma in trouble, and how he sees the company’s new products stacking up against the competition.The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity:Last year, when you started incorporating generative AI into Figma, there was consternation about it in the industry. It feels like the mood has shifted. Now, people are starting to accept the idea of AI in these creative products. Do you feel that shift?I think that people understand now what the models do, and that’s different from Config 2024, where we had a different approach that was not model-driven, and we didn’t feel it was meeting the mark.Models are useful, and I think that they come with trade-offs. We’re using Claude Sonnet 3.7 in the Make demo. Obviously, it’s modular. We can use other models, and will, in the future. The only thing that’s constant is change when it comes to model development. You cannot necessarily predict from these models what they’ll put out, and if it’ll be something that’s derivative or non-derivative. In your view, does this plug-and-play model approach you’re taking now move responsibility from you to the model provider?We do our best wherever possible to make attributions. For example, if you take a design that’s from the community, and we can detect that it came from the community, we put an attribution link in your code. At the same time, we cannot tell when the model has potentially remembered something. It’s not something we’ve even trained, right? So there’s only so far we can go here. That doesn’t mean that it’s not beneficial to the user.Do you worry about the model providers doing more of what Figma can do? How do you think about your place as an application in an AI world?Looking back at the last decade at Figma, the thing that’s been continually amazing to me is that we truly have been on this exponential curve of how much software is created. It’s basically going vertical. We’re going to see more software created than ever before because of AI.I really believe that design and craft are the differentiator that makes a product and a brand stand out. Can you vibe code or hack your way towards something that makes money? Absolutely. But is it going to be an enduring product? For that, if you have any level of competition, you need to have really good design, a point of view, a great user experience, and a great brand. If you think about all the context that humans have that a LLM does not, I don’t see it being the case that models will get you there all the way.How do you approach the way that Figma expands into new product areas?We see what people are doing in Figma already. Back in 2020, in pandemic times, people were treating Figma like a space to collaborate. We saw tons of brainstorming and ideation. We had to pull that out and make it its own surface because Figma Design is not optimized for brainstorming, ideation, whiteboarding, or diagramming. We saw that 5 percent of the files in Figma Design were slides, so we went and made Figma Slides. I think there’s a lot more inside of Figma, in terms of use cases, that need to be pulled out.Figma Make, which you just introduced, is very broad in what it can do. What’s the goal?We talk a lot about the process of going from idea to product, and that can involve all sorts of different steps. Make spans that whole process. Sometimes you have an idea in your head, and you’re like, “I want to prototype this. I want to get it out there, or I want to use it for myself to iterate and see if it does actually work.” With Figma Sites, are you aiming to compete with Squarespace and WordPress? How deep are you going into web hosting and all that entails?Right now, we’re hosting. You can set a custom domain. Sites have been made in Figma for a long time. You’d have to either go somewhere else to deploy them, or you could code it all up yourself from Figma. Obviously, we hope that Dev Mode can help with that, but if we can get to the point where you can just press the publish button, that seems infinitely better to me for a designer trying to get a site out into the world. I think that’s a pretty distinct use case from the Squarespaces of the world, where, similar to Canva, they are more targeted towards consumers and small businesses.Will you release a mobile app for Figma Buzz, your AI marketing tool? If you do, I could see it more directly competing with Canva.That’s not in our plans right now. I think we are right now focused on making sure Buzz is really high quality for what we’re trying to do on the web, and we can go from there.I have the utmost respect for Canva. The founders are credible. My conceptualization of Canva is more on the consumer and small business side. You’re trying to do something fast. Buzz is focused on brand assets. It’s an enterprise use case. Do you think tools like Buzz will replace digital advertising as it exists today?I think there’s a role for AI in generating marketing assets. In Buzz, you can generate images and you can write text. What I have not seen yet is a world where the models can generate content that a brand team would be really proud of. Maybe that’s coming, but it seems further away than you might expect. ElsewhereMeta’s wake-up call: The AI team at Meta is feeling the heat. Chief product officer Chris Cox, who oversees the division building Llama and Meta AI, recently wrote an internal memo addressing “a lot of burnout” in the org and the cultural problems he wants to fix. While he acknowledges a “kernel of excitement with early adopters” of the Meta AI app, he challenges the org to be “self-aware about what it will take for us to level up” and stresses the need for a “flatter” structure to fix the “layers of review between our best technical leaders and the top.” Some other quotes, per a copy of the memo I’ve seen: “We need a culture of saying ‘no’ more often when asked to tighten timelines if it means cutting corners… There’s a pattern too often of wanting to hide bad news… In some cases we are missing critical infrastructure that we need to be successful at the scale we are operating at.”OpenAI is still a nonprofit: Despite OpenAI saying that it has found a way to stay a nonprofit while still making unlimited profits, its corporate restructuring is far from over. There’s still the big question of how much equity the controlling nonprofit will own in the business (a decision that has to be blessed by regulators and has already had a price floor set by Elon Musk), which in turn has massive implications for OpenAI’s investors. Newcomer reports that “Microsoft wants a bigger stake than OpenAI feels is fair.” If Sam Altman can escape cleanly from the faustian bargain he made with Microsoft years ago for compute, it will be a feat more impressive than ChatGPT’s user growth. OpenAI’s future funding from Softbank, ability to do big deals like Windsurf, and recruiting efforts all ultimately depend on this mess getting sorted out. Overheard”That has never happened in 20 years.” - Eddy Cue on the witness stand, describing how Google traffic declined in Safari for the first time last month. (It’s amazing what the threat of $20 billion-plus in pure profit margin evaporating will get you to say.)“Tim has had a bad week. I’m not going to pile on. Sundar is cool.” - Mark Zuckerberg onstage at Stripe Sessions with John Collison. “It is what it is.” - Dara Khosrowshahi during an Uber all-hands about the company’s change to sabbatical policy and return-to-office mandate. “Certain products that I’ve been very, very involved with, I think there were some unintended consequences that were far from pleasant.” - Jony Ive onstage with Patrick Collison at Stripe Sessions. “The world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the world’s poorest children” - Bill Gates on Elon Musk while speaking to The New York Times.Personnel logThe only job move anyone could talk about this week was Instacart CEO Fidji Simo heading to OpenAI to be “CEO of applications” (Last I checked, OpenAI only operates one app, so that’s a solid hint at what’s coming). This news was leaked well in advance of when it was planned to be announced, causing a lot of drama at Instacart, especially. Simo makes sense as a leader at OpenAI, given that she was already on the nonprofit board, knows how to scale orgs, and joins a familiar bench of other ex-Facebook leaders. What’s more puzzling is that Sam Altman just gave COO Brad Lightcap oversight of “day-to-day operations,” and now Simo is set to presumably be Lightcap’s boss. Usually, a company becomes a massive conglomerate with several huge businesses before it has multiple CEOs. Altman says this new setup will let him focus on “research, compute, and safety.” We’ll see about that!Speaking of OpenAI: Aliisa Rosenthal, its first head of sales, is leaving.Rob Fergus, a co-founder of Meta’s AI research lab, FAIR, has returned after five years at Google DeepMind to lead the organization. Chief scientist Yann LeCun is billing this as a “refocusing on Advanced Machine Intelligence: what others would call human-level AI or AGI.” Also, Dan Reed, Meta’s COO for Reality Labs, is leaving. Google Cloud exec (and former ads product chief) Jerry Dischler announced he is leaving the company after 20 years.Aurora co-founder Sterling Anderson is leaving for a “senior leadership role at an iconic global company.”Greg Estes, Nvidia’s VP of corporate marketing and developer programs, is retiring after 15 years. Chris Handman, Snap’s first general counsel, is joining Rippling in the same role. And Ruby Zefo, Uber’s first chief privacy officer, is retiring. Netflix is looking for a product manager to help people “create and share content in engaging ways off-and-on Netflix.”X is looking for a new head of PR. (Good luck.)Link listMore to click on:If you haven’t already, don’t forget to subscribe to The Verge, which includes unlimited access to Command Line and all of our reporting.As always, I welcome your feedback, especially if you have thoughts on this issue or a story idea to share. You can respond here or ping me securely on Signal.Thanks for subscribing.See More: