Rohan

The penguin with the orange backpack.. 🐧🎒

Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke explains Goodhart’s law and why he doesn’t like KPIs or OKRs “Goodhart’s law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it’s no longer a useful metric… No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business. There’s a million different tensions in a company, and you can’t keep all of them in harmony by optimizing for one thing.” For this reason, Shopify doesn’t use KPIs or OKRs. But as Tobi explains, this doesn’t mean they don’t value data and metrics. “We are extremely data informed. We have invested enormous amounts of money and time into systems that give us basically everything at our fingertips… But what Shopify attempts to do is just not over-fit for what’s quantifiable.” People love optimizing for highly-quantifiable things because there’s immediate gratification that comes from seeing a number go up. But Tobi thinks that the most important aspects of a product are rarely quantifiable: “The overlap of the most valuable things you can do with a product and the things that happen to be fully quantifiable are like maybe 20%. Which leaves 80% of a value space unaddressable by the people who only look at quantifiable things.” He continues: “Shopify is comfortable with unquantifiable things like taste, quality, passion, love, hate… The sort of deep satisfaction that a craftsperson feels when they’ve done a job well is actually a better proxy if you allow it to be.” They then have robust analytics systems that tell the company if something’s wrong or a new rollout breaks something. “We think about it as a cockpit for a pilot. The decisions are still made by pilots, and we think this leads to better results… I think there needs to be more acceptance in business of unquantifiable things… And then metrics take a support function.” Source: @lennysan (Feb 2025)

Physicist Michio Kaku suggests dark matter isn’t matter at all. It is gravity leaking from a parallel dimension.

How do I explain to a non-cricket fan that this is the most beautiful thing ever 🤌🏻❤️

A simple example: days of the week, which lie on a circular path in models’ activations. Steering linearly from Monday to Friday gets you incoherent outputs in between. Steering along the circular manifold means you cleanly shift from Mon → Tues → Wed → Thurs → Fri. (5/8)

Esto es lo que pasa cuando 2 pingüinos se encuentran de frente en el camino

Neural networks might speak English, but they think in shapes. Understanding their rich *neural geometry* is key to understanding how they work – and to debugging and controlling them with precision. Starting today, we’re releasing a series of posts on this research agenda. 🧵

@Chandrika633 and Quivly are building for the world where every day post-sale is a revenue moment that matters 🚀🚀

Imagine running to save your life and this is your full speed 😭😭

Forward deployed engineers, or equivalent, are about to become one of the most in-demand jobs in tech. And one of the most important functions for AI rollouts. Deploying agents is far more technical of a task than most people realize, often far more involved than deploying software. Software generally works the same way every time, and generally for the past few decades has been updated versions of an existing technology or concept (which basically means easier for the enterprise to update their workflows on a newer system). With agents, you’re actually deploying the equivalent of work output within the enterprise. The customer is effectively using you as a professional services provider for a task, which they expect to get solved nearly end-to-end now. This means you need to actually deeply understand the business process as a vendor, and get the customer from the current to the end state seamlessly. Companies need help figuring out which models will work best for their workflows, they need extensive evals setup often, they need change management support for workflows, they need to get their data setup for the agents, and constant tuning of the agentic system for their process. Massive role in tech now. And another example of the kind of highly technical work that AI is creating.

in enterprise sales, pilots are the very last stage of sales/buying process — ie bottom-of-funnel never, ever middle of the funnel …

@Evanish @joshua_sirota

Related: If you're in SF, I may have a bit of time Tuesday afternoon and Friday afternoon for some coffees and catchups. DM me if you want to meet up.

Any of my friends in SF have an office I can work out of tomorrow afternoon? Visiting for company offsite, but not checking into the Airbnb til 4pm.

🪙𝐍𝐒𝐄 𝐋𝐚𝐮𝐧𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐬 𝐄𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐜 𝐆𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐢𝐩𝐭𝐬 The National Stock Exchange of India (#NSE) announced the launch of Electronic Gold Receipts (EGRs), a new segment aimed at bringing greater transparency, efficiency and formalisation to India's gold market. 🪙𝑾𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝑬𝑮𝑹𝒔? EGRs are dematerialised securities that represent ownership of physical gold, which is stored in the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) accredited vaults and held electronically through depositories. Each EGR is fully backed by physical gold and can be traded on the exchange, integrating gold into the formal financial system.

@saen_dev Agreed. We often try and tinker and break our own agent Richard (which automates GTM for us) and it causes us more pain when it throws random errors which are unexpected.

@rohanmanchanda Most underrated observation in AI right now. Benchmarks measure capability, production measures reliability. An agent that works 95% but fails catastrophically 5% is worse than one at 80% with graceful fallbacks. Ship the handoff, not the autonomy.

Every AI agent shipping real work today runs on a tight tether.Long-horizon demos get the headlines. Short horizons get the work done.A short thread on why short wins. 🧵

Rumored today that both OAI + Anthropic are in some way funding consulting firms that help companies adopt AI. This is neither bearish or bullish — just proves that it's going to be a 10-20 year slog to get all businesses agentified. Wrote about this a while back: drew.tech/posts/agi-some…

Under the directives of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum , we are launching today a new initiative to transform towards Agentic AI (self-executing and self-leading artificial intelligence) in Dubai’s private sector. Our goal is for Dubai to become the world’s leading city in adopting these technologies economically and commercially — giving us a new competitive edge for the future. The transformation program spans two years and includes specialized training tracks for all business councils affiliated with the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry. We have also directed the Chamber to establish incubators for Agentic AI companies to support this transformation, create new economic opportunities for young people in this field, and set up dedicated funds to back this new shift. Our objective is to empower our companies to adopt these technologies that will boost productivity, expand business volumes, and reshape the city — making its economy the best in the world in adopting Agentic AI technologies. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid is today leading a comprehensive movement to reshape Dubai into the world’s most future-ready city — technologically, economically, in infrastructure, and with facilities that elevate quality of life to standards no one has reached before.

Full piece here: linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…

This is how we build at Primordial. Every agent runs on a short horizon. Every output graded against a rubric. Every rubric written by a Nucleus Engineer who owns the function end to end. Autonomy is earned function by function and our job is to make it safe to extend.