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Check out AI Vis 1.5!

Building a great product isn’t about writing more code. It’s knowing which code to write. In July, Amplitude acquired @Kraftful, an AI startup that synthesizes product feedback into action items! Today, it went live ... check it out: amplitude.com/ai-feedback?ut…

I use it all the time and I’m constantly impressed at what an LLM can do with behavioral context. So good!

The State of AI in SaaS: SaaS is Dead, Long Live SaaS This started as an analysis of Andrej Karpathy's excellent overview of AI's capabilities. Those who deeply understand this will make all the returns and everyone else will lose a lot of money. "Ghosts" is a brilliant metaphor for what we've created. They're not animals, and they're definitely not human. They are imperfect replicas of us. Karpathy describes them as a "statistical distillation of humanity's documents". AI channels that distribution more effectively than any human and can beat us at Go, schoolwork, analyzing medical images, and many well defined tasks. At the same time, it lacks the reward systems that humans use to improve including curiosity, empowerment, play, intrinsic motivation, and culture. As a result, AI's capabilities are limited. If you watch how the best work gets done with AI, it happens in chunks where a human supervises the output and gives iterative feedback to the AI. Large scale autonomous agents are brittle and fail quickly. Watch anyone vibe code an application with any level of novel complexity. AI also faces integration barriers into existing organizations. AI is not capable of pulling a lot of the levers you need to be effective like coordinating with multiple stakeholders, building trust, authenticity, and interacting with different modalities across time and space. You could argue that the average human doesn't either, but people know when they're interacting with an AI and don't allow it the same agency as they do to people. The most successful AI B2B companies actually need more humans to integrate what they've built (forward deployed engineers) than traditional B2B SaaS. What's next? Those who understand AI and its limitations will transform the industry. Incumbents will be killed by those who know how to leverage AI. I've seen countless homepages talk about being the "AI platform for AI agents" but can't even string a demo together. Meanwhile they're trying to pitch a future where fully autonomous entities collaborate in parallel to write all the code and humans are useless. They will be the first to be replaced when they get surpassed by AI native companies. The investors blindly throwing money into companies at 100x multiples are going to lose their money. I spoke with one of the most disciplined investors I know last week. They said they felt they had to play the game on the field even though they knew it didn't make sense. And this was from someone who is closer to the technology than 95% of investors. On the other hand, companies who deeply understand AI will win everything. Cursor, Glean, Decagon, Sierra, Linear, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, and many AI natives are off to a great start. While 90% of incumbents haven't adapted, it is possible. Figma, Notion, Vercel, Box, and Intercom have done a great job of tearing down what they have and rebuilding AI native products. They have teams who are close to the current capabilities of the models. They also understand their problem domain and as new capabilities come out know what capabilities will map well to what problems in what way. They are able to deliver on AI's promise to their customers. Whereas the majority of existing companies will die. In analytics, the door is wide open. In spite of many of our competitors filling up their homepages with the text "AI", I haven't seen a single compelling demo. We're still working like it's 2015. This will change. We have spent the last year at Amplitude rebuilding our team to be AI native. We've learned about what models are capable of, how to write prompts, and how to leverage evals for building great products. We've worked with our customers to see what gets used in practice and what doesn't. We are building a vision for the future of analytics. We are all in on AI at Amplitude. Stay tuned for what's next. We're going to be fast and furious with AI products at Amplitude.

RT @spenserskates: Just had @kimberlywtan come by and talk to the senior leaders at Amplitude about how to sell AI to the enterprise. Lot…

@matthieurouif @Amplitude_HQ @spenserskates Sincerest apologies ... changes are being rolled back, post-mortem scheduled. We will do better.

Hey @Amplitude_HQ , @spenserskates , could you have a look at this? It’s causing multiple apps including Photoroom to crash.

@evanreiser Congratulations! Abnormal is making exceptional look normal 😁

Today we are announcing a $200M+ series C investment to further invest in Abnormal’s AI technologies and to expand our cloud email security platform. This investment will help us better protect our customers and advance our joint mission to fight crime. wsj.com/articles/abnor…

Exciting (and true) ...

There is no such thing as too cold to grill.

@NWSBayArea From Angwin in Napa Valley 😁

Temperatures will be dropping into the 30s/low 40s for most of the area tonight (and throughout the week). These temps can bring on hypothermia for those without proper clothing and shelter. Be aware of the warning signs and seek out help for those in need. #CAwx #cold

Excited by the momentum ... looking forward to the impact at @IncludedHealth!

Congratulations to @spenserskates, @paladin314159, @curtisbliu and the rest of the team at @Amplitude_HQ on their first day of being a public company. Incredibly proud of what you have accomplished! $AMPL, #AmplitudeListed

@syun Yeah, I’m in

omg omg omg omg

You pay dividends when you ignore culture and collect them when you are purposeful about getting it right ... great panel with @saammotamedi, @kevin_wang, and @ganjianwei to discuss principles and give practical tips on the topic. Thanks @GreylockVC for making it happen!

Huge!

When 1+1 >= 3! Exciting things ahead!!! Join us ... businesswire.com/news/home/2021…

@dreamjar @ameet @Twitter What a great memory! Thanks again for being so generous with your talent

Awesome!

Looking forward to this! I hope you can join (to both understand/avoid the mistakes I have made as well as how to focus on directed/deliberate career growth) #engineeringleadership #ELCSummit #ELCSummit2020

1/ Covid (@UCSF) Chronicles, Day 199 OK, now this is now officially mind-blowing. Of course, today’s thread will be all about the President’s illness, what might come next, and what it means.