Jess Hofmann

[Spenser Skates @spenserskates]

Watch the Analytics League Championship Grand Finals to crown the world's fastest data analyst!

See who can accurately analyze data and share insights in the least amount of time. 📈📊💻⏱️💨

5 time world champion and Amplitude expert Olly Smyth is going up against newcomer Frank Lee using Claude with Amplitude MCP. 👨🏽‍💻🆚👨🏻‍💻🥊🏟️

WATCH LIVE NOW (and check out Amplitude MCP in the thread below):

[Spenser Skates @spenserskates]

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.

[Jess Hofmann @JessicaHofmann]

@Zola really knows how to add stress for Brides. Highly recommend not ordering any paper products from @Zola - worst experience ever 😱

[Jess Hofmann @JessicaHofmann]

@SpotifyCares my account was hacked and the contact page is asking me to login, I obviously can’t do that because my login was changed. Please help

[Jess Hofmann @JessicaHofmann]

@Iberia forces passengers to check their hand luggage and then loses it and provides zero help to locate. Maybe posting on social will get their attention.

[Jess Hofmann @JessicaHofmann]

@BankofAmerica my credit card was stolen out of the mail and your fraud dept won’t answer the phone after hours of being on hold. What do you recommend? #switchingtochase

[Apollo @apollographql]

What's up @MongoDB World? Come find us at the Terrace for some limited edition swag, rooftop views, and good vibes! 🚀 #MDBW22

[Jess Hofmann @JessicaHofmann]

We need a @JohnMayer Christmas album 🙏

[Optimizely @Optimizely]

📢 Calling all PMs, growth marketers, engineering leaders & data teams: #Opticon20 registration is live! Save your spot for our free, 2-day virtual event. https://t.co/91ZHBVxv9A

[Jess Hofmann @JessicaHofmann]

@cheyswaaag So many spiders 😖

[Jess Hofmann @JessicaHofmann]

@cheyswaaag Omg me too 😭

[Jess Hofmann @JessicaHofmann]

@JustinaEats WILD CHILD

[Jess Hofmann @JessicaHofmann]

Why are bad eyebrow days a thing? 🤨

[Jess Hofmann @JessicaHofmann]

Help Retire Lolita and the Orcas at Marineland Antibes to a Seaside Sanctuary https://t.co/4CHWMvpjYz via @PETA

[dr. nicole forsgren @nicolefv]

If you want to come hear about progressive delivery and innovation and high performance (gosh, and apparently win keynote BINGO), tune in! <3

[CNN @CNN]

On two occasions during Sunday's coronavirus briefing, President Trump falsely denied he had said words he had said publicly last week regarding governors and medical equipment. https://t.co/7HtmsxiJJt

[BetaList @BetaList]

@optimizely @isquick @yeesheenyang @KodyOConnell @asametrical You're featured on BetaList! 🙌

https://t.co/qwBzSrwXm4

[Jess Hofmann @JessicaHofmann]

Reading through @Nextdoor comments is the new Facebook scroll... It's official, I live in the suburbs

[Renegade, LLC. @RenegadeLLC]

Want to push your testing further in B2B marketing? Carl Tsukahara, CMO at @Optimizely, can help. Listen in to this week's Renegade Thinkers Unite episode to learn more: https://t.co/0mOtEh1OeZ