Ari

Verified Human ||📊#Data #Products wannabe || 💨 #SaaS, #Telecom, #Crypto & #Trading product engineering survivor || #Harley & #Weapons fan

[Ari @datAriRoss]

Happy to be inside the colored dot

[Nozz @NoahEpstein_]

stop what you're doing and look at this image.

each dot is 3.2 million people. 2,500 dots = 8.1 billion humans.

the grey? 6.8 billion people who have never used AI.
the green? 1.3 billion free chatbot users.
the yellow? 15-35 million who pay for it.
the red? that tiny sliver is us.

you think the AI space is crowded because you're in an echo chamber of the 0.06%.

the real world hasn't even started.

wrote a full breakdown on the data, the opportunity, and 7 businesses you can build from this gap today:

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

The godmother of AI just delivered the reality check Silicon Valley refuses to hear. She has the standing to say it.

Li: “Silicon Valley as a whole tends to mistake clear vision with short distance.”

Seeing the destination clearly has nothing to do with how hard it is to reach.

Self-driving cars were first demonstrated in 2006. Twenty years later Waymo is barely on the road.

The vision was never the problem. The distance was.

Clarity of destination gets mistaken for proximity to arrival. That’s the mistake the industry keeps making. And keeps making.

Li: “I consider myself a scientist in my heart and I actually really don’t like hyping.”

In an industry running at maximum temperature, Fei-Fei Li is one of the few people at the top willing to say that publicly.

Not because the technology isn’t real. Because the gap between what’s visible and what’s required is being systematically underestimated.

Large Language Models dominate the conversation. Text to text. Comparatively contained.

The harder problem is spatial intelligence. AI that reasons about and acts within the physical three-dimensional world. Hardware. Physics. Data that doesn’t exist yet. Real-time adaptation to chaos.

A robot that can clean a bathroom requires understanding every surface, every object, every force, every exception.

That’s not a software update. That’s a civilizational research problem.

Li: “I don’t call it hype. I call it a misleading sentiment. We don’t want to replace human creators.”

The second place the industry gets it wrong is creativity.

The narrative has hardened around replacement. AI takes the jobs. AI tells the stories. AI makes the art.

Li considers that not just wrong but destructive.

Wrong because AI doesn’t replicate creativity. Destructive because believing it can devalues the humans creating culture.

Human creativity isn’t a process to be automated. It’s fundamental to what we are as a species.

The goal is augmentation. Tools that make human creators faster and more capable. Not systems that generate output in the style of human work and call it creation.

That distinction matters more than most people in the industry are willing to sit with.

Precision of imagination is not proximity to reality.

Li has spent her career in the gap between those two things. The map isn’t the territory. The journey is long. The hurdles are deep.

And the scientist who built the foundation this era stands on is telling you the timeline everyone is selling is wrong.

We’ve been almost there with self-driving for twenty years.

The pattern doesn’t change just because the destination looks different.

[Ari @datAriRoss]

🎸🚀

[Ari @datAriRoss]

Meanwhile…

[Ari @datAriRoss]

Beyond Pokemon…

[Cyberpunk Trading Card Game @Cyberpunk_TCG]

Our Kickstarter is live! 💛🩵

Follow our pre-launch page and back the campaign when it launches on March 17 to receive a Foil Nova Rare Lucy card for free ✨

👇🔗
https://t.co/K8aMc2zS2I

[Ari @datAriRoss]

@WaveCut @durov @pandadoc same for @peakdesignltd

[Ari @datAriRoss]

@bbkorol а Купер — это в честь Шелдона? 😇

[Ari @datAriRoss]

Will do

[Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin @jasonlk]

My rough advice for events, having produced many of them, with lots of data:

- Go to 2 of the top events in your industry each year
- Go to 2 local meet-ups, dinners, etc. in your industry each month

The relationships you build — and refresh — are worth it

[Ari @datAriRoss]

Can I consider myself a power user, @cursor_ai, @leerob? 😜😇

[Ari @datAriRoss]

Experimenting w/ @NanoBanana, here’s how this flow looks like 🧑‍💻

[Ari @datAriRoss]

Btw, I finally nailed those Vercel deployment failures.

Basically, I always forget to run local build checks. So, I added the dumbest test to the suite: run `pnpm build` locally.

Then I hooked up Husky (@typicode) to fire it on every git push.

99% of errors gone 🎊🧑‍💻🛠️

[Marc Lou @marclou]

20 projects to go

one of those days

[Ari @datAriRoss]

Sounds pretty legal 🤔🧑‍💻💸

[Mike Hoffmann @MikeHoffmann]

Every millionaire owns a vending machine.

Here's why:

[Ari @datAriRoss]

This really went out of line… trying to roll back one message in the chat (out of 10+), and it kills everything, up to the initial message/prompt (code and files also got killed).

@antigravity, is that how you think it should work?

[Ari @datAriRoss]

. @antigravity Please stop deleting the whole conversation (including the initial prompt) when the user clicks “Undo changes up to this post”. People lose their prompts and start thinking about gravitating (yeah) back to their @cursor_ai accounts, which doesn’t do this crazy shit

[Ari @datAriRoss]

“Will it scale?” ©

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.

$30 per seat per month.

$1.4 million annually.

I called it "digital transformation."

The board loved that phrase.

They approved it in eleven minutes.

No one asked what it would actually do.

Including me.

I told everyone it would "10x productivity."

That's not a real number.

But it sounds like one.

HR asked how we'd measure the 10x.

I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards."

They stopped asking.

Three months later I checked the usage reports.

47 people had opened it.

12 had used it more than once.

One of them was me.

I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.

It took 45 seconds.

Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.

But I called it a "pilot success."

Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail.

The CFO asked about ROI.

I showed him a graph.

The graph went up and to the right.

It measured "AI enablement."

I made that metric up.

He nodded approvingly.

We're "AI-enabled" now.

I don't know what that means.

But it's in our investor deck.

A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT.

I said we needed "enterprise-grade security."

He asked what that meant.

I said "compliance."

He asked which compliance.

I said "all of them."

He looked skeptical.

I scheduled him for a "career development conversation."

He stopped asking questions.

Microsoft sent a case study team.

They wanted to feature us as a success story.

I told them we "saved 40,000 hours."

I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up.

They didn't verify it.

They never do.

Now we're on Microsoft's website.

"Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot."

The CEO shared it on LinkedIn.

He got 3,000 likes.

He's never used Copilot.

None of the executives have.

We have an exemption.

"Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction."

I wrote that policy.

The licenses renew next month.

I'm requesting an expansion.

5,000 more seats.

We haven't used the first 4,000.

But this time we'll "drive adoption."

Adoption means mandatory training.

Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches.

But completion will be tracked.

Completion is a metric.

Metrics go in dashboards.

Dashboards go in board presentations.

Board presentations get me promoted.

I'll be SVP by Q3.

I still don't know what Copilot does.

But I know what it's for.

It's for showing we're "investing in AI."

Investment means spending.

Spending means commitment.

Commitment means we're serious about the future.

The future is whatever I say it is.

As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

[Ari @datAriRoss]

Great point 👍
We meatbags are wired to assume there’s a real person behind every chat window. So we end up talking to LLMs like they’re one too

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Don't think of LLMs as entities but as simulators. For example, when exploring a topic, don't ask:

"What do you think about xyz"?

There is no "you". Next time try:

"What would be a good group of people to explore xyz? What would they say?"

The LLM can channel/simulate many perspectives but it hasn't "thought about" xyz for a while and over time and formed its own opinions in the way we're used to. If you force it via the use of "you", it will give you something by adopting a personality embedding vector implied by the statistics of its finetuning data and then simulate that. It's fine to do, but there is a lot less mystique to it than I find people naively attribute to "asking an AI".

[Ari @datAriRoss]

Keep getting this while trying to connect Slack and @cursor_ai.
Could you guys please take a look?

[Ari @datAriRoss]

Awesome move, @getsentry!

[Ari @datAriRoss]

Setting up notifications @Airtable → @SlackHQ was a breeze.
Doing the same from @supabase… Pain in the 🍑

[Ari @datAriRoss]

I just logged a bug in Linear: “Download doesn’t start on iPad/iPhone”

Assigned it to Agent Cursor → it fixed the issue, created a branch on GitHub, pushed the code, opened a PR into Stage, and asked me to approve.

I tested it: works perfectly.

This is the future 🤯