The State of AI in SaaS
This started as an analysis of Andrej Karpathy's excellent overview of AI's capabilities: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1979644538185752935
"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.
Now, that all said, I think AI will completely reshape SaaS. 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, Granola, 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.
Within Amplitude's space (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.
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.
I know HN isn't one for hype, but we're going to be coming out with a lot over the next 6 months and I genuinely think it will change analytics.