recovering founder. past lives: @spc @waymo, @snapchat, @microsoft.
San Francisco
Joined April 2023
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Lica came out of an obsession: to give everyday people access to powerful design agents to tell their stories, without the tool itself becoming an inhibitor to creative expression.
As we went deeper, we kept running into fundamental problems that remain unsolved at the frontier and stand in the way of everyday people using these models to truly express themselves. Easy to one shot a stunning image; precisely shaping an output to match what someone has in mind, and more importantly, understanding their version of taste, is much harder.
We spent the last three years chasing many of these problems: layer level editability, quantifying taste, building RL loops that could hill-climb on specific creative tasks, and systems that intelligently allocate tokens across models while preserving creative intent. Along the way, we built the data, evaluation, and model infra to turn that research into products used by some of the world's largest consumer brands across fashion and CPG.
What @thisisgrantlee and the team have built at Gamma is special. Serving 100M+ users everyday, they have a unique vantage point into what still stands between frontier models and everyday adoption. And we have a shared commitment to solving those fundamentals. I'm incredibly excited to join forces and push that last mile forward.
Thanks to our early customers, employees and investors. Thank you for believing in us. Your conviction gave us the chance to pursue an idea we deeply cared about. We uncovered answers to many of the questions we set out to solve, and I’m excited to see them reach millions in this next chapter.
Shoutout to @amasad and @pirroh for being day 0 believers in me. I vibe coded and spun up agents in @Replit back in early 2023 before it was a thing, and a lot of what @world_lica became later wouldn’t have been possible without you both.
Thanks @spc for nurturing one of the best communities any founder could ask for. (no surprise that @GammaApp came out of it too)
Thanks to our investors @Accel , @spc, @villageglobal , @spc , @amasad, @pirroh , @snsf
Shoutout to @adityaag, @ditzikow, @SaraIttelson, @skg_accel , Amrit, @bencasnocha, Rei-Ling. You guys were always generous with your time through all the ups and downs.
I’ll write more about the journey in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, if you’re curious about our new research direction, send me a DM!
Thanks @IndianIdle for covering this.
Can you train AI to have taste? We think it's worth finding out.
I’m thrilled to announce our acquisition of Lica.
@pritopian and @purvanshi_mehta share our belief that visual communication should be easy and accessible. Together, we plan to build a new research team exploring what comes next:
How do design, layout, and visuals shape attention?
Can qualities like taste and trust become learnable signals?
And how can we help our customers make their ideas matter?
Visual intelligence remains remarkably jagged at the frontier. We’re investing in the research and talent needed to help AI truly understand design, taste, and communication. Our ambition is to create new visual formats that surprise and delight without becoming harder to use.
The team has already hit the ground running, and we can’t wait to share more in the coming weeks.
Priyaa retweeted
On August 31, the first two participants were injected with @PopVaxIndia’s first fridge-stable RNA vaccine candidate in a Phase I clinical trial in Australia. We built this vaccine at our RNA Foundry in Hyderabad – from computational design to GMP manufacturing. Here's how:
How are people finding nannies in SF? And if anyone here has worked with au pairs, id love to hear about your experience. No AI yet to even solve for discovery and top of the funnel reliably :(
Why are they singling out Microsoft? Their hiring strategy is no different than that of Amazon or Google.
.@VP: "There has been no company in the United States, unfortunately, that has abused this system more than Microsoft."
Microsoft laid off 6,000 American workers in 2025 after certifying that it could not find qualified American employees — yet the company was approved for more than 6,000 H-1Bs and filed 3,682 PERM applications, including nearly 1,000 applications for the same positions as the laid off American workers.
Priyaa retweeted
Everyone is sick of generic AI, including us.
Gamma was the first AI presentation platform to reach real scale. But now that AI tools are everywhere, everything looks the same.
Earlier this summer, we came to an uncomfortable conclusion: without a step change in visual variety, Gamma’s output would look and feel too similar to all the other AI tools. The entire point of a presentation is to help someone "get" your idea, to see it as unique and do something with it.
We started over. Today we're shipping Gamma 5, the biggest product overhaul in our company's history.
We rebuilt Gamma to create presentations that actually look like you and your brand. Your teams can design anything they dream up, following your brand's aesthetic or something entirely new, with every frontier and image model under the hood. And the same goes for your docs, social assets, and graphics.
We revamped our agent, design tools, editing, import, export, connectors, and more.
Get your ideas out there.
Uhmm open models also were trained
on copyrighted content? Probably to a lesser degree than closed source. Which open models is he talking about ?
Ben Affleck (Hollywood star & Artists Equity CEO) talks about how he fine-tunes open video models by unfreezing weights and trained only the last cinematic layer so a film crew can hit real production standards.
for context, Ben Affleck founded InterPositive in 2022, a 16-person AI shop for film post and Netflix bought it in March 2026 for $587 mn in cash.
He needed that model because public video models were trained on his peers' films, and he did not think that was a real business. So InterPositive raised money, shot its own dataset for 8 months on a controlled stage, and used it only as late-stage training.
Each new film then trains a private model on its own dailies, so the production keeps the footage and the learning. That is the product Netflix paid $587 million for.
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From "Bloomberg Live" YouTube channel, (link in comment)
I have tried calling dot several times now, and it won't pick up! does not feel good to be ignored. I thought AI's promise was to be there whenever you need them🤧
I’ll accept we’ve solved computer use if the models can navigate the dumpster fire that is the VFS website and get an appointment booked for a Schengen visa. How can such an incompetent organization have an effective monopoly over visa processing in the age of AI?!
Wait what’s new here? I use Apple Pay in India but with US cards. There’s no support for Indian cards?
sign-in with chatgpt + letting users use their credits to use those apps should be made available to consumers too. will make building disposable apps a lot of fun!
I’ve been building fun disposable games on codex sites. Sign in with ChatGPT should let the players i share it with burn their own tokens to use it. None of these games have a long shelf life, but the creators can earn a small share as a referral fee. Cuz some of the multiplayer games can burn tokens quickly and there’s no way to split that bill today. Many interesting business models to think through and a new definition for creator payouts.
sad, visiting India this week and can't access dots :/ any way to bypass regional restrictions as a US based subscriber? 🤧
I would’ve expected them to scoop up @imVkohli. There’s so much room to build a universe around him and @AnushkaSharma: cricket, film , young parents raising two kids. That opens up a whole world of personal agent use cases they could make relatable.
I’m excited to announce my partnership with OpenAI. We have some interesting things coming up, and I can’t wait to share them with you.
I’ve always been curious... One question usually leads to another, and ChatGPT has certainly encouraged that habit. But it has also proved useful when I’ve needed to get things done, like planning my last trip with the family.
That’s what I’m looking forward to with this partnership. Discovering what else I can do with ChatGPT, sharing what I find useful, and encouraging more people to give it a try with something they care about.
A question, an idea, something you’ve always wanted to explore. There are so many places to start.
Looking forward to exploring together.
#Partnership
Love chtagpt voice, but it starts every answer with "checking" or "let me check". That's annoying :/
Dark not being on this list makes me dismiss it immediately
Over 500 influential stars, showrunners and other notable names in the world of TV vote for The 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century for the New York Times.
The Top 10 Best TV Shows:
1. Breaking Bad
2. The Wire
3. Mad Men
4. Succession
5. Fleabag
6. Game of Thrones
7. Veep
8. 30 Rock
9. Curb Your Enthusiasm
10. Atlanta
(nytimes.com/interactive/2026…)
Metaverse Zuck will be back with a glow up
Astra just checked my entire family in for an international flight with layovers and texted me the boarding pass 😭 forwarded a copy to my dad, so he can pick us up. I can’t go back to a time without these agents.
AI discourse was getting too Horcrux coded. Meta is showing up like the Weasleys with fireworks through the Great Hall. Much needed magical whimsy and spectacle to bring the Muggles along and remind the wizards that magic is supposed to be fun.
