Sabrina Halper sits down with Ali Ansari, the 25-year-old solo founder and CEO of Micro1, which just passed $1B in ARR. But it all began when Ali moved from Iran to the U.S. at age nine, going from flipping textbooks to building a company that supplies the human expertise used to train AI models.

We get into Micro1’s pivot from AI recruiting to training data, growing to $1B ARR in 2.5 years, whether experts are training their replacements, how to teach AI subjective judgment, why robotics is a data problem, the stakes of selling training data to China, and whether the AI economy can justify the infrastructure being built.

Ali Ansari: https://x.com/aliansarinik

Sabrina Halper: https://x.com/SabrinaHalper

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Presented by micro1: https://micro1.ai They're building the infrastructure for advancing intelligence through expert human data, real-world training environments, and contextual evaluations.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00 Intro

02:56 Growing up in Iran and moving to America

07:37 From eBay to textbook flipping

13:54 Building micro1 and the pivot to training data

19:39 Why internet data is the worst data

22:41 Are experts training their replacements?

29:27 Creativity, alignment, and subjective judgment

36:01 The robotics data bottleneck

45:11 Ordinary vs. Extraordinary Training Data

43:56 America selling data to China

53:56 $1B in 2.5 years

56:53 Can the AI economy deliver?