The a16z Show

The AI-Native CRM

his team followed customers from AI presentations into sales workflows and eventually found a harder problem: making sense of the fragmented and often conflicting data spread across a company's emails, calls, CRM, and other systems.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Why the current tech backlash feels different

Software engineering is verifiable, you can run it through the compiler and see if it works. AI has obviously gotten really good at making software. If you believe the world is just software, that means AI has gotten good, it's done. You can see the labs are talking about how they've achieved AGI or they will very soon and it is very much connected to the ability of AI to write software. I'm just not discounting that that's important. I'm just saying once you get outside of software, verifiability gets way harder.

The a16z Show

World Models, Robotics, and the Future of 3D AI

just as language models became general-purpose engines for working with text, world models could become a horizontal layer for visual and physical intelligence across industries from entertainment and gaming to construction and robotics.

TBPN

GG Navier Stokes, Math Wars, Greg Brockman Joins, Scott Wu Joins, The Seufenator Joins

These uh these math models have discovered the the hardest problem of advanced mathematics which is authorship uh contribution. Who actually did the work? Who gets lead left on the paper?

Diet TBPN

OpenAI Cracks Navier-Stokes, Tech Trailers, AI Jobs Apocalypse on Hold | Diet TBPN

Same month that AI solved this incredibly difficult math problem, I saw someone use Chachi PT to book a haircut. So equivalent, no, I mean in terms of the actual economy, the actual impact of these things, uh like practically using these tools for something that people enjoy, that's not just spinning their wheels, that's not just optimizing endless things, that's actually uh generative and moving things forward.

TBPN

Greg Brockman on Astra and the Future of OpenAI

I think that talking about curing diseases and new medicines we're going to be able to develop, all of that starts to become much more real when you have models that are at this level of assistance and capability. And I do think that there are going to be real changes to to think about in terms of we can have so much more ambition with the kinds of of challenges that we can hope to tackle now.

Throughline

Is it time for a Luddite Renaissance? | Throughline

Something about this moment feels more existential. Like the very core of who we are as human beings is under threat, challenging the way we think, communicate, connect.

The a16z Show

OpenAI Researchers on the Future of Mathematical Reasoning

the reasoning traces look remarkably similar to the work of an expert mathematician, including choosing promising approaches, backtracking when they fail, and combining ideas from across the literature.

The a16z Show

Can Open Source Keep AI Power From Concentrating?

today's concentration may be a feature of the current technological paradigm rather than a permanent feature of AI. Transformers reward enormous amounts of data and compute, but future breakthroughs could make smaller, more specialized models far more capable.

The a16z Show

Your AI Doctor Is Coming | Julie Yoo

Because healthcare never built the same layers of legacy software as other industries, it may now be able to leapfrog directly into agentic AI.

Diet TBPN

Astra Reactions, Jobs Print, Cybercab Launch | Diet TBPN

Those are never really feel the AGI moments for me, but this, uh, but I I've actually spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours in 3D modeling software, uh, mostly in Cinema 4D and Houdini, and it was really fun. I really enjoy making uh, uh, 3D renders and motion graphics. Uh, and it was also useful when I was making YouTube videos. Uh, but every step in building a scene uh requires you got to watch a YouTube tutorial. Then you got to look up how all the different functions work. And then ultimately you're tweaking settings in literally four dimensions because it's a 3D scene.

TED

How AI Is Breaking the Internet (and What to Do About It) | Matthew Prince | TED

The answer engines are giving the answers and people aren't following the footnotes. You're actually trusting that AI systems are giving you the right answer, and that's destroying media. Across the board, we're seeing reported numbers of between a 90 and 30 percent decline in the traffic to their sites.

TED

How AI Is Breaking the Internet (and What to Do About It) | Matthew Prince | TED

The answer engines are giving the answers and people aren't following the footnotes. And this was 18 months ago. What's happened since, has it gotten better or worse? Do you trust AI more today than you did 18 months ago? The answer is most people do, and as a result, it's actually gotten twice as hard to get traffic to content that's there. You're not following the footnotes anymore. You're actually trusting that AI systems are giving you the right answer, and that's destroying media.

TBPN

Jobs Boom, Astra Reactions, Cybercab Roll Out, The Dyson Debate

It was a time when technology gave us all a deep sense of optimism for the future. I feel like some of that sense has been lost since certainly. But I hope models like Astra can help restore it and push us towards a more hopeful future.

TED

How AI Is Breaking the Internet (and What to Do About It) | Matthew Prince | TED

What is it with OpenAI? 750 times harder. What is it with Anthropic? 32,000 times harder. The answer engines are giving the answers and people aren't following the footnotes.

Fresh Air

Back-to-school with Big Tech

the tech companies want kids to be prepared for the world the tech companies are building. But we're not saying to kids, do you want an AI-driven future? Do you want an AI-first future? Like, we're skipping over all the hard questions.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sarah Guo - What the 250 People Building AI Believe - [Invest Like the Best, EP.489]

At the center is Sarah's conviction that no single company will own the future of AI, and what that means for founders, investors, and anyone allocating their time and resources in a world moving this fast.

The a16z Show

Gavin Baker: Why AI Demand Is Outrunning Compute Supply

David explores whether the bigger near-term risk is not overbuilding, but failing to build enough.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Neil Movva - Making AI 10x Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.488]

the premium the frontier labs charge for being three to six months ahead may not last

The a16z Show

The Infrastructure Behind the Machine Age

AI is turning problems once constrained by engineering into problems that can increasingly be attacked with capital and compute.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Neil Movva - Making AI 10x Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.488]

The cost of running AI models has dropped roughly 10x per year for the past several years, which is faster than Moore's Law ever moved. If that rate continues, the things that are economically impossible to automate with AI today become possible very quickly.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

OpenAI's executive exodus has one big winner

While Sam Altman is the CEO and still OpenAI's most public face, Brockman has amassed enormous power and influence within the top ranks of the company as other senior leaders have left in rapid succession.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Ben Thompson on Big Tech, China, and the AI Boom Running Out of Money - [Invest Like the Best, EP.487]

The interesting thing about AI is that the returns are so uncertain. You could imagine a world where AI is transformative and these investments are the best ever made, or you could imagine a world where the returns never come and it's the biggest misallocation of capital in history.

The a16z Show

The State of AI: Macro, Apps, and Consumer

the biggest risk for today's founders may no longer be thinking too big, but thinking too small

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Neil Movva - Making AI 10x Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.488]

one where AI agents run in the background for hours or days at a time rather than answering a human in real time. In that world, latency matters less and cost matters more, and Neil has built the whole company around driving the cost of a token as low as it can possibly go.

The a16z Show

The New Economics of AI | Martin Casado & Steven Sinofsky

problems that were once constrained by engineering talent can increasingly be attacked with capital and compute

The a16z Show

Martin Casado on Where the Value Is Going in AI

Martin believes this may be the biggest unlock of wealth he's seen since the 1990s.

The Prof G Pod

China Builds a Germany Every Year — And the U.S. Is Losing

The challenge when it comes to power demand for AI is that Europe and the US have actually gone through a very very long period of not really building out an electricity grid. Right? Electricity demand across Europe has actually fallen in the last 30 years. In the US it basically hasn't grown much at all. And now we're starting to see this huge demand from AI.

The a16z Show

Microsoft's Deputy CISO on Securing AI Agents

AI is shifting the CISO's role from saying "no" to safely enabling new technology.

The Prof G Pod

China Builds a Germany Every Year — And the U.S. Is Losing

The challenge with energy demand for AI is really a geographical and localized problem. So even though it's not a huge share of the world's electricity, almost all of the world's demand is being served by a very few select locations. And that's a really really key local concern and puts pressure on local grids even if it doesn't consume a huge amount of the world's electricity.

The a16z Show

How Do You Defend Against AI That Can Hack?

the same AI capabilities creating new attack surfaces could ultimately give defenders their biggest advantage yet

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Ben Thompson on Big Tech, China, and the AI Boom Running Out of Money - [Invest Like the Best, EP.487]

why he thinks it would be dangerous for the United States to win the AI race outright, what container shipping and the railroads of the 1870s tell us about the buildout, and why the binding constraint on all of this may be capital rather than compute.

The a16z Show

Stripe’s AI Strategy: Build More, Not Less

Stripe sees AI productivity as an opportunity to build more rather than simply cut costs, including how its internal coding agents now generate thousands of pull requests each week.

Diet TBPN

North Korea’s Secret US Workforce, Canceling the SaaSpocalypse, MSL’s Latest Exits | Diet TBPN

There were a lot of companies that were getting thrown in the SAS bucket as just like a pure pile of code. You could vibe code it. Uh and while that thesis might play out over a few years, it's it was a little bit too soon. it seemed a little bit too aggressive

Decoder with Nilay Patel

The left and right agree on one thing: no data centers

You're seeing that on the right and the left. So for example, at the Abundance Conference last year, it was center-right to center-left-ish. And everybody was pro-nuclear, pro-AI. And we were hearing that, 'These things are here to stay. We have to figure out how to do it smartly.' At the same time, the populist left and the populist right are both skeptical of tech development, to put it lightly.

The a16z Show

The Two Ways to Sell AI: Lighthouse or Landgrab?

the current rush to adopt AI has created a rare window for startups to sell big software again

Diet TBPN

Zuck’s AI Vision, Celebs Are Dating Private Equity Guys, AI Agent Hacks Gym | Diet TBPN

By recording the screens of every Meta employee which is very controversial and bold but actually ripping that band-aid off and just saying hey we're we're an AI training company now and everyone's going to be recording their screens and their flows and all how all their work gets done. They basically got like a frontier leading AI data labeling company for free.

Diet TBPN

Nvidia’s $500B Compute Deal, Paramount Threatens CA Exit, Musk’s Shortcut to $1T Payday | Diet TBPN

AI tokens are profitable incredibly profitable. When you have something profitable, everybody wants to make more of it. Great demand, great profitability. The conditions are exactly right for the work that we're doing right now.

Pivot

Kara Swisher on Zuckerberg's New AI Manifesto: "He's in Desperate Need of an Editor" | Pivot

After he goes on about, you know, the need to decentralize power and checks and balances to all that, go look at how they built that data center in Louisiana. It was something like 50 non-disclosure agreements. The arrival of the data center came as a massive shock to that community, right? So when push comes to shove, they're doing what every other company does, which is building data as data centers as secretly as possible and then writing essays about how the future is for everyone.

TED

The Path to Mathematical Superintelligence | Tudor Achim | TED

Humans are becoming the bottleneck of verification for AI. And now the question is, where does that leave us? Is this the end of the road for reliable mathematical discovery? Are we resigned to drowning in a sea of unverified claims where we can't really tell truth from fiction?

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

The economic growth we've had in the last 200 years is this extraordinary exception in human history. And yet, I think we're about to look back on that and think it was just this tiny little warmup. I think we can do the equivalent of that again in a very small number of years.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

The economic system that we all inhabit is basically a way of turning energy and ideas into goods and services. And if you think about what's possible when both of those inputs are effectively infinite, I think the world totally changes.

Fresh Air

Best Of: Jia Tolentino on plastic surgery & AI / ‘Beef’ creator Lee Sun Jin

The face looked like the beauty filters that Snapchat and Instagram provided to kind of lift your cheeks and plump your lips and make your eyes bigger and make your chin a little more heart-shaped. And you could press a button or you could use Facetune to digitally alter your face to fit this kind of algorithmically approved beauty standard. Like this was a face that the algorithm liked.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we're at an extraordinary moment in history where the tools to solve problems that have been stuck for 100 years, or maybe never been solvable, are becoming available to us. And I think in the next few decades, we will make more scientific progress than in all of human history combined.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we may be approaching a moment where many instances of AI are out there doing scientific research full time, and the cumulative effect of that could be that we compress decades of scientific progress into just a few years. AI agents that can run experiments and think about what to do next and look at data and say what we should try and the next time could fundamentally change the rate of scientific progress.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

The left and right agree on one thing: no data centers

It's not a left-right thing. It's a populous technocrat divide. You're seeing that on the right and the left. So for example, at the Abundance Conference last year, it was center-right to center-left-ish. And everybody was pro-nuclear, pro-AI. And we were hearing that, 'These things are here to stay. We have to figure out how to do it smartly.' At the same time, the populist left and the populist right are both skeptical of tech development, to put it lightly.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Gavin Baker - AI Market Jitters - [Invest Like the Best, EP.485]

The bears say inference is a commodity and that we'll see severe margin compression. I think that's probably right in aggregate, but I think that also misses what happened in the cloud. Amazon and Microsoft and Google do sell compute as a commodity, but they make enormous profits doing so, because commodities at massive scale with high fixed costs and low variable costs can be very, very profitable businesses.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Gavin Baker - AI Market Jitters - [Invest Like the Best, EP.485]

The most underappreciated thing about AI is that it's deflationary. Every single time in history when something has caused the kind of growth in demand that AI is causing, it has been because it is deflationary — because it lowers the cost of doing something that people want to do.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Gavin Baker - AI Market Jitters - [Invest Like the Best, EP.485]

The street is now generally assuming that hyperscalers are going to spend somewhere between $300-325 billion in capex in 2025. And these are numbers that were literally unimaginable 2 years ago. The question is what is the ROI on that spend and what is the right mental model for thinking about it.