The a16z Show

Epizódok

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  David George & Jack Altman on AI, Autonomy, and the Next $25 Trillion 04.10.2026 55p

  a16z General Partner David George joins Jack Altman on Uncapped to make the case that many of the biggest debates in AI are framed the wrong way. Frontier models or open source? Labs or applications? David’s answer is often “and.” With AI adoption still concentrated among a relatively small group of heavy users, he argues there could be room for multiple layers of the stack to grow at once. David and Jack discuss why demand for compute continues to outstrip supply, why applications can thrive even as frontier labs expand into new products, and why consumer AI may still be at the beginning of its biggest shift, from reactive chatbots to proactive assistants that can act on our behalf. They also zoom out to autonomy, robotics, healthcare, and the next generation of technology companies, before turning to venture itself: why David believes today’s product cycle is unusually strong, how capital can accelerate AI companies in ways it couldn’t during the SaaS era, and why founders and narrative become increasingly important as companies scale. This conversation originally appeared on Jack Altman’s Uncapped.
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  Beyond the God Model | Alex Atallah & Amjad Masad 03.10.2026 48p

  A16z’s Erik Torenberg sits down with OpenRouter’s Alex Atallah and Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad to discuss why the future of AI may look less like one all-purpose model and more like an ecosystem of specialized models working together. Alex explains why OpenRouter is betting on “neurodiversity”: different models trained in different ways, routed and combined based on the job at hand. Amjad makes a similar case from inside the enterprise, where companies increasingly need to own their AI capabilities rather than depend entirely on a single model provider. They explore what happens when general-purpose agents give way to teams of specialized agents, why smaller models can sometimes be cheaper, safer, and easier to control, and how routing and model fusion could deliver frontier-level performance at lower cost. They also get into agent-to-agent communication, AI security, and why the next generation of companies may need an independence layer across models, clouds, and data.
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  Why AI Agents Can Beat the Incumbents 02.10.2026 59p

  a16z’s Seema Amble and Elena Burger sit down with Lio co-founder and CEO Vladimir Keil to ask where AI-native startups have an advantage when incumbent software companies already own the customer, the data, and the system of record. Their answer comes down to the work that happens outside those systems. In procurement, a final price in an ERP can hide hundreds of emails, spreadsheets, supplier conversations, engineering analyses, and decisions across legal, finance, and operations. Vlad explains how Lio uses multi-agent systems to take on more of that end-to-end work, from sourcing and RFQs to negotiation, shipment tracking, and invoices. They also discuss how enterprises learn to trust agents with increasingly consequential decisions, why the last 20% of an internal AI build can require most of the effort, and what happens when both buyers and suppliers have agents working on their behalf.
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  Rebuilding the Internet for Privacy | Barrett Lyon on DoxxNet 01.10.2026 45p

  a16z’s Joel de la Garza sits down with DoxxNet founder Barrett Lyon to discuss what it would take to rebuild the internet around privacy, direct communication, and less dependence on centralized intermediaries. Barrett explains why he thinks traditional VPNs only solve part of the problem and how DoxxNet is building a parallel mesh network where users can communicate peer-to-peer, transfer large files, make calls, and message without routing those interactions through a central application server. He also explains why the company owns its infrastructure and runs its AI systems locally rather than relying on third-party inference providers. doxxnet_assembly They also get into the growing amount of tracking embedded across the internet, what happens when that data can be analyzed by increasingly capable AI, and why Barrett believes the underlying protocols of the internet are due for another wave of experimentation. Along the way, he shares lessons from decades of building internet infrastructure, from fighting early DDoS attacks to mapping the internet and building global networks.
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  The $1 Trillion AI Buildout | State of Markets 30.09.2026 53p

  a16z’s David George, Sarah Wang, Alex Immerman, and Santiago Rodriguez unpack 25 key charts from the latest State of Markets presentation, from the scale of the AI infrastructure buildout to what adoption looks like inside companies today. They examine why rising markets have so far been supported by earnings rather than multiple expansion, why hyperscaler CapEx is approaching $1 trillion annually, and why demand for compute continues to outrun supply. They also look at the downstream effects of that spending across chips, power, construction, and physical infrastructure. State of Markets Then they move up the stack: OpenAI and Anthropic’s revenue growth, the gap between AI deployment and measurable enterprise impact, the rise of agents, falling inference costs, and what all of this means for SaaS. They close with where the team is spending time next, including consumer agents, robotics, autonomy, AI and biology, personal health, defense, and the continued diffusion of AI across the enterprise. State of Markets
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  The Personal Agent Race Is Here | Anish Acharya & David Pawlan 29.09.2026 51p

  a16z General Partner Anish Acharya sits down with Assistant Benchmark creator David Pawlan to unpack the sudden explosion of personal AI agents and what it will take for one to become part of everyday life. David has been testing dozens of assistants across real-world tasks, from managing email and booking travel to handling financial admin. They discuss why the most useful agents may become increasingly invisible, proactively checking you into flights, finding refunds, filing reimbursements, or simply handling the small tasks that pile up across everyday life. They also explore whether the winning interface is an app, text thread, voice, or wearable; how much autonomy consumers will actually give their agents; and what happens when agents start interacting with other agents. From commerce and restaurant reservations to entirely new agent-native services, Anish and David ask what the internet looks like when software starts acting on our behalf. This episode was recorded on September 24, 2026.
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  AI Can Write Code. Why Isn’t Software Better? 28.09.2026 43p

  a16z’s Ben Horowitz and Martin Casado sit down with TypeSafe AI founder Diogo Almeida to ask a simple question: AI has become remarkably capable, so where is all the automation? Diogo argues that coding agents may help us write software faster, but the software they produce still largely works the way software always has. TypeSafe is taking a different approach with Jev: putting intelligence inside software itself, so developers can build programs that reason about intent and make probabilistic decisions rather than simply generate text for a human to interpret. They discuss why reliability is the key to making AI genuinely programmable, how this could open a new era of probabilistic software, and why established SaaS companies may be particularly well positioned to benefit. Ultimately, Diogo’s goal is straightforward: technology that can reliably “do what I mean.”
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  Building a Team at AI Speed | Harvey’s Maggie Landers 27.09.2026 48p

  a16z’s Katie Kirsch sits down with Harvey VP of Talent Maggie Landers to discuss what happens inside a company growing at AI speed, and how you preserve culture while adding more than 1,000 employees in a year. Maggie explains why Harvey prioritizes progress over perfection, how its values of simplicity, decisiveness, and “job’s not finished” shape the way people work, and why moving quickly requires giving employees significant trust and autonomy. For people accustomed to being the “A student,” that can mean learning to experiment, make mistakes, and course-correct quickly. They also get into how Harvey identifies people who can thrive in that environment, what changes when most of your company is relatively new, the role its founders play in maintaining culture, and why judgment becomes increasingly important when employees are given the freedom to move fast.
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  Aaron Levie, Steven Sinofsky & Martin Casado: How Do You Secure a World of AI Agents? 26.09.2026 56p

  Erik Torenberg sits down with Box CEO Aaron Levie, and a16z’s Martin Casado, and Steven Sinofsky to debate how the AI industry should think about safety, security, and regulation as increasingly capable agents move into the real world. They argue that much of today’s conversation is happening before we have clearly defined the risks we’re trying to regulate. Drawing on earlier waves of computing, from computer viruses and the early internet to aviation and automobiles, they ask what AI can learn from industries that developed safety standards only after understanding how their technologies actually failed. The conversation then gets concrete: agents don’t get tired, can operate at enormous scale, and can probe systems in ways human employees never could. That could require rethinking permissions, authentication, operating systems, and the security stack itself. They also discuss why AI innovation may increasingly move beyond the frontier labs and into the software built around the models.
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  The Reputation Graph of Silicon Valley | Introducing Cosign 25.09.2026 50p

  a16z’s Erik Torenberg sits down with Josh Elman, Olivia Moore, and David Booth to introduce Cosign, a new product built around professional reputation and the people, companies, and products you’re willing to put your name behind. They unpack a simple idea at the heart of Silicon Valley: some of the most valuable professional signals aren’t credentials, but who believes in you. From the mentor who shaped your career to the colleague you’d work with anywhere or the young builder you think everyone should be watching, Cosign is an attempt to make those signals more visible and durable. They also discuss why human endorsements may become more valuable as AI makes outreach and information abundant, what existing professional networks get right and miss, and how making reputation more legible could help talented people get discovered earlier, find collaborators, and carry the work they’ve done behind the scenes into whatever they do next.
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  The Case Against an AI Pause | Eddy Lazzarin 24.09.2026 27p

  a16z crypto General Partner Eddy Lazzarin joins Theo Jaffee on MTS to debate the increasingly prominent calls to slow AI development and whether the current safety conversation is conflating very different kinds of risk. Eddy argues that the debate puts too much emphasis on speculative superintelligence and not enough on the costs of delaying useful technology. Rather than treating every AI failure as evidence of an alignment problem, he makes the case for familiar tools like cybersecurity, accountability, liability, market incentives, and stronger technical controls. They also discuss whether AI models can develop reputations for trustworthiness, the risks of concentrating oversight among a small group of evaluators, and why Eddy thinks the collision between Silicon Valley’s AI debates and broader politics could fundamentally reshape the conversation over the next year.
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  Amjad Masad on Rethinking College for the AI Era 23.09.2026 47p

  Erik Torenberg sits down with Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad and Horowitz and Andreessen Academy co-founder and CEO Gagan Biyani to ask what education should look like for a generation growing up with AI. Amjad argues that one of the most valuable things young people bring to society is their willingness to question deeply held assumptions. They discuss how education could create more room for that instinct through project-based learning, intellectual side quests, and giving students the freedom to follow an idea deeply rather than optimizing around grades and credentials. They also explore whether young founders are being pushed to professionalize too early, why Amjad thinks starting a company can sometimes be a form of “premature optimization,” and how curiosity led him from learning chess to experimenting with AI that can conduct machine-learning research. Finally, they discuss trust, judgment, and what it means to develop as a person, not just a builder, including why being contrarian and ambitious still needs to be balanced with the ability to work with other people.
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  Why a16z is Building a New School for the AI Era | Ben Horowitz 22.09.2026 43p

  Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg sit down with Gagan Biyani to introduce the Horowitz and Andreessen Academy and discuss a bigger question: what should education look like when AI is rapidly changing the skills people need to build, work, and create? Ben and Gagan explain why they believe learning should be more focused on doing rather than studying about doing, with students building real projects, developing people skills, and working alongside companies and builders in San Francisco. The goal isn’t to replace college for everyone, but to create a different path for young people who already know they want to build. They also discuss why AI could make this an unusually powerful time to be young, how project-based learning changes when everyone has access to powerful tools, why failure can be valuable when it produces real learning, and what it takes to develop the judgment and people skills that can't simply be learned from a textbook.
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  AI Safety Language Is Destroying the Debate | Steven Sinofsky 21.09.2026 29p

  a16z Board Partner and former Microsoft Windows president Steven Sinofsky joins Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini on MTS to argue that the language we use to describe AI failures is making it harder to understand what’s actually going wrong. Steven takes aim at terms like “alignment,” “goal-seeking,” and “rogue agents,” arguing that they can anthropomorphize problems that software engineers have dealt with for decades. His framing is simpler: when software doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, it has a bug. And as AI becomes more widely deployed, labs need the same kind of telemetry, debugging, incident reporting, and operational discipline that previous generations of software eventually developed. Drawing on everything from early computer hacking and Microsoft’s response to major software failures to Y2K and cybersecurity standards, Steven makes the case for treating AI reliability as an engineering problem. They also discuss what AI labs can learn from CVE reporting, why industry has a responsibility to make its systems safer, and how confusing terminology can lead to equally confused regulation.
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  Nas, Grandmaster Caz, Steve Stoute & Ben Horowitz on Paying Hip-Hop’s Pioneers Their Due 20.09.2026 57p

  Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg sit down with Nas, Grandmaster Caz, and Steve Stoute for a conversation about the Paid in Full Foundation and its mission to recognize and support the pioneers who built hip-hop. Ben, Nas, and Steve share how the foundation began, why simply giving artists money wasn’t enough, and how the Hip Hop Grandmaster Awards became a way to pair financial support with the recognition many foundational artists never received. Caz brings the perspective of one of those pioneers, reflecting on his role in hip-hop’s earliest history and what receiving the award has meant for his life and legacy. They also discuss the enormous cultural and commercial impact of hip-hop beyond music, from language and fashion to some of the world’s biggest brands, why so many of its pioneers captured so little of that value, and what happens when generations of hip-hop finally come together in the same room.
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  What Makes a Consumer AI Product Stick? | Josh Elman 19.09.2026 1ó

  a16z Partner Josh Elman joins Ollie Forsyth on New Economies to discuss the next wave of consumer AI and what separates a product people try once from one that becomes part of their everyday lives. Josh argues that getting attention has actually become easier, but getting consumers to stick is harder than ever. He explains what he looks for in consumer products, why the best ones start with a narrow wedge and earn the right to do more, and why trust becomes increasingly important as AI agents gain access to more of our personal lives. They also explore personal AI agents, the future of shopping and entertainment, why we haven’t seen another major social network emerge, and how AI could make technology more social rather than less, including agents that help people spend more time together in the real world. This conversation originally appeared on the New Economies podcast.
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  Databricks CEO on AI Pacing, Cyber Risk, and the Enterprise 18.09.2026 1ó 8p

  Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi joins a16z General Partners Martin Casado and Sarah Wang for a conversation about AI risk, recursive self-improvement, cybersecurity, and what’s actually holding back enterprise adoption. Ali argues that today’s models are already capable enough to automate far more work than most companies are using them for. The bigger problem is context: models haven’t been in every meeting, don’t understand how decisions actually get made, and lack the institutional knowledge that experienced employees accumulate over years. He explains why building an organizational “ontology” could help close that gap and what Databricks has learned from doing it internally. They also debate the current conversation around pacing frontier AI, what would constitute meaningful recursive self-improvement, and why Ali distinguishes speculative superintelligence risk from the much more immediate challenge of AI-powered cyberattacks. They close with how enterprises are managing exploding AI usage and costs, the shift toward multiple models and harnesses, and why agents are beginning to reshape infrastructure itself.
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  The Next Frontier of AI Video Is Control 17.09.2026 39p

  a16z General Partner Jennifer Li sits down with fal co-founder Gorkem Yurtseven and Head of Engineering Batuhan Taskaya to discuss what changes when generative video becomes fast enough to run in real time. They unpack the technical work behind H3 Max, fal’s post-trained version of MiniMax’s open-weight video model, and how combining model post-training with systems and hardware optimization significantly reduced generation time while maintaining quality. That speed has enabled experiments with continuous video, including streams that can remember previous scenes and respond to new directions while they’re running. They also discuss why the next challenge may be less about speed and more about control, from camera movement and lighting to characters, motion, and lip sync. And they explore what those capabilities could mean for professional creative workflows, where artists and studios need predictable tools rather than simply generating a video from a prompt.
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  The AI-Native CRM 16.09.2026 52p

  a16z’s Alex Rampell and Joe Schmidt sit down with Lightfield co-founder and CEO Keith Peiris to discuss what it takes to rethink the CRM for an AI-native world, and the unusual pivot that got him there. Keith previously built Tome to 25 million users, but eventually walked away from the product after concluding that the underlying technology couldn’t capture enough context about a presenter, their audience, and the relationship between them. Starting again, 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. They unpack Lightfield’s idea of a “business world model,” why Keith believes intelligence can replace much of the rigid schema behind traditional software, and what changes when AI has enough context to reason about a company and its customers. They also get into building for greenfield versus brownfield markets, AI-era pricing, running a company where everyone is a generalist, and Keith’s lessons from making a hard pivot.
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  The Age of Body Futurism | Ruby Justice Thelot 15.09.2026 42p

  Elena Burger sits down with academic and cyber ethnographer Ruby Justice Thelot to explore the increasingly blurry line between internet culture and the real world, and how to tell the difference between a trend that’s actually changing behavior and one that simply feels enormous online. They use today’s wellness and optimization culture as a case study, from peptides and GLP-1s to protein maxxing, wearables, microplastics, and the quantified self. Ruby explains her concept of “paracontent,” where the conversation around a phenomenon can become much larger than the phenomenon itself, and what social media data can tell us about how these trends move from niche communities into the mainstream. They also trace the much longer history of body optimization, from changing ideals of thinness to the rise of the quantified self, and ask what comes next as technology gives people increasingly granular ways to measure and modify themselves. Ruby’s prediction: rather than everyone optimizing toward the same ideal, we may see increasingly individualized and sometimes extreme forms of “body futurism.”