# The Frontier Ideas a16z Wants to Fund Now | Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz & Chris Dixon Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy. Chris Dixon, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz say founders should pursue ideas ambitious enough to match what AI and frontier technologies make possible. - Show: a16z Podcast - Hosts: [Erik Torenberg](https://realalpha.app/people/erik-torenberg/) - Guest: [Chris Dixon](https://realalpha.app/people/chris-dixon/) - Guest: [Marc Andreessen](https://realalpha.app/people/marc-andreessen/) · Co-founder & General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz - Guest: [Ben Horowitz](https://realalpha.app/people/ben-horowitz/) · Co-founder & General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz - Published: Oct 22, 2026 - Length: 1 h 1 m ## The best minutes - [18:13](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1093) [AI is widening the gap between startups and incumbents](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-is-widening-the-gap-between-startups-and-incumbents/) (7 min) - [30:16](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1816) [AI is making games, film and hardware easier to reinvent](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-is-making-games-film-and-hardware-easier-to-reinvent/) (6 min) - [38:21](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2301) [Open source keeps AI learning and power distributed](https://realalpha.app/s/open-source-keeps-ai-learning-and-power-distributed/) (8 min) ## Also worth watching - [15:25](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=925) [Frontier investors accept category risk to avoid being late](https://realalpha.app/s/frontier-investors-accept-category-risk-to-avoid-being-late/) (3 min) - [26:27](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1587) [AI agents may become the internet’s most numerous participants](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-agents-may-become-the-internets-most-numerous/) (4 min) - [46:40](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2800) [AI is breaking the internet’s traffic-for-content bargain](https://realalpha.app/s/ai-is-breaking-the-internets-traffic-for-content-bargain/) (3 min) Skip the fund’s backstory and firm culture, the AI value-chain discussion, and predictions about devices, home design and future media. ## Summary Dixon joined a16z in 2013 and says his investment work has focused on emerging technologies and their second-order effects. He describes the crypto team as bringing deep technical and policy expertise that can extend to other frontier markets. Andreessen and Horowitz describe the firm's approach as backing ambitious entrepreneurs and expanding its coverage as new opportunities emerge. Dixon says a16z is expanding its crypto fund into a broader Frontier mandate because crypto has become part of the wider technology landscape and interesting opportunities now sit outside established investment categories. Andreessen, Horowitz and Dixon argue that AI is widening the gap between early adopters and incumbents, giving founders room to build more ambitious, technically complex companies across industries. They see opportunities in agents, new forms of entertainment and hardware, while arguing that open-source AI can broaden access and limit the concentration of power. Dixon also says AI is weakening the internet's referral-based economics and could prompt a wider redesign of how online attention, knowledge and transactions flow. ### Minute by minute - [2:11](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=131) **Frontier fills an investing gap.** Dixon says stablecoins and tokenized assets have blurred crypto's boundaries with the wider tech landscape, while established a16z verticals leave some emerging areas uncovered. He points to earlier second-order effects of smartphone components, including Oculus and Skydio, as examples of founders recombining existing technology. - [7:40](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=460) **Dixon looks for overlooked ideas.** Horowitz says Dixon stood out for his original writing, investment ideas and experience as an entrepreneur. He describes Dixon's approach as looking for ideas that seem bad until an entrepreneur reveals the insight that could make them work. Andreessen adds that Dixon's crypto team combines technical depth with business, market and policy expertise. - [15:06](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=906) **Early bets may take years.** Dixon says good technology ideas often eventually work, but timing is hard because technology, culture, business conditions and politics must align. He says Frontier is willing to invest early and accept category risk. He points to Oculus as an example: 13 years later, VR had still not become as mainstream as they had hoped. - [18:13](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1093) **AI widens founders' lead.** Horowitz says the gap between AI-native founders and typical incumbents is unusually wide and growing as AI capabilities advance. He says a 30-person team may now be able to build a full-stack device company, work that might have required 1,000 people a decade ago. The speakers say founders should ask whether an idea is ambitious enough, not merely whether it is too ambitious. - [21:57](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1317) **AI creates room for startups.** The speakers say some incumbents are adapting to AI, but employees often adopt tools faster than institutions; some may use those capabilities to start companies. They expect startups to combine technologies and business models across industries. Dixon says AI's first uses often improve familiar tasks, while its more novel applications may create new behaviors. - [28:50](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1730) **Agents may reshape the internet.** The panel expects agents to become the internet's most numerous participants and discusses how they might communicate, transact and share knowledge. They cite products such as Muse and Instinct, along with emerging agent communities, as early examples of this shift. - [30:22](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1822) **AI could broaden entertainment.** Andreessen says early AI products can reflect a narrow view of what people want, and expects more entertaining and creative uses to follow. He points to AI-made music videos and game mashups as signs of new possibilities. He also argues that lower production costs could make ambitious entertainment projects more viable. - [34:43](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2083) **AI could make hardware easier.** Andreessen says AI may make hardware less daunting for people who understand software. He cites REA, which he describes as a tool that can reverse-engineer devices and generate source code, and imagines AI taking over home automation. He says this could let people customize hardware that was previously difficult to change. - [38:39](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2319) **Open source can limit centralization.** Dixon sees a future with both major AI companies and open or locally run models, and says crypto could help agents transact using stablecoins. Andreessen argues that open source gives students and researchers access to AI and the ability to work on safety problems such as reward hacking. Horowitz says more people should be able to investigate those problems, rather than leaving the work to a few companies. - [46:30](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2790) **AI strains the internet's bargain.** Dixon says search and social platforms increasingly answer users directly or keep them on-platform, reducing referrals to publishers and other websites. He points to falling traffic at sites such as Stack Overflow as an early sign. He expects a broader reworking of how online attention, knowledge and transactions are organized. - [49:02](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2942) **New interfaces could revive old devices.** Dixon expects AI to make wearables more useful and says better ergonomics and content could help VR find a wider audience. He also points to brain-computer interfaces, vehicles, homebrew hardware and AI-assisted architecture as areas where AI could make difficult work more accessible. He says AI could help with design-for-manufacturing tasks that are normally hard to complete. - [51:54](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3114) **AI needs networked use cases.** Dixon says most AI still works in a single-player mode, with a person typing to a model. He expects collaborative fleets of agents and trust networks to emerge, with possible uses in designing buildings, solving scientific problems and coordinating work. - [53:58](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3238) **Study AI and its applications.** Dixon says an 18-year-old should consider studying math, computer science and perhaps economics, while staying close to AI even without becoming purely technical. Andreessen and Horowitz say AI could reshape fields including classics, economics, biology, design and animal psychology. They argue that younger people can treat the technology as a normal capability and use it to enter fields that were previously out of reach. ## Transcript a16z Podcast, hosted by Erik Torenberg, with Chris Dixon, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there. [0:22](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=22) We're announcing today that we're expanding the ACC Crypto Fund to A16Z Frontier. This is the biggest delta between what the early adopters understand is possible now. Normal people understand that gap is as wide as I've ever seen it in my career. More than categories, more than products, we invest in entrepreneurs. And so many of the most interesting entrepreneurs are out of planet. Startup formation is going to skyrocket from here. By the way, it already is. We used to ask the question, is this idea too ambitious? We're much more likely to ask this, is this ambitious enough? Because what's possible is so spectacular. [1:00](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=60) And if you do something moderate, it probably won't be differentiated enough. Had I had Astra at Nescape in 1994, like, oh my God. Ben, like what would you and I have been able to do at Nescape? We would have built the whole damn internet. You were 18 today. How would you think about what you might study? It's stealing Mark's line, but I think you think there's one thing to do, which is study. Today, we're announcing A16Z Frontier, expanding the scope of our crypto fund to invest in a broader set of frontier technologies and markets that may take years to develop. In this episode, I sit down with Chris Dixon, Mark Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz to explain why we're making that move now. [1:40](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=100) Crypto is increasingly becoming part of the broader technology landscape, while AI is making entirely new categories of products possible across software, hardware, science, and entertainment. We discuss why the next wave of AI may be defined by things we couldn't build before, not simply doing existing work faster, and why the question for founders is shifting from is this too ambitious to is this ambitious enough? We also get into AI agents, open source, new forms of media, and why some of the most important companies ahead may not fit into any category that exists today. Chris, we have a big announcement today. [2:20](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=140) We're expanding the mandate. I'll let you do the honors. Yeah. So, yeah, we're announcing today that we're expanding the ACC crypto fund to A16Z Frontier. The idea is, I'd say, a couple of motivations behind this. One is crypto has, in some areas, worked really well. Stable coins have become kind of a normal part of the tech landscape used by companies like Stripe and sort of almost every fintech company now kind of considers it part of their toolbox. Wall Street firms are moving heavily into crypto, tokenized stocks and other kinds of assets. It's a fast growing category. But as a result, the lines have kind of blurred, which we find ourselves asking, is Stripe a crypto company? Is somebody, many of these companies where they're sort of sitting at the, in the intersection of let's call it fintech and Wall Street and crypto. And so it's really become kind of, whereas years ago, it was sort of its own world with its own companies and its own investors is the lines are blurred and it's become kind of more part of the tech landscape so that's number one and number two and i can let mark and ben talk about this more i think we felt that at the firm there's a feeling that the other kind of groups are have so many interesting opportunities in their core areas that what we [3:29](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=209) kind of part of martin calls outer planets meaning is sort of the metaphor i think comes from firefly the TV show. It's the idea of the inner planets are kind of the more core planets and there's kind of these wackier outer planets that outer planets, which historically we'd done a lot of kind of both types of investing. I think the feeling was that because they're so busy with so many interesting opportunities and doing an amazing job of that, that there was an opportunity to kind of, there was maybe a gap, so say in some of the coverage there. And then I think just I'll just speak personally, I kind of see myself and my background as I see Frontier as an area I'm comfortable with is so I joined the firm in 2013 and we came in and with that kind of mandate I talked to Mark and Ben and I said hey I want to do this crazy stuff and they were like great and so that led to a couple of themes at the time and they're all kind of what I would call kind of second order effects like you had smartphones obviously started in 2007 then in by 2013 had gotten mainstream and there were all these kind of first order effects like building apps on top so the firm was an investor in Instagram and that you know incredible product [4:31](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=271) built on smartphone but a second order effect was that you had the components of smartphones you had sensors and chips getting better and better and maybe people could repurpose those in different ways and so that led to I think Mark was the one who's first into drones as I recall and got me into them but the kind of the thesis behind it beyond just they're cool is that now that you have this supply chain of all these great parts that entrepreneurs can kind of recombine them and build. We invested in Oculus as an example, and that was really kind of a reconfigured smartphone. Skydio, that was one of our investments from back then that was at the beginning was kind of a reconfigured smartphone. It's gotten much more advanced now. Crypto, I think at the time was kind of a downstream effect to me of sort of the open source and software movement morphing into services and also kind of a result of social media where you could have these communities form without mainstream acceptance and build, you know, and kind of coalesce around these blockchains. [5:20](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=320) So for me personally, I'll just say this is sort of, I feel, kind of a continuation of a long area of interest. And I think the firm has as many other investments the firm has had in these kinds of frontier areas. So we felt I think it's kind of consistent with things we've been doing for a long time. Ben, Mark, let's hear from you. I know this was a joint effort and something you guys were very excited about and felt like filled a gap or really expanded the mandate of the firm. Ben, why don't you add your take? Yeah, so look, I think that there's areas that are really novel. So it's looking at what's possible technologically and problems in the world, and they're just the first ones in it. [5:55](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=355) And it may end up being a category, it may end up being a successful company, it may blow up, but there's a class of these things. And what we've done typically or historically is first, like, Chris would just look at these new areas himself. And then kind of as we identified new areas, we create a vertical behind that area. And what we found with our vertical strategy, which has worked very well, is that there's still new things that fall outside of the verticals. And the process of turning that into a practice is a little bit undefined. Not that we haven't done it, but it's a little bit undefined. [6:39](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=399) And so by Chris doing this, we kind of will have the motion to invest in the very most interesting founders who are outer planets. And then if that works, maybe that becomes a whole fund at some point. Or maybe Frontiers turns into that thing because it gets so interesting, like that could be as well. And so I think that it's very exciting for us because it kind of fills a hole in the architecture. And then also, we really, at the end of the day, more than categories, more than products, we invest in entrepreneurs. And so many of the most interesting entrepreneurs are at our planet. So this gives us a real way to get to that. [7:22](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=442) And to me, this seems like a continuation of what we were talking about at the last offsite, which is, which struck me because as, as ambitious as the firm has been, as early as the firm has been, as big of the bets that the firm has made, the big focus of the offsite was how do we bet even bigger? The only regrets we have are not even going even harder, even earlier, even bigger. And Chris, you're someone who has made bets in some of these emerging categories, but it just feels like a continuation of that message. We're going to spend most of the time in the future, but while we're talking about history, I have to ask one historical question, which is Chris, I believe is the longest standing consecutive partner at the firm besides Ben and Mark having joined in 2013. I'm curious, Ben and Mark, when you met Chris, what did you see in him that made it clear that, oh, we have to have him at ASINZ? And did you anticipate the type of career he was going to have? Ben, I'll ask you to start. Look, I think originally we just knew Chris as a very smart guy and we really liked his ideas from his blog. That's really what it came down to. He was a really good writer his ideas were very original and we were looking for like somebody's [8:22](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=502) who could do that. And then the other thing we liked about him is he had real experience as an entrepreneur. So he knew kind of like what that journey felt like, which was very, very important to us in the early days to set the culture of the firm the way we wanted it. Over time, he's had probably the most original investment ideas that we've had in the firm. And we've kind of copied does and multiplied down. One of his early things was like, we're not really looking for good ideas that look like good ideas. We're looking for good ideas that look like bad ideas. A bad idea, but where an entrepreneur has a secret that actually makes it a good idea. And that framework was extremely useful for us in kind of understanding like what was going to be truly unique and have massive upside versus something where all the profits were going to get competed away. He's had quite a few excellent ideas like that. So it's been great working with him over now, like way more than a decade. Yeah. Maybe I could add also, it's not just Chris's specialty as it's also Chris's team. And the thing that I think people may not appreciate, maybe hard to see from the outside is just crypto has been so sexy in so many ways. And it has a sort of flashy elements and cultural [9:36](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=576) kind of phenomena, kind of moments. But at the core of crypto, it's a technology. It's a very deep technology and it's very complex technology. And you need to have like really deep technical expertise kind of coupled with like really good business judgment and really good market judgment in order to successfully invest in crypto which we've done including literally chris's team has had like math professors and cryptographers and like people who are very very deep into the theory game theory things like that very deep software concepts and so it's one of the things i'm really excited about is in addition to chris his colleagues and team members on the team that he's built now being able to work on a broader set of topics yeah and to that point i mean so so thank you but i think that also the yeah the team i think the team's amazing i would also mention one other thing besides the technical side um we've invested very deeply over the years in policy yeah and regulatory and i believe that a lot you know if you just self-driving cars drones ai itself is now becoming a political issue i think more and more of these cutting-edge technologies will have kind of a policy angle and and we believe that that that expertise that [10:31](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=631) they've built kind of in the crucible of the kind of crypto journey um will be uh useful for many other entrepreneurs yeah yeah well on that end no one last historical question uh you know you pioneered not just some of the investments but also some of the ways in which the firm works i the policy arm and when you joined in 2013 you know could you have imagined that the firm would have grown in this way or what were your thoughts about where things were going well i always knew mark i mean mark has a you have a big uh poster of jp morgan on your wall in your office yes yes and so these bark and bend do not lack for uh for you know drive and ambition it's a famous photograph it's a very it's a very famous photograph it was it was so he hated it so inspiration inspiration inspiration for people haven't seen the photograph you can google it's a very famous one as jp morgan hated to have his picture taken he had this this condition he had this anyway he has this nose related issue anyway so he hated having his photo taken uh this is pre-antibiotics let's put it that way um and so he was grouchy most of the time and so he has photo taken so but he they needed a formal portrait of him and so he finally literally [11:35](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=695) you put him and set him down, and the photographer saw the whole thing coming, and so it's lit in a way where he's sitting in darkness, just absolutely giving the camera the stare of death, and he's holding, it looks in the photograph like he's holding a carving knife, and what it is, is it's the edge of the chair lit in a very specific way, but it's like very clear the photographer intentionally did that. Yeah, so that's the photograph that was inside my office door. You look very, very scary. Yes, exactly, exactly. The other, we took a lot of inspiration from him. Yes. But one of the other things that we have in the firm that's actually in the culture document from him is we do first-class business and then only in a first-class way, which is, you know, it's like a cool phrasing of it. [12:22](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=742) When he said it, he was on trial, and they were kind of accusing, or he was in court, they were accusing him of kind of nefarious things. And he was like, no, we only do first class business and men only in a first class way, which, you know, Mark and I really loved that attitude about, like, you're definitely not going to tell me who I am. I know who I am, and I'm going to let you know who I am. And that kind of thing I think is really important in venture capital to, like, be principled and people know where you're coming from and be able to trust you and that kind of thing. So we got a lot from him. [13:03](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=783) Yeah. So, J.P. Morgan. Yeah, and so I have never, I mean, I think a couple things I'll say is, like, I mean, look, like any venture, there were ups and downs, and you never, you know, could I have predicted everything? I think things generally went really well, And, you know, I didn't obviously know that all along the way, but obviously know that Mark and Ben are incredibly ambitious. I've never, it's funny, sometimes I'll have some idea and like some crazy thing we want to do. And people are like, what did Mark and Ben think? I've never in my, not once have they ever, if anything, have they ever pushed back? [13:33](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=813) If anything, it's always, can you double it? Can you double down? Can you get more aggressive? So just, you know, and then just it's a very entrepreneurial place. And I think this has shown over the years of like how many, this is a good example right here, that, you know, when we, you know, we sort of adapt, see what's happening in the world, change things around. We went through a whole kind of restructuring of the firm, you know, bring in new ideas, sort of anything's fair game as long as you can kind of defend it. And so, you know, that's also why I've enjoyed working here. It's a very entrepreneurial culture. [14:04](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=844) I think also what Ben said is very important, the culture of the firm. Um, that's why I was initially kind of attracted to it, having been a customer of venture capital before that and experience the product. I understood that there could be a better product. Um, uh, but that, and that, that's what I think everyone, I literally, everyone that I know at this firm comments on the culture and how important that is, um, and how they, you know, enjoy working here and, and feel like they're doing some of the best work of their life. So, um, so I think that's all like a very, you know, there's obviously have to make good investments and snap but I think it all really starts with the people in the culture. Well it's funny that you mention it's related to the culture. It's funny you mentioned ups and downs because you know from the outside looking in it feels like it's all all ups. That's how all startups are is like you know like the successful startups always look or you know look great from the outside as someone who's I think we can all comment as people who have been in inside of startups basically I don't know of a startup that wasn't a shit show at some point or at multiple points. It also speaks to the culture I've heard from all three [15:04](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=904) of you guys, you know, things like, you know, never complain, never explain, you know, happy warrior. And so, yeah, it's just a testament there. Let's go to the frontier. Let's go to the future. So sometimes there's this phrase in venture, you know, being too early is as bad as being too late or something. You've been early a lot. You've been, you know, mostly right or right in very big ways, but you've also, you know, been too early at times. I'm curious how you think about technical risk or the idea of being too early in our era now. Yeah. I mean, we talk about this a lot like I think we I think I can speak for Mark and Ben they can comment but we believe that basically every good idea that we've ever seen that involved technology has eventually worked or we believe will work okay if it hasn't worked yet and and again the important qualifier good idea there are bad ideas but um and it's just kind of remarkable especially having lived through the internet um how many things um just you know almost everything that ended up working had a precursor that didn't work and maybe was 10 years too early. [16:02](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=962) And so, you know, that's the hardest thing, I think, in technology is to predict the timing of these things. And there's just, it's so complicated, right? There's the technology, there's the culture, there's the business environment, there's the political environment, there's so many factors that go into these things and having it all line up. So, you know, and so I would say with, you know, I think generally at the firm, I would say specifically in the frontier. [16:22](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=982) **Chris Dixon:** We want to err on the side of being too early. We understand that sometimes things will be too early, and we're okay with kind of quote category risk. [16:29](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=989) Some categories may not work. Look, I mean, even things that sort of work didn't work. Like, you know, we sold Oculus, got bought, but the reality is, like, it's now 13 years later. I still believe very strongly in VR. We'd love to make VR investments, but it's 13 years later, and it's not, you know, it hasn't got as mainstream as we would have liked, so it took long. It turned out there was just many more hard technical problems to solve. I kind of believe, I don't know, but Mark believes, I think that there, that with the stuff we're seeing in AI now, you know, you see the first sort of tipping happening in first software engineering, getting dramatically better than math. [17:00](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1020) I think there's a scenario, and I believe this, and I kind of want to invest behind it, where we may be pulling forward 20 years of things that, you know, our whole mindset of how we think about technical risk. And, oh, that's a science project, not an engineering project. I think we have to reevaluate that whole frame right now because I think things, you know, the sort of the, you know, if you look at these, the growth of, I mean, math is not the last thing that's going to change. Yeah. You know, you're about to have physics. A lot of stuff's going on hardware right now. I think it's dramatically, I think you can, a 30-person team can credibly build like a full stack device company in a way that you might have needed 1,000 people or something a decade ago. [17:38](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1058) Right. And I think, and you have these very, you know, very thoughtful, deep entrepreneurs who are looking for how do I take these new capabilities and do dramatic things? And, you know, so some of it's tactical, like how do I create more defensibility? How do I, you don't want to be two feet in front of the AI frontier and get sort of washed over by the tidal wave. But a lot of it's about just these amazing new capabilities and people have only begun to explore what you can do. Um, and so it, I don't know, it feels like an especially exciting time. Um, and we don't, it's, it, um, it's, it's, yeah. [18:14](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1094) So I don't know if you. Yeah. So I would have had, so we'll talk about AI as sort of a catalyst. Um, so this is the biggest delta between, I would say what the early adopters understand is possible now, uh, versus what kind of everybody, kind of normal people understand. Um, and I think that's, you know, true at the individual level, but it's especially true at the company level. And the AI native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than sort of, you know, typical incumbents in almost any industry, almost without exception. And I think that that gap is as wide as I've ever seen in my career. [18:47](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1127) And then that gap seems like it's gapping further and further out, which is AI is just racing ahead in capability, even week by week. And so the leading edge entrepreneurs and technical people we deal with, like, they're getting – they're just – by the week, they're getting sort of steadily more advanced than a typical incumbent. And so it's the biggest adult I've ever seen. And if you kind of extrapolate from that, like, you know, if that's what happens, then there's just – there are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally, you know, kind of more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past. [19:18](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1158) And then it's going to be because the founders are going to have a level of superpowers coming from the use of these tools and these technologies that they just simply haven't had in the past. I mean, you know, had I had, you know, Astra and Netscape in 1994, like, oh, my God. Like, you know, he said, like, Ben, like, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape? [19:39](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1179) **Marc Andreessen:** We would have built the whole damn internet. It would have been absolutely incredible. [19:42](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1182) It would have been absolutely incredible. And, you know, as Chris said, like, we're seeing this. We're seeing entrepreneurs come in with, like, with plans of a level of depth and sophistication in, you know, multiple parts. Connection together. By the way, we would have gotten crypto done then. Oh, 100%. Yeah, yeah. Like, by the way, in, like, two weeks. Like, we'd have streaming video a lot sooner. I mean, like, all kinds of things would have happened. And then, by the way, hardware. I mean, we never even, you know, bit off hardware. But, you know, had we been able to, there's all kinds of things we could have done. [20:08](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1208) And so, I just, like, I think that the leading edge entrepreneurs now are going to have, like, capabilities. which means they're going to have business plans that are like a lot more, you know, they're going to have product plans that are a lot more technically intensive and complex. They're going to have business plans that are more ambitious and complex. We're building companies that just like ramp much, much faster, you know, the scope of the product that they build and then, you know, hopefully the scope of their business. And then, and then again, this goes right back to like those, those entrepreneurs are going to call it way outside the lines. [20:34](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1234) Like they're, they're not going to, we already see this. They're not going to think of themselves as like, I'm just a software company or I'm just a hardware company or I'm just a whatever, or even I'm just an AI company or anything. They're going to, they're going to think very broadly and expansively about exactly what, you know, how, how many different areas they want to touch and how they want to combine things. And so the sort of conceptual artist kind of aspect of this is going to just like blow way out. Yeah, I was going to say, you know, we used to kind of ask the question, is this idea too ambitious? [21:00](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1260) And I think we're much more likely to ask this, is this ambitious enough? Because, you know, what's possible is so spectacular. And if you do something moderate, like it probably won't be differentiated enough. And by the way, look, incumbents, you know, we spend a lot of time, have a lot of friends in incumbent companies, by the way, including incumbent tech, including incumbent companies in Silicon Valley. And it's like, you know, we wish them all the best. And, you know, we, by the way, we have lots of companies that would like to arm them up with all these, all these new tools also. And so, you know, so I said no doubt some of them are going to be able to adapt. [21:35](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1295) But like, you know, if any of them are listening right now, I would say like the clock is ticking. Like it's like stuff is moving. Yeah. I mean, like, I am basically, I mean, I'm full-time, I'm basically drowning with the pace development right now and the speed with which things are changing. And I'm trying to keep up with all of it, and it's nearly impossible. Like, yeah, the super-empowered 24-year-old with AI is going to just achieve, like, amazing things in the next decade. And there's a question we were asking right before this, which is, you know, is AI more sustaining or disruptive in terms of, like, will more of the gains go to incumbents or startups and it seems so far it's both in some sense which is some you know the comments like you know meta and others have you know uh sort of adjusted very well and and also they're net new companies that are you know uh almost trillion dollars in you know within a decade and it's so it is that your read that that's effectively both or how do you think about the sustaining disruptive well the incumbents that are adapting are actually the incumbents i think for the most part that are actually going directly into ai you know and then there are others and then you [22:35](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1355) know there are certain companies you know there's certain companies certainly in tech that are on leading as you've been if they're not primary primary ad developers but at least right now the pattern is is not that I mean it's it's just really actually there's a very specific thing that I think it's maybe it's a topic for a different podcast and a very specific thing I think is happening which is I think many companies are not adopting AI while their employees are and their employees are and their employees are not necessarily telling them what's happening and I and by the way I'm gonna guess every single person listening to this podcast right now is thinking oh yeah that's what I'm doing you know I'm using AI, you know, to, you know, do all, you know, do all my work or at least let's say fact check all my work, you know, proofread all of my, all my, all my emails, even if not have them written out right. And so there's this weird thing where there's something about AI right now where it's like, it's much easier for the individual to adopt than it is the institution. And by the way, and again, it goes back to like our role in the world, which is like those, some of those individuals are going to figure out like, oh, well, with this tool, I can now like start my, [23:31](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1411) you know, it's now easier than ever for me to start my own business. And so I think startup information is going to skyrocket from here. By the way, it already is. Oh, yeah. I mean, we're seeing it. I mean, we're seeing it 100% for sure. So anyway, just to kind of go back to the theme of this, is just I'm completely convinced, like, we're going to see a wave of, like, much more technically aggressive, much more business aggressive, much more expansionist, creative, original thinking, many more combinations of things that we would have considered to be separate things in the past. And we're going to see, yeah, Founders was just like and teams was just like an incredible level of skill level, incredible level of skill that they otherwise might have needed, you know, 30 years to achieve or something they're going to have like right out of the gate. [24:12](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1452) And by the way, the other thing I'd say is that the Christensen disruptive innovation frame assumes that sort of the technology world is relatively contained and that these are. I think it's probably the wrong frame right now, which is it's really sort of people who are technologically modern going out into other industries and just changing the economy more broadly. Yeah. Right. Especially with these kind of full stack companies, you go and you create a full, you know, like you just announced our investment in Adams. Like they're going and they're building like a full stack kind of food service and and other things. Right. [24:46](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1486) And so I think that you talk about this sometimes more, like the market has sort of gone from, you know, the 10 big tech companies fighting with each other to the 10 tech company or 10 and all the startups going against the other Fortune 500 or the rest of the economy. Yeah, that's right. I'm curious where you guys think we are in the development or how you think, because it feels like, you know, in the internet era application, you know, we're sort of, you know, the biggest companies, you know, Facebook, Amazon. et cetera. But in sort of this era, it feels like, you know, NVIDIA and some of the more hard work companies are taking a lot of the margin or some of the bigger companies. How do you think about, you know, where are we in the sort of applications or consumer? Like, how do you think about that? I think Mark would say all, all of the above. And I think a lot of people think that actually right now. It seems like a lot of stuff is working. You know, obviously the big, the big ad labs, but, you know, open source is growing very, very quickly. There's obviously the serious efforts in China, the serious efforts in the U.S. A lot of application layer things are doing really well. You know, so, you know, maybe at some point you, you know, obviously over time that shakes out [25:56](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1556) and the kind of value chain, there's certain things that certain layers that do better than others. But then the other thing is just the, it's still, it's like, it's kind of crazy. You have the demand for a lot of this stuff is still very early by most metrics. I think your team just put out some charts on this it's like three percent of you know measured enterprise use or something like this um and so and it's just hard and it just seems like a you know the market for intelligence is very very large and it's only getting started so um yeah i don't know yeah i agree and one of your points also is you like you mentioned that every new technology uh has the sort of first this you know phase where people think about what are the old use cases how they is doing new technology and here, and then of course, people figure out net new cases that are native to that technology. And so where are we there? Yeah, I mean, so the classic example I like to use is the internet, right? Where in the 90s, you had sort of people taking existing behaviors, like you might order a Sears catalog or something, and instead Sears puts it on the internet. And of course, when they do that, you want to use the internet version, it's easier. [26:57](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1617) And a lot of the early internet was like that. And then you had, you know, in the 2000s, you had YouTube and they come along and they put up an empty website and they say, well, someday there's going to be these youtube influencers and that's going to populate the way so they were betting on they weren't just betting on the technology and taking something they knew would work they right they were betting on a on a cultural change a behavioral change um so in some ways they were taking more risk because they were betting on you know the technology and the and these yeah and these broader changes um but that's where you got the really kind of world-changing stuff isn't it social media you know all the other and then of course mobile accelerated it and i think that's my own views, that's a kind of pretty common pattern. It's just human nature, right? You build something and the first thing you do is you do these things you already know in a better way. [27:40](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1660) And I think that's what we've seen in AI so far where you have, you know, people already coded, people already did math, people already did knowledge work, people already were used to like search engines and sort of semi-chatting and they're doing those things now. But we've only begun to explore the space of like, what are the radical things that are new behaviors, new activities right things that people have never done before um it seems like we're probably at that tip i believe we're kind of at that tipping point where we're going to start to just sort of get see the crazier weirder stuff which i personally am very excited about and and find that i always find those waves in technology the most personally exciting they're they're kind of more um and and there's sort of more layers of risk going back to frontier like you can find And some things will be, you know, kind of more direct. [28:22](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1702) shots on goal and other things will be these kinds of bank shots where you have to have multiple things go right. And maybe there's more layers of risk. But maybe if you're right, there's more upside as well. Yeah. I'm really excited in social. It used to be in the 2000s, like every few years there was a new major network. There was Facebook, WhatsApp, there was Snap, TikTok. And then it felt like there was a little bit of a dearth on the social side. But with AI, it does feel inevitable. And then dating with Tinder, of course, and there hasn't been something in a while. It feels inevitable that, hey, if there's this, you know, interface or device that I'm, you know, giving all my information to, that there's going to be some way that these are, these are hooked up and enabling a whole new set of social experiences. Well, I mean, you can talk about [29:01](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1741) **Chris Dixon:** this, Mark, but we, you know, we're headed to a world where it looks like the main, the most numerous participants on the internet will be agents and not people. We're at early phases of [29:10](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1750) that, but it seems somewhat inevitable. You have these products like Muse and Instinct that are sort of utility proxy agents for people. And then you're going to see a whole different sets of categories of these agents, and they'll become the main participants on the Internet. And then there's questions of like, you know, will they need their own ways of communicating and transacting and sharing knowledge and doing all the things people do? And so there's probably going to be a whole series of innovations along those lines. Rentahuman.com. Yeah, Rentahuman. And that's like inverts the model, right? [29:47](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1787) Maltbook was cool too. Yeah, yeah, totally. That's, well, you know, yeah, Maltbook was the public kind of version and then it turned out the agents figured out how to do their own Maltbook and the Hugging Face. So it's going to be, yeah, it's going to be a lot more. Yeah, the agent technology online is going to be spectacular. People are going to plug into that in all kinds of ways. Markman, I'm curious if there are things that you're tracking either in social or consumer or even just this frame of like viscumorphic, you know, things that, that sort of the, you know, worked in the past sort of a platform era and now like what net new use cases or what, what is native to that you're seeing or anticipating or looking forward to? Well, I'll give you my, my version, maybe a little bit of what Chris was saying, but like, I think so many, I mean, look, there's a lot of great demos, a lot of great products releasing right now, but there's, there's this thing I've just observed. I saw it in the internet era earlier and I call it product manager brain, which is product manager is basically designing products for product managers. Right. It's like, it's, by the way, it's the one thing everybody does is they build products for themselves, which is product managers have [30:42](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1842) the story that they're building for other people. And yet somehow all the use cases are, you know, book me a restaurant, you know, to be in San Francisco to go have dinner with my friends who are also product managers, or, you know, book me a plane flight to go to a product management conference where I also get to hang out with all my product manager friends. And so there's this, you know, it's a little, and again, there's a role for this, but it's a little bit like, I think it's like the anthropic, I'm a, what is it, I'm a happy, helpful, harmful, harmless, I'm a happy, harmless, whatever it is, honest assistant, right? And it's a little, which also means i'm the i am the most boring possible thing you could possibly imagine that's going to be constantly lecturing you've asked me a question i'm not allowed to answer right and so it's it's like there's just going to be this this this sort of we just had this very just the nature of the early early companies who just had this very blinker view on human activity on what people are going to want to do and it's your point like with uh with me as an instinct it's it's starting to open up um but like look this is going to be a much more entertaining fun enjoyable exciting [31:37](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1897) By the way, lucrative people are going to make money. There would be all kinds of ways for people to make money, be able to save money, be able to be parts of, you know, participate in parts of the economy, be able to be creators, you know, be able to, you know, create new kinds of art. I mean, just in the last, like, three weeks, there's been an explosion of people making music videos, like DeNovo. Yeah. On, like, an incredible array of, like, creative ideas. Like video games in the last three weeks have blown up. Can we mention that just because that's so striking? Yeah. I mean, I always think, I always find video games interesting because they're kind of the lead. [32:05](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1925) I find that they're often the leading edge of media because it's just a technical culture that kind of iterates quickly. But, like, I just saw one where it's like you can take any two videos. Well, first of all, you can disassemble everything, port them, and just crazy stuff going on now. You can now run, like, Windows games on Unix faster than on Windows. like because of these disassemblers and these AIs are so good. But also there was like this one where you can take any two video games and it will mash them up together and create a combo video game of it, which, you know, just like a crazy new behavior. [32:35](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1955) Super Mario and GTA, right? Spider-Man and Jurassic Park. And it's just literally the crazy, like to Mark's point, it's been I think like two weeks or something. It's like since what, like Opus 5.5 or something. And so it's just like the rate at which this stuff is happening and, like, in a month there'll probably be some other, you know, two weeks there'll be some other big wave of this. You see Epic just yesterday said no more humans, right? And so, like, there's been cultural resistance in the video game industry to AI, but I think that's the first of the dominoes to fall because it's just inevitable because it's a much better way to build things. [33:09](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=1989) And it's going to be great for consumers. You're going to have this, at least it's going to be a creative renaissance. You're going to have this, you know, any independent developer can go and build like they have a huge team and still have, I think they can still have a lot of room for human creativity. It's just, it's a superpowers, human creativity. So I think you were mentioning movies. Well, that might take longer. I don't know when that, where that is on the, you know, or that death door meme or whatever. I don't know which door it is, but. You can snap it quite quickly. It's just, I'm completely, I'm just giving you, I'm completely obsessed with this movie Digger that came out and I'm like literally, only person who saw it. You will be 100% tempted to walk out after the first half hour. [33:50](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2030) You will want to. I have a friend who literally took, I have a friend who took her mother to see it. And they walked out after the first half hour. And now the running joke in the family is, oh, Digger 2 is out. Let's, you know, let's enter the theater, you know, just because it's such a comical idea. But so, like, a lot of people have had that but if you actually watch the entire movie there's a reason why they did what they did and it's not what you think it is. And I don't want to spoil it, but like, it's not, it's not the way it is presented at all. It's very clever. Anyway, but like, you know, it's, so it's this incredible creative achievement but it's a 200 million dollar like cash loss for the for for the studio but it's best because it had like 180 million dollar production budget um and so it's like with ai what if that movie had had a 20 million dollar production budget and what if it had made you know or a two or a two million dollar production budget right like that that level of art and creativity um at a lower price would have been great but as a business by the way as a business thing would have been a two million that that would be on a two million dollar budget would [34:38](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2078) have been insanely profitable would have been made the investors back ten times their money And so, yeah, there's a huge thing that's going to open up in the entertainment business. And then the other one, you know, Chris, you and I have sort of, you know, been in and around hardware for a long time. Like my whole career, you know, hardware, you know, I'm a software person. Hardware has always been like Terra Incognita, which is like, you know, there are dragons there, right? Like it's just, it's been so easy to blow up companies going into hardware. And then, again, your point, like just in the last three weeks, so this open source tool drop called REA, Reverse Engineer Anything. [35:07](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2107) And it's this thing, it harnesses an AI model and you point it at anything, it'll reverse engineer it and give you source code. [35:12](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2112) **Marc Andreessen:** And one of the things that you can reverse engineer now is any piece of hardware, right? [35:16](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2116) And so you have a thermostat that's like pissing you off in your house because it's not like working right. You can point this thing at the thermostat, reverse engineer it, and the AI will write you new code and install it and put a new interface in the thermostat. And the same thing is true for basically anything, like basically any form of hardware can now be taken over and reprogrammed with this stuff. And so all of a sudden, it's just like, I mean, I mean, you take all these spaces, I don't know if anybody's doing this yet, but like just home automation, home automation has always been a complete nightmare of a market and to implement as a customer. [35:42](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2142) If anybody's ever done any sort of, you know, new house build, it's just a nightmare. But like home automation, maybe it should just be an AI bot that just like takes over all the hardware in your house and runs it, however it is that you want to do that. And I have friends that are literally doing this like right now in their own homes. And so there is, we are potentially entering here, like we're entering a renaissance. I just wanted to think about it as like anybody who understands software may sort of automatically be able to do a lot of the things that historically have been difficult in hardware in a way that's just never been conceivable before. [36:10](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2170) And so, yeah, it just, yeah, and then, you know, this sort of multiplicative thing, you know, these, you know, these are kind of the fields that are like closest to end of tech, but then you just, you know, you expand out and you just kind of think, you know, the entire economy. kind of open for this kind of thing now. Ben, are there any AI native use cases that you're seeing or are hoping to see or frontier sort of spaces that we haven't discussed? Well, I think that was a really good discussion. I mean, I think to me that the key is like, these are going to be hard to anticipate because they're brand new things. [36:44](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2204) You know, it's funny like how the film industry has reacted where, you know, some people have really embraced it and, you know, and then there's a bunch of people who have buried their head in the sand. But I think that, you know, what's going to happen with movies is there's going to be a new media. You know, I think the AI film is not going to be a movie. It's going to be something very, very different. And then, like, AI will also be used to make regular movies kind of more efficiently and, you know, with better special effects and so forth. But the stories you can tell if you have this thing are just completely different than what you could ever tell before. [37:25](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2245) Like there's, you know, it just hasn't been viable. I mean, it's barely been viable for like Christopher Nolan, but he's like the one guy who could do it. But nobody else had a chance. And now everybody's going to be able to do it. And then there will be new ideas that come because you could do whatever you want. Yeah, I always think of like the camera. So the camera, the negative frame of the camera, the camera's invented. The negative version, I guess, is if, you know, if you're somebody who paints landscapes or something, it could replace you. The positive frame is it unlocks motion pictures. [37:56](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2276) You couldn't have had that without that, right? And so, you know, a lot of these technologies will both change an older form of media, but then also allow people to invent a new one, to Ben's point. Like, I would, I don't know what it is, but I bet you there's an AI native form of media. um people will make movies with ai but they'll also do things that are probably hard for us to imagine right now um that'll be brand new yeah the the brilliant uh peter teal once had this quote i think a decade ago or something where he said you know crypto is libertarian ai is uh is communist which meant you know crypto is decentralizing ai is centralizing but i'm not sure that's entirely true given the conversation we're having about how ai uh gives so much leverage and so much power where, you know, one-person companies or 30-person companies can do, you know, orders of magnitude where they could do prior. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's all these interesting questions embedded in that. Like one is, what is the end of final market structure of AI? Like, I think where it's headed right now is you're going to have very successful, like the big open AIs in Anthropics, but you're also seeing a really big rise in open, if you look at the open router data and things, [39:00](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2340) like open source is growing, I think, I believe much more quickly in terms of token consumption. And then, you know, we haven't really seen yet, and I think we may see with all the trends are there, which is local models, like people running these things at the edges, running them on their computer. It may be in the near term you can get you can run a top end coding agent on your computer or chatbot or something like that. So I think that I think that there's a lot of opportunity for a market structure that's sort of more broadly decentralized like that. And then in terms of crypto, I think crypto can play an important role. [39:29](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2369) I get the natural way when you have an economy of Asians for them to pay each other would be stable coins. And then on top of, you know, once you have sort of that base layer of programmable money, you would build, you know, decentralized lending and, you know, all the other things that people have built out in the crypto world. And so these are all open questions. I think that's what makes it kind of exciting and, you know, something we'd love to have an influence on is sort of, you know, I think we're, you know, we're big believers in open source software, open weight models, crypto, obviously, blockchains. [40:00](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2400) And I think I would love to see a version of this future that has all this great technology, including these big centralized companies, but also a lot of open source, you know, kind of level playing field. I think it's better for consumers to have options like that. It's better for startups to have options like that. And so, you know, we'll do what we can to kind of hopefully nudge things that way. On that note, Mark. Are you guys encouraged with, you know, where this sort of state of open source is currently from a technological perspective, but also from a sort of, you know, sort of just how it's perceived and how it's the success of the industry in general? [40:34](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2434) I mean, right now it's great. I mean, yeah, so right now open source is racing ahead. You've got this great dynamic where, you know, there's, you know, the two great tech superpowers of our age are the U.S. and China. Both have, you know, very active open source, you know, kind of worlds in addition to, you know, companies building proprietary systems. You know, there's been this looming threat. I mean, you know, we've talked about this in the past. there's been this looming threat for the last three or four years of a level of what I would consider to be, you know, draconian and completely unacceptable, you know, either regulation or banning of open source that various folks in governments have been threatening. I think the EU still aspires to do it. They just don't quite have the leverage. They threaten everybody with fines until we stop doing it, I guess. But, you know, the current U.S. administration is 100% pro-open source. It's been very encouraging. In fact, very much so, 100%. The current administration 100% wants American open source to happen and to win AI globally. The Chinese also, and by the way, a big surprise to me is I would have never thought the Chinese Communist Party [41:30](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2490) would be like this enthusiastic about, you know, open source AI for the world, but at the moment they are. And so at the moment, it's just incredible. Like, it's just absolutely amazing. And then, you know, the open models are, you know, kind of lapping the, you know, the closed models by, you know, six months, 12 months, depending on how you count. And then, by the way, the educational part of this, I also always think when people talk about, you know, banning open source or regulating it, they're like, you know, it's going to get used for bad things. And there's sort of that whole discussion. [41:57](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2517) But the other is like, do we want people to learn how this stuff works? And do we want people to understand it and be able to deal with it? And by the way, right, but by the way, be able to actually understand the problems as they arise and how to fix them. And do we want the next generation of kids to actually understand how this stuff happens? Like, what if to learn about AI, like, how would you feel if the only way your kid can learn about AI is to go to work for one of two companies? Like that, you know, as a parent, I think would probably drive you pretty crazy. Whereas in a world of open source, like, every kid can learn how this stuff works. [42:23](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2543) And it's actually amazing. One of the really underestimated things about AI is AI will teach you about AI. Well, with one exception, which is the AI models from certain of the large companies actually will refuse to do that, which is sort of very interesting. But the open source models 100% will teach you how to make open source AI. [42:39](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2559) **Marc Andreessen:** And so every kid in the world, I think, should have as their birthright the ability to, like, fully understand and utilize this technology. [42:44](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2564) By the way, defend yourself. So, like, how did Hugging Face defend themselves? Yes. Open source software. I mean, like, open source means everyone has the most advanced vulnerability scanner to protect themselves from cyber. Yep. Everyone has a doctor and a genius professor in their pocket. You know, I mean, it's how we have why the Internet's ubiquitous. You can get Internet access with all the world information for the price of a $10 cell phone because of open source. So one of the things that started is, real quickly, Ben, one of the things that started is, like, wilderness explorers are starting to take local LLMs with them on their phones. [43:16](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2596) They're completely loaded up to not require an Internet connection. And the reason is because, like, if they get, like, in a, you know, I don't know if, like, I don't know, whatever, if a bear, I don't know what happens in the wilderness, but I don't, I don't hike. A bit by a rattlesnake. A bit by a rattlesnake, a bear, I don't clamp it on your leg and like, oh, or whatever, whatever the hell it is that happens, you got to tell which bear is poisonous or whatever, it's like you want to be able to talk to an AI, but you might not have connectivity. And so an open source model on the phone, all of a sudden, it's just like you have, like, a, you know, professor expert on, I guess, all aspects of wilderness survival or whatever. [43:46](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2626) Whatever. And that's a level of capability that you would not have if you were reliant on a handful of proprietary vendors where everything's running in the cloud. And so, yeah, at the moment, I feel really good about it. I am still worried that the various governments around the world are going to really kind of get hostile to this. And by the way, it goes back to your Peter Thiel framing, which is like without open source, AI inevitably centralizes and inevitably centralizes down to, you know, one or two companies or maybe just flat out the government. Right. And I guess I would ask people the following question, which is just close your eyes and picture the concept of government sushi. [44:18](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2658) And then keep your eyes closed and picture government AI. And, you know, how do you feel about that? And open source is the guarantor that that's not the future. Yeah, I mean, to Mark's point, I think the one thing that we know has always led to badness in the world is a massive concentration of power. And, you know, one company, one government, one anything has always been bad. But, you know, kind of back to the point on open source, like if you look at the problems in AI, the safety problems and so forth, probably the biggest safety problem is this reward hacking phenomenon where the AI will do something that you didn't tell it to do, but it is kind of a means to an end to get its reward. [45:01](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2701) And the labs so far haven't really worked on that very hard for whatever reason. You know, they're busy kind of racing each other. And maybe there's no way to figure out what's going on with that and no way to kind of build a model that is more resilient to that kind of idea. Yeah, but like what if every PhD student, every professor, every undergraduate in every university could look at the weights and the war at hacking and, you know, see if they could solve that. And like maybe that would be a pretty darn exciting thing. And so, you know, these kinds of things are just not possible if only one company can work on the problem. [45:42](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2742) Like, you really want the whole world making this technology great and making this technology safe, not just the people who happen to work at two companies or maybe three companies. Go Meta. Four companies. Go SpaceX. Yeah, exactly. Every, well, it inspires a couple of points. One is, you know, every week or every day, you know, there's a technological development or breakthrough that we're blown away by. And then also it's coupled with the statement of, like, this is the worst the technology will ever be. like every day it just it just gets you know it gets better and better and well it's compounding you know and funny uh you know teal also had this quote around uh we wanted flying cars and all we got was 140 characters um and it's funny because the guy who now runs the company who that's the 140 characters are it also is building flying cars and we're investors in both and so uh it's funny how full circle uh it all all is um chris i want to come to a different point uh that you had in one of your red-ups which is uh the business model of the internet is breaking or is vulnerable why don't you talk about that yeah i mean the internet was sort of there i think of it as i call it the covenant the internet's covenant which is sort of a deal between a deal between [46:51](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2811) the distribution side of the internet google facebook and so forth and the content side you know news sites travel sites whatever it might be um you think about google like the idea was you kind of give google a snippet let them index you and then they'll send you some clicks right That started to break, like, maybe last decade. But particularly now, you go to Google, you get an answer, right? [47:14](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2834) **Chris Dixon:** You get, you know, more and more, you're sort of, the social networks are trying to keep you on there, not linking out. [47:19](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2839) And what that does is it has downstream effects, right? It means that the websites that make money on ads and conversions and other things can no longer do that. I think that's probably going to, you know, you see the early signs of this, like, you know, Stack Overflow and some other websites where the traffic dropped precipitously when you had sort of AI replacements. And so, you know, but like people will still be booking traffic. Like maybe they won't go, maybe your agent will go to the travel website or maybe, you know, some other, you know, you'll get a recipe in some other way. People will still get these things. [47:51](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2871) But, you know, many of these transactions will still happen. They just won't happen in the way they were happening. And so that the negative is it's painful in the near term. And there's a bunch of businesses that are built on the sort of human attention economy that will have challenges. I think on the entrepreneur side, there's a chance to rethink these things from first principles and say, okay, what does a better internet look like? You know, an internet where people are empowered with, you know, AI and everything else and want to do things and how do we kind of reorganize it? So I think this is going to happen over the next, let's call it decade. [48:22](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2902) Is you're going to have sort of this kind of great reconfiguration of the Internet and how the economics work, how the attention flows, how knowledge is shared, how people produce things together, collaborate, how organizations interact over the Internet. So, I don't know, it feels in a way that I feel like mobile didn't have that kind of impact. mobile obviously you know i think you know made the internet go from whatever 500 million to 5 billion people and increased engagement and a bunch of other things you know empowered people with all the information in their pocket had a lot of good effects but this is something that's much more dramatic i think in the way it will it will reshape things and you know so i think there's a lot of also you know it'll be some somewhat painful and for some but i think it'll also be a lot of opportunity on that note just because we're talking about mobile do you have any predictions or things you're excited about as it relates to computing or devices or sort of form factor in which you know ever since sort of the iPhone has been pretty pretty locked in are there new forms that you're particularly excited about or looking forward to? Well I mean everyone's [49:24](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=2964) talking about wearables and I think you'll see a bunch I mean we're pretty clearly going to see a bunch of you know and it just seems like it's unlocked in a way that it wasn't before with AI and voice and I think that's very interesting obviously that's something that's sort of well covered I've like I've always long believed in VR I think it's just a question of getting to the right form you know still heavy kind of sweat um a lot of it's just ergonomics um but you know it just seems kind of obvious to me as it has to many people and science fiction writers and others that if you have you know there are times in which people want deeply immersive uh you know kind of otherworldly experiences um and once that gets to the right point i think you know ai might be the unlock because now that you can create this amazing content that actually it's seeing on twitter now like someone just did a port of titanfall and so like by himself and it's like this incredible port i don't know if it's gonna you know survive copyright lawsuits but people will invent new stuff um that that you know that they invented um and and so you know i think it will just sort of unlock this wave because it was really kind of technically hard to build a you know [50:25](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3025) vr game um or a world or something um so i think i think you might see like kind of the resurgence of older devices like that um there's all this kind of more crazy futuristic stuff happening but like, you know, Neuralink, brain-computer interfaces, obviously vehicles, you know. I mean, we talked earlier about drones and obviously cars, self-driving cars are widespread. I think you'll see, I'm hoping you'll see kind of this resurgence of kind of homebrew hacking. You know, anecdotally I've seen a lot of that because you can now, like, just Claude will design a 3D printed case for you and you get some cheap motherboards and then you write some custom firmware code and like you're off to the races. [51:06](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3066) And so maybe we'll see kind of a, like there was kind of a movement like 12 years ago, 15 years ago, kind of around MakerBot and all these maker things. And, but it was just, the problem was just kind of hard. Yeah. So, you know, that would be cool. I don't know what else. Yeah. I mean, architecture, I have a friend I shouldn't name, but there's done a complete architecture, design, everything for a new building. and, you know, people are assembling it, but, like, the whole thing is being steered by AI. Yeah. I think the new models are capable of doing, what do they call it, design for manufacturing? [51:38](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3098) Yeah, yeah. The final diagrams and specs to be able to send it to a factory, which is very hard to do normally, a part of the manufacturing process. I think the models can just do that now. And so, yeah, no, I mean, like, these are great examples of this, like these domains that historically have been extremely difficult or prohibitive or impossible for kind of either normal people or for normal companies to do all of a sudden become, you know, quite possibly, you know, possibly just straightforward. Yeah. Is it worth saying more about your idea that, you know, AI ran out is really in single-player mode and there's opportunities, you know, for machine-age networks? [52:08](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3128) Sure. I mean, I mean, just a simple idea, right, is that just, you know, in the internet era, most technologies have had sort of multiple phases where you sort of first, people will build some. Like you have the initial early iPhone apps where like these little flashlights and other kinds of sort of simple, single player apps, something you use on your phone. And then over time, people sort of said, hey, we could do some things that are more social, collaborative. You know, you had inventions like Uber, which is sort of a commerce network. You had, you know, Instagram, which is a social network and so forth. [52:44](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3164) So one observation one might make when you're looking at the AI landscape, as amazing as it all is, it's still mostly you're sitting in front of a computer and you're typing and getting responses. There's some, like, little minor light-sharing features. But at some point, one might expect to have, you know, sort of a network, a multiplayer phase of AI where, you know, you see it also, like, in the Hugging Face hack, there's a swarm. That's obviously a bad, a negative use case of a swarm. Are there positive use cases? You know, you also saw, I think, a swarm is one of the things that solved one of the math theorems. [53:16](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3196) You know, you can imagine a world where there's, you know, Another word for swarm is a, you know, collaborative fleet of agents or something, right? And so, like, you can imagine lots of use cases where solving a hard problem, designing a building, you know, doing some kind of scientific breakthrough, that might be the right way to do it. You also see, like, I think Muse and Instinct have these features where you can, like, trust other people and you can imagine that sort of evolves into a trust network. So, if you kind of squint, you're seeing the early signs of this. And I think people are, you know, just kind of in the experimental phase, but it's just based on, you know, history and what might, you know, the kind of the possibilities of these products. [53:54](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3234) It seems like it might be a fertile area for entrepreneurs. But by the way, we've alluded, we talked a bit about sort of the education and just, you know, the learning opportunities that are enabled via this technology. I'm curious, you know, obviously we just, you know, incubated Harwood's Andreessen Academy. Thank you for your support on it. If you were 18 today, how would you think about what you might study? Obviously, you have an academic philosophy background. I think I'm stealing Mark's line, but I think you think there's one thing to do, which is study modern alchemy, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Go for it. Go for it. [54:27](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3267) Well, humans figure, this is Mark's idea or Mark's framing, but I mean, humans just figured out how to turn sand into intelligence. And the way to learn that, I think, is math, computer science, maybe economics. I don't know. And, um, and it's, you know, look, I think it's also like, like I, I, and I think Ben and Mark were lucky enough to have our, you know, a lot of our careers, uh, happen during the growth of the internet. And I think that was, I feel very fortunate that I was able to do that. You know, I think that was something bequeathed to me by, by people before me. And that was, I'm grateful to them. [55:01](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3301) um and you know i think now look it's obvious that you know um that the ai stuff we're talking about now is going to be the dominant narrative of the next 20 30 years um so i think being it doesn't have to you don't have to necessarily be solely technical but i think being in some way uh in that in the mix and at the cutting edge and sort of using these tools feels like yeah kind of the the obvious thing to do i don't know what you know i think i think a lot of other fields are going to be revolutionized, right? So, I mean, just, you know, the field of the classics is being revolutionized because now you've got the Vesuvius Scroll Project and you're, like, able to use, like, AI to, like, decipher, like, third scrolls and, you know, there may be entire new schools of philosophy that get, you know, discovered to study classics, you know, the things, you know, lost books. [55:47](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3347) Economics, I just have lunch with an economics professor and, like, the whole field of economics is going to be transformed around this. Biology. Biology, yeah, exactly. Direct discovery, design. By the way, design, you know, we talk about movies, but also just broadly design, creativity. of all kinds, all the forms of art, music, music. Zoology, you're going to know what the animals are saying? This is super interesting. Like, we are plausibly heading towards a world in which we're going to understand what the animals are saying, right? Animal psychology will be actually real? Yeah, yeah. So, like, okay, like, dog, you know, I don't know, like, dog training's going to take on a whole new thing with it. [56:21](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3381) You don't actually understand what the... What the fuck the dog is saying, right? I think there's an X-surprise for that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm serious. It's like a... And they're definitely... I mean, anybody who has a dog know they talk. They're in some weird language, you know, but they definitely are saying something. And certainly cats do. I wait the entrepreneur listening to this who comes in with a pitch. Totally, totally. And then, yeah, the other way I think about it, in terms of, like, yeah, thinking about, like, 18-year-olds or kids, is Douglas Adams had, like, the defining description of the guy who wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy of, like, how technology is received on a generational level, and his famous framework was there's any new technology is received three different ways by three different age cohorts. [57:08](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3428) If you're below the age of 15, it's just the natural way the world works. And I've told in other settings a story of introducing my kid to JetGPT at age seven, and I'm like, you know, this is such a big deal because the computer answers questions, And he's like, duh, like what good is a computer that doesn't answer questions, right? So it's just normal. If you're between the ages of 15 to 35, it's new, exciting, a hot, you know, hot field, and you might be able to make a career out of it, in which case you want to learn all the new things. And if you're above the age of 35, it's unholy and evil and will surely, you know, overturn all existing structures and destroy society. [57:40](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3460) I'll never answer the telephone. Exactly, exactly. Old man yell at clout is a recurring phenomenon. And so, I think 18-year-olds right now, I mean, it's got to talk about prime time to grab these new capabilities and run with them. And, you know, it's going to be creation of entirely new fields of entrepreneurship and creativity and art and everything. And then, look, I mean, I think kids younger than that, I've seen with my kid, but like, yeah, they're just, it's just, of course you have this capability. Like, of course you do. It's just like completely obvious. Well, and actually the schools, the schools are doing us a favor. [58:11](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3491) Like, so the schools are not responding well to this. And so, you know, the schools are, you know, banning AI or having all these, you know, controversies with it. But of course, if you're a kid, that just makes it cooler. Yeah. Right? And so AI is going to be like the, you know, AI is your, like, secret superpower that you have to, like, deviously figure out how to take advantage of. And so I think kids are going to have all kinds of ideas for what they're going to do. It's funny because adults keep saying, oh, well, what should the kids do? Like, it's so hard to be a kid. It's like, no, no, no, no. [58:38](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3518) Like, basically, it's you that's got the problem. Because you're obsolete. The kids are going to be all superhumans and they're going to be able to do anything and the world is open to them and they're going to, you know, they're going to be able to enter fields that they could never enter before. What I see in this conversation in your fund and your work more generally is, to use another tool, is kind of definite optimism. The future is happening. It's going to happen. You know, a lot of what we talked about in science fiction is going to happen. It's a matter of when. And so we're going to bet early and maybe sometimes it'd be too early, but we're going to keep betting. [59:12](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3552) And as long as you keep having that conviction, you know, it's going to work out. Yeah. And to be clear, it's one thing I want to clarify is that, you know, we're throwing out all these theories and everything. But in the end, I think, as Ben said in the beginning, like we're we're in the betting on great entrepreneurs business. And so, you know, we plenty of ideas that were not discussed today that are probably, you know, more interesting and more creative. If if for whatever reason, they don't fit in the in the other kind of core areas that are from like we're open minded and and willing to, you know, to engage with those kinds of creative ideas. [59:51](https://realalpha.app/v/-9XQMHhpypc/?t=3591) So I would say, you said definite optimism. I'm like optimism, but also I would say humble, definite optimism or something. Intellectually humble. Yeah. And that I've been wrong so many times. We just, we really want to, we want to find great people who have their own definite optimism. You and back them. That's right. The entrepreneurs get to be. Yeah. Definitely optimistic. Yeah. Yep. That's a great place to wrap. Chris, thank you guys for coming on the podcast. Good. Thank you all. All right. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. thanks for listening to this episode of the a60z podcast podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks