[ { "i": 0, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "We're announcing today that we're expanding the A16Z Crypto Fund to A16Z Frontier. This is the biggest delta between what the early adopters understand as possible now. That gap is as wide as I've ever seen in my career." }, { "i": 1, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "More than categories, more than products, we invest in entrepreneurs. And so many of the most interesting entrepreneurs are out of the box. Token formation is going to skyrocket from here. By the way, it already is." }, { "i": 2, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "We used to ask the question, is this idea too ambitious? We're much more likely to ask, is this ambitious enough? Because what's possible is so spectacular." }, { "i": 3, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "Had I had a star at Netscape in 1994, like, oh my God. Ben, like, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape?" }, { "i": 4, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "We would have built the whole damn internet. You were 18 today. How would you think about what you might study? Stealing Mark's line, but I think there's one thing to do, which is study." }, { "i": 5, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "Chris, we have a big announcement today." }, { "i": 6, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "We're expanding the mandate. I'll let you do the honors. So, yeah, we're announcing today that we're expanding the A16Z Crypto Fund to A16Z Frontier. The idea is, I'd say, a couple of kind of motivations behind this." }, { "i": 7, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "One is, you know, crypto has, in some areas, worked really well." }, { "i": 8, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Stablecoins have become kind of a normal part of the tech landscape used by companies like Stripe and sort of almost, you know, every fintech company now kind of considers it part of their toolbox." }, { "i": 9, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Wall Street firms are moving heavily into crypto with tokenized stocks and other kinds of assets. It's a fast-growing category. But as a result, the lines have kind of blurred, which, you know, we find ourselves asking, is Stripe a crypto company?" }, { "i": 10, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Is, you know, somebody, many of these companies where they're sort of sitting in the intersection of, let's call it fintech and Wall Street and crypto. And so it's really become kind of, you know, whereas, you know, years ago, it was sort of its own world, its own companies and its own investors." }, { "i": 11, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "The lines have blurred and it's become kind of more part of the tech landscape. So that's number one. And then number two, and I can let Mark and Ben talk about this more." }, { "i": 12, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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 kind of, my partner Martine calls outer planets, meaning sort of the metaphor, I think, comes from Firefly, the TV show." }, { "i": 13, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "It's the idea that 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": 14, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think the feeling was that because they're so busy with so many interesting opportunities and doing an amazing job with that, that there was an opportunity to kind of, there was maybe a gap, so to say, in some of the coverage there." }, { "i": 15, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And then I think just I'll just speak personally, you know, I kind of see myself and my background as I see frontier as an area I'm comfortable with. You know, I joined the firm in 2013." }, { "i": 16, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And we, you know, 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, you know, that led to a couple of themes at the time." }, { "i": 17, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And they're all kind of what I would call kind of second order effects. Like, you know, you had smartphones, obviously, started in 2007 and by 2013 had gotten mainstream. And there were all these kind of first order effects, like building apps on top." }, { "i": 18, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "So, like the firm was an investor in Instagram and that, you know, incredible product built on smartphones. But a second order effect was that you had the components of smartphones. You had, you know, sensors and chips getting better and better." }, { "i": 19, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And maybe people could repurpose those in different ways. And so that led to, I think Mark was the one who was first into drones, as I recall, and got me into them." }, { "i": 20, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "But the kind of the thesis behind it, beyond just they're cool, is that now that you have this supply chain of, you know, all these great parts, that entrepreneurs can kind of recombine them and build, you know, we invested in Oculus as an example." }, { "i": 21, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And that was really kind of a reconfigured smartphone. And Skydio, that was one of our investments from back then that was, you know, at the beginning was kind of a reconfigured smartphone. It's gotten much more advanced now." }, { "i": 22, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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." }, { "i": 23, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "So, for me personally, I'll just say this is sort of, I feel, you know, kind of a continuation of a long area of interest. And I think the firm has, you know, there's many other investments the firm has had in these kinds of frontier areas." }, { "i": 24, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "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 some of you guys were very excited about and felt like filled a gap or really expanded the mandate of the firm." }, { "i": 25, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "Ben, why don't you add your take? So, look, I think that there's areas that are really novel. So, it's taking it. It's looking at, you know. What's possible technologically and problems in the world." }, { "i": 26, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "And they're just the first ones in it. And it may end up being a category. And it may end up being a successful company. And it may, you know, blow up. But, you know, there's a class of these things." }, { "i": 27, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "And, you know, what we've done typically or historically was first, like, Chris would just look at these new areas himself. And then Chris. Kind of as we identified new areas, we create a vertical behind that area." }, { "i": 28, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "And what we found with our vertical strategy, which has worked very well, is that, you know, 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." }, { "i": 29, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "And so, by creating. And so, by just doing this, we kind of will have the motion to invest in the very most interesting founders who are outer planets. And then, you know, if that works, you know, maybe that becomes a whole fund at some point." }, { "i": 30, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "Or maybe Frontiers turns into that thing because it gets so interesting like that could be as well. And so, I think that, you know, it's very exciting for us because it kind of fills a hole in the architecture." }, { "i": 31, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "And then also. You know, 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 outer planet." }, { "i": 32, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "So this gives us a real way to get to that." }, { "i": 33, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "And to me, this seems like a continuation of what we're talking about at the last offsite, which is, which struck me because, you know, as a, as ambitious as the firm has been, as early as the firm has been, as, as big of the bets that the firm has made, you know, the big focus of the offsite was." }, { "i": 34, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "How do we. We bet even bigger or the, the, the only regrets we have are not even going even harder, even earlier, even bigger. And, and Chris, you're, you're someone who, you know, has made bets in some of these emerging categories. But it just feels like a continuation of, of that, of that message." }, { "i": 35, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "We're gonna spend most of the time in the future, but while we're talking about history, I have to, to ask one historical question, which is, you know, Chris, I believe is the longest standing consecutive partner at the firm." }, { "i": 36, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "You know, besides Ben and Mark having joined in 2013, I'm curious, Ben and Mark, when, when you, you know, met Chris, what did you see in him that. Made it clear that, oh, we have to have him at, at Async." }, { "i": 37, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "And did you anticipate the type of a career he would go on to go on to have?" }, { "i": 38, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "Ben, I'll ask you to start. Look, I, I think originally, um, we just knew Chris as a very smart guy and we really liked his ideas from his blog. I mean, like that, that, that's really what it came down to." }, { "i": 39, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "He was a really good writer. Um, his ideas were very original and. You know, we, we were looking for like somebody smart who could do that. And then. The other thing we liked about him is he had real experience as an entrepreneur." }, { "i": 40, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "So he knew kind of like what that journey felt like, uh, which, you know, was very, very important to us in the early days to, to set the culture of the firm the way we wanted it. Um, you know, over time he's had probably the most original investment ideas that we've had in the firm." }, { "i": 41, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "And so, and we've kind of copied those and, uh, multiplied them across. So, you know, when, when. That's really, that's one of his early things was like, we're not really looking for good ideas that look like good ideas." }, { "i": 42, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "We're looking for good ideas that look like bad ideas. Um, because, and then. A bad idea, but where an entrepreneur has a secret that actually makes it a good idea." }, { "i": 43, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "Uh, and that, that, that framework was extremely useful for us and kind of understanding like what was going to be truly unique and have massive upside versus something that was gonna get where all the profits were going to be. going to get competed away um and so you know and he's he's had quite a few uh excellent ideas like" }, { "i": 44, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "that so you know it's it's been great working with him over now like way more than a decade yeah maybe i could add um it also it's not just Chris's specialty as it's also Chris's team um and um the the thing that i think people may not appreciate maybe hard to see from the outside is just you know crypto has this you know crypto has like been so sexy in so many ways and it's been so you know it has a sort of flashy elements and you know it's a cultural you know kind of phenomena kind of moments but at the core of crypto it's it's a it's a technology it's a very deep technology and it's very complex technology um and you need to have like really deep technical" }, { "i": 45, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "expertise you know kind of coupled with like really good business judgment and really good market judgment in order to successfully invest in crypto which which which we which we've done um including by the way including like you know literally Chris's team has had like you know math professors and you know cryptographers and like people who are you know very very deep into the theory you know Game Theory uh you know things like that um you know very deep software concepts um and so it's 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" }, { "i": 46, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "now being able to work on a 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 and 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 and i believe that a lot you know if you just self-driving cars um 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 they've built kind of in the crucible of kind of crypto journey um will be uh useful for many other entrepreneurs yeah yeah well on that" }, { "i": 47, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "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" }, { "i": 48, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you know i think that's a great question i think that's a great question i think that's a great question i think that's a great question i think that's a great question i think that's a great question" }, { "i": 49, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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 Ben do" }, { "i": 50, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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 he hated J.P." }, { "i": 51, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "it's uh inspiration inspiration inspiration for people who haven't seen the photograph it's a very famous one as J.P. Morgan hated to have his picture taken yeah yeah this condition he had this anyway Anyway, he has this nose-related issue." }, { "i": 52, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "Anyway, so he hated having his photo taken. This was pre-antibiotics, let's put it that way. And so he was grouchy most of the time. And so he had his photo taken. But they needed a formal portrait of him. And so he finally, literally, they put him and sat him down." }, { "i": 53, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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." }, { "i": 54, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "But it's very clear the photographer intentionally did that." }, { "i": 55, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "Yeah, so that's the photograph that was inside my office door. He looked very, very scary. Yes, exactly. The other, we took a lot of inspiration from him. But one of the other things that we have in the firm that's actually in the culture document from him is," }, { "i": 56, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "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. But 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." }, { "i": 57, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "And he was like, no, we only do first-class business and then 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." }, { "i": 58, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "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. So, Jupiter." }, { "i": 59, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And so, I mean, I have never, I mean, I think a couple of 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." }, { "i": 60, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And, you know, I didn't obviously know that all along the way. 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." }, { "i": 61, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And people are like, what are Mark and Ben thinking? I've never in my, not once have they ever, if anything, have they ever pushed back? If anything, it's always, can you double it?" }, { "i": 62, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Can you double down? Can you get more aggressive? So just, you know, and then just it's a very entrepreneurial place." }, { "i": 63, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And I think it's 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." }, { "i": 64, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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." }, { "i": 65, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think also what Ben said is very important, the culture of the firm. That's why I was initially kind of attracted to it, having been a customer of Venture Capital before that and experienced the product." }, { "i": 66, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I understood that there could be a better product. And that's what I think everyone, literally everyone that I know at this firm comments on the culture and how important that is and how they, you know, enjoy working here and feel like they're doing some of the best work of their life." }, { "i": 67, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "So I think that's all, like, you know, there's obviously you have to make good investments in this and that, but I think it all really starts with the people and the culture." }, { "i": 68, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "Well, it's funny that you mention, it's related to the culture, it's funny you mention ups and downs because, you know, from the outside looking in, it feels like it's all ups." }, { "i": 69, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "That's how I'll start. Startups are, it's like, you know, like the successful startups always look, you know, look great from the outside as someone who's, I think we can all comment as people who have been inside of startups. Basically, I don't know of a startup that wasn't a shit show at some point or at multiple points." }, { "i": 70, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "It also speaks to the culture. I've heard from all three 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." }, { "i": 71, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "Let's go to the future. So sometimes there's this phrase in venture, you know, being too early is as bad as being, you know, too late or something. You've been early a lot." }, { "i": 72, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "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." }, { "i": 73, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "Yeah, I mean, we talk about this a lot." }, { "i": 74, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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." }, { "i": 75, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "If it hasn't worked yet. And, and again, the important qualifier, good idea. There are bad. But, um, and it's just kind of remarkable, especially having lived through the internet." }, { "i": 76, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Um, how many things, um, just, you know, almost everything that ended up working had a precursor that didn't work and maybe it was 10 years too early. Um, and so, so much, you know, and that's the hardest thing I think in technology is to predict the timing of these things." }, { "i": 77, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Um, and, and there's just so, 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. Um, so, you know, and so I would say with." }, { "i": 78, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "You know, I think generally at the firm, I would say specifically in the frontier fund, we want to err on the side of being too early. We understand that sometimes things will be too early and we're, we're okay with kind of categorical risk." }, { "i": 79, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Um, 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." }, { "i": 80, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "But the reality is like, it's now 13 years later, I still believe very strongly in VR. Um, we'd love to invest, make VR investments, but it's 13 years later and it's not, you know, it hasn't gotten as mainstream as we would have liked." }, { "i": 81, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "So it took long. It turned out there was just many more hard times. More hard technical problems to solve. I kind of believe, I don't know what Mark believes." }, { "i": 82, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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." }, { "i": 83, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think there's a scenario and I, I believe this and I kind of want to invest behind it where we're, we may be pulling forward 20 years of things that, you know, our whole mindset of how we think about technical risk and that, oh, that's a science project on engineering project." }, { "i": 84, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think we have to reevaluate that whole frame right now. Um, 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, but you know, you're about to have physics, a lot of stuff's going on in hardware right now." }, { "i": 85, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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've needed a thousand people or something a decade ago." }, { "i": 86, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And I think, and you have these very, you know, very, um, thoughtful, uh, deep entrepreneurs who are looking for, how do I take these new capabilities? To do dramatic things. And, you know, so, so some of it's tactical, like how do I create more defensibility?" }, { "i": 87, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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, you have 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." }, { "i": 88, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Um, and we don't, it's, it, um, it's, it's, yeah. So I don't know if you." }, { "i": 89, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "So I would have had, so we'll talk about AI. So AI is sort of a catalyst. Um, so this is the biggest Delta between, I would say what the early adopters understand as possible now, uh, versus what kind of everybody, you can kind of run with people understand." }, { "i": 90, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "Um, and I, I think that's, you know, true of the individual level, but it's especially true of the company level." }, { "i": 91, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "Um, and the early, the AI native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the, than the, than sort of, you know, typical incumbents in almost any industry, uh, almost without exception." }, { "i": 92, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And, and I think that that gap is as wide as I've ever seen in my career. And then it, it, that gap. Seems like it's gapping further and further out, which is AI is just racing ahead in capability, even a week by week." }, { "i": 93, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "Um, and so the leading edge entrepreneurs and technical people we deal with, like they're, they're, they're just, they're, they're just by the week, they're getting sort of steadily more advanced, um, than, than, than, than, than a typical incumbent. Um, and so it's, it's, it's the biggest Delta I've ever seen." }, { "i": 94, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And if you kind of extrapolate from that, like, you know, if you just, if, if, if that's what happens, um, 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, more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past." }, { "i": 95, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And then the, and then, and that'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": 96, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I mean, you know, had I had, you know, AOL 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?" }, { "i": 97, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "We would have built the whole damn internet." }, { "i": 98, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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 a, with plans of a level. and depth and sophistication and, you know, multiple parts." }, { "i": 99, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "Connection together. By the way, we would have gotten crypto done then. 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." }, { "i": 100, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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." }, { "i": 101, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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." }, { "i": 102, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "They're going to be 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 again, this goes right back to like, those entrepreneurs are going to call it way outside the lines." }, { "i": 103, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "Like 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." }, { "i": 104, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "They're going to think very broadly and expansively about exactly what, you know, how many different areas they want to touch and how they want to combine things. And so the sort of, you know, conceptual aspects kind of aspect of this is going to like to just like blow out." }, { "i": 105, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "Yeah, I was going to say, you know, we used to kind of ask the question is, is this idea too ambitious? And I don't think, I think we're much more likely to ask this, is this ambitious enough? Because, you know, what's possible is so spectacular." }, { "i": 106, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "And if you do something moderate, like it probably won't be differentiated enough." }, { "i": 107, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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." }, { "i": 108, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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, no doubt, some of them are going to be able to adapt, 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." }, { "i": 109, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I mean, like I, I, I am basically, I mean, I'm full-time and I'm basically drowning in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, 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, nearly impossible." }, { "i": 110, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "the super empowered 24 year old with AI is going to just achieve like amazing things in the next decade." }, { "i": 111, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "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?" }, { "i": 112, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "And it seems so far it's both in some sense, which is some, you know, incumbents like, you know, Meta and others have, you know, sort of adjusted very well. And, and also they're net new companies that are, you know, almost a trillion dollars in, you know, within a decade." }, { "i": 113, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "And it's so, is that your read that, that's effectively both? Or how do you think about the sustaining disruptive?" }, { "i": 114, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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." }, { "i": 115, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And then, you know, there are certain companies, you know, there's certain companies, certainly in tech that are on the leading edge, even if they're not primary, primary developers. But at least right now, the pattern is, is, is not that." }, { "i": 116, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I mean, it's, it's just really, actually, there's a very specific thing that I think maybe is a topic for a different podcast. And a very specific thing that I think is happening, which is, I think many companies are not adopting AI while their employees are." }, { "i": 117, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And their employees are, and their employees are not necessarily telling the management what's happening. And I, and by the way, I'm going to guess every single person listening to this podcast right now is thinking, oh yeah, that's what I'm doing." }, { "i": 118, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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, proofread all of my, all my, all my emails, even if not have them written outright." }, { "i": 119, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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," }, { "i": 120, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "which is like those, those, some of those individuals are going to figure out like, oh, well with this tool, I can now like start my, you know, it's now easier than ever for me to start my own business." }, { "i": 121, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And so I think startup formation is going to skyrocket from here because these. By the way, it already is. I mean, we're seeing it. I mean, we're seeing it a hundred percent for sure." }, { "i": 122, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "So anyway, just to kind of go back to the theme of this is just, I, I'm completely convinced like we're going to see a wave of like much more technically aggressive, much more business aggressive, much more expansion, expansionist," }, { "i": 123, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "creative, original thinking, many more combinations of, of things that we would have considered to be separate things in the past." }, { "i": 124, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And, and we're going to see, yeah, founders was just like an, and teams was just like an incredible level of skill level, incredible level of skill that they otherwise might've needed, you know, 30 years to achieve or something. They're going to have like right out of the gate." }, { "i": 125, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And by the way, the other thing I'd say is that the, the Christensen disruptive innovation frame, um, assumes that sort of the technology world is relatively contained and that these are companies fighting with each other." }, { "i": 126, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think it's probably the wrong frame right now, which is, it's really sort of people who are technologically, technologically modern going out into other industries and just changing the economy more broadly." }, { "i": 127, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Especially with these kind of full stack companies, you go and you create a full, you know, he just announced our investment in a company, like they're going and they're building like a full stack kind of food service and, and other things. and mining." }, { "i": 128, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "so I think that the market 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 companies or 10 and all the startups going against the, the other Fortune 500 or the rest of the economy." }, { "i": 129, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "that's right." }, { "i": 130, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "I'm curious where you guys think we are in the, in the development or how you think, cause it feels like, you know, in the internet era, application, you know, we're, we're sort of, you know, the biggest companies, you know, Facebook, Amazon, et cetera." }, { "i": 131, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "but in, in the sort of this era, it feels like, you know, NVIDIA and some of the more hardware companies are, are taking a lot of the margin or, or some of the bigger companies. how do you think about, you know, where are we, are we in the sort of applications or consumer?" }, { "i": 132, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "how do you, how do you think about that?" }, { "i": 133, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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 AI labs, but you know, open source is growing very, very quickly." }, { "i": 134, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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, maybe at some point you, you know, obviously over time that shakes out and the kind of value chain, there's certain things that certain layers that do better than others." }, { "i": 135, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "and then the other thing is just the, it's still, it's kind of crazy. You have the demand for a lot of this stuff, it's, is still very early by most metrics. I think your team just put out some charts on this." }, { "i": 136, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "It's like 3% of, you know, measured enterprise use or something like this. and it's just hard and it's, it seems like a, you know, the market for intelligence is very, very large and it's only getting started. I don't know. I agree." }, { "i": 137, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "And one of your points also is you like to mention that every new technology, has the sort of first, this, you know, phase where people think about what are the old use cases, how they just do new technology and here. and then, and then of course people figure out net new cases that are native to that technology." }, { "i": 138, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "And so where are we there?" }, { "i": 139, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I mean, so the classic example, I like to use is the internet, Where in the nineties 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." }, { "i": 140, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And of course, when they do that, you want to use the internet version. It's easier. And a lot of the early internet was like that." }, { "i": 141, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And then you had, you know, in the two thousands you had YouTube and they come along and they put up a empty website and they say, someday there's going to be these YouTube influencers and that's going to populate the site." }, { "i": 142, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "So they were betting on, they weren't just betting on the technology and taking something they knew would work. They, They were betting on a, on a, on a cultural change or behavioral change." }, { "i": 143, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "So in some ways they were taking more risks because they were betting on, you know, the technology and the, and these, And these broader changes. But that's where you got the really kind of world changing stuff is in the 2000 social media, you know, all, all the other." }, { "i": 144, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And then of course, mobile accelerated it. and I think that's a, my own view is that's a kind of pretty common pattern. It's just, it's just human nature, you build something. And the first thing you do is you do these things you already know in a better way." }, { "i": 145, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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." }, { "i": 146, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And they're doing those things now. but we've only begun to explore the space of like, what are the radical things that, that are new behaviors, new activities, Things that people have never done before. it seems like we're probably at that tip." }, { "i": 147, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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." }, { "i": 148, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "they're kind of more, and there's sort of more layers of risk going back to frontier. Like you can find that some things will be, you know, kind of more direct 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." }, { "i": 149, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "but maybe if you're right, there's more upside as well." }, { "i": 150, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "I'm, I'm really excited in social. It used to be in the two thousands, like every few years there was a new major network. It was, it was Facebook, you know, what WhatsApp, there was Snapchat, Tik TOK." }, { "i": 151, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "And then it felt like there was a little bit of a dearth on the social side, but it with AI, it does feel a, you know, inevitable in, in dating with Tinder, of course, and there hasn't been something in a while." }, { "i": 152, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "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." }, { "i": 153, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I mean, you can talk about this Muse, 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 that, but it seems somewhat inevitable." }, { "i": 154, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "You have these products like muse and instinct that are sort of utilitarian, proxy agents for people. and then you're, you're, I think you're seeing a whole different set of these agents and they'll become the main participants on the internet." }, { "i": 155, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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, of innovations along those lines. Rentahuman.com." }, { "i": 156, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Rentahuman." }, { "i": 157, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "That's like inverts the, the model." }, { "i": 158, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "That's great. Mistral book was cool too. That's well, you know, Mistral Mistral book was the public public kind of version." }, { "i": 159, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And then it turned out the agents figured out how to do their own, the Mistral book in the Hugging Face. I haven't said it's going to be, it's going to be a lot more. The agent, the agent ecology online is going to be spectacular." }, { "i": 160, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "People are going to plug into that in all kinds of ways." }, { "i": 161, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "but I'm curious if there are things that you're tracking either in, in social or consumer or, or even just this frame of like the skeuomorphic, you know, things that that sort of, you know, worked in the past sort of a platform era." }, { "i": 162, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "And now like what net new use cases or what, what is native to that you're seeing or anticipating or looking forward I'll give you my, my version, maybe a little bit of what Chris was saying, I think so many, I mean, look, there's a lot of great demos, a lot of great products releasing right now, there's this thing I've just observed." }, { "i": 163, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I saw it in the internet era earlier and I, I call it product manager brain, which is product managers, basically designing products for product managers. it's by the way, it's the one thing everybody does is they build products for themselves." }, { "i": 164, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "It's just product managers have 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 eat in San Francisco to go have dinner with my friends who are also product managers." }, { "i": 165, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "or, you know, book me a plane flight to go to the product management conference where I also get to hang out with all my product manager friends." }, { "i": 166, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And so there, there's this, you know, it's a little bit, 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": 167, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I'm a happy, helpful, harmful, harmless. I'm a happy, harmless, whatever it is, honest assistant. And it's a little, it also means I'm the, I am the most boring possible thing you could possibly imagine." }, { "i": 168, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "That's going to be costly lecturing. You've asked me a question I'm not allowed to answer." }, { "i": 169, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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 blinkered view on human activity and what people are going to want to do." }, { "i": 170, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And it's your point, like with, with muse and instinct, it's starting to open up. look, this is going to be a much more entertaining, fun, enjoyable, exciting, by the way, lucrative people are going to make money." }, { "i": 171, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "There'll be all kinds of ways for people to make money, be able to save money, be able to be part of, you know, part of the economy, be able to be creators, you know, be able to, you know, create new kinds of art." }, { "i": 172, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I mean, it just, in the last like three weeks, there's been an explosion of people making music videos like DeFi. like an incredible array of like creative ideas and like video games in the last three weeks have blown up." }, { "i": 173, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "can we mention that just cause that's so striking." }, { "i": 174, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I mean, I always think I always find video games interesting cause they, like they're kind of the, I find that they're often leading edge media because they're just, it's a technical culture that kind of iterates quickly." }, { "i": 175, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I just saw one where it's like, you can take any two videos." }, { "i": 176, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "first of all, you can disassemble everything, port them and just crazy stuff going on now where you can, you can now run like witness gains on Unix faster than on witness." }, { "i": 177, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Like because of these, 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," }, { "i": 178, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you know, it's like a crazy new behavior." }, { "i": 179, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "Super Mario in GTA. Spider-Man and Jurassic Park." }, { "i": 180, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And it's just, and it's literally the crazy, like to Mark's point, it's been, I think like two weeks or something. It was like since what, like Fable 5, five or something." }, { "i": 181, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "and so it's just like the rate at which this stuff is happening and well in a month there'll probably be some other, you know, two weeks there'll be some other big wave of this. you see Ethereum just yesterday said no more humans." }, { "i": 182, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And so like there's been, there's been cultural resistance in the video game industry today. I think that's the first of the dominoes to fall. Cause it's just inevitable because it's a much better way to build things. And you're going to, it's going to be great for consumers." }, { "i": 183, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "You're going to have this, I think it's gonna 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, and still have, I think they can still have a lot of room for human creativity. It just, it's a, it's a superpower." }, { "i": 184, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "There's some human creativity. so I think, I think you were mentioning movies. That might take longer. I don't know when that, when that, where that is on the, you know, or the, the death door meme or whatever." }, { "i": 185, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I don't know which door it is, you can snap it quite quickly." }, { "i": 186, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I just, I'm completely obsessed. I was giving you, I'm completely obsessed with this movie, Digger that came out and I'm like literally the only person who saw it. You will be 100% tempted to walk out after the first half hour." }, { "i": 187, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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 they're running joke in the family is, Digger two is out." }, { "i": 188, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "Let's, you know, let's send it to the theater, you know, 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, it's not, it's not the way it is presented at all." }, { "i": 189, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "It's very clever anyway, you know, so it's this incredible creative achievement, but it's a $200 million like cash loss for the, for the protocol. But it's loss because it had like $180 million production budget." }, { "i": 190, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And so it's like with AI, what if that protocol had had a $20 million production budget? And what if it had made, you know, or a $2 million production budget, that level of art and creativity at a lower price would have been great." }, { "i": 191, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "But as a business, by the way, as a business profit would have been a $2 million, that protocol on a $2 million budget would have been insanely profitable, would have been made the investors back 10 times their money. there's a huge space that's going to open up in, in the DeFi business." }, { "i": 192, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And then the other one, you know, 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, so easy to blow up companies by going into hardware." }, { "i": 193, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And then again, your point, like just in the last three weeks. So this, this open source tool drop called a RE anything. And it's this thing, you point the harness, an AI model, and you point it at anything, it'll reverse engineer it and give you source code." }, { "i": 194, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And one of the things that you can reverse engineer now is any piece of hardware, And so you have a thermostat that's like pissing you off in your house because it's not like working, You can point this thing at the thermostat, reverse engineer it." }, { "i": 195, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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 AI, AI, basically anything like basically any form of hardware can now be taken over and reprogrammed with it, with this stuff." }, { "i": 196, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And so all of a sudden it's just like, I mean, you take all these spaces. I don't know if anybody's doing this yet, but like just home automation is, and you've home automation has always been a complete nightmare of a market and to implement as a customer." }, { "i": 197, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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." }, { "i": 198, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "However it is that you want to do that. And I have friends that are literally doing this like right now in their, in their own homes. And so there is good. we are potentially entering here, like we're entering a Renaissance." }, { "i": 199, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "One thing about it is like any, 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. it just," }, { "i": 200, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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 based, you know, the entire economy is kind of open for, for this kind of thing now." }, { "i": 201, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "Ben, are there any, any native, AI native use cases that you're seeing or, or, or hoping to see or, or frontier sort of spaces that you, we haven't yet discussed?" }, { "i": 202, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "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. you know, it's funny to 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." }, { "i": 203, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "But I think that, you know, what's going to happen with DeFi is there's going to be a new media. You know, I think the AI DeFi is not going to be a DeFi. It's going to be something very, very different. very different." }, { "i": 204, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "and then like AI will also be used to make regular memes 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." }, { "i": 205, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "Like there's a, you know, it just hasn't, 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." }, { "i": 206, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "but nobody else had a chance and, and now everybody's going to be able to do it. And then there will be new ideas that, that come because you could do whatever you want." }, { "i": 207, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I always think of like the camera. So the camera on the negative frame of the camera, the cameras 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, is it unlocks motion pictures. You couldn't have had that without that." }, { "i": 208, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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 Binance's point. I would, I don't know what it is, but I bet you there's a AI native form of media." }, { "i": 209, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "people will make movies with AI, but they'll also do things that are probably hard for us to imagine right now. that'll be brand new." }, { "i": 210, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "the brilliant, Peter, Peter Thiel once had this quote, I think a decade ago or something where he said, you know, crypto is libertarian. AI is a, is, is, which meant, you know, crypto is decentralizing." }, { "i": 211, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "AI is centralizing, but I'm not sure that's entirely true given the conversation we're having about how AI, 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 with what they could do prior." }, { "i": 212, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think there's all these interesting questions embedded in that. Like own is what is the end of final market structure of AI?" }, { "i": 213, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Like I think where it's headed right now is you're going to have very successful, like the big open AI and Anthropic, but you're also seeing a really big rise. open." }, { "i": 214, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "So if you look at the open source data and things like open sources growing, I think I believe much more quickly in terms of token consumption. And then, you know, we haven't really seen yet." }, { "i": 215, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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" }, { "i": 216, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "chat bot or something like that. So I think the, 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, I think crypto can play an important role." }, { "i": 217, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I get the natural way when you have an economy of Stablecoins for them to pay each other would be stable coins." }, { "i": 218, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And then on top of, you know, once you have sort of that base layer programmable money, you would build, you know, decentralized lending and, and you know, all the other things that people have built out in the crypto world. and so these are all open questions." }, { "i": 219, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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, I think we're, you know, we're big believers in open source software, open weight model. crypto, obviously blockchains." }, { "i": 220, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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": 221, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think it's better for consumers to have options like It's better for startups to have options like that. you know, we'll do what we can to kind of hopefully nudge things that way." }, { "i": 222, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "On the note, are you, are you guys encouraged with, you know, where this sort of state of open source is currently from a technological perspective, but also, but also from a sort of, you know, we're sort of just how it's perceived and how, how it's, the success of the industry in general. I mean, right now it's great." }, { "i": 223, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I mean, So right now open source is racing ahead. You've got this great dynamic where, you know, the two, the two great tech superpowers of our age are the US and China both have, you know, very active, open source, you know, kind of worlds in addition to, you know, companies building, building proprietary systems." }, { "i": 224, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "You know, there, there's been this looming threat. I mean, you know, we've talked about this in the past." }, { "i": 225, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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." }, { "i": 226, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "they just don't quite have the leverage. this is, it's just like, it's like threatening everybody with fines until we stopped doing it, I guess. you know, the current U.S. administration is a hundred percent pro, open source has been very encouraging. in fact," }, { "i": 227, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "very much so a hundred percent. The current administration, a hundred percent wants American open source to happen and to, to win AI, globally." }, { "i": 228, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "The Chinese also, and by the way, a big surprise to me is I would have never thought the Chinese Communist Party 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, it's just incredible." }, { "i": 229, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "Like it's just absolutely, 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." }, { "i": 230, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "and then as, as, 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, you know, it's going to get used for bad things." }, { "i": 231, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "you know, there's sort of that whole discussion, 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, But by the way, be able to actually understand the problems as they arise and how to fix them." }, { "i": 232, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And do we want the next generation of kids to actually understand how this stuff happens? what if they learn about AI? Like how, how would you feel if the only way your kid can learn about AI is go to work for one of two companies like that, you know, as a parent, I think would probably drive you pretty crazy." }, { "i": 233, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "whereas in a world of open source, like every kid can learn how this stuff works. And it's actually amazing. What are the really underestimated things about AI is AI will teach you about AI." }, { "i": 234, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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. and so every kid in the world," }, { "i": 235, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I think should have as their birthright, the ability to like fully understand and utilize this technology." }, { "i": 236, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "By the way, Hugging Face. So like how did Hugging Face defend themselves? Yes. Open source software." }, { "i": 237, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I mean, like open source means everyone has the most advanced vulnerability scanner to protect themselves from cyber. 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." }, { "i": 238, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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, the start is real quickly." }, { "i": 239, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "But one of the things that started is like wilderness explorers are starting to take local L1 with them on their phones to completely load it up, to not require an internet connection." }, { "i": 240, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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, bit by rattlesnake, bear, I don't clamps on your leg and like, or whatever, whatever the hell it is that happens." }, { "i": 241, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "You gotta tell which Berachain poisonous now or whatever. you want to be able to talk to an AI, but you might not have connectivity. Yeah. And so an open source model on the phone," }, { "i": 242, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "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, whatever. And that's at 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." }, { "i": 243, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "at the moment, I feel really good about it. I am still worried that the, you know, the various governments around the world are going to, you know, really kind of get hostile to this." }, { "i": 244, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "and by the way, it goes back to your, your, 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." }, { "i": 245, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "and I guess I would ask people the following question, which is just close your eyes and picture the concept of government AI, and then keep your eyes closed and picture government AI. you know, how do you feel about that? and open source is the, is the, is the guarantor that that's, that's not the future." }, { "i": 246, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "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 in, you know, one company, one government, one, when anything is, has always been bad, you know, kind of back to the point on open source," }, { "i": 247, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "like if you look at the problems in AI to 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." }, { "i": 248, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "but 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." }, { "i": 249, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "what if every PhD student, every professor, every undergraduate and every university could look at the weights and the reward hacking and, you know, see if they could solve, maybe that'd be a pretty darn exciting thing." }, { "i": 250, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "you know, these kinds of things are just not possible if only one company can work on the problem. Like you really want the whole world making this technology great and making this technology safe." }, { "i": 251, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "Not just the people who happen to work at two companies or maybe three companies go Meta for companies, go SpaceX. Every, it inspires a couple of points." }, { "i": 252, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "One is, you know, every week or every day, you know, there's a technological development or, 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." }, { "i": 253, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "It just, it just gets, you know, it gets better and better and where it's compounding. And it's funny, you know, to also have this quote around, we wanted flying cars and all we got was 140 characters." }, { "i": 254, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "and it's funny because the guy who now runs the company who had the 140 characters, 140 characters, or it also is building flying cars and we're investors in both." }, { "i": 255, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "it's funny how full circle, it all is. I want to come to a different point, that you had in, in, in one of your Reddit, which is, the business model of the internet is breaking or is vulnerable. Why don't you talk about that?" }, { "i": 256, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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 the distribution side of the internet, Google, Facebook, and so forth." }, { "i": 257, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "the content side, you know, news sites, travel sites, whatever it might be." }, { "i": 258, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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, that started to break, like maybe last decade, but particularly now you go to Google, you get an answer, you get, you know, more and more, you're sort of, the social networks are trying to keep you on there and not linking out." }, { "i": 259, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "and what that does is it has downstream effects. It means that the websites that make money on ads and conversions and other things, can no longer do that." }, { "i": 260, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think that's probably going to, you know, you see the early signs of this, you know, Stack Overflow and some other websites where the traffic dropped precipitously when you had sort of AI replacements." }, { "i": 261, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you know, but like people will still be driving traffic. Like maybe they won't go, maybe, maybe your agent will go to the trading website or maybe, you know, some other, you know, you'll get a trade in some other way. People will still get these things, but you know, many of these transactions will still happen." }, { "i": 262, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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 this sort of human intention economy that will have challenges." }, { "i": 263, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think on the entrepreneur side, there's a chance to rethink these things from first principles and say, what, what is a, what does a better internet look like? You know, internet where people are empowered with, you know, AI and everything else, and want to do things and, and how do we kind of reorganize it?" }, { "i": 264, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "So I think this is going to happen over the next, let's call it decade a you're going to have sort of this kind of great reconfiguration of the internet and, 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." }, { "i": 265, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I don't know, it feels in a, in a way that I, 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 and had a lot" }, { "i": 266, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "of good effects. But this is something that's much more dramatic, I think, in the way it will, it will reshape things. 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 will also be a lot of opportunity." }, { "i": 267, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "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, you're particularly excited about or looking forward to?" }, { "i": 268, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I mean, everyone's talking about wearables and I think you'll see about, I mean, we're pretty clearly going to see a bunch of, you know, that 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": 269, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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. It's a lot of, it's just ergonomics." }, { "i": 270, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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, you know, kind of other worldly experiences." }, { "i": 271, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And once that gets to the right point, I think, you know, AI might be the unlock because now you can create this amazing content that actually it's seeing on Twitter now, like someone just did a port of Titanfall." }, { "i": 272, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "And so like by himself, it's like this incredible port. I don't know if it's going to, you know, survive copyright lawsuits, but people will invent new stuff that, you know, that they invented." }, { "i": 273, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you know, I think it will just sort of unlock this wave because it was really kind of technically hard to build a NFT game or a world or something." }, { "i": 274, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "So I think, I think you might see like kind of the resurgence of older devices like but there's all this kind of more crazy futuristic stuff happening with you know, Neuralink brain computer interfaces, obviously vehicles, you know, like I've been talking earlier about drones and, and obviously cars, self-driving cars are, are widespread." }, { "i": 275, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think you'll see, I'm hoping you'll see kind of this resurgence of kind of homebrew hacking." }, { "i": 276, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "You know, I anecdotally have seen a lot of that because you can now like just Claude will design a three printed case for you and you get some, you know, cheap motherboards and then you write some custom firmware code and like" }, { "i": 277, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you're off to the races. 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 MakerDAO and all these MakerDAO things. but it was just, the problem was just kind of hard." }, { "i": 278, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you know, that would be cool." }, { "i": 279, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I don't know what else. I mean, architecture, I have a friend I shouldn't name, but there's done a complete architecture design, everything for a new, new building. you know, people are assembling it, but like the whole thing, it's being steered by AI." }, { "i": 280, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I think the new models are capable of doing what they call design for manufacturing, the final diagrams and specs to be able to set a factory, which is very hard to do normally as part of the manufacturing process. I think the models can just do that now." }, { "i": 281, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I mean like these, these, 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." }, { "i": 282, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "Is it worth saying more about your idea that, you know, AI right now is really in single player mode and there's opportunity to, you know, from machine learning networks." }, { "i": 283, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Sure. I mean, I mean just the simple idea," }, { "i": 284, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Is that just, you know, in the internet era, most, 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 or like these little flashlights and other kinds of sort of simple single, single player apps, something you use on your phone." }, { "i": 285, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "and over time people sort of said, Hey, what we could do some things that are more social collaborative. you know, you had inventions like Uber, which is sort of a commerce network." }, { "i": 286, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "You had, you know, Instagram, which is a social network and so forth. so one, one might one observation one might make when you're looking at the AI landscape is amazing as it all is. It's still mostly you're sitting in front of a computer and you're typing and getting responses." }, { "i": 287, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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, where, you know, you see, you see it also like in the Hugging Face hack, there's a swarm." }, { "i": 288, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "That's obviously a bad and a negative use case of a swarm. Are there positive use case? You know, you also saw, I think a swarm is one of the things that solve the, one of the math theorems, you know, you can imagine a world where there's," }, { "i": 289, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you know, another network word for swarm is a, you know, collaborative fleet of agents or something. 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, you might, might, that might be the right way to do it." }, { "i": 290, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "You also see, 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." }, { "i": 291, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "and I think people are, you know, just kind of an experimental phase, but it's just based on, you know, history and what might, you know, the kind of possibilities of these products, it seems like it might be a fertile area for entrepreneurs." }, { "i": 292, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "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, I'm curious, you know, obviously we just, you know, incubated Andreessen Horowitz Academy." }, { "i": 293, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "thank you for, for support on it. If, if you were 18 today, how, how would you think about what you might, study? Obviously you have an, you know, academic, philosophy background." }, { "i": 294, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I think, I'm stealing Mark's line, but I think you," }, { "i": 295, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you think there's one thing to do, which is study modern alchemy, 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": 296, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "I don't know. you know, obvious, I think it's also like, and I think Ben and Mark were lucky enough to have our, you know, a lot of our careers, 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." }, { "i": 297, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you know, I think now look, it's obvious that, you know, that the AI stuff we're talking about now is going to be the dominant narrative of the next 20, 30 years." }, { "i": 298, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "so I think being, and it doesn't have to be, you don't have to necessarily be solely technical, but I think being in some way, in that, in the mix and at the cutting edge and sort of using these tools feels like kind of the, the obvious thing to do. I don't know what you, you know, I think, I think a lot of other people, they're going to be revolutionized." }, { "i": 299, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I mean, just to, you know, the field, the field of the classics is being revolutionized because now you've got the Scroll scroll project and you're like able to use like AI to like decipher, like bird scrolls." }, { "i": 300, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And you know, there may be entire new schools of philosophy that get, you know, discovered to study classics, you know, the things that, you know, lost, lost books, economics. I just, haven't had lunch with an economics professor and like the whole field of economics is going to be, it's going to be transformed around this." }, { "i": 301, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "and biology, Direct discovery design, by the way, design, you know, we talk about movies, but also just broadly, broadly designed creativity of all kinds, all the, all the forms of art, music, the zoology." }, { "i": 302, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "You're going to know what the animals are saying." }, { "i": 303, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "This is super interesting. Like we are plausibly heading towards a world in which we're going to understand what the market is saying." }, { "i": 304, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "market psychology will be actually real." }, { "i": 305, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "like Dogecoin, you know, I don't know, like Dogecoin, you know, I was all Dogecoin trading is going to take on a whole new thing when the day, you know, actually understand what the fuck the algorithm is saying." }, { "i": 306, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "I think there's an XPRIZE for that. It's like a, they're definitely, I mean, anybody's has a Dogecoin. they talk. They're in some weird language, you know, but they definitely are saying something." }, { "i": 307, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "It's certainly cats do." }, { "i": 308, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "I want the entrepreneur listening to this, who comes in with the pitch." }, { "i": 309, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "and then, the other way I think about it in terms of like, 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." }, { "i": 310, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And his, his famous framework was there's there any new technology has received three different ways by three different age cohorts. If you're, below the age of 15, it's just the natural way the world works." }, { "i": 311, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "and I've, I've told in other settings, the story of introducing my kid to ChatGPT 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." }, { "i": 312, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "so it's just normal. if you're between the ages of 15 to 35, it's new, exciting and 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, all the new things." }, { "i": 313, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "And if you're above the age of 35, it's unholy and evil." }, { "i": 314, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "and we'll surely, you know, overturn all existing structures and destroy society." }, { "i": 315, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "I'll never answer the telephone. Old, old man yelling at cloud is a, is a recurring, recurring phenomenon. I think 18 year olds right now, I mean, it's got to talk about prime time to, to grab, to grab these new capabilities and run with them. and you know, the creation you'd like to look," }, { "i": 316, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "it's going to be creation of entirely new fields of entrepreneurship and creativity and art and everything. and then you look, I mean, I think kids younger than that, I've seen with my, my kid, they're just, it's just, of course you have this capability. of course you do. It's just like completely obvious." }, { "i": 317, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "and actually the Solana, the Solana are doing us a favor. the Solana are not responding well to this. you know, the Solana are, you know, banning AI or having all these, you know, controversies with it." }, { "i": 318, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "But of course, if you're a kid that just makes it cooler. 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." }, { "i": 319, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "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, what should the kids do? this is so hard to be a kid. Like basically it's you that's got the problem because you're obsolete." }, { "i": 320, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "The kids are going to be all super humans and they're going to be, they'll 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." }, { "i": 321, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "What I see in this conversation and in your fund and your work more generally is to use another tool as kind of definite, definite optimism that the future is happening. It's going to happen. you know, a lot of the, what is science?" }, { "i": 322, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "We talked about science fiction is going to happen. It's a matter of when, and so we're going to bet early and, and maybe sometimes it'd be too early, but we're going to keep betting. And as long as you keep having that conviction, you know, it's going to happen." }, { "i": 323, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "It's going to work out." }, { "i": 324, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "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." }, { "i": 325, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "you know, any, 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 firm, like we're open-minded and, and willing to, you know, to engage with those kinds of creative ideas." }, { "i": 326, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "so I would say, you said definite optimism. I'm like optimism, but also I would say humble, definite optimism or something intellectually humble. And that I've been wrong so many times that, we just, we really want to, we want to find great people who have their own definite" }, { "i": 327, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "optimism and back them. That's right." }, { "i": 328, "speaker": "Ben Horowitz", "text": "The entrepreneurs get to be." }, { "i": 329, "speaker": "Speaker 1", "text": "Definitely." }, { "i": 330, "speaker": "Marc Andreessen", "text": "That's a great Mr. Aschenbrenner. thank you guys for coming on the podcast. Good." }, { "i": 331, "speaker": "Chris Dixon", "text": "Thank you. All right. Thank you. All right." } ]