The Frontier Ideas a16z Wants to Fund | Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz & Chris Dixon

a16z is expanding a16z crypto into a16z Frontier, a broader mandate to back founders building at the edges of what's possible. Chris Dixon joins Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Erik Torenberg to explain why founders should increasingly ask not “is this too ambitious?” but “is this ambitious enough?” — and how AI could pull decades of technological progress forward across hardware, robotics, entertainment, science, and entirely new forms of media. They also explore the coming internet of AI agents, why open source matters as AI becomes more powerful, and why some of the most important companies of the next decade may combine technologies and business models that previously belonged in separate categories.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Chris Dixon?

  We're announcing today that we're expanding the ACC Crypto Fund to A16Z Frontier.

• 0:06Marc Andreessen?

  This is the biggest delta between what the early adopters understand is possible now, or what people understand. That gap is as wide as I've ever seen it in my career.

• 0:14Ben Horowitz?

  More than categories, more than products, we invest in entrepreneurs. And so many of the most interesting entrepreneurs are outer planets.

• 0:23Marc Andreessen?

  Startup formation is going to skyrocket from here.

• 0:25Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, it already is. 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. And if you do something moderate, it probably won't be differentiated.

• 0:43Marc Andreessen?

  Had I had Astro at Netscape in 1994, like, oh my God. Ben, like, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape?

• 0:50Ben Horowitz?

  We would have built the whole damn internet.

• 0:51Erik Torenberg?

  You were 18 today. How would you think about what you might study?

• 0:55Chris Dixon?

  Stealing Mark's line, but I think you think there's one thing to do, which is study.

• 0:59Erik Torenberg?

  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, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz to explain why we're making that move now. 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?

• 1:44Erik Torenberg?

  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.

• 1:56Erik Torenberg?

  Chris, we have a big announcement today. We're expanding the mandate. I'll let you do the honors.

• 2:01Chris Dixon?

  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 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 in the intersection of, let's call it fintech and Wall Street and crypto.

• 2:43Chris Dixon?

  And so it's really become kind of, whereas years ago, it was sort of its own world, its own companies and its own investors, the lines are 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 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, partner Martin calls outer planets, meaning he's sort of the metaphor. I think it comes from Firefly, the TV show. 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 think the feeling was that because they're so busy with so many interesting opportunities

• 3:27Chris Dixon?

  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. 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. 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 really 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 and 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 incredible product built on smartphone.

• 4:11Chris Dixon?

  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 was 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

• 4:55Chris Dixon?

  and build, you know, and kind of coalesce around these blockchains. 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 the 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.

• 5:11Erik Torenberg?

  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?

• 5:20Ben Horowitz?

  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. 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,

• 6:02Ben Horowitz?

  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. 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 Frontier 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.

• 6:44Ben Horowitz?

  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 outer planets. So this gives us a real way to get to that.

• 7:00Erik Torenberg?

  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 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 A16Z? And did you anticipate the type of career he would want to have, Ben? I'll ask you to start.

• 7:43Ben Horowitz?

  Look, I think originally, we just knew Chris as a very smart guy. And we really liked his ideas from his block. 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 smart 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 so, and we've kind of copied those and multiplied them.

• 8:27Ben Horowitz?

  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.

• 9:02Marc Andreessen?

  Yep. Maybe I could add, also, it's not just Chris's specialty, 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's been so sexy in so many ways. And it has a sort of flashy elements and it's a cultural and kind of phenomena, kind of moments. But at the core of crypto, it's a technology, it's a very deep technology. It is 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.

• 9:45Chris Dixon?

  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. We've invested very deeply over the years in policy.

• 9:55Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 9:55Chris Dixon?

  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 they've built, kind of in the crucible of, of the crypto journey, will be useful for many other entrepreneurs.

• 10:17Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 10:18Erik Torenberg?

  Well, on that end, no, we'll do one last historical question. You know, you pioneered not just some of the investments, but also some of the ways in which the firm works, i.e. the policy arm. And when you joined in 2013, you know, could you have imagined that the firm would have grown in this way? What was, what were your thoughts about where things were going?

• 10:32Chris Dixon?

  Well, I always knew Mark, I mean, Mark has a, you have a big poster of JP Morgan on your wall in your office.

• 10:38Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 10:40Chris Dixon?

  And so these, Mark and Ben do not lack for, for, you know, drive and ambition.

• 10:45Marc Andreessen?

  It's a famous photograph. It's a very, it's a very famous photograph. It was, he hated JP Morgan.

• 10:49Ben Horowitz?

  It's a, inspiration, inspiration.

• 10:52Marc Andreessen?

  Inspiration, James. For people who haven't seen the photograph, Google, it's a very famous one. It's 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. This is pre-antibiotics, let's put it that way. And so he was grouchy most of the time. And so he has photo taken. So, but they, they needed a formal portrait of him. And so he finally, literally, he put him and set him down, and the photographer like 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. And, and, 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 like intentionally did that. Yeah. So that's the photograph that was inside my office door.

• 11:37Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. You look very, very scary, very scary.

• 11:40Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, exactly, exactly.

• 11:41Ben Horowitz?

  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, 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 that, 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 then only in a first-class way, which, you know, Mark and I really loved that attitude about, like, you're, you're definitely not going

• 12:25Ben Horowitz?

  to tell me who I am. I know who I am. And I'm gonna 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, so we got a lot from him.

• 12:41Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So JP Morgan.

• 12:43Chris Dixon?

  Yeah. 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, I, could I have predicted everything? I think things generally went really well. And, you know, I didn't, obviously not at 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 are Mark and Ben doing? Like, 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, 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 it's just shown over the years of like, how many, this, this is a good example right here. That, you know, when we, you know, we sort of adapt, see what's happening

• 13:26Chris Dixon?

  in the world, change things around. We went through a whole kind of restructuring of the, of the firm. You know, bring in new ideas, sort of anything's, 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 think, and I also, what Ben said's 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 understood that there could be a better product. But that, and that's where I think everyone, literally everyone that I know at this firm, like comments on the culture and how important that is, and how they, you know, enjoy working here and, and feel

• 14:08Chris Dixon?

  like they're doing some of the best work of their life. So, so I think that's all like in a very, 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.

• 14:18Erik Torenberg?

  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, all, all ups.

• 14:25Chris Dixon?

  That's how all 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 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.

• 14:41Erik Torenberg?

  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, let's, 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, you know, 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?

• 15:09Chris Dixon?

  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, if it hasn't worked yet. And, and again, the important qualifier, good idea, there are bad ideas. But, and it's just kind of remarkable, especially having lived through the internet, how many things, just, you know, almost everything that ended up working had a precursor that didn't work, and maybe was 10 years too early. And so, so, you know, and that's the hardest thing, I think, in technology, is to predict the timing of these things. And, 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

• 15:51Chris Dixon?

  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 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 quote category risk. Some categories may not work. Look, I mean, even things that sort of worked, 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 people 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, what 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,

• 16:35Chris Dixon?

  first software engineering, getting dramatically better, then math. I think there's a scenario, and I, 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 that, 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.

• 17:02Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Chris Dixon?

  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. 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, you have these amazing new capabilities. And people have only begun to explore what you can do. And so, it, I

• 17:44Chris Dixon?

  don't know, it feels like an especially exciting time. And we don't, it's, it's, it's, yeah. And so, I don't know if you.

• 17:54Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So I would have, so we'll talk about AI as sort of a catalyst. So this is the biggest delta between, I would say, what the early adopters understand is possible now, versus what kind of everybody, kind of normal people understand. And I think that's, you know, true to the individual level, but it's especially true to the company level. 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, almost without exception. And, and I think that that gap is as wide as I've ever seen it in my career. And then it, 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, they're, they're getting, they're just, they're, they're just, by

• 18:37Marc Andreessen?

  the week, they're getting sort of steadily more advanced than, than, than, than a typical incumbent. And so it's, it's, it's the biggest delta I've ever seen. And if you kind of extrapolate from that, like, you know, if, if, 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, more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past. And then the, and then 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 mean, you know, had I had, you know, Astra in, 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?

• 19:17Ben Horowitz?

  We would have built the whole damn internet.

• 19:20Marc Andreessen?

  Absolutely incredible. 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, you know, multiple parts.

• 19:28Erik Torenberg?

  Connection together.

• 19:30Ben Horowitz?

  But by the way, we would have gotten crypto done then.

• 19:34Marc Andreessen?

  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. 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. 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, 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. 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

• 20:17Marc Andreessen?

  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, the sort of, you know, conceptual artist kind of aspect of this is going to like, to just like blow way out.

• 20:32Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. I, I was going to say, you know, we used to kind of ask the question, is, is this idea too ambitious? And I, 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. And if you do something. Moderate, like it probably won't be differentiated enough.

• 20:56Marc Andreessen?

  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, I, you know, I, 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 say 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. Yeah. 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, with the pace development right now. Yeah. 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. Like it, it, the, yeah, the, the, the, the, the super empowered 24 year old with AI is going to just achieve like amazing things in the, in the next decade.

• 21:42Erik Torenberg?

  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 their net new companies that are, you know, uh, almost trillion dollars in, you know, within a decade. And it's so, is that your read that that's effectively both? Or how do you think about this sustaining disruptive?

• 22:08Marc Andreessen?

  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 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 AI 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 if maybe it's a topic for a different podcast, but a very specific thing that 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 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. You know, I'm using AI, you know, to, you know, do, you know, do all my work or at least let's say fact check all my work, uh, for, for, for all of my, all my, all my, uh, emails.

• 22:53Marc Andreessen?

  Even if not have them written outright. 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, 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, with this tool, I can now like start my, you know, it's now easier than ever for me to start my own business. And so I think startup formation is going to skyrocket from here because these.

• 23:16Ben Horowitz?

  By, by the way, it already is.

• 23:18Marc Andreessen?

  Oh yeah. I mean, we're seeing it. I mean, we're seeing it a hundred percent for sure. So anyway, just to kind of go, go back to the theme of this is just, I, 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 expansionist, creative, original thinking, many more combinations of, of, of, of things that we would have considered to be separate things in the past. And, uh, and we're going to see, yeah, founders was just like, and, and, and teams was just like an incredible level of skill level, uh, 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.

• 23:51Chris Dixon?

  And by the way, the other thing I'd say is that the, the Christensen disruptive innovation frame assumes that sort of the technology world is relatively contained and that these are companies fighting with each other.

• 24:01Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Chris Dixon?

  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.

• 24:12Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Chris Dixon?

  Right? Especially with these kind of full stack companies, you go and you create a full, you know, like, uh, 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?

• 24:24Erik Torenberg?

  And mining.

• 24:26Chris Dixon?

  So, so I think that the, you talk about this sometimes, right? 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 in all the startups going against the, the other Fortune 500 or the rest of the economy.

• 24:41Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

• 24:43Erik Torenberg?

  I'm curious where you guys think we are in the, in the development or how you think, because it feels like, you know, in the internet era, um, application, uh, you know, we're, we're sort of, you know, the biggest companies, um, you know, Facebook, Amazon, et cetera. But in, in this 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 some of the bigger companies. How do you think about, you know, where are we, are we in the sort of applications or consumer, like, how do you, how do you think about that?

• 25:10Chris Dixon?

  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 US. 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 and the kind of value chain, there's certain things, certain layers that do better than others. But, um, and then the other thing is just the, the, it's still, it's like, it's kind of crazy. You have the demand for a lot of this stuff, uh, is, is still very early by most metrics.

• 25:48Marc Andreessen?

  Yep.

• 25:49Chris Dixon?

  I think your team just put out some charts on this. It's like 3% of, you know, measured enterprise use or something like this.

• 25:56Chris Dixon?

  And so, and it's just hard and it's 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.

• 26:05Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 26:07Erik Torenberg?

  And one of your points also is you like to mention 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 just do new technology. And here, uh, and then, then of course people figure out net new cases that are native to that technology. And so where are we there?

• 26:23Chris Dixon?

  Yeah. I mean, like sort of the classic example I like to use is the internet, right? 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. 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. And then you had, you know, in the 2000s, you had YouTube and they come along and they put up a empty website and they say, well, someday there's going to be these YouTube influencers and that's going to populate the. 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, on a cultural change or behavioral change. 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. But that's where you got the really kind of world changing stuff, isn't it? Two thousand, social media, you know, all, all the other, and then of course mobile accelerated it.

• 27:08Chris Dixon?

  And I, and I think that's a, my own view is that's a kind of a pretty common pattern. It's just, it's just night, human nature, right? You, you build something and the first thing you do is you do these things you already know, um, in a better way. 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, um, 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. 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.

• 27:52Chris Dixon?

  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 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, uh, but maybe if you're right, there's more upside as well.

• 28:09Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. I'm, 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, Tik Tok. And then it felt like there was a little bit of a dearth on the social side, but it, with AI does feel inevitable. You know, 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.

• 28:37Chris Dixon?

  Well, I mean, you can talk about this, Mark, but we, you know, we're headed to a world where it looks like the main, the, the, 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. You have these products like Muse and Instinct that are sort of utility proxy agents for people. And then you're, you're, I think you 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, well, you know, will they need their own ways of communicating and transacting and, uh, sharing knowledge and doing all the things people do. And so it's probably going to be a whole series of, of innovations along those lines.

• 29:19Marc Andreessen?

  Rent a human.com.

• 29:21Chris Dixon?

  Rent a human. That's like inverts the model.

• 29:25Chris Dixon?

  Moltbook was cool, too.

• 29:26Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. That's well, you know, yeah, Moltbook was the public kind of version. And then it turned out the agents figured out how to do their own the Moltbook and the Hugging Face app. So it's gonna be, yeah, it's gonna be a lot more.

• 29:38Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 29:38Marc Andreessen?

  The agent ecology online is gonna be spectacular. People are gonna plug into that in all kinds of ways.

• 29:43Erik Torenberg?

  Mark, I'm curious if there are things that you're tracking either in social or consumer or even just this frame of like the skeuomorphic, you know, things that that sort of, you know, worked in the past, sort of platform era. And now, like, what net new use cases or what is native to that you're seeing or anticipating or looking forward to?

• 30:01Marc Andreessen?

  Well, I'll give you 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 the internet era earlier, and I call it product manager brain, which is product managers basically designing products for product managers. Right? It's like, by the way, it's the one thing everybody does is they build products for themselves.

• 30:19Erik Torenberg?

  Totally.

• 30:20Marc Andreessen?

  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 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 the 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, it also means I'm the most boring possible thing you could possibly imagine. It's gonna be constantly lecturing you. You've asked me a question I'm not allowed to answer. Right? And so it's like, there's just gonna be this, this sort of, we just had this very, just the nature of the early companies who just had this very blinker view on human activity, on what people are

• 31:04Marc Andreessen?

  gonna want to do. And it's your point, like with Muse and Instinct, it's starting to open up. But like, look, this is gonna be a much more entertaining, fun, enjoyable, exciting. By the way, lucrative, people are gonna make money. There'll 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 De novo, on like, incredible array of like, creative ideas and topics.

• 31:35Chris Dixon?

  Like video games in the last three weeks have blown up.

• 31:37Marc Andreessen?

  You might mention that just because that's so striking.

• 31:39Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, I mean, I always think, I always find video games interesting because they're kind of the, I find that they're often the leading edge of media because they're just, it's a technical culture that kind of iterates quickly. But like, I just saw one where it's like, you can take any two, well, first of all, you can disassemble everything, port them. And just crazy stuff going on now, where 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.

• 32:13Marc Andreessen?

  Super Mario and GTA. Right? Spider-Man and dress.

• 32:17Chris Dixon?

  Yeah. And it's just, and 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, 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 Epic just yesterday said, no more humans. Right? And so like,

• 32:39Marc Andreessen?

  Ready, ready code.

• 32:39Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, there's been cultural resistance in the video game industry to AI. But like, 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. And you're gonna, it's gonna be great for consumers. You're gonna have this, I think it's gonna be a creative renaissance. You're gonna 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 superpowers, this human creativity. So I think, I think you mentioned movies. Well,

• 33:07Marc Andreessen?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:08Chris Dixon?

  That might take longer. I don't know when that, when that, where that is on the, you know, the, or that death door meme or whatever. I don't know which door it is, but uh.

• 33:18Marc Andreessen?

  You can say that quite quickly. I just, I'm completely obsessed, I'm completely obsessed with this movie, 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. 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 head to the theater, you know, just because it's such a comical. 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, but like, you know, it's, it's, so it's this incredible creative achievement, but it's a $200 million, like, cash loss for the, for the studio. But it's best because it had like $180 million production

• 34:00Marc Andreessen?

  budget. And so it's like, with AI, what if that movie had had a $20 million production budget? And what if it had made, you know, or a $2 million production budget, right? Like, that, that level of art and creativity at a lower price would have been great. But as a business, by the way, as a business thing, would have been, that movie on a $2 million budget would have been insanely profitable, would have made the investors back 10 times their money. And so, yeah, there's, there's a huge thing that's gonna 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's 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 by going into hardware. And then, again, your point, like, just in the last three weeks. So this, this open source tool dropped called

• 34:42Marc Andreessen?

  REA, reverse engineer anything. 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. And one of the things that you can reverse engineer now is any piece of hardware. Right? 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's always been a complete nightmare of a market and to implement as a customer. 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

• 35:26Marc Andreessen?

  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, in their own homes. And so there is, we are potentially entering here, like, we're entering a renaissance. When I think about it, it's 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. 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 feels that are like, closest to the tech. But then you just, you know, you expand out and you just, you kind of think, basically, you know, the entire economy is kind of open for this kind of thing now.

• 36:03Erik Torenberg?

  Ben, are there any, any native, AI native use cases that you're seeing or hoping to see or frontier sort of spaces that you, we haven't discussed?

• 36:13Ben Horowitz?

  Well, that, I think that was a really good discussion. I mean, I think, to me, the key is like, these are gonna be hard to anticipate. They're brand new things. So, 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 gonna happen with movies is there's gonna be a new media. You know, I think the AI film is not going to be a movie. It's gonna be something very, very different. And, and then, like, AI will also be used to make regular movies, kind of more efficiently, and, and, you know, with better special effects

• 36:55Ben Horowitz?

  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. 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, and now everybody's gonna be able to do it. And then there will be new ideas that, that come because you could do whatever you want.

• 37:22Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, I always think of like, the camera. So the camera, on 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. 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. 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.

• 37:57Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. The brilliant, Peter Thiel once had this quote, I think a decade ago or something, where he said, you know, crypto is libertarian, AI is communist, to 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 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 what they could do prior.

• 38:22Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, I think there's all these interesting questions embedded in that. Like, one is, what is the end up, final market structure of AI? Like, I think where it's headed right now is you're gonna have very successful, like, the big OpenAI's and Anthropic's, but you're also seeing a really big rise in open, so if you look at the open routed data and things, 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.

• 39:07Chris Dixon?

  Like, the natural way, when you have an economy of agents, for them to pay each other, would be stablecoins. 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 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 models, crypto, obviously, blockchains, and I, 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

• 39:52Chris Dixon?

  to have options like that. And so, you know, we'll do what we can to kind of hopefully nudge things that way.

• 39:58Erik Torenberg?

  On the, Mark and Ben, 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, where we're sort of just how it's perceived and how it's, the success of the industry in general?

• 40:12Marc Andreessen?

  I mean, right now, it's great. I mean, yeah, so right now, open source is racing ahead, you got this great dynamic where, you know, there's, 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. You know, there, 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 and governments have been threatening. I think the EU still aspires to do it. They just don't quite have the leverage. This is, this is, I guess, threaten everybody with fines until we stop doing it, I guess, but, you know, the, the current US administration is 100% pro open source, has been very encouraging.

• 40:57Marc Andreessen?

  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 would be like this, and think 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, like, it's just absolutely, absolutely amazing, and then, you know, the, the open models are, you know, kind of lapping the, you know, the, the closed models by, you know, six months, 12 months, depending on how you count.

• 41:26Marc Andreessen?

  And then, 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, they're like, you know, it's gonna get used for bad things, and, you know, there's, 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, right, but by the way, be, 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 go to work for one or 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. 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

• 42:10Marc Andreessen?

  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.

• 42:18Marc 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.

• 42:22Chris Dixon?

  By the way, defend yourself, so like, how did Hugging Face defend themselves?

• 42:26Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 42:26Chris Dixon?

  Open source software?

• 42:27Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 42:27Chris Dixon?

  I mean, like, yeah, open source means everyone has the most advanced vulnerability scanner to protect themselves from cyber.

• 42:34Marc Andreessen?

  Yep.

• 42:35Chris Dixon?

  Everyone has a doctor and a genius professor in their pocket, you know, I mean, that's how we have, why the internet's ubiquitous, you can get internet access with all the world's information for the price of a $10 cellphone because of open source.

• 42:48Marc Andreessen?

  So one of the things that started, real quickly, Ben, one of the things that started is like wilderness explorers are starting to take local LNs with them on their phones, 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.

• 43:04Ben Horowitz?

  Bit by rattlesnake.

• 43:05Marc Andreessen?

  You're bit by rattlesnake, bear, like, clamps on your leg, or whatever the hell it is that happens, you gotta tell which berry's poisonous, or whatever, it's like, you wanna 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, is just like, you have like a, you know, professor expert on, I guess, all aspects of wilderness survival, or whatever, and, right, 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, I, at the moment, I feel really good about it. I am still worried that the, you know, that the various governments around the world are gonna, you know, really kind of get hostile to this. And by the way, it goes back to your, your Peter Thiel framing, which is like, without open source, AI inevitably central, centralizes, and inevitably centralizes down to, you know, one or two companies, or maybe just flat out the government. Right?

• 43:50Marc Andreessen?

  And, and I, and I guess I would ask you the following question, which is, just close your eyes and picture the concept of government sushi.

• 43:57Marc Andreessen?

  And then keep your eyes closed and picture government AI. And, you know, how do you feel about that? And open source is the, is the guarantor that that's, that's not the future?

• 44:06Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I, I mean, to Mark's point, I, 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, when anything is, is 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. And the labs, so far, haven't really worked on that very hard, for whatever reason, you know, they're, they're busy kind of racing each other.

• 44:48Ben Horowitz?

  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, but like, what if every PhD student, every professor, every undergraduate in every university could look at the weights and the reward hacking, and, you know, see if they could solve that, and like, maybe that'd 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. 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.

• 45:33Ben Horowitz?

  Four companies, go SpaceX.

• 45:35Erik Torenberg?

  Exactly. Every, well, yeah, inspires a couple of points. 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, it just, it just gets, you know, it gets better and better, and it's compounding, and funny, you know, Thiel also had this quote around, we wanted flying cars, and all we got was 140 characters. And it's funny, because the guy who now runs the company who, that's the 140 characters, or, it also is building flying cars, and we're investors in both of them. And so, it's funny how full circle it all is. Chris, I want to come to a different point that you had in, in one of your retips, which

• 46:16Erik Torenberg?

  is, the business model of the internet is breaking, or is vulnerable. Why don't you talk about that?

• 46:22Chris Dixon?

  Yeah, I mean, the internet was sort of, I, I think of it as, I call it the covenant, the internet's covenant, which is sort of a deal between, a deal between the distribution side of the internet, Google, Facebook and so forth, and the, the content side, you know, news sites, travel sites, whatever it might be. 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? You get, you know, more and more, you're sort of, the social networks are trying to keep you on there, not linking out. 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.

• 47:05Chris Dixon?

  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, the, but, but like, people will still be booking, like, maybe they won't go, maybe, 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, 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, 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 attention economy that will have challenges. I think on the entrepreneur's side, there's a chance to rethink these things from first principles and say, okay, what is a, what does a better internet look like?

• 47:49Chris Dixon?

  You know, internet where people are empowered with, you know, AI and everything else, and wanna do things, and how do we kind of reorganize it? So I think this is gonna happen over the next, let's call it decade, is you're gonna 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. So it, I don't know, it feels, 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

• 48:31Chris Dixon?

  things, 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 reshape things. And so I think there's a lot of also, it'll be somewhat painful for some, but I think it'll also be a lot of opportunity.

• 48:48Erik Torenberg?

  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, ever since the iPhone has been pretty locked in, are there new forms that you're particularly excited about or looking forward to?

• 49:01Chris Dixon?

  Well, I mean, everyone's 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 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. 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. A lot of it's just ergonomics. 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, you know, kind of otherworldly experiences. 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 I actually was seeing on Twitter now, like

• 49:43Chris Dixon?

  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 going to, you know, survive copyright lawsuits, but people will invent new stuff that, you know, that they invented. 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, VR game or a world or something. So I think, I think you might see like kind of the resurgence of older devices like that. There's all this kind of more crazy futuristic stuff happening with like, you know, Neuralink, brain computer interfaces, obviously vehicles, you know, like I've been talking earlier about drones and obviously cars, self-driving cars are widespread. Yeah, I think you'll see, I'm hoping you'll see kind of this resurgence of kind of home brew hacking.

• 50:29Chris Dixon?

  You know, I anecdotally have 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. 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.

• 50:55Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 50:56Chris Dixon?

  So, you know, that would be cool. I don't know what else.

• 50:59Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I mean, architecture, I have a friend, I shouldn't name, but he'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.

• 51:13Marc Andreessen?

  I think the new models are capable of doing what they call a design for manufacturing, the final diagrams and specs to be able to send to a factory, which is very hard to do normally as part of the manufacturing process. I think the models can just do that now.

• 51:26Marc Andreessen?

  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.

• 51:39Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. Is it worth saying more about your idea that, you know, AI right now is really in single player mode and there's opportunity, you know, for machine age networks?

• 51:46Chris Dixon?

  Sure. I mean, I mean, just the simple idea, right, 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 where like these little flashlights and other kinds of sort of simple, single, single player apps, something you use on your phone. And then 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. 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

• 52:31Chris Dixon?

  you're typing and getting responses. There's some like little minor like 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, 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 case, you know, you also saw, I think a swarm is one of the things that solved one of the math theorems. 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 scientific breakthrough, you might, 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

• 53:16Chris Dixon?

  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, it seems like it might be a fertile area for entrepreneurs.

• 53:35Erik Torenberg?

  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 Harvard and Dresden 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.

• 53:58Chris Dixon?

  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?

• 54:03Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it.

• 54:05Chris Dixon?

  Well, humans, it's 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, and it's, you know, like, 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 happened 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 I was, I'm grateful to them.

• 54:41Chris Dixon?

  And, 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. So I think being, and it doesn't have to, 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, yeah, kind of the obvious thing to do. I don't know what you.

• 55:06Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I think, I think a lot of other fields are going to be revolutionized, right? So I mean, just to, you know, the field, 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 verb scrolls and, you know, there may be entire new schools of philosophy to get, you know, discovered to study classics, you know, the things, you know, lost, lost books. Economics, I just have a, have lunch with an economics professor and like the whole field of economics is going to be, is going to be transformed around this.

• 55:31Chris Dixon?

  Biology.

• 55:32Marc Andreessen?

  Biology, yeah, exactly. Direct discovery, design, by the way, design, you know, we talk about movies, but also just broadly, broadly design, creativity of all kinds, all the, all the, all the forms of art, music.

• 55:41Ben Horowitz?

  The zoology, you're going to know what the animals are saying.

• 55:45Marc Andreessen?

  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?

• 55:51Ben Horowitz?

  Animal psychology will be actually real.

• 55:54Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah. So like, okay, like dog, you know, I don't know, like dog, you know, dog training is going to take on a whole new thing when they, you know, actually understand what the, what the fuck the dog is saying, right?

• 56:02Chris Dixon?

  I think there's an X prize for that.

• 56:04Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:05Chris Dixon?

  It's like a, it's like a.

• 56:09Ben Horowitz?

  And they're, they're definitely, I mean, anybody who has a dog know they talk.

• 56:15Ben Horowitz?

  They're in some weird language, you know, but they definitely are saying something.

• 56:19Marc Andreessen?

  And certainly cats do.

• 56:21Erik Torenberg?

  I wait the entrepreneur listening to this who comes in with the pitch.

• 56:25Marc Andreessen?

  Totally, totally. And then, yeah, the other way I think about it, yeah, 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, his famous framework was there's, any new technology is received three different ways by three different age cohorts. If you're, if you're below the age of 15, it's just the natural way the world works. And I've told in other settings, the story of introducing my kid to chat GPT 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

• 57:10Marc Andreessen?

  the, 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.

• 57:18Ben Horowitz?

  I'll never answer the telephone.

• 57:21Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly, exactly. Old man yellow cloud is a recurring, 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, good, they create, like, look, 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, like, so the, 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.

• 57:58Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 57:58Marc Andreessen?

  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.

• 58:08Ben Horowitz?

  It's funny because adults keep saying, oh, well, what should the kids do? Like this is so hard to be a kid. It's like, no, no, no, 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, they're going to be able to enter fields that they could never enter before.

• 58:32Erik Torenberg?

  What I see in this conversation and your fun and your work more generally is to use another tool as kind of definite optimism, that the future is happening, it's going to happen. You know, a lot of the, what is science, we talked about science fiction is going to happen. It's a matter of when, and so we're going to bet early and maybe sometimes it'll be too early, but we're going to keep betting and as long as you, you know, keep, keep having that conviction, you know, it's going to work out.

• 58:55Chris Dixon?

  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 at our firm, like we're open minded and, and willing to, you know, to engage with those kinds of creative ideas. So, so I would say, you said definite optimism, I'm like optimism, but also I'd say humble, definite optimism or something intellectually humble.

• 59:39Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 59:39Chris Dixon?

  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 optimism and back them.

• 59:47Marc Andreessen?

  The entrepreneurs get to be definitely.

• 59:49Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 59:49Marc Andreessen?

  Yep.

• 59:50Erik Torenberg?

  That's a great place to wrap. Chris, thank you guys for coming on the podcast.

• 59:52Marc Andreessen?

  Good.

• 59:53Ben Horowitz?

  Thank you. All right. Okay. Thank you.

• 59:57Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z 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 again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 1:00:23Erik Torenberg?

  As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.