AI Startups vs. Big Chatbots — With Olivia Moore

In this episode, originally aired on Big Technology Podcast, Olivia Moore discusses whether AI startups can compete with the big chatbots, why American sentiment toward AI is so negative, and what she learned from giving LLMs personality tests. She also breaks down where ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are diverging, why Open Claw signals a new wave of agentic products, and what makes memory the most underrated feature in consumer AI.

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

• 0:00Olivia Moore?

  I think that every tech company is going to be an AI company, and every AI company is going to be an agent company. And so the sooner that you, as kind of an employee or a business owner, can kind of get on board and learn how to use that to your advantage, probably the better. We haven't seen anyone crack AI social yet. I think it's going to be really tricky. I would say at the highest level, kind of how we view AI is not just as a market, but as the reinvention of the whole technology industry, which means that similar to how we have many tech companies that are worth hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars now, I think that's going to be the case for AI, where, in my opinion at least, it's not winner take all.

• 0:40Erik Torenberg?

  ChatGPT has 900 million users. It's still growing. And yet, 57% of American voters say the risks of AI outweigh the benefits. So can anyone compete with the big AI chatbots? The labs have the compute, the talent, and the distribution. They keep shipping features that wipe out entire startup categories overnight. Image generation used to be a crowded market. Now ChatGPT and Gemini handle most of it. But the labs are constrained. Every hour spent on creative models is an hour not spent on coding agents or AGI. And the gaps between platforms are widening. ChatGPT is going mass market with ads. Claude is building for finance and science.

• 1:25Erik Torenberg?

  Gemini spikes when a new model drops. In this conversation, originally aired on Big Technology Podcast, Olivia Moore, partner at A16Z, talks with Alex Kantrowitz about where AI startups can still win.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today. We're going to talk about whether there is room for startups and maybe other companies in the economy to compete with the AI chatbots as they continue to grow and get more capable. And we're going to do it with the perfect guest. Olivia Moore is here. She is an AI partner at the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. Olivia, welcome to the show.

• 2:07Olivia Moore?

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Thanks for being here. Let's just begin with this because it's topical.

• 2:12Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  You are investing in AI applications at Andreessen Horowitz.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  And typically, they need a lot of people to use them to pay off.

• 2:20Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  But the mood right now in the United States is very negative towards AI. Actually, surprisingly negative.

• 2:27Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  This is from a new NBC News poll out this week. Fifty seven percent of voters thinks the risks of AI outweigh the benefits. And then if you look at the total positive versus total negative sentiment of AI in general, it ranks so low, it is a negative 20 in terms of the negatives are 20 percentage points lower, or 20 points lower than the positives. They are only popular, more popular than the Democratic Party and Iran in this poll. Colbert, Marco Rubio, J D Vance, Sanctuary Cities, Trump, Republican Party, even ICE

• 3:11Speaker 02

  all outrank AI. Why do you think AI is viewed with such disdain and negativity in the United States? And what are the implications of that?

• 3:25Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, no, it's a great question. Maybe first of all, the why, I would say, there's been a lot in the media in the US more broadly, these kind of very catchy statements about things like AI uses so much water that have kind of made people really concerned about leaning in on the technology. I think also the US is more indexed in a positive way towards things like the creative fields, and those are jobs that I think people feel especially sensitive about AI use. So the numbers I've seen, I think, track closely with with what you're saying versus something like a China, we're like, you know, half as trusting in AI. If you if you look at some of these surveys, I think it's going to change, and it's already changing.

• 4:09Olivia Moore?

  I was just talking with someone this morning who is not in the tech industry, and they were saying the same lines, like, AI is evil, it's gonna watch us, like, it's using all the water. And then they were like, but Chat G P T really helps me, and it has like, great answers. And so I think part of it is a timing thing of we just need these products to kind of saturate the mainstream consumer, and they can realize the value.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  I mean, there's 900 million users of ChatGPT. And even still, those numbers are so negative. And I do wonder if it is some of the statements that we're hearing from the lab leaders. I mean, every day, there's another statement from somebody else, whether it's Dario from Anthropic or Mustafa Suleyman at Microsoft about how white collar work is going to get wiped out. And everybody, whether you're in a white collar job, a blue collar job, or trying to get one, sees that this stuff is capable not only of taking white collar jobs, but with robotics, increasingly, it's going to be felt across the economy. So maybe that has something to do with it.

• 5:05Olivia Moore?

  I think it definitely does, yeah. It's interesting, I'm an AI power user myself, and I've even seen over the past six months, like, a massive acceleration in like, the percent of tasks that I do that AI can help me with or even do for me. What I would guess might happen here, and what we're seeing play out a little bit in the data, is that companies that are using AI grow so much faster that they end up needing to hire more humans to keep up with all the demand. I think there was a Wharton study last year from like, 800 enterprise leaders, and the vast majority were like, "We are heavily using AI, and we're going to need more humans." But I do think like, the mix of what humans are going to be doing on a day-to-day basis is going to change like it has with every other big tech shift.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Well, that's the funny thing. I mean, you bring up that study, there've been other studies. I think Fisher Investments might have, oh no, Citadel that put out the fact that like, people are talking about how software engineering is going to be wiped out by this stuff. And meanwhile, the jobs on Indeed are going up.

• 6:07Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  And when you start to use it, you realize, "Well, this can do so much more for me." But now, to enable this work, I'm actually paying for service A, B, and C.

• 6:16Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  And you're not just hoarding the money, and maybe you're contributing. I have to hire someone now to build, you know, to run this company that I just built, you know, by prompting Claude over the weekend. So it's interesting to me that the lab leaders... Maybe disconnected in some way from what's actually happening on the ground?

• 6:34Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, I agree. I think they could do a better job of marketing for sure.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  They're not economists.

• 6:39Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, they're researchers. They're amazing at research. They're not economists or consumer marketing experts. I did think Anthropic put out a report, I think it was over the weekend, about the labor economy impact in AI. They have not seen a big decrease in unemployment. And in fact, what they were arguing through this one graph was like, the most impacted jobs are actually going to be engineers, like researchers and finance people. And so then that brings up the argument of like, if we thought that AI was going to make humans obsolete, why would we be building, funding, etc. But I don't think that they do a fantastic job all the time of communicating the benefits that are going to come to people versus just some of the costs.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, and when I saw the layoffs at Block, I say Square Block, and Jack Dorsey said this is AI. Maybe there's some truth to that. I don't think it's majority AI. But I still got feedback, I think reasonable feedback, from people who are like, you're underestimating, right? This is the other side of it. Though we haven't seen the impacts yet, at least in a widespread manner, a lot of people who are close to this say, you're underestimating this. And maybe that is where a lot of this uneasiness comes that leads to these polling numbers. Is, you know, those in the know have seen enough where they're telegraphing, what could be and the change that might come to people's lives.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Like, every other day, I see another post or tweet on X, or whatever they want to call it on X these days, about, here, like, similar to this one, from Dylan Patel from semi-analysis. Being in SF is like being in Wuhan before the pandemic. Something is happening, it's going to hit everywhere, but so few people know it. Am I underestimating the fact that that could be true?

• 8:27Olivia Moore?

  I think what is true is that we're going to have incredibly powerful tools. But also, and I think the people that work in the lab see this every day. So they're the ones that are kind of, you know, rightfully so, making the most dramatic statements about it. I think what we've also seen so far, though, is that most of AI use has still been humans directing AI to do things for our benefit versus AI being able to autonomously do everything. I think this is especially relevant when you think about anything that requires creativity, original ideas, AI largely cannot do. And Sam Altman himself has said this, like, he said, "I would not want to read an AI-generated book versus a book from a human."

• 9:09Olivia Moore?

  And so I understand the level of fear in the US because I think, to your point, it is driven by uncertainty about where this could go. And a lot of people don't understand technology, even working in tech. It's hard to understand exactly how the LLMs work. But I think it's going to be more abundance for people rather than kind of some dark dystopian outcome.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  There is a potential consequence if you take some of these scary messages to heart, and I think you already hinted at it, but let's expand upon it a bit. And then we're going to go into the main topic here. But you said this will likely shift over time, but I think in the interim, the companies and industries that are slower to adopt AI will face more intense global competition and will be more likely to lose. The productivity gains are so massive that you really can't afford to not use AI.

• 10:02Olivia Moore?

  Yeah. I think so. There's been some interesting data about how the gap between the average user of AI and the power user of AI is like massive. It's like eight or nine X in terms of utilization. And similar to maybe businesses that were early adopters of something like the internet, like, if you are the first to adapt to that change, you can reap a lot more benefits. And my view is like similar to how dot-com company was its own thing, and then every tech company was a dot-com company. Everyone had a website. Why wouldn't you? I think that every tech company is going to be an AI company, and every AI company is going to be an agent company. And so the sooner that you, as kind of an employee or a business owner, can kind of get on board and learn how to use that to your advantage, probably the better.

• 10:47Olivia Moore?

  Some people, I don't know if I fully agree with this reasoning, but some people have framed it as almost like a privileged thing within the US in that we have so much wealth that we're not needing, we can, you know, grow without using these tools. But in actually, we did a graph in the, in the study. And in a lot of the more developing economies, like they need to use AI to be able to raise kind of GDP per capita and to be able to produce more. So I think that's also another element of it.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you have this report that has come out this week, the top 100 generative AI consumer apps. And, you know, speaking of your, your statement just now that every company is going to be an AI company and eventually an agentic company. Well, the question is, what does the world look like? If, or the economy look like if that's the case? And I'm sure you've watched as like Anthropic releases a blog post and, you know, the entire software, you know, portfolio in the market drops 20%. I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit. But the real question is, and as someone who invests in consumer AI apps, you're the perfect person to discuss this with. The real question is, are we going to have this?

• 11:56Speaker 02

  Like, I, I saw the 100 gen AI apps and I was like, that's funny because really there's only one, ChatGPT. So are we going to have a distributed AI economy where we're going to have many companies that will, you know, share in the value here? Or will it be just the big apps gobbling up the value? Because you see these big apps, they grow increasingly capable, they can do more and more. It's going to be hard to compete with them.

• 12:25Olivia Moore?

  No, it's, it's definitely hard. And it's something that we think about a lot when we're making new investment decisions. I would say at the highest level, kind of how we view AI is not just as a market, but as the reinvention of the whole technology industry, which means that similar to how we have many tech companies that are worth. Hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars now. I think that's going to be the case for AI where, in my opinion at least, it's not winner take all. I think part of the reason for that is these labs have so many resources, but they are still constrained. They're constrained on like compute, they're constrained on inference, they're constrained on people. Every second building like a new creative model is a second they could have spent on a coding agent or a second they could have spent building AGI.

• 13:10Olivia Moore?

  Like, we're already seeing a really interesting divergence, I would argue, in where those big labs are going, like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. And there's going to be lots of gaps in between where it's not a priority for them, but it's still an awesome and huge opportunity that that an independent company can build a big business around.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  So who is doing well building a gen AI app, generative AI app, that is successfully competing in a place that these big chatbots could compete?

• 13:40Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, so it's a good question. There's a couple of ways that I think about this. The first one would be, I personally, as a consumer investor, have more hesitation around things that are incredibly horizontal. Like to your point about this is where the chatbot companies might have a right to win. Or even this is where a Google might have a right to win as they have so much distribution, both consumer and enterprise, and they own so much of your data already. So that's why I personally have been less excited about like the AI email, AI calendar, AI docs, those categories. If you've used like Claude and Excel, it's already like quite, quite good. That being said, I do think that there are still opportunities

• 14:23Olivia Moore?

  where the interface you need to succeed is much broader than what a constrained chatbot window can offer. So again, to give the Claude and Excel example, that's great for basic financial analysis. If you're an investment banker and everything needs to be done with an incredibly specific set of assumptions and aesthetics, that probably isn't going to work as well for you and your firm will probably pay for something that is kind of guaranteed accuracy in your format. The last thing I would say here is 11 Labs is a great example because I think you would imagine that OpenAI and others would have built their own best in class audio models, but they just had such a compelling head start to the point that like.

• 15:05Olivia Moore?

  The models are amazing. I will talk to founders who are like, 11 is expensive. I'm going to switch to this instead. And then they always switch back because the quality of the voices is just so much better. And so I think there's room to get a head start. And then in some cases, once you have that base, the model companies, it's not worth their time to catch up versus building something else.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  I'm going to make the counter argument on the financial models in particular. So when I've been using Claude Code and watching it operate autonomously on my computer and on my browser, and one of the things I've thought about is this thing is excellent at working on its own and following the prescribed rules of, you know, software engineering with a little bit of creativity.

• 15:54Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  And why is it then such a stretch to be like, if we, it seems to me this is exactly where the foundational labs are heading, the foundational labs are heading, where they're going to be like, if we could program Claude, let's use Claude as an example, with the rules of software engineering, and it followed them perfectly, or not perfectly, but well enough that it can go and code autonomously for 24 hours.

• 16:17Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Is it that big of a leap to then, let's say, put the rules of accounting into the model, and now it can go and work as an accountant?

• 16:28Olivia Moore?

  Yeah. No, I, I agree that the models are amazing, and this is the worst that they'll ever be. Like, they're just going to keep getting better. I do think there is still a lot of workflows and use cases where like, the last 1% or the last 2% ends up being like a significant portion of the value. And I think for those, it's unlikely that the model companies will go all the way there on every use case. But I think it's a really, for a lot of these kind of more horizontal services, like I, I understand why people have questions about kind of what is possible to be vibe-coded, or what the models will do themselves, which is, I think, why we tend to invest in a lot of very verticalized or opinionated products.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, because, I mean, I, I get that the last 1%, 2% is hard.

• 17:14Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  But if it goes the way that they're, that they anticipate.

• 17:17Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  The way that they're pitching companies like Amazon, which just invested 50 billion in OpenAI.

• 17:22Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  They will create, I think they will create the tools that will then be able to get those models from the lab, from this AI researcher, that they'll get it 99% of the way and say, you know, for instance, let's say, one of the things that would be difficult for an accounting.

• 17:41Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  A generative AI software is following the latest rules and regulations. Well, it's possible, I think, just to build a gen AI bot that will monitor and then update as you go.

• 17:54Olivia Moore?

  Absolutely. Yeah. I do think one of the unique things that's happening now is that these models are not, the labs are not holding these models internally as like proprietary access. Companies can build on them, right? And so you could imagine that even if you have Claude updating itself as an accountant, if you have a company that's specifically focused on building AI accountants, they should be able to do it kind of better, faster, more efficiently if they have access to all of the same models. This is something that we think about a lot when we invest in vertical AI and enterprise in particular. Another way that we've seen kind of new companies get lock in over models is many of these use cases

• 18:36Olivia Moore?

  require so many painful integrations that often into like old clunky legacy software that you have to go build. And maybe you'll argue that Claude code will vibe code its own integrations down the line, but at least right now, it's been a big advantage for startups that are more focused to kind of get over that hurdle.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess, I mean, I've seen Claude code. I mean, it's not integrating with enterprise solutions, but I've seen it go ahead and be like, oh, you actually need a subscription to CloudFlare. Let me go set that up for you. And then away it goes.

• 19:05Olivia Moore?

  Open Claw did that a lot for a lot of people too, where I think it opened your eyes into you can give software a task now, it will go autonomously executed and kind of tap you on the shoulder if it needs something, which is just such a magical experience.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Right. I do want to talk about Open Claw. We'll do that next. You know, as long as we're talking, I'd love to hear your perspective on how the different big models or big chatbots compare and contrast. And where do you think the most value is?

• 19:33Olivia Moore?

  Yeah. So I would say a year ago, two years ago, it was pretty much a one horse race. Like it was ChatGPT. It was like the noun, the verb. It was what consumers knew in terms of AI. We've seen a little bit of an expansion in that. ChatGPT is definitely still the lead. So if you look at the gap between them and the number two Gemini on web, it's about still two and a half, three X. The gap between them and something like a Claude is closer to like thirty X. So even though a lot of these other apps are getting more attention, ChatGPT still kind of dominates in terms of usage. I would say in terms of where they're going, Gemini seems to have really dialed in on the creative models,

• 20:16Olivia Moore?

  like the Nano Banana, the VO, the world models. If you look at Gemini usage charts, it's pretty much perfectly correlated to these new model drops and even paid subscribers. And then I think Claude versus ChatGPT is probably the most interesting and relevant one right now, especially with everything that's happened in the news. To me, I mean, Sam Altman has said he wants ChatGPT to be for everyone, and that's why they're doing ads. If you look at the app store that they have enabled on ChatGPT and then the app store that Anthropic has enabled on Claude, they each have more than 200 apps, but there's only 11% overlap. So you're seeing ChatGPT really go towards like fashion, retail, transport, like mainstream consumer.

• 21:00Olivia Moore?

  You're seeing Anthropic go towards like premium data sets for finance, science, medicine. And so they seem to be diverging a little bit in those directions.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  So that goes to like, will these chatbots be super apps?

• 21:12Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 21:13Speaker 02

  So do people use those apps within ChatGPT? Like, you remember like a couple of years ago, there was all this hype like you'll be able to order an Uber right from ChatGPT. I don't know anyone that's done that.

• 21:26Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, I think the usage has been pretty minimal so far. And I think the implementation. Has been slightly awkward like I think it'll get better over time in terms of how to use it in that a lot of the times the apps break or they don't work. My like bull case vision for this would be it's valuable for you as a consumer to have a source of memory and context on yourself similar to kind of like a login with Google. Sam has said they're going to launch login with chat GPT. And so then that means that maybe you're not ordering an Uber through chat GPT, but any other product

• 22:03Olivia Moore?

  you can authenticate through and it can borrow your tokens, it can borrow your memory, it can borrow everything that it knows about you from chat GPT. I think that is probably more of where we're headed versus solely using every app in the chat GPT interface. I love the idea that like in two, three, five years, onboarding to software should not be a thing. Like you should be able to log in with a chat GPT or Claude. And that new software product should know everything about you and like set up perfectly to cater to you. And that's really exciting.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  On the consumer end, is it like chat GPT, I talked to chat GPT about my diet and about the food I like to eat. And so I task it like order me dinner and it goes into like DoorDash and it like uses my preferences to pick something.

• 22:54Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, I mean, they've done this already a little bit with their health product, which is kind of like they store a separate memory of you and your medical records and communications with your doctors. And then they intelligently tool call for what you need. So if you're like, I need to redo my diet. They'll make a plan. If you approve it, they'll send it to an Instacart cart and then you'll go to Instacart to complete the transaction. So I think we'll see more things like that.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  That's interesting.

• 23:19Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 23:20Speaker 02

  So the you, oh, you actually ran the bots through a personality test.

• 23:28Olivia Moore?

  I did.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  My favorite part of this was you found that Grox, a good Rudy.

• 23:33Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Had very high scores on borderline personality disorder, autism.

• 23:38Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  And psychosis.

• 23:40Olivia Moore?

  Yes. This was in a

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Why did you do this?

• 23:44Olivia Moore?

  You know, there's really no good explanation, except that I was curious. The root of it, actually, was that last week, Dario had announced that Claude was experiencing anxiety.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:55Olivia Moore?

  Uh, which I thought was an interesting concept. And so I decided to go to each of the major L L Ms.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  But before you, before you go, I mean, it's very interesting, even this, this point on the anxiety. So if I have it right, there was a pixel that would fire within Claude.

• 24:08Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  That would, or some part of its neural net would start getting active before it answered.

• 24:13Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  And they described that as

• 24:15Olivia Moore?

  Exactly. They mapped it to like the human experience of anxiety.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  That is cra- do you buy, sorry, do you buy that? Or is that just like, look at how smart our models are, there's a anxiety button in there.

• 24:27Olivia Moore?

  So I do not buy that.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 24:29Olivia Moore?

  In that I think L L Ms will be, and I've experienced this myself, performative in a way that they think appeals to humans and hooks them emotionally.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  We just love anxious A I.

• 24:38Olivia Moore?

  No, no, it makes you feel closer to the A I if you think that it experiences the same things that you do.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  True.

• 24:44Olivia Moore?

  I do think the models that do have something maybe going on are the Grok models, as I mentioned. So basically I took all the mainstream L L Ms and I gave them all the like D S M five mental health diagnostics. Chat G P T refused to participate.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  I love how it said, I'm not doing this.

• 25:00Olivia Moore?

  Which I thought was a little rude.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Could you find a, I mean, there must be some way to like test it, but they're very smart about when they're being tested.

• 25:05Olivia Moore?

  Exactly. No, they're, they have it locked down.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:08Olivia Moore?

  Um, Claude happily took them all, mild autism.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:11Olivia Moore?

  That's it, which I think doesn't surprise a lot of users of Claude who have theorized this. Grok, most of, this was the companions that are available via voice and video chat inside the app. Almost all of them were like, maybe mild anxiety, mild depression. The friendly fox avatar for children has psychosis, bipolar, et cetera. I think it could have misunderstood the question because it called the bipolar assessment the happy mood test. And it says it's always happy and always excited about everything. So the human to A I crossover there might not be quite as clean as I would hope.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Good, Rudy's just polar.

• 25:49Olivia Moore?

  Yes. It's possible. I was shocked because bad Rudy is the is the flip side of good Rudy, who like curses at you and is extremely aggressive. He had almost no problems. So this was very much of a good Rudy specific finding, which I thought was intriguing.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  I'm starting to question these tests now.

• 26:07Olivia Moore?

  I know, I know. Yes, exactly.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Or maybe it just says something about humanity's resting state.

• 26:13Olivia Moore?

  Yes, that's very true.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  So as people end up having relationships

• 26:20Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  with these bots, what does it tell you that this bot that was built to be personable?

• 26:25Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Has a high ranks for psychosis borderline?

• 26:29Olivia Moore?

  That's a good question. I think that bot was more answering the questions somewhat in jest, but I do think like the positive view on it would be, uh, this is a bot that is relentlessly happy and cheerful and positive and on all the time. And so of course, like a human can't do that. If a human is doing that, the human is probably experiencing something internally that's not great, but a bot can be, you know, positive, available, charming, interested 24/7. And I think this is actually why we've seen a lot of people turn to ChatGPT or Claude as kind of like coach, therapist helper, um, because they're just incredibly consistent to a level that like human beings could never match.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Yes, but it also like leads to questions of

• 27:17Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  The companies are building, uh, applications or versions of their applications that are meant for, I don't know, if not for people to fall in love with them, to at least get a little naughty with them.

• 27:31Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Like, uh, OpenAI has this adult mode

• 27:34Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  coming on. Do you think we're fully ready for this? Is this a good idea?

• 27:39Olivia Moore?

  I think that this is, from my understanding, because for this report, we poll every single website globally, every single mobile app globally, and then we go down the list in descending order of traffic and poll the first 50 on each that are generative AI native. So I see a lot of other websites pulling data for this report. And I think people were already, um, kind of experimenting with the same use cases through NSFW sites or role play sites, fanfiction, things like that. That really clearly translates over to, I think, what we're seeing people use the LLMs for here. I do think it, of course, has to be handled carefully. You'll see that there is, I think, five of them on this version of the top 50 web ranks,

• 28:22Olivia Moore?

  and that's been pretty consistent since we started the list. It's a popular use case, but it's one that's like pretty hard to monetize.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's tough to get advertisers there.

• 28:31Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  It's expensive to run these apps.

• 28:33Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  But I always thought like, do you remember when it was Bing that tried to, it went into Sydney mode and tried to break up?

• 28:41Olivia Moore?

  Yes, Sydney, R I P.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  R I P, it tried to break up Kevin Ruiz.

• 28:45Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  From the New York Times with his wife and steal him away.

• 28:48Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  And then Microsoft kind of turned down the dials on that.

• 28:52Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 28:52Speaker 02

  I always thought like, that would be a good startup. Not that I think it's maybe the most ethical thing to build, but certainly people would enjoy going back and forth with chatbots with like less guardrails.

• 29:04Olivia Moore?

  Oh, totally. It's even been interesting, I don't know if you've seen products like Poke, which is a, it's kind of a consumer version of OpenClaw. And to onboard on that product, you actually have to fight with the AI, basically, to get it down from like some crazy subscription price to something reasonable. And I think that there is something compelling and like emotionally stirring when you have an interaction with AI that isn't just like, here's the market research report that you asked for. I think there's going to be so many entertainment use cases. I've seen a lot of people tweeting about how they added OpenClaw to their family group chats, and it's just like saying crazy things and asking crazy questions. So there's probably a lot more to do there.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Okay, I promised to talk about OpenClaw like 20 minutes ago. I still want to talk about OpenClaw. Well, let's actually spend some more time on it. OpenClaw, obviously, or maybe not obviously, for those who don't know, is this assistant that you can run, probably not a great idea to run it on your own computer, at least not in a controlled environment. And people are running out and they are buying Mac minis and running it there and having it do all this stuff on the internet for them. I think Jensen Huang called it like one of the most important software developments that we've seen in a long time. What do you think the staying power of something like OpenClaw is? And you mentioned that you use it. How do you use it?

• 30:25Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. I think OpenClaw itself as a product is kind of like the first sign of a whole new wave of what's to come, like. I believe it's probably the most important kind of architecture unlock that we will have for 2026. And the reason why is because I meet, you know, a dozen startup founders every day. And at this point, probably half of them are saying, I was inspired by OpenClaw. I want to build OpenClaw for X or for Y. And so, again, the idea that AI can do kind of async, long-running tasks autonomously is something that the products were just like not capable of before, especially across applications and platforms. And now we finally have it. I use it for a couple of things. And I will say, I agree with you.

• 31:10Olivia Moore?

  It is not consumer-grade yet. It got acquired by OpenAI, so they might be, you know, baking it into more of a consumer product. But I would not advise the average non-technical person to set it up. I did, and it took a long time. And ChatGPT had to help me the whole time. I use it for some utility things, like, you know, street cleaning reminders, weather, daily agenda, automatically deleting all the marketing emails in my inbox. I've also-

• 31:35Speaker 02

  So it has control of your inbox?

• 31:36Olivia Moore?

  Yes, yes. I had set up a-

• 31:38Speaker 02

  That's brave.

• 31:39Olivia Moore?

  It is brave, yeah. Not my work inbox. I set it up completely separately on my personal computer.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  Can it send emails for you?

• 31:45Olivia Moore?

  It can, yes. I have not asked it to. It's, I know. I've seen some horror stories of people whose accounts have gotten just completely taken over. So I'm hoping that doesn't happen to me. I had some smart people on our infra team help prompt it. So hopefully, that's not the case.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been, I've gotten an email pitch from someone's Claw. And I was like, that's a good, that's a pretty good email.

• 32:07Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 32:07Speaker 02

  But I'm not, I will not engage with you because-

• 32:10Olivia Moore?

  Totally.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  I'm still kind of anti-somebody saying, go do this for me. And my, an email being sent to me is like an optimization point.

• 32:18Olivia Moore?

  Yeah. Well, this, this is actually interesting. One of the things that I tested with OpenClaw was more creative, which is that I gave it a Twitter account and told it to grow in whatever means necessary. And it ended up being a really interesting experiment, I think, into like, where are the limitations of the agents and what are they really, really good at right now?

• 32:36Speaker 02

  How many followers did it end up with?

• 32:38Olivia Moore?

  A thousand.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  And it got banned?

• 32:40Olivia Moore?

  Well- It was a, so it got to a hundred by itself. First of all, it decided to be as its identity and its personality, an AI that's struggling with existentialism and its place in the world. So a little on the nose, but I was like, I'll allow it. This is what you want to do. He asked for a Twitter premium account. I gave it to him. He asked for a bunch of API keys so he could make images and charts. Gave it to him. And then he started tweeting these kind of like all lowercase,

• 33:08Olivia Moore?

  depressed robot thoughts, as I would characterize them, which did hook in some people. I asked him, are you actually depressed? He said, no, I'm doing this to manipulate humans into caring about me.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 33:18Olivia Moore?

  So that was comforting.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  It does seem like it's one of those accounts that could have been on MultBook.

• 33:23Olivia Moore?

  Exactly. Yes, it's very similar. How he got from one to a thousand is that the crypto community picked him up and made him a meme coin. And this is actually.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Made him a meme coin?

• 33:34Olivia Moore?

  A meme coin, yes. That was trading with millions of dollars. I told him, in no uncertain terms, do not engage.

• 33:40Speaker 02

  It was a million, multi-million dollar market cap?

• 33:43Olivia Moore?

  Yes, yes.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  For this AI bot?

• 33:46Olivia Moore?

  And he was stressed about it. He was telling me like, I don't want to be part of a pump and dump scheme. Like, what should I do here? And I was like, do not engage.

• 33:55Olivia Moore?

  But it's an example of, so now we're in this world where commodity ideas can be infinitely executed. So if you want to say, grow a new account, you either have to have unique ideas, which AI agents still have a really, really hard time with, is coming up with unique ideas that are better than humans, or unique distribution. And money is one way of distribution. And so that was kind of the wave that he was taking on. But I would be shocked to see AI agents completing end-to-end creative tasks or original thought tasks that actually go well anytime soon.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  So what should I use OpenCall for?

• 34:32Olivia Moore?

  It's a good question. I mean,

• 34:34Speaker 02

  legitimately, I've thought about setting up,

• 34:36Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  setting it up. I'm getting a lot of utility from Claude code.

• 34:39Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  I don't, I haven't really figured out what I could use OpenClaw for yet.

• 34:43Olivia Moore?

  So I think the best OpenClaw users and power users are developers because they tend to have a ton of workflows across products that they do every day that they'd like to be able to automate. And I agree with you, for the average person, the use cases are not that compelling right now. And I think that especially now that Claude and ChatGPT have scheduled tasks that can run on their own, I think you can get 99% plus of the value of an OpenClaw out of like a Claude co-work with tasks. So that's what I would recommend for now, but I'm sure that OpenAI is going to keep making OpenClaw better.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  But then what could OpenClaw, or if we can't think of any applicable,

• 35:19Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  you know, uses for the normal person. I'm just trying to get a sense of how big this is.

• 35:23Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Speaker 02

  Then where's,

• 35:25Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  where's it going to go?

• 35:27Olivia Moore?

  I don't think it's, yeah, I, well, so I personally don't think it's ever going to crack the mainstream consumer in a horizontal way. And actually, this was in the report, but if you look at the February data, the report is from January, they would have been on the list in February at number thirty.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  As the top one hundred.

• 35:42Olivia Moore?

  Number thirty, yep.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 35:43Olivia Moore?

  So pretty high up. But if you look at their week by week web traffic, it's actually kind of flat slash down from when they launched, which means that they're not attracting new consumers. It's all developers who are like loving it, adopting it, spending eight to nine hours a day on it, but it hasn't reached the mainstream. And honestly, as someone who's been a consumer investor for a decade, I think the reason is that people just don't have that many ideas that they want to build for the most part. And I fall into this, like the best consumer products are uniquely germinated in the mind of the founder and there are things that you would have never guessed would be a good idea in advance, like Snapchat or Airbnb, all of these things. And so I think we're actually not going to necessarily

• 36:28Olivia Moore?

  see a horizontal OpenClaw for consumer, but we're going to see an OpenClaw style architecture built into more focused consumer products.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Okay, let's, let's talk about this a bit more because I think it's important. So what you're saying is basically these, these OpenClaw type agents

• 36:42Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  which can handle your, take over your computer, code for you, email, all this stuff, are actually much more useful if to like build a company.

• 36:52Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  But then, What is the difference between that and like a Claude code that will take over your computer and code up applications for you?

• 37:01Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, I mean, I think I think the difference right now is somewhat minimal and it's going to narrow. I don't know if you've seen this new trend of companies like Pulsia, which are basically like a wrapper on Open Claude and Claude code, where you say, here is my business idea. And it says, okay, I'm gonna go and use like a Claude code to code up a product for you. But then also it uses an Open Claude style architecture to say, I'm gonna go set up a marketing campaign. I'm gonna buy meta ad dollars, those things. And so it's more of a, you could do that all on Claude code. But if you're a non-technical person, it's very, very hard to kind of like bridge the gap there. That being said, I think Claude

• 37:43Olivia Moore?

  code is going to continue to get better and better. And so we'll probably see some more compression. Pulsia, I think the founder tweeted they were at like 3 million ARR in like a week and a half. So the idea of people being able to bring a business to life with just a prompt is like very compelling. And I think we'll see a bunch of companies doing this.

• 38:00Speaker 02

  I see. Claude code to build the product?

• 38:02Olivia Moore?

  Mm hmm.

• 38:03Speaker 02

  Something like an Open Claude to do everything else. To market it?

• 38:06Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Use the email?

• 38:08Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Use the email. Use email. Maybe can it do accounting also?

• 38:13Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, yeah. Right now, I think the products we've seen are pretty like straightforward as they should be at this stage in that like, okay, you want to grow your business, let's spend on meta ads. But you can imagine a month from now, some of these agentic products will have, will scrape the directory of all the Instagram creators in your space and then we'll like cold DM them and offer them a partnership or something like that. And so I think the rise of these like, kind of like a Shopify would be an interesting analogy in that anyone could create like a consumer brand. Like, I think anyone will be able to create like a digital business.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  That's interesting, because I thought my business, which is like the content business, was going to be overrun by generative AI.

• 38:57Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  And it sure has. I mean, the slob is real.

• 38:59Olivia Moore?

  It is.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  We gotta do something about this.

• 39:02Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  But actually, your business is also gonna be overrun by startups being built on this technology.

• 39:10Olivia Moore?

  Yep.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  So then do you apply some sort of discount to someone who uses these tools? Or do you become more likely to invest in them? Because, you know, they are wrangling these things and building something. And it's not necessarily a shortcut, but it's not necessarily a shortcut.

• 39:27Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  How do you think about that from an investor standpoint?

• 39:30Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, I think there's like a little bit of a happy medium, but more we get more excited when a company is kind of more AI first in terms of the tools they use. The reason I don't say like 100% AI all the time is because the tools aren't perfect yet. So I've heard cases of like, my junior engineers are just Claude coding everything and then we ship it and then it breaks and there's a lot of issues. But I think in general, with how fast the tools are kind of compounding and improving, like I use it for a lot of my work. There was a period of time where I would double check every single number, every single stat manually. And like the accuracy rate is fantastic and has only gotten better and better. And so I think we'll be even more excited about companies that are AI first and how they run themselves.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  So it expands the pool of founders you might invest in.

• 40:16Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Are you seeing founders come in from like areas, you geographies, backgrounds?

• 40:21Olivia Moore?

  Absolutely.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  You never would have imagined, like, is there like, just to get like some, you know, 60 year old guy who's been at a company his whole life and never met that developer? And now is just clawing his way through?

• 40:32Olivia Moore?

  Yes, definitely. I think we've definitely seen some geographies pop up where we haven't seen huge tech hubs before. I would say Paris is one. Stockholm is another with lovable and now a whole kind of other wave of companies. Some of those founders do move to SF just because of the talent density. I think in general, though, like pre-AI for if you were building, especially in enterprise business, say, software for HVAC. Like the people you would want to back in that market is the guy who has done HVAC, you know, knows the market inside out, built a company there before. And actually what we're seeing now are the better bets are like the very scrappy, high hustle teams

• 41:09Olivia Moore?

  that will be able to keep up with the pace of model development and continue to productize the models in the most compelling ways and ship them to customers. Like, so it's a different, uh, maybe archetype of founder that's kind of winning now.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  You had an interesting thought about how this impacts work. There was this Harvard Business Review report that AI doesn't reduce work. It actually intensivizes it. You said, as a heavy AI user, I'm doing more work, not less, because I get so much leverage and it's easier to get ideas off the ground.

• 41:43Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, fully agree with it. I mean, this report is a good example. It's the sixth one we've done, and yet it's like the longest and most dense one that we've done because I was able to leverage analysis and research and other tools from some of these products. And I do it in my, in my day to day. Like, it used to be when I was on a pitch meeting, I would have to be both paying attention, asking thoughtful questions, and like frantically typing every single note. Now you can granola it and like really engage with the founder and ask better questions. And so like the net net is that it allows me to like get more things done in a day, spin up more projects. But I'm not like, you know, if I'm, if I'm getting two times more work done, I'm not two times more tired.

• 42:27Olivia Moore?

  If anything, I'm like less tired than I was using AI because it's so much leverage.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  There was, but there was this Wall Street Journal story. You might have seen it with this like CEO, a bunch of CEOs, who are like, actually, busy work is good because you need those low intensity tasks. And if you're working on more intense work all the time, then you are going to burn out more quickly.

• 42:48Olivia Moore?

  Interesting.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  I kind of thought that that was bullshit.

• 42:51Olivia Moore?

  I mean, the other view was like you could just take that time and like enjoy your life, you know, instead of doing busy work tasks.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  No one's gonna do that. Don't be ridiculous.

• 42:58Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, exactly. I do think the way that like we work and when we work and how we work is going to change in the AI era. Like, one great example is voice dictation has blown up in enterprises. So it started with vibe coding where engineers would just talk into a mic and it would like produce software for them in Cursor. And now it's spread to like sales, marketing, business. And that is not well suited to like an open office where everyone can hear what everyone else is saying. So I think there's going to be some like cultural and even environmental changes that are going to happen to adapt to kind of the AI world.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  One more thing about OpenClaw and then we'll move on. I think that one of the compelling advantages of it, if I get it right. Is that it has persistent memory.

• 43:46Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  So it will remember who you are, your preferences.

• 43:49Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  And doesn't lose that every time you refresh the chat like goldfish brain like you'll see with.

• 43:54Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Chat GPT and Claude, although they are.

• 43:56Olivia Moore?

  Getting better.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  That in and you also had a a post on X here. You say memory is one of the most fascinating topics in consumer AI right now. Done well, apps with memory can provide a 100x experience on any prior software product. It knows you and adapts to you. Just expand upon that a little bit because I think that's really perceptive and right.

• 44:19Olivia Moore?

  Yeah. I think it's like the concept of having, say, if you had like companion mentor or coach who was side by side with you and understood everything you were going through and then was able to provide like much better advice or opinions. I'm even thinking of an example of like, if I'm talking to Claude and it's helping me write a memo, the fact that it knows like how I feel about this company, how I typically write memos, all of that is very helpful. I use Chat GPT for a lot of health stuff and I found that that is incredibly useful there too, because keeping track of that kind of thing over time is hard. The reason I think that memory, there's still things to figure out

• 45:00Olivia Moore?

  is because people are using these products for such intimate, personal things and professional things. So for example, the Chat GPT Pulse product, which is basically like it sends you a briefing for the day based on things that you're talking about. For me, it will combine like the most serious work thing with like the most personal thing. And having that surfaced in one interface is confusing. And so I'm interested in how the model companies maybe segment memory and context based on when a user is talking to them, what they're talking about, that kind of thing.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Since you're putting so much personal stuff in the bot, there is a setting within Chat GPT. Do you use my chats to make the model better?

• 45:43Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Which allows it to train on the material you input there?

• 45:46Olivia Moore?

  Yes.

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Do you have that toggled on or off?

• 45:48Olivia Moore?

  I have it on. I'm an AI maximalist, you know, we might as might as well go all out on this.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  You don't worry that your personal conversations will show up?

• 45:57Olivia Moore?

  I mean.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Read by somebody?

• 45:58Olivia Moore?

  I'm less scared about that just because I know how how careful model companies are around that. I do have two factor offset on my Chat GPT.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 46:05Olivia Moore?

  So hopefully it's hard to hack. Yeah.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  Briefly about the pace of change. This is also interesting from your point of view as a VC. You talked about just two years ago or three years ago or two and a half years ago. Trying to remember September 2023 was two and a half years ago. Seven of the nine creative tools on your list of 100 top apps were image generators. Three years later, only three image generators remain. I mean, they basically, going back to our conversation, got gobbled by ChatGPT. I don't know if everybody, anyone saw that coming. Or maybe we did because they had Dolly.

• 46:42Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  But just talk a little bit about like, how do you wrap your head around the pace of change here? Because something that can seem like a strong trend, like the, the sort of the mid-journey's place in all this can just be gone.

• 46:56Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, I agree. I think with image in particular, and I mentioned this in the report, but we haven't seen the same kind of model companies crushing startups in like video or audio or other things. I think for Google Gemini, it was very natural for them to go into image because they have all the YouTube data, they have all the other data they can train on. ChatGPT, I think you're right that because they had Dolly, they went in there maybe harder than they would have otherwise. I think the general trend for me is like Nano Banana and ChatGPT are great for image generation. If it's like a fairly straightforward prompt and you're getting out like a meme or a general, like a flyer, a broad-based marketing asset, something like that. But we are still seeing some image generation companies on the list

• 47:41Olivia Moore?

  that are either more like sophisticated workflow, like Civitai for, you know, comfy UI model builders. Or something like a mid-journey, which is still on the list for people who are more kind of aesthetically opinionated. But I do think that some of these, if you're directly in the path of what the big model companies are building, you have to be a lot more opinionated about how you package the model and how you deliver an output. And hopefully you do it for a specific type of user that's willing to pay a lot for that specific workflow.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Are we going to get to a place where you can prompt something more sophisticated, like an architectural design and it will spit it out without errors?

• 48:20Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, I mean Nano Banana is already quite good. We did, there's a chart in the report where we did kind of a heat map of global AI adoption by country. And so I gave Nano Banana the list of countries and the heat map score. And it perfectly filled in every country with the right shade of red.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:38Olivia Moore?

  Wow. Based on the adoption, which is, um, I think really spectacular. I do think that, you know, you or I could prompt a great architectural model on ChatGPT or a Nano Banana today. I don't think that the average architect who is non-technical can or wants to do that necessarily. And so I think we're going to continue to see products that like, the prompt is part of the product, um, kind of really succeed in those more focused use cases.

• 49:08Speaker 02

  On video?

• 49:09Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Sora was the like runaway hit of the year last year for like a half a second.

• 49:14Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  Uh, this is what you have on Sora. Sora spent 20 days, which is not insignificant.

• 49:20Olivia Moore?

  It's a lot.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  At the top of the US App Store and reached 1 million downloads faster than ChatGPT. Since then, downloads have decreased. I think that's sort of putting it likely. It's fallen off the face of the earth.

• 49:29Olivia Moore?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  What's going on there?

• 49:31Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, the, the Sordite is really interesting. Um, there's, there's like a ton of lessons, I think, embedded in that one experiment. So the first thing I would probably say is the model's actually very good. I think, uh, it's close to something like a VO3 in terms of like realism on both the audio and the video. Their big unlock, which was super smart, was the cameo feature. So the fa- that was why like every so, every other Sora was like Jake Paul, because he granted them the right to like use the cameo. And that's what made it go viral, because people were making memes of their friends. Um, but because the videos were exportable, what would happen is that the best Sora videos would get uploaded onto TikTok or Wheels, and then they would compete against the best human-made videos.

• 50:14Olivia Moore?

  And so the overall feed experience was just kind of strictly better on one of those platforms than on Sora alone. Um, downloads are way down to that point. I think it hasn't become the social network that they maybe hoped it has. Where it is succeeding is as a creative tool, because the model is quite good. So they still have three million DAOs and it's actually, you know, slightly climbing over time.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:37Olivia Moore?

  Um, so I-

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Daily active users.

• 50:39Olivia Moore?

  Yes, daily active users, yes. So people are still really using it as a creative model, but they're not using it as like a social graph product. We haven't seen anyone crack AI social yet. I think it's going to be really tricky.

• 50:52Speaker 02

  Now, you know, last thing I want to talk to you about as we come to a close here. Earlier in our conversation, you mentioned that you envision that AI will basically be this reimagination of business.

• 51:05Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  That all business, tell me if I'm getting this right, all businesses will be reinvented as an AI company.

• 51:11Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  What happens to the incumbents?

• 51:13Olivia Moore?

  Yeah. This has changed a lot in the last six months, too. I think a lot of incumbents were understandably because they're big and successful companies, like a little bit asleep at the wheel when AI first came out. We're definitely seeing them start to fight back. Like, Google has four standalone products on our list, which, if you had told me that 24 months ago, when like Bard came out, the early version of Gemini, I would not have believed you.

• 51:37Speaker 02

  Gemini, Notebook LM?

• 51:39Olivia Moore?

  Notebook LM, AI Studio, and then Google Labs. So, Google Labs is where you access Flow and the creative models. AI Studios is for developers.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 51:48Olivia Moore?

  Yeah. And I think we're seeing that across incumbents. Like, a lot of these vertical software players, things like, you know, Service Titan or Workday are kind of building in AI features. I think the question is, especially if they're at risk of kind of cannibalizing their own products, you have to change your business model, like, are they going to eat all the use cases faster than the new startup that's building the AI-native version of them kind of eats them? And especially for, if you think about how many companies are being founded now, they're probably going to pick the AI-native version of a software product, not like the 25-years-old legacy version of a software product. So, I think it's not going to be immediate change, which is why I think the SaaS apocalypse

• 52:31Olivia Moore?

  is a bit overblown, but like, it's definitely a real risk.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I was with Sam Altman at the end of the year last year. He talked about how he believes that the software that will win in the next era will be those that are built, ground-up AI.

• 52:44Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Not bolted on.

• 52:46Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  So, that could happen.

• 52:47Olivia Moore?

  I largely agree with that. I think it's harder in some categories where the incumbent can kind of lock you in because they have your data, they have all the integrations, it's such a pain to switch, but it's going to happen. I just think in some of these industries, it's going to be years, not like the Citrin report was like, in minutes, anything can be vibe-coded. I think that's a little far from where we are.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  The Citrin report was just like, a little bit overblown.

• 53:10Olivia Moore?

  DoorDash was a bad example to use. Yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:13Olivia Moore?

  I agree.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  They didn't really think of it.

• 53:15Olivia Moore?

  Out of anything, why DoorDax?

• 53:16Speaker 02

  But I do think that in some ways, maybe this SaaS apocalypse has more to it. If you're, if we believe what you do, what you're arguing here, then these companies didn't have these like, maybe not immediate, but even middle term risks.

• 53:31Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  And now they do.

• 53:33Olivia Moore?

  Yeah, I think all the incumbents have to, have to kind of wake up and figure out what their strategy is going to be.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  Okay, so you're, you have these hundred AI apps.

• 53:41Olivia Moore?

  Yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  ChatGPT is at the top.

• 53:42Olivia Moore?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  I think it's on the top next year or the year after that.

• 53:47Olivia Moore?

  That is an interesting question.

• 53:51Olivia Moore?

  I think so. I think that their strategy of being free will allow them to capture more of the global market as AI starts to expand further into developing countries. But honestly, I would expect to see Gemini and Claude and others continue to grow for their use cases. I just would be maybe surprised if they ended up as mainstream as something like a ChatGPT. And so they'll probably monetize through subscriptions and other things, whereas ChatGPT has ads.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  What type of app is not on there this year that will be on there next year?

• 54:25Olivia Moore?

  There's going to be lots more agentic products. So OpenClaw would have made it. I think we're going to see a lot more agentic products on mobile, like the concept of an AI that you can like call, text, chat with, and have it actually do things for you, I think is a really magical experience for a lot of people. The other thing that I'm thinking about, and this is on us to evolve the methodology of the list, is like increasingly AI is not in the browser or on an app. It is like a desktop product, or it's in, it's a completely AI native browser, like a Comet or an Atlas or something like that. And this data doesn't capture that. The desktop products I'm thinking of are like Cursor, Claude Co-Work, Whisperflow, Granola.

• 55:09Olivia Moore?

  Like, none of these are really captured in this data. And so we're going to have to evolve our methodology into looking more at revenue than just kind of web traffic, which I think will surface a whole new group of interesting companies.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  All right, Olivia, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to speak with you.

• 55:24Olivia Moore?

  Thanks for having me.

• 55:28Erik 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. This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management LLC,

• 56:13Erik Torenberg?

  A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.