In this episode of AI + a16z, Fivetran cofounder and CEO George Fraser and a16z partner Guido Appenzeller discuss how LLMs fit into the data management picture within large enterprises. In order to take advantage of a potentially revolutionary technology, organizations don't need to rip out their existing infrastructure, but they do need to rethink their data hygiene so language models can understand it. Follow everyone on X: George Fraser Guido Appenzeller Derrick Harris Check out everything a1...
Feb 07, 2025•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of AI + a16z, a16z General Partner Martin Casado and Rasa cofounder and CEO Alan Nichol discuss the past, present, and future of AI agents and chatbots. Alan shares his history working to solve this problem with traditional natural language processing (NLP), expounds on how large language models (LLMs) are helping to dull the many sharp corners of natural-language interactions, and explains how pairing them with inflexible business logic is a great combination. Learn more: Task-O...
Jan 10, 2025•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast A 2024 highlight reel, featuring founders sharing their insights, advice, and experiences building AI companies — from foundation-model labs to vertical applications. Topics include: Building AI tools for developers Getting into AI as a systems expert The researcher-to-founder journey Founding AI companies in specific industries Early lessons from selling AI agents And more Companies include: Ambience Anyscale Black Forest Labs CommandZero Databricks Decagon Ideogram Inngest Replicate Socket Che...
Dec 27, 2024•46 min•Ep 30•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Decagon cofounder/CEO Jesse Zhang and a16z partner Kimberly Tan discuss how LLMs are reshaping customer support, the strong market demand for AI agents, and how AI agents give startups a a new pricing model to help disrupt incumbents. Here's an excerpt of Jesse explaining how conversation-based pricing can win over customers who are used to traditional seat-based pricing: "Our view on this is that, in the past, software is based per seat because it's rou...
Dec 18, 2024•44 min•Ep 29•Transcript available on Metacast This is a replay of our first episode from April 12, featuring Databricks VP of AI Naveen Rao and a16z partner Matt Bornstein discussing enterprise LLM adoption, hardware platforms, and what it means for AI to be mainstream. If you're unfamiliar with Naveen, he has been in the AI space for more than decade working on everything from custom hardware to LLMs, and has founded two successful startups — Nervana Systems and MosaicML. Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here...
Nov 30, 2024•43 min•Ep 28•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of AI + a16z, Replicate cofounder and CEO Ben Firshman, and a16z partner Matt Bornstein, discuss the art of building products and companies that appeal to software developers. Ben was the creator of Docker Compose, and Replicate has a thriving community of developers hosting and fine-tuning their own models to power AI-based applications. Here's an excerpt of Ben and Matt discussing the difference in the variety of applications built using multimedia models compared with language...
Nov 15, 2024•42 min•Ep 27•Transcript available on Metacast Longtime machine-learning researcher, and University of Washington Professor Emeritus, Pedro Domingos joins a16z General Partner Martin Casado to discuss the state of artificial intelligence, whether we're really on a path toward AGI, and the value of expressing unpopular opinions. It's a very insightful discussion as we head into an era of mainstream AI adoption, and ask big questions about how to ramp up progress and diversify research directions. Here's an excerpt of Pedro sharing his thought...
Nov 04, 2024•38 min•Ep 26•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of AI + a16z, General Partner Anjney Midha shares his perspective on the recent collection of Nobel Prizes awarded to AI researchers in both Physics and Chemistry. He talks through how early work on neural networks in the 1980s spurred continuous advancement in the field — even through the "AI winter" — which resulted in today's extremely useful AI technologies. Here's a sample of the discussion, in response to a question about whether we will see more high-quality research emerg...
Oct 25, 2024•40 min•Ep 25•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of AI + a16z, General Partner Anjney Midha explains the forces that lead to GPU shortages and price spikes, and how the firm mitigates these concerns for portfolio companies by supplying them with the GPUs they need through a program called Oxygen. The TL;DR version of the problem is that competition for GPU access favors large incumbents who can afford to outbid startups and commit to long contracts; when startups do buy or rent in bulk, they can be stuck with lots of GPUs and —...
Oct 23, 2024•39 min•Ep 24•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of AI + a16z, Bowen Peng and Jeffrey Quesnelle of Nous Research join a16z General Partner Anjney Midha to discuss their mission to keep open source AI research alive and activate the community of independent builders. The focus is on a recent project called DisTrO, which demonstrates it's possible to train AI models across the public internet much faster than previously thought possible. However, Nous is behind a number of other successful open source AI projects, including the p...
Sep 27, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep 23•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of AI + a16z, Ambience cofounder and chief scientist Nikhil Buduma joins Derrick Harris to discuss the nuances of using AI models to build vertical applications (including in his space, health care), and why industry acumen is at least as important as technical expertise. Nikhil also shares his experience of having a first-row seat to key advances in AI — including the transformer architecture — which not only allowed his company to be an early adopter, but also gave him insight ...
Sep 13, 2024•43 min•Ep 22•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of AI + a16z, a16z General Partner Jennifer Li joins MotherDuck Cofounder and CEO Jordan Tigani to discuss DuckDB's spiking popularity as the era of big data wanes, as well as the applicability of SQL-based systems for AI workloads and the prospect of text-to-SQL for analyzing data. Here's an excerpt of Jordan discussing an early win when it comes to applying generative AI to data analysis: "Everybody forgets syntax for various SQL calls. And it's just like in coding. So there's ...
Aug 30, 2024•33 min•Ep 21•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Black Forest Labs founders Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser sit down with a16z general partner Anjney Midha to discuss their journey from PhD researchers to Stability AI, and now to launching their own company building state-of-the-art image and video models. They also delve into the topic of openness in AI, explaining the benefits of releasing open models and sharing research findings with the field. Learn more: Flux Keep the code to ...
Aug 16, 2024•37 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, a16z General Partner Vijay Pande walks us through the past two decades of applying software engineering to the life sciences — from the Folding@Home project that he launched, through AlphaFold and more. He also discusses the major opportunities for AI to transform medicine and health care, as well as some pitfalls that founders in that space need to watch out for. Here's an excerpt of Vijay discussing how AlphaFold and other projects revolutionized biology research not just beca...
Aug 09, 2024•47 min•Ep 19•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, a16z General Partner Anjney Midha speaks with PromptFoo founder and CEO Ian Webster about the importance of red-teaming for AI safety and security, and how bringing those capabilities to more organizations will lead to safer, more predictable generative AI applications. They also delve into lessons they learned about this during their time together as early large language model adopters at Discord, and why attempts to regulate AI should focus on applicat...
Aug 02, 2024•45 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Command Zero cofounder and CTO Dean de Beer joins a16z's Joel de la Garza and Derrick Harris to discuss the benefits of training large language models on security data, as well as the myriad factors product teams need to consider when building on LLMs. Here's an excerpt of Dean discussing the challenges and concerns around scaling up LLMs: "Scaling out infrastructure has a lot of limitations: the APIs you're using, tokens, inbound and outbound, the cost ...
Jul 26, 2024•40 min•Ep 17•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Anyscale cofounder and CEO Robert Nishihara joins a16z's Jennifer Li and Derrick Harris to discuss the challenges of training and running AI models at scale; how a focus on video models — and the huge amount of data involved — will change generative AI models and infrastructure; and the unique experience of launching a company out of the UC-Berkeley Sky Computing Lab (the successor to RISElab and AMPLab). Here's a sample of the discussion, where Robert e...
Jul 19, 2024•38 min•Ep 16•Transcript available on Metacast In this archive episode from 2015, a16z's Sonal Chokshi, Frank Chen, and Steven Sinofsky discuss DeepMind's breakthrough AlphaGo system, which mastered the ancient Chinese game Go and introduced the public to reinforcement learning. Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here , including articles, projects, and more podcasts.
Jul 05, 2024•33 min•Ep 15•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Luma Chief Scientist Jiaming Song joins a16z General Partner Anjney MIdha to discuss Jiaming's esteemed career in video models, culminating thus far in Luma's recently released Dream Machine 3D model that shows abilities to reason about the world across a variety of aspects. Jiaming covers the history of image and video models, shares his vision for the future of multimodal models, and explains why he thinks Dream Machine demonstrates its emergent reason...
Jul 03, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 14•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, design engineer Alasdair Monk joins a16z's Yoko Li and Derrick Harris to discuss how generative AI is changing how developers — and the those building for developers — interact with the tools of their trade. Alasdair’s journey includes stints at dev-centric companies such as Heroku/Salesforce, and he's presently designing the user experience for Poolside, an AI programming startup. Here's a sample of Alasdair discussing the future of the prompt bar in generative coding tools: "W...
Jun 21, 2024•38 min•Ep 13•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Inngest cofounder and CEO Tony Holdstock-Brown joins a16z partner Yoko Li, as well as Derrick Harris, to discuss the reality and complexity of running AI agents and other multistep AI workflows in production. Tony also why developer tools for generative AI — and their founders — might look very similar to previous generations of these products, and where there are opportunities for improvement. Here's a sample of the discussion, where Tony shares some advice for engineers lookin...
Jun 14, 2024•44 min•Ep 12•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, Ideogram CEO Mohammad Norouzi joins a16z General Partner Jennifer Li, as well as Derrick Harris, to share his story of growing up in Iran, helping build influential text-to-image models at Google, and ultimately cofounding and running Ideogram. He also breaks down the differences between transformer models and diffusion models, as well as the transition from researcher to startup CEO. Here's an excerpt where Mohammad discusses the reaction to the original transformer architectur...
Jun 07, 2024•37 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast For this holiday weekend (in the United States) episode, we've stitched together two archived episodes from the a16z Podcast , both featuring General Partner Anjney Midha. In the first half, from December, he speaks with Mistral cofounder and CEO Arthur Mensch about the importance of open foundation models, as well as Mistral's approach to building them. In the second half (at 34:40), from February, he speaks with Stanford's Stefano Ermon about the state of the art in video models, including how...
May 24, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast a16z partners Guido Appenzeller and Matt Bornstein join Derrick Harris to discuss the state of the generative AI market, about 18 months after it really kicked into high gear with the release of ChatGPT — everything from the emergence of powerful open source LLMs to the excitement around AI-generated music. If there's one major lesson to learn, it's that although we've made some very impressive technological strides and companies are generating meaningful revenue, this is still a a very fluid sp...
May 17, 2024•40 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast In this bonus episode, recorded live at our San Francisco office, security-startup founders Dean De Beer (Command Zero), Kevin Tian (Doppel), and Travis McPeak (Resourcely) share their thoughts on generative AI, as well as their experiences building with LLMs and dealing with LLM-based threats. Here's a sample of what Dean had to say about the myriad considerations when choosing, and operating, a large language model: "The more advanced your use case is, the more requirements you have, the more ...
May 15, 2024•23 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, a16z General Partner Zane Lackey and a16z Partner Joel de la Garza sit down with Derrick Harris to discuss how generative AI — LLMs, in particular — and foundation models could effect profound change in cybersecurity. After years of AI-washing by security vendors, they explain why the hype is legitimate this time as AI provides a real opportunity to help security teams cut through the noise and automate away the types of drudgery that lead to mistakes. "...
May 10, 2024•37 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Socket Founder and CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh joins a16z's Joel de la Garza and Derrick Harris to discuss the open-source software supply chain. Feross and Joel share their thoughts and insights on topics ranging from the recent XZutils attack to how large language models can help overcome understaffed security teams and overwhelmed developers. Despite some increasingly sophisticated attacks making headlines and compromising countless systems, they're optimistic that LLMs, in particular, could be a...
May 03, 2024•39 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, though, we’re traveling back in time to distant — in AI years, at least — past of 2020. Because amid all the news over the past 18 or so months, it’s easy to forget that generative AI — and LLMs, in particular — have been around for a while. OpenAI released its GPT-2 paper in late 2018, which excited the AI research community, and in 2020 made GPT-3 (as well as other capabilities) publicly available for the first time via its API. This episode dates back to that point in time (i...
May 01, 2024•33 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Pinecone Founder and CEO Edo Liberty joins a16z's Satish Talluri and Derrick Harris to discuss the promises, challenges, and opportunities for vector databases and retrieval augmented generation (RAG). He also shares insights and highlights from a decades-long career in machine learning, which includes stints running research teams at both Yahoo and Amazon Web Services. Because he's been at this a long time, and despite its utility, Edo understands that RAG — like most of today's popular AI conc...
Apr 26, 2024•37 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast a16z General Partner Anjney Midha joins the podcast to discuss what's happening with hardware for artificial intelligence. Nvidia might have cornered the market on training workloads for now, but he believes there's a big opportunity at the inference layer — especially for wearable or similar devices that can become a natural part of our everyday interactions. Here's one small passage that speaks to his larger thesis on where we're heading: "I think why we're seeing so many developers flock to O...
Apr 19, 2024•39 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast 
