AI + a16z

Recent AI Content

• The Future of Prosumer: The Rise of “AI Native” Workflows

  Anish Acharya, Justine Moore, Olivia Moore

  Generative AI offers founders an opportunity to completely reinvent workflows — and will spawn a new cohort of fully AI-native companies.

• Why 2023 Was AI Video’s Breakout Year, and What to Expect in 2024

  Justine Moore

  2023 was a breakout year for AI video. At the start of the year, no public text-to-video models existed, and there's a lot to come.

• Marketplaces in the Age of AI

  Olivia Moore

  Every new platform changes how and where transactions happen. Now, we believe gen AI will be the latest revolution in marketplaces.

• The Future of Music: How Generative AI Is Transforming the Music Industry

  Justine Moore, Anish Acharya

  In April, the first viral AI cover dropped. More innovation in music and generative AI is coming, and here's what it might look like.

• The American Dynamism 50: AI Edition

  Katherine Boyle, David Ulevitch, Ryan McEntush, Lauren Murrow

  50 groundbreaking tech companies advancing the national interest, from the last mile to low Earth orbit....

• Announcing Our Latest Open Source AI Grants

  Matt Bornstein, Rajko Radovanovic

  a16z announces its second batch of a16z Open Source AI Grant recipients. This cohort focuses mainly on LLMs and visual AI models.

• Commercializing AI in Healthcare: The Enterprise Buyer Perspective

  Jay Rughani, Julie Yoo

  At the end of the day, even the best AI models will fail if they don’t figure out a way to achieve broad distribution and profitable monetization, so it’s important to understand the psyche of the buyers and decision makers who will determine the fate of your products.

• AI Jobs to be Done in Life Sciences

  Becky Pferdehirt, Bryan Faust, Zak Doric, Vijay Pande

  We have long believed that AI will fundamentally reshape biotech and healthcare, positioning us at the brink of an AI-driven Industrial Revolution. But when will we see this payoff? Put more boldly, when will the majority of new drugs be designed with AI?

• Big Ideas in Tech for 2024

  a16z editorial

  Smart energy grids. Voice-first companion apps. Programmable medicines. AI tools for kids.
We asked over 40 partners across a16z to preview one big idea they believe will drive innovation in the coming year.

• The Economic Case for Generative AI (presentation)

  Martin Casado

  To date, a handful of large companies have captured the value created by advances in AI. With generative AI, that’s changing.

• Let’s Get Personal: Why AI Will Unlock a Massive Market for Online Consumer Services

  Alex Immerman, Jamie Sullivan

  AI is creative massive opportunities for startups by making it possible to build scalable online experiences that replicate the benefits of being in person.

• How Are Consumers Using Generative AI?

  Olivia Moore

  To see how people are interacting with generative AI, we used data to rank the top 50 GenAI web products by monthly visits.

• BarbAIrians at the Gate: The Financial Opportunity of AI

  Alex Rampell

  Generative AI is likely going to usher in a far more profound method of company transformation.

• Supporting the Open Source AI Community

  Matt Bornstein, Rajko Radovanovic

  a16z announces its Open Source AI Grant program, which will support a small group of open source developers through grant funding.

• The Race to Capture Value: Cloud Lessons for the AI Era

  Peter Lauten, David George

  When a platform shift reshapes the technology landscape, who wins? We unpack the market dynamics between startups and incumbents from the SaaS and cloud era that are likely to play out in the AI era.

• Where Will AI Have the Biggest Impact? Healthcare.

  Daisy Wolf, Vijay Pande

  We believe that any new technology has to be 10 times better to successfully displace the last one – marginal improvements aren’t worth the effort. Enterprise software struggled to clear that 10x bar in healthcare; AI clears it easily.

• More Countries, More Problems: Selling AI Products Around the World is Still Too Hard

  Sumeet Singh, Angela Strange

  Many digital-first companies have been propelled by generative AI. However, selling these digital products globally is not a straightforward undertaking. Here's how to simplify the cross-border selling experience, get in front of the right customers, and build long-term value.

• Money on Autopilot: The Future of AI x Personal Finance

  Olivia Moore, Anish Acharya

  Thanks to generative AI, the much-discussed topic of “self-driving money” finally has a chance to achieve its potential.

• The NeverEnding Game: How AI Will Create a New Category of Games

  Jonathan Lai

  We believe the largest opportunity long-term is in leveraging AI to change not just how we create games, but the nature of the games themselves.

• It’s Not a Computer, It’s a Companion!

  Justine Moore, Bryan Kim, Yoko Li, Martin Casado

  Chatbots have been around for decades, but this time is different. Today’s bots are making inroads into our social lives.

• The Next Token of Progress: 4 Unlocks on the Generative AI Horizon

  Sarah Wang, Shangda Xu

  How 4 key AI innovations will evolve over the next 6–12 months, and how founders can integrate these new advances into their businesses.

• Five Predictions for the Future of Learning in the Age of AI 

  Anne Lee Skates

  If leveraged well, AI has the potential to greatly enhance students’ abilities to think critically and expand their soft skills.

• “Adventure is out there!”: Opportunities in AI x Travel

  Bryan Kim, Justine Moore

• Art Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Machine-Generated

  Guido Appenzeller, Matt Bornstein, Martin Casado, Yoko Li

  Why AI models will replace artists long before they’ll replace programmers Perhaps the most mind-bending implication we’re seeing fr...

• The Long-Tail Problem in AI, and How Autonomous Markets Can Solve It

  Ali Yahya

  In the past decade, our progress in Artificial Intelligence has been staggering. We’ve gone from barely detecting cats in YouTube videos to building cars that can drive themselves. And yet, as ...

• The Generative AI Revolution will Enable Anyone to Create Games

  Joshua Lu, Robin Guo

  Generative AI will completely reshape UGC and expand the games market beyond what many thought was possible.

• The New Industrial Revolution: Bio x AI

  Vijay Pande

  This new era of industrialized bio--enabled by AI as well as an ongoing, foundational shift in biology from empirical science to more engineered approaches--will be the next industrial revolution in human history.

• Using Generative AI to Unlock Probabilistic Products

  Anish Acharya

  Those who complain about hallucinations miss the point. A dispersion of outputs (including hallucinations) will unlock a whole new category of product design: probabilistic products.

• Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications

  Matt Bornstein, Rajko Radovanovic

  A reference architecture for the LLM app stack. It shows the most common systems, tools, and design patterns used by AI startups and tech companies.

• a16z Slack Debate: Will Generative AI Supplant Therapists, Game Makers…Friends?

  Connie Chan, Matt Bornstein, Vijay Pande, Jonathan Lai, Jack Soslow

  There’s much more to generative AI than heroic avatars and tongue-in-cheek art. The potential applications are widespread, from drug discovery and therapy to writing, game development, educ...

• Aligning Founder Superpowers with Product Cycles

  Anish Acharya

  At this early stage in generative AI, technologists and product pickers will likely have the biggest impact on which companies emerge as winners. 

• 5 Founders on the Future of Data

  a16z editorial

  Highlights from the a16z Data and AI Forum, featuring founders building products across the spectrum of data and AI use cases.

• Why AI Will Save the World

  Marc Andreessen

  There's a full-blown moral panic about AI right now. But the real risk is losing the race to global AI technological superiority.

• AI Canon

  Derrick Harris, Matt Bornstein, Guido Appenzeller

  A curated list of resources we’ve relied on to get smarter about modern AI, including generative AI, LLMs, and transformer models.

• Generative AI: The Next Consumer Platform

  Connie Chan, Justine Moore

  We’ve entered the age of generative AI. When new technology captures consumer attention so quickly, it begs the question: Is there real value here?

• Embracing the Future: How Chatbots Can Become Great Companions

  Connie Chan

  In a world of retweets, upvotes, and right swipes, studies show that many of us still feel lonely. Thanks to generative AI, we potentially have a new solution: companion chatbots.

• For B2B Generative AI Apps, Is Less More?

  Zeya Yang, Kristina Shen

  We’ve watched large language models (LLMs) become mainstream over the past few years and have studied the implementations in the context of B2B applications. Despite some enormous technological ...

• Big Ideas in Tech for 2023: An a16z Omnibus

  a16z

  From entertainment franchise games to the precision delivery of medicines, small modular reactors to loads of AI applications, here are 40+ builder-worthy pursuits for 2023.

• Financial Services Will Embrace Generative AI Faster Than You Think

  Angela Strange, Anish Acharya, Sumeet Singh, Alex Rampell, Marc Andrusko, Joe Schmidt, David Haber, Seema Amble

  The emergence of generative AI could yield the largest transformation the financial services market has seen in decades.

• Taming the Tail: Adventures in Improving AI Economics

  Martin Casado, Matt Bornstein

  AI has enormous potential to disrupt markets that have traditionally been out of reach for software. These markets – which have relied on humans to navigate natural language, images, and physical space – represent a huge op...

• Navigating the High Cost of AI Compute

  Guido Appenzeller, Matt Bornstein, Martin Casado

  The generative AI boom is compute-bound and, as a result, a predominant factor driving the industry is simply the cost of training and inference. 

• The Generative AI Revolution in Games

  James Gwertzman, Jack Soslow

  To understand how radically gaming is about to be transformed by generative AI, look no further than this recent Twitter post

• Who Owns the Generative AI Platform?

  Matt Bornstein, Guido Appenzeller, Martin Casado

• Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure

  Matt Bornstein, Jennifer Li, Martin Casado

  To help data teams stay on top of the changes happening in the industry, this article reviews an updated set of data infrastructure architectures.