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PODCAST

AI + a16z

Artificial intelligence is changing everything from art to enterprise IT, and a16z is watching all of it with a close eye. This podcast features discussions with leading AI engineers, founders, and experts, as well as our general partners, about where the technology and industry are heading.

technology entrepreneurship

All Episodes

00:36:26

What Is an AI Agent?

AI + a16z ·

2025/04/28

In this episode of AI + a16z, a16z Infra partners Guido Appenzeller, Matt Bornstein, and Yoko Li discuss and debate one of the tech industry's buzziest words right now: AI agents. The trio digs into the topic from a number of angles, including:Whether a uniform definition of agent actually existsHow to distinguish between agents, LLMs, and functionsHow to think about pricing agentsWhether agents can actually replace humans, andThe effects of data siloes on agents that can access the web.They don't

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00:33:28

Benchmarking AI Agents on Full-Stack Coding

AI + a16z ·

2025/03/28

In this episode, a16z General Partner Martin Casado sits down with Sujay Jayakar, co-founder and Chief Scientist at Convex, to talk about his team’s latest work benchmarking AI agents on full-stack coding tasks. From designing Fullstack Bench to the quirks of agent behavior, the two dig into what’s actually hard about autonomous software development, and why robust evals—and guardrails like type safety—matter more than ever. They also get tactical: which models perform best for real-world app

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00:44:39

Automating Developer Email with MCP and Al Agents

AI + a16z ·

2025/03/21

In this episode of AI + a16z, Resend founder and CEO Zeno Rocha sits down with a16z partner Yoko Li to discuss:How generative AI — powered by agents and, now, MCP — is reshaping the email experience for developers, as well as the overall world of programming. Zeno's obsession with developer experience has evolved into designing for "agent experience" — a new frontier where LLM-powered agents are not only building products but also operating within them. How email, one of the most ubiquitous tools

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00:26:31

The Future of Digital Workers

AI + a16z ·

2025/03/20

In this episode of AI + a16z, a16z Partner Joe Schmidt sits down with 11x CTO Prabhav Jain for an inside look at how AI-powered digital workers are reshaping sales and revenue operations. They discuss the evolution of agentic AI, the trade-offs between orchestration and autonomy, and the technical innovations driving 11x’s products, Alice and Mike.Prabhav breaks down the challenges of real-time voice AI, the complexities of multimodal agent interactions, and why the future of enterprise AI is about

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01:41:37

Building the Next Generation of Conversational AI

AI + a16z ·

2025/03/14

In this episode of AI + a16z, Sesame Cofounder and CTO Ankit Kumar joins a16z general partner Anjney Midha for a deep dive into the research and engineering behind their voice technology. They discuss the technical challenges of real-time speech generation, the trade-offs in balancing personality with efficiency, and why the team is open-sourcing key components of their model. Ankit breaks down the complexities of multimodal AI, full-duplex conversation modeling, and the computational optimizations

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00:40:55

Agent Experience: Building an Open Web for the AI Era

AI + a16z ·

2025/03/07

In this episode of AI + a16z, Netlify CEO and Cofounder Matt Biilmann joins a16z General Partner Martin Casado to explore how AI is reshaping web development — not just through faster code generation, but by fundamentally shifting how we think about building for the web. At the center of this shift is Agent Experience (AX), a new paradigm where AI agents aren’t just tools, but active participants in development, shaping both the creative process and the underlying infrastructure.Matt shares how

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00:52:13

What DeepSeek Means for Cybersecurity

AI + a16z ·

2025/02/28

In this episode of AI + a16z, a trio of security experts join a16z partner Joel de la Garza to discuss the security implications of the DeepSeek reasoning model that made waves recently. It's three separate discussions, focusing on different aspects of DeepSeek and the fast-moving world of generative AI.The first segment, with Ian Webster of Promptfoo, focuses on vulnerabilities within DeepSeek itself, and how users can protect themselves against backdoors, jailbreaks, and censorship. The second

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00:40:14

Agents, Lawyers, and LLMs

AI + a16z ·

2025/02/21

In this episode of AI + a16z, Aatish Nayak, head of product at Harvey, sits down with a16z partner Kimberly Tan to share his experience building AI products for enterprises — including the legal profession — and how to address areas like UX, trust, and customer engagement. Importantly, Aatish explains, industries like law don't need AGI or even the latest and greatest models; they need products that augment their existing workflows so they can better serve clients and still make it home for

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00:37:48

Reasoning Models Are Remaking Professional Services

AI + a16z ·

2025/02/14

In this episode of AI + a16z, a16z partner Alex Immerman sits down with Hebbia founder and CEO George Sivulka to discuss the potential for reasoning models and AI agents to supercharge knowledge-worker productivity — and the global economy along with it. As George explains, his customers are already saving significant time and and effort on important, but monotonous, tasks, and improved models paired with savvy users will continue to reshape how industries including finance, law, and other

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00:38:12

Data Management for Enterprise LLMs

AI + a16z ·

2025/02/07

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 FraserGuido AppenzellerDerrick HarrisCheck out everything a16z is

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00:38:21

From NLP to LLMs: The Quest for a Reliable Chatbot

AI + a16z ·

2025/01/10

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

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00:46:15

Best of the Year: Building AI Companies

AI + a16z ·

2024/12/27

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 developersGetting into AI as a systems expertThe researcher-to-founder journeyFounding AI companies in specific industriesEarly lessons from selling AI agentsAnd moreCompanies include:AmbienceAnyscaleBlack Forest LabsCommandZeroDatabricksDecagonIdeogramInngestReplicateSocketCheck out everything

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00:44:12

Can AI Agents Finally Fix Customer Support?

AI + a16z ·

2024/12/18

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 roughly

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00:43:12

REPLAY: Scoping the Enterprise LLM Market

AI + a16z ·

2024/11/30

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,

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00:41:49

Building Developers Tools, From Docker to Diffusion...

AI + a16z ·

2024/11/15

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

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00:38:02

The Best Way to Achieve AGI Is to Invent It

AI + a16z ·

2024/11/04

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 thoughts on

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00:40:12

Neural Nets and Nobel Prizes: AI's 40-Year Journey...

AI + a16z ·

2024/10/25

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 emerge

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00:39:08

How GPU Access Helps AI Startups Be Agile

AI + a16z ·

2024/10/23

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 —

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01:12:55

DisTrO and the Quest for Community-Trained AI Models

AI + a16z ·

2024/09/27

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

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00:42:59

Balancing AI Expertise and Industry Acumen in...

AI + a16z ·

2024/09/13

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 into

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62 results

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