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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

00:40:14

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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00:33:08

AI, SQL, and the End of Big Data

AI + a16z ·

2024/08/30

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 some

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00:37:16

The Researcher to Founder Journey, and the Power of...

AI + a16z ·

2024/08/16

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:FluxKeep the code to AI

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00:47:10

Why Computer Science Subsumed Biotech

AI + a16z ·

2024/08/09

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 because

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00:44:48

Securing AI By Democratizing Red Teams

AI + a16z ·

2024/08/02

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 applications

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00:40:14

Augmenting Incident Response with LLMs

AI + a16z ·

2024/07/26

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

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00:37:56

Scaling AI for the Coming Data Deluge

AI + a16z ·

2024/07/19

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

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00:33:00

ARCHIVE: The Dream of AI Is Alive in AlphaGo

AI + a16z ·

2024/07/05

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.

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75 results

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