The a16z Show

Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez are joined by Alejandro Maza Ayala, Chief Product & AI Officer at Kavak, to unpack how the Latin American used-car marketplace rebuilt itself around AI agents, with 96% of customer interactions and 95% of transactions now handled by agents.

Alejandro explains why Kavak decided that simply giving employees AI tools wasn't enough, and instead redesigned the company's systems, teams, and customer experience around agents. They discuss why Kavak spends as much engineering effort on evals as it does building agents, how its AI sellers outperform its human teams, and an experiment where an AI "CEO" increased profits in one city by 50% in its first month.

The conversation also explores what happens to organizational structure when agents do most of the work, why Kavak trains everyone from executives to mechanics to build with AI, and Alejandro's argument that companies looking for incremental AI adoption may be missing the larger opportunity: redesigning the organization itself.

 

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Joel De La Garza is joined by Dylan Ayrey, co-founder and CEO of Truffle Security, and Feross Aboukhadijeh, founder and CEO of Socket, to discuss one of the biggest shifts happening in cybersecurity: AI models are no longer just finding vulnerabilities—they're exploiting them. As frontier models become increasingly capable of hacking, software security, supply chain attacks, and cyber defense are entering a fundamentally new era.

The conversation explores AI-powered hacking, software supply chain attacks, leaked credentials, zero-day vulnerabilities, package manager security, and why the path of least resistance for increasingly autonomous AI systems may also be the most dangerous. They also discuss what enterprises, developers, and the open-source ecosystem need to do to adapt as the gap between vulnerability discovery and exploitation continues to shrink.

 

Resources:

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Elena Burger and Matt Bornstein are joined by Simon Mo, co-founder and CEO of Inferact, the open-source inference engine powering many of today's most advanced AI applications. Together, they explore how open-source AI evolved from a research project into critical infrastructure, why inference has become one of the most important layers of the AI stack, and what it takes to bring frontier intelligence to developers around the world.

The conversation covers vLLM's origins, the rise of open-weight models, why companies increasingly want control over their AI infrastructure, and how open-source inference enables the next generation of AI applications. They also discuss model licensing, the economics of open-weight AI, Kimi K3, distillation, AI infrastructure, and why Simon believes the gap between open and closed models is rapidly disappearing.

 

Resources:

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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This week, a16z American Dynamism Films premiered three short documentaries highlighting companies tackling some of America's biggest industrial challenges: Ulysses, Mariana Materials, and Radiant. Before watching those films, we're revisiting conversations with the founders behind each company.

You'll hear Will O'Brien explain why autonomous underwater robots could unlock a new era of ocean exploration and security, Turner Caldwell discuss rebuilding America's critical minerals supply chain and modernizing mining, and Doug Bernauer share why portable nuclear microreactors could transform how we generate power. Together, these conversations offer a look at the technologies—and the founders—working to rebuild the industrial foundations of the United States.

 

Resources:

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Theo Jaffee is joined by Joshua Achiam, Chief Futurist at OpenAI, for a conversation on AI cybersecurity, frontier model capabilities, and why he believes society may have already crossed the threshold into an AGI-era without fully recognizing it.

They discuss AI's rapidly advancing cyber capabilities, state-sponsored hacking, model jailbreaks, recursive self-improvement, and what happens when AI systems begin discovering vulnerabilities faster than humans can patch them. Joshua also explains why most people have quietly adapted to capabilities that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago, and why the biggest changes from AI may arrive gradually rather than all at once.

 

Resources:

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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