AI + a16z

Sam Altman has led OpenAI from its founding as a research nonprofit in 2015 to becoming the most valuable startup in the world ten years later.
In this episode, a16z Cofounder Ben Horowitz and General Partner Erik Torenberg sit down with Sam to discuss the core thesis behind OpenAI’s disparate bets, why they released Sora, how they use models internally, the best AI evals, and where we’re going from here.
Follow Sam on X: https://x.com/sama
Follow OpenAI on X: https://x.com/openai
Learn more about OpenAI: https://openai.com/
Try Sora: https://sora.com/
Follow Ben on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz
Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

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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Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins of the Wall Street Journal sit down with a16z General Partner Martin Casado on WSJ’s Bold Names to ask whether the AI spending boom is a bubble waiting to burst. Martin explains why the fundamentals differ dramatically from the dot-com era—when WorldCom had $40 billion in debt versus today's tech giants with hundreds of billions on their balance sheets—and why a speculative valuation correction shouldn't be confused with systemic collapse. They also discuss where a16z sees opportunity in the "long tail" of AI companies beyond the state-of-the-art large language models.
 
Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado
Follow Christopher Mims on X: https://twitter.com/mims
Follow Tim Higgins on X:  https://twitter.com/timkhiggins
Check out WSJ’s Bold Names: https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

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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In this feed drop from The Six Five Pod, a16z General Partner Martin Casado discusses how AI is changing infrastructure, software, and enterprise purchasing. He explains why current constraints are driven less by technical limits and more by regulation, particularly around power, data centers, and compute expansion.
The episode also covers how AI is affecting software development, lowering the barrier to coding without eliminating the need for experienced engineers, and how agent-driven tools may shift infrastructure decision-making away from humans.

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado  
Follow Patrick Moorhead on X:  https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead
Follow Daniel Newman on X: https://twitter.com/danielnewmanUV
Watch more from Six Five Media: https://www.youtube.com/@SixFiveMedia

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

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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Mintlify is a documentation platform built by cofounders Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee to help teams create and maintain developer docs. In this episode, Andreessen Horowitz general partners Jennifer Li and Yoko Li speak with Han and Hahnbee about how coding agents are changing what “good docs” mean, shifting documentation from a human-only resource into infrastructure that powers AI tools, support agents, and internal knowledge workflows. They share Mintlify’s early journey, including eight pivots, the two-day prototype that landed their first customer, and the “do things that don’t scale” sales motion that helped them win early traction. The conversation also covers why docs go out of date, what “self-healing” documentation requires to actually work, and how serving fast-moving customers has shaped both their product priorities and their pace.
Follow Jennifer Li on X: https://twitter.com/JenniferHli
Follow Yoko Li on X: https://twitter.com/stuffyokodraws
Follow Han Wang on X: https://twitter.com/handotdev
Follow Hahnbee Lee on X: https://twitter.com/hahnbeelee

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

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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Inferact is a new AI infrastructure company founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM. Its mission is to build a universal, open-source inference layer that makes large AI models faster, cheaper, and more reliable to run across any hardware, model architecture, or deployment environment. Together, they broke down how modern AI models are actually run in production, why “inference” has quietly become one of the hardest problems in AI infrastructure, and how the open-source project vLLM emerged to solve it. The conversation also looked at why the vLLM team started Inferact and their vision for a universal inference layer that can run any model, on any chip, efficiently.
Follow Matt Bornstein on X: https://twitter.com/BornsteinMatt
Follow Simon Mo on X: https://twitter.com/simon_mo_
Follow Woosuk Kwon on X: https://twitter.com/woosuk_k
Follow vLLM on X: https://twitter.com/vllm_project

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

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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