a16z Live

In a new episode of My First 16, a16z partner Seema Amble talks with co-founder and CEO of Mercury Immad Akhund about the idea of a “minimum delightful product” in fintech, doing the spreadsheet math on unit economics early on, and how to compete in a category already filled with incumbents.

0:00 - 1:28 Introduction

1:28 - 9:14 History of Mercury

9:14 - 19:07 Mercury's first customers

19:07 - 22:15 Scaling up

22:15 - 25:48 Pricing journey

25:48 - 31:37 Lessons and advice

Ali Ghodsi, CEO and cofounder of Databricks, and Ben Horowitz, cofounder of a16z, explain the data wars happening inside and outside enterprises and how they could impact the evolution of LLMs. 

• [0:59] Why is it so hard for enterprises to adopt AI?
• [3:29] Data wars
• [4:49] Big vs. small LLMs
• [8:35] Finetuning
• [14:14] Open source AI
• [18:13] Benchmarks
• [19:51] Why Ali isn't afraid of AI

This conversation is part of our AI Revolution series, recorded August 2023 at a live event in San Francisco. The series features some of the most impactful builders in the field of AI discussing and debating where we are, where we’re going, and the big open questions in AI. Find more content from our AI Revolution series on www.a16z.com/AIRevolution.

Daphne Koller is the founder and CEO of insitro, a company using AI and machine learning to engineer drug discovery. In this conversation with a16z's Vijay Pande, she discusses how an LLM for cells could revolutionize drug discovery and how to bridge the technological and cultural divide between building with atoms and building with bits.

• [0:59] Why life sciences?
• [3:42] AI in the life sciences
• [7:20] LLM for cells
• [11:55] Engineering disease and drug discovery
• [13:51] Bits vs. atoms
• [17:55] The opportunity ahead

This conversation is part of our AI Revolution series, recorded August 2023 at a live event in San Francisco. The series features some of the most impactful builders in the field of AI discussing and debating where we are, where we’re going, and the big open questions in AI. Find more content from our AI Revolution series on www.a16z.com/AIRevolution.

Will AI take all the design jobs? Dylan Field, founder and CEO of Figma, looks at the relationship between designers, developers, and AI, in conversation with a16z's David George. 

• [0:58] Will AI replace designers?
• [4:13] Human vs. AI creativity
• [8:38] Applying AI to design
• [11:35] Startups vs. incumbents

This conversation is part of our AI Revolution series, recorded August 2023 at a live event in San Francisco. The series features some of the most impactful builders in the field of AI discussing and debating where we are, where we’re going, and the big open questions in AI. Find more content from our AI Revolution series on www.a16z.com/AIRevolution.

Cofounder and CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei unpacks how far can scaling laws take us and how can AI be used to improve AI, in conversation with a16z's Anjney Midha. 

• [0:59] Dario's background
• [2:45] GPT-2's emergent capabilities
• [5:16] Scaling laws
• [8:55] Why are there so many physicists in AI?
• [11:58] Constitutional AI
• [18:29] Anthropic's Roadmap

This conversation is part of our AI Revolution series, recorded August 2023 at a live event in San Francisco. The series features some of the most impactful builders in the field of AI discussing and debating where we are, where we’re going, and the big open questions in AI. Find more content from our AI Revolution series on www.a16z.com/AIRevolution.

Roblox cofounder and CEO David Baszucki and a16z's Jonathan Lai discuss the ways AI is changing games and virtual worlds, as well as how we create them. 

• [1:00] Generative AI in games
• [4:56] Fully personalized playthroughs
• [7:50] Roblox's generative model
• [11:28] Future of interfaces
• [13:25] impact on creators
• [16:36] NPCs as copilots
• [18:49] VR & spatial computing

This conversation is part of our AI Revolution series, recorded August 2023 at a live event in San Francisco. The series features some of the most impactful builders in the field of AI discussing and debating where we are, where we’re going, and the big open questions in AI. Find more content from our AI Revolution series on www.a16z.com/AIRevolution.

As CTO of OpenAI, Mira Murati oversaw the development and release of GPT-4 and ChatGPT. Here she tells Martin Casado the story behind the release of ChatGPT—and what it tells us about the future of AI and human-machine interactions. 

• [0:59] Mira's background
• [4:55] Math, physics, and AI
• [7:31] Natural language interfaces
• [10:51] OpenAI Roadmap
• [17:47] Scaling Laws
• [20:48] One model to rule them all?
• [23:34] The next 5-10 years

This conversation is part of our AI Revolution series, recorded August 2023 at a live event in San Francisco. The series features some of the most impactful builders in the field of AI discussing and debating where we are, where we’re going, and the big open questions in AI. Find more content from our AI Revolution series on www.a16z.com/AIRevolution.

Noam Shazeer, Character.ai CEO and cofounder, talks to a16z's Sarah Wang about the dawn of universally accessible intelligence, the compute it will take to power it, and his pursuit of AGI's first use...

• [0:59] Real Noam vs. AI Noam
• [6:14] Next unlocks
• [8:11] First use case for AGI
• [11:06] Building a full-stack LLM
• [13:33] Noam calculates global compute capacity
• [15:24] Universally accessible intelligence

This conversation is part of our AI Revolution series, recorded August 2023 at a live event in San Francisco. The series features some of the most impactful builders in the field of AI discussing and debating where we are, where we’re going, and the big open questions in AI. Find more content from our AI Revolution series on www.a16z.com/AIRevolution.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, in conversation with a16z's Bob Swan, explains how AI copilots are keeping developers longer in a flow state and why AI copilots more broadly could be the start of an industrial revolution for knowledge work.

• [0:59] Microsoft's approach to AI
• [6:15] The next Industrial Revolution
• [10:47] Developer productivity & flow state
• [15:46] Reprogramming the American Dream
• [20:08] Advice to builders

This conversation is part of our AI Revolution series, recorded August 2023 at a live event in San Francisco. The series features some of the most impactful builders in the field of AI discussing and debating where we are, where we’re going, and the big open questions in AI. Find more content from our AI Revolution series on www.a16z.com/AIRevolution.