AI + a16z
The stakes are high. The opportunities are profound. From the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change, this is our vision for the AI-enabled future.
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Why AI Will Save the World
Marc AndreessenNo, AI won’t kill us all, take our jobs, or otherwise ruin society. The threat of not aggressively pursuing global AI dominance, however, is considerable. A counterpoint to the moral panic that is currently influencing AI policy.
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The Economic Case for Generative AI
Martin Casado and Sarah WangIt has typically been difficult for startups to reach escape velocity using AI as a core differentiator. But with generative AI, we’re already seeing use cases with orders-of-magnitude improvement in time, cost, and performance over previous AI waves.
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Founders at the Forefront
A neural language model chatbot that enables open-ended conversation with characters you create.
“There are billions of people out there who are lonely and don’t have anyone to talk to. We want to give everyone access to their own deeply personalized superintelligence that has their preferred personality, visuals, and values. These characters will continue to become smarter, more useful, and more fulfilling. Their memory will get better and better. With AI, we’re creating an accessible computing platform that has a universal interface: dialogue.”
An external vector database where developers can store and search relevant contextual data for LLM apps.
“The ability to build applications that can not only remember information, but update their knowledge is absolutely needed. I think we’ll see an emergent phenomenon in memory that we’ve already seen in compute: that quantitatively changing what vector databases in memory can do will qualitatively change what’s possible. In the process, we’ll unlock a bunch of value for knowledge organization—reducing information clutter, increasing efficiency. The utility for society cannot be overstated.”
A text-to-image generative AI system with applications in design, photography, entertainment, and more.
“This technology is transforming visual expression—we’ll be able to communicate our ideas in visual form much more easily. The ability for anyone to quickly generate video, the highest-quality photos, game assets, marketing clips, or 3D content will soon be at our fingertips. Our kids will see their wildest dreams come to life in front of them, and we’ll be able to generate personalized educational videos and animations. AI will help humans become orders of magnitude more creative.”
A drug discovery and development company that uses machine learning to improve how medicines are created.
“We need to collect unbiased, high-content data that provides us with multiple perspectives on human biology in health and disease, use machines to do what they do far better than humans—which is uncover patterns in those data that correspond to different biological states in health and disease—and with that machine-learned understanding, we will be better able to uncover therapeutic interventions that move people along this manifold from disease back to a healthy state.”
A collaborative software-building platform and an AI-powered code-generating tool.
“I’ve predicted that we’re going to see a billion-dollar single-person startup, and I think that’ll happen in the next couple of years. Companies will not need to be that big in order to have a really big impact. We’re going to get to a point where you’ll have fully digital software engineers that you can direct in the same way you would a team of human engineers. Every engineer will be using AI tools to power their productivity, including autonomous agents that feel like coworkers. It’s all happening at the speed of processors.”
A generative AI company building large language models for healthcare to combat the healthcare worker shortage.
“Today, we’re only able to give chronic care nurses to 1 or 2 percent of patients, because at $90 an hour the math doesn’t work. Imagine if every single person with a chronic disease had their own nurse looking after them every day, every minute of the day, who remembered everything about their past conversations and who could speak to them in any language—like a personalized guide helping them with their healthcare at all times. With AI, that’s what we can finally do.”
A platform for hosting and running machine learning models in the cloud.
“There has been so much innovation in open source machine learning. Until recently, all of this research would typically be published as academic papers around these six-month conference journal cycles and you wouldn’t talk to anyone about it in advance. In this new world, machine learning is done more like open source software as these big collaborative efforts on the internet, which is part of the reason it moves so fast. You can have an idea, and the next day somebody’s already riffed on it and made something else.”
An AI co-pilot that gives clinicians real-time predictive care signals to improve healthcare outcomes and manage costs.
“One in three nurses are leaving the workforce. We’ve demonstrated we can use AI to synthesize information and dramatically streamline workflow, saving nurses significant time. That means they do a tenth of the work, but get 10X better outcomes. The breakthrough moment is here: the data, platforms, talent, and proof points are all there. Now it’s a question of accelerating the pace at which we can show results across hundreds of use cases.”
An AI platform that makes it easy to search, filter, and analyze image and video data.
“Eighty percent of internet traffic is unstructured visual content, but most companies don’t have tools to leverage that data. That’s a shame because when you think about what could be done with all this visual content, it’s super broad: everything from analyzing medical imaging to organizing media and marketing assets to visually filtering real estate listings. And on the flip side, AI tools can filter out problematic content, so that never has to be seen by human reviewers or the wider online community.”
A biotech company using AI to map human aging and extend healthy lifespan.
“We’re finding which molecular pathways are most important for human aging and which are responsible for diseases like Alzheimer’s. We have massive data sets of tens of millions of molecular measurements, and this is fundamentally a data problem, mapping out molecular pathways through time: What are the most important features that predict future lifespan and healthspan? AI is really critical to tease out the signal from the noise and pinpoint the pathways we need to target with drugs.”
A research and deployment company developing realistic, versatile AI audio software for creators and publishers.
“Through AI, all content will be able to be produced as compelling audio in any voice and language. That applies to everything from news articles to audiobooks to movies dubbed for global audiences that preserve the original actors’ voices and emotionality. We’ve developed a model that understands context and is able to derive emotions accurately from text. So if you type something that’s happy, the audio form will sound happy, personalized to the content.”
A deep learning and biology company developing Biological Software, the molecules at the core of novel RNA medicines.
“Ten years from now, it’s likely that medicine is going to look unrecognizable in a significant fraction of cases. In oncology, personalized therapies for a variety of different cancers are starting to really work and beginning to be scalable for a significant subset of the population. But it’s not only that. We’re also moving towards a kind of medicine where we can control those interventions with a level of precision that previously wasn’t possible.”
The Builders: a16z's AI portfolio
- AKASA
- Ambience Healthcare
- Ambient AI
- Anduril
- Anyscale
- Applied Intuition
- Asserts.AI
- Azra Games
- Bayesian Health
- BigHat Biosciences
- BioAge
- Biodock
- Captions
- Captions
- Cartography Biosciences
- Character.AI
- Coactive AI
- Cresta
- Databricks
- Deepcell
- Descript
- Dialpad
- DoNotPay
- Drishti
- Dyno Therapeutics
- ElevenLabs
- Equals
- Firefly Health
- Flock Safety
- Freenome
- Genesis Therapeutics
- Gensyn
- Golden
- Hex
- Hippocratic AI
- Hippocratic AI
- Inductive Bio
- Instabase
- KoBold Metals
- Komodo Health
- Labelbox
- Levels Health
- Loom
- Macro
- Marker Learning
- Mem
- Memora Health
- Navan
- Omada Health
- OpenAI
- PLAI Labs
- Pahdo Labs
- People.ai
- Pinecone
- Pomelo Care
- Q Bio
- Rasa
- Ready Player Me
- Reface
- Regression Games
- Replicate
- Replit
- Rewind
- Rezo Therapeutics
- Ribbon Health
- Sardine
- Season Health
- Shield AI
- Skydio
- Sourcegraph
- Sprinter Health
- Steamship
- Tecton
- Thatch Health
- Topography Health
- Turquoise Health
- Ultima Genomics
- Valar Labs
- Ventus Therapeutics
- Waymark
- Waymo
- Zuma
- Zus Health
- insitro
Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described on this page are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by a16z is available here: https://a16z.com/investments/. Excluded from this list are investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets. Past results of Andreessen Horowitz’s investments, pooled investment vehicles, or investment strategies are not necessarily indicative of future results.
Featured AI Content
Recent AI Content
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It’s Not a Computer, It’s a Companion!
Chatbots have been around for decades, but this time is different. Today’s bots are making inroads into our social lives.
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The Next Token of Progress: 4 Unlocks on the Generative AI Horizon
How 4 key AI innovations will evolve over the next 6–12 months, and how founders can integrate these new advances into their businesses.
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Five Predictions for the Future of Learning in the Age of AI
If leveraged well, AI has the potential to greatly enhance students’ abilities to think critically and expand their soft skills.
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“Adventure is out there!”: Opportunities in AI x Travel
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Art Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Machine-Generated
Why AI models will replace artists long before they’ll replace programmers Perhaps the most mind-bending implication we’re seeing fr...
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The Long-Tail Problem in AI, and How Autonomous Markets Can Solve It
In the past decade, our progress in Artificial Intelligence has been staggering. We’ve gone from barely detecting cats in YouTube videos to building cars that can drive themselves. And yet, as ...
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The Generative AI Revolution will Enable Anyone to Create Games
Generative AI will completely reshape UGC and expand the games market beyond what many thought was possible.
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The New Industrial Revolution: Bio x AI
This new era of industrialized bio--enabled by AI as well as an ongoing, foundational shift in biology from empirical science to more engineered approaches--will be the next industrial revolution in human history.
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Using Generative AI to Unlock Probabilistic Products
Those who complain about hallucinations miss the point. A dispersion of outputs (including hallucinations) will unlock a whole new category of product design: probabilistic products.
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Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications
A reference architecture for the LLM app stack. It shows the most common systems, tools, and design patterns used by AI startups and tech companies.
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a16z Slack Debate: Will Generative AI Supplant Therapists, Game Makers…Friends?
There’s much more to generative AI than heroic avatars and tongue-in-cheek art. The potential applications are widespread, from drug discovery and therapy to writing, game development, educa...
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Aligning Founder Superpowers with Product Cycles
At this early stage in generative AI, technologists and product pickers will likely have the biggest impact on which companies emerge as winners.
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5 Founders on the Future of Data
Highlights from the a16z Data and AI Forum, featuring founders building products across the spectrum of data and AI use cases.
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Why AI Will Save the World
There's a full-blown moral panic about AI right now. But the real risk is losing the race to global AI technological superiority.
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AI Canon
A curated list of resources we’ve relied on to get smarter about modern AI, including generative AI, LLMs, and transformer models.
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Generative AI: The Next Consumer Platform
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Embracing the Future: How Chatbots Can Become Great Companions
In a world of retweets, upvotes, and right swipes, studies show that many of us still feel lonely. Thanks to generative AI, we potentially have a new solution: companion chatbots.
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For B2B Generative AI Apps, Is Less More?
We’ve watched large language models (LLMs) become mainstream over the past few years and have studied the implementations in the context of B2B applications. Despite some enormous technological ...
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Big Ideas in Tech for 2023: An a16z Omnibus
From entertainment franchise games to the precision delivery of medicines, small modular reactors to loads of AI applications, here are 40+ builder-worthy pursuits for 2023.
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Financial Services Will Embrace Generative AI Faster Than You Think
The emergence of generative AI could yield the largest transformation the financial services market has seen in decades.
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Taming the Tail: Adventures in Improving AI Economics
AI has enormous potential to disrupt markets that have traditionally been out of reach for software. These markets – which have relied on humans to navigate natural language, images, and physical space – represent a huge op...
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Navigating the High Cost of AI Compute
The generative AI boom is compute-bound and, as a result, a predominant factor driving the industry is simply the cost of training and inference.
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The Generative AI Revolution in Games
To understand how radically gaming is about to be transformed by generative AI, look no further than this recent Twitter post
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Who Owns the Generative AI Platform?
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Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure
This is an updated version of a post we originally published in 2020. You can read the original version here....
The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the current or enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements; a16z has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein.
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/.
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