Infra

Oxygen is an a16z program that helps AI startup founders navigate their compute challenges and access the GPUs and other resources they require.

Braintrust is a devtool platform for any product effort — from simple apps to sophisticated products — based around large language models.

Bowen Peng and Jeffrey Quesnelle of Nous Research discuss their mission to accelerate open source AI research, including with a new project called DisTrO.

Ambience cofounder Nikhil Buduma discusses how to build vertical applications with AI models, including in health care, and why tech expertise isn't enough.

Fei-Fei Li and are team of experts at World Labs are building a spatial intelligence model that can generate 3D worlds that users can interact with.

Mintlify lets companies publish quality software documentation that aligns with their brands, including guides, API reference, and examples.

MotherDuck CEO Jordan Tigani discusses DuckDB's spiking popularity as the era of big data wanes, as well as the nexus of SQL and LLMs.

Pylon provides a single view of customer issues, wherever they are happening — Slack, Teams, chat widget, ticket forms, or emails.

Cursor is a fork of VS Code that’s heavily customized for AI-assisted programming, with loads of features designed to integrate AI into developer workflows.

Black Forest Labs founders Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser discuss their new company building state-of-the-art image and video models.

Vijay Pande walks us through two decades of applying software engineering and AI to biotech and health care — from Folding@Home through AlphaFold and more.

PromptFoo creator Ian Webster discusses the importance of red-teaming for AI safety and security, and of bringing those capabilities to more organizations.

We're excited to announce our investment in Black Forest Labs (BFL), which is building the world’s best open visual models for developers.

Martin Casado and Ion Stoica argue that open-source models will power innovation without compromising security.

Command Zero CTO Dean de Beer discusses how large language models can help with cybersecurity incident response, and how to build products on LLMs.

Anyscale's Robert Nishihara discusses the challenges of training and running AI models at scale, and how a focus on video data will change generative AI.

Jiaming Song and Anjney Midha discuss Luma's Dream Machine 3D model that shows abilities to reason about the world across a variety of aspects.

Alasdair Monk discusses how generative AI is changing how developers — and the those building for developers — interact with the tools of their trade.

Senate Bill 1047 is designed to apply to models trained above certain compute and cost thresholds. It also holds developers legally liable for the downstream use or modification of their models.

In this AI + a16z episode, Inngest CEO Tony Holdstock-Brown discusses the reality of running AI agents and multistep AI workflows in production.

In this AI + a16z podcast episode, Mohammad Norouzi shares his story of building influential text-to-image models at Google and cofounding Ideogram.

We stitched together two episodes from the a16z Podcast, featuring Anjney Midha interviewing Arthur Mensch (Mistral) and Stefano Ermon (Stanford).

In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, a16z partners Guido Appenzeller and Matt Bornstein discuss the state of the generative AI market, about 18 months after it really kicked into high gear with the release of ChatGP...

The stakes are high. The opportunities are profound. From the creation of new medicines to bolstering national defense, this is our vision for the AI-enabled future.

Security-startup founders Dean De Beer (Command Zero), Kevin Tian (Doppel), and Travis McPeak (Resourcely) share their thoughts on generative AI.

Mature code-generation technology, coupled with advanced generative AI image models, has shortened the journey from idea to fully operational application.

In this AI + a16z episode, a16z's Zane Lackey and Joel de la Garza discuss how generative AI and LLMs could effect profound change in cybersecurity.

In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Socket's Feross Aboukhadijeh and a16z's Joel de la Garza discuss the open-source software supply chain.

Pinecone Founder and CEO Edo Liberty discusses the promises, challenges, and opportunities for vector databases and retrieval augmented generation (RAG).

Anjney Midha shares his thoughts on how hardware for AI might evolve over the years to come as we place more emphasis on AI inference workloads.

Jennifer Li is being promoted to General Partner at a16z. She will continue to invest broadly within the enterprise space, focusing on infra.

Naveen Rao of Databricks joins a16z's Matt Bornstein and Derrick Harris to discuss where we're at in terms of large language model (LLM) adoption.

This episode of the AI + a16z podcast features a panel discussion from back in February, focused on the state — and future — of open source AI models.

a16z's Martin Casado lays out the case for AI as a driving force behind incredible advancements in tech, creativity, and the human experience.

Senator Todd Young speaks about the importance of open innovation and US leadership in AI, and why we need to support AI research.

a16z announces its second batch of a16z Open Source AI Grant recipients. This cohort focuses mainly on LLMs and visual AI models.

No one knows how generative AI will play out from a product perspective. The speakers at our Connect/Enterprise event shared their thoughts and experiences.

To date, a handful of large companies have captured the value created by advances in AI. With generative AI, that’s changing.

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.

a16z announces its Open Source AI Grant program, which will support a small group of open source developers through grant funding.

With generative AI, we’re already seeing use cases with orders-of-magnitude improvement in time, cost, and performance over previous AI waves.

Chatbots have been around for decades, but this time is different. Today’s bots are making inroads into our social lives.

A very simple “getting started with AI” template for those who want to play with core technologies, but not have to think too much about tooling. 

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.

A curated list of resources we’ve relied on to get smarter about modern AI, including generative AI, LLMs, and transformer models.

Composable customer data platforms are taking advantage of a shift in data infrastructure and embracing a “warehouse-first” architecture.

Highlights from the a16z Data and AI Forum, featuring founders building products across the spectrum of data and AI use cases.

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. 

Transactional databases have long been the most critical component of application design. Why? Because a steadfast database is generally the ultimate enforcement point for correctness in a messy, distributed world. Witho...

We're starting to see the very early stages of a tech stack emerge in generative artificial intelligence (AI). Hundreds of new startups are rushing into the market to develop foundation models, build AI-native apps, and...

Understanding how to build a company in the face of a new, immature, or non-existent market is a topic startups should obsess about.

Why AI models will replace artists long before they'll replace programmers

Vertical clouds are on the rise, as traditional clouds give way to specialization.

The pressure the cloud puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits you scale and growth slows. Understand how much market cap is being suppressed by the cloud to help inform the decision-making framework on managing infrastructure as companies scale.

New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories: 1) doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc. 2) doing brand new things...

To help data teams stay on top of the changes happening in the industry, this article reviews an updated set of data infrastructure architectures.

0/ Is there an Enterprise Margin Crisis? It's not uncommon to see software startups with surprisingly low margins (30-40%). I believe there is a broader trend going on here, which I explore in this thread.

Editor’s note: It’s Summit week at a16z, so each day we’re sharing some of our favorite talks from the last few years. a16z Summit is an annual, invite-only event bringing together thinkers, builders, and innovators to e...

Attackers look for the path of least resistance. Recently, that path has shifted from enterprise networks to you and your devices for two reasons. First, as we have built more secure software and systems, it has made it...

The recent Capital One data hack and breach that compromised sensitive information for 106 million people, including 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers, was executed by a single hacker who ex...

watch time: 18 minutes

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BY BENEDICT EVANS

[vimeo 88682226 w=720 h=404]

There is a perfect storm of three distinct disruptive forces that has the potential to topple nearly every major enterprise software incumbent. And the traditional approach of dealing with technology shifts – through acq...

The Internet dramatically reduced the costs of a number of creative activities. For example, publishing written work used to require a large upfront investment. As a result, publishing was controlled by corporations who...