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Excited to introduce @cosign: the curated professional network for the startup community: cosign.co
Our goal is to create the following:
- A comprehensive startup directory of investors, companies, and operators, including what they worked on and who they worked on it with.
- Cosign graph: Who shaped your career? Who were you actually in the trenches with? Who would work with you again? Who thinks you’re someone to watch?
- Durable reputation: Great endorsements happen every day on X and disappear into the feed. Cosign attaches those signals permanently to people and companies.
- Discovery: Who are the best fintech angels? Which AI companies should I watch? Who are the best designers?
- Intent network: Privately signal “I’d invest in them,” “I’d hire them,” “I’d work with them,” or eventually even “I’d acquire this company.” Match people when interest exists on both sides.
Imagine if Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and OG AngelList had a baby. Though Cosign is a community, not a business.
In order to join, you need to be cosigned. Or you can apply directly.
David Booth and I started this idea 7 years ago but didn’t have the firepower to make it work. Now we do.
No one has really touched LinkedIn in 20 years. Excited to take a swing.
cosign.co
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One answer to what's driving GPU rental prices:
Token demand on OpenRouter is up ~27x since last November, from ~6T/week to ~165T/week
Open-weight models now handle ~72% of those tokens, up from ~28% last November
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
Token demand on OpenRouter is up ~27x since last November, from ~6T/week to ~165T/week
Open-weight models now handle ~72% of those tokens, up from ~28% last November
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
Zooming out, GPUs are still renting ahead of a standard 6-year depreciation schedule
Rental price vs. schedule:
- H200: +143%
- B200: +111%
- RTX PRO 6000: +73%
- H100: +54%
- A100: +9%
Most of the gap opened up after April, when token demand took off
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
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Ben Horowitz's message to early-stage founders on betting on yourself, the doubts that do the most damage, and why fear means you're doing it right:
"Your job is to make your bet pay off. You believed in yourself enough to do it. There are gonna be many times when you question on that belief, but that gets you nothing."
"The doubts are gonna be there. Ignore the doubts. The worst doubts aren't the ones people put on you. It's the ones that you put on yourself. Every entrepreneur has them."
"I spent a lot of time with Mark Zuckerberg when he was 22 years old and he had a tremendous doubt about whether he was gonna make it."
"It's not what you feel. It's what you do. You're gonna feel scared. If your guts aren't boiling, you're not even trying at this thing."
@bhorowitz w/ @speedrun GP @andrewchen
"Your job is to make your bet pay off. You believed in yourself enough to do it. There are gonna be many times when you question on that belief, but that gets you nothing."
"The doubts are gonna be there. Ignore the doubts. The worst doubts aren't the ones people put on you. It's the ones that you put on yourself. Every entrepreneur has them."
"I spent a lot of time with Mark Zuckerberg when he was 22 years old and he had a tremendous doubt about whether he was gonna make it."
"It's not what you feel. It's what you do. You're gonna feel scared. If your guts aren't boiling, you're not even trying at this thing."
@bhorowitz w/ @speedrun GP @andrewchen
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a16z's Alex Danco and Moses Sternstein on the AI buildout's missing supply response, and the one category where US production is actually shrinking:
Moses: "You would think with this epic run on prices, which is what we've had, that you would see an increase in output. That's demand would say. You see it to some extent, but not really.
"There's really two levers you can pull. There's utilization, you can get more with what you got, and you can build more capacity."
"The real puzzling one, and perhaps the most important one, is electrical equipment, which is like switchgear, transmission stuff, all the stuff that's really necessary to power on all these GPUs and data centers and the electrification of everything."
"I was so surprised I had to quadruple check this. Production has actually declined. We actually make less of this stuff... Prices have gone up astronomically. There's a huge impulse in demand and we're actually making less of it."
@Alex_Danco @MosesSternstein
Moses: "You would think with this epic run on prices, which is what we've had, that you would see an increase in output. That's demand would say. You see it to some extent, but not really.
"There's really two levers you can pull. There's utilization, you can get more with what you got, and you can build more capacity."
"The real puzzling one, and perhaps the most important one, is electrical equipment, which is like switchgear, transmission stuff, all the stuff that's really necessary to power on all these GPUs and data centers and the electrification of everything."
"I was so surprised I had to quadruple check this. Production has actually declined. We actually make less of this stuff... Prices have gone up astronomically. There's a huge impulse in demand and we're actually making less of it."
@Alex_Danco @MosesSternstein
Power is one of the AI buildout's biggest bottlenecks, and US capacity to make electrical equipment is shrinking
US factory capacity since 2019:
- Comms equipment: +110%
- Semis: +77%
- Computers: +16%
- Electrical equipment: -9%
Electrical equipment prices are up 69%, the r categories
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
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a16z's Alex Danco and Moses Sternstein on the bear case that GPUs would depreciate fast, what rental rates actually show, and why the data points to scarcity:
Alex: "There is a whole case that people made on both sides of the argument that these things were assets that would e. And in the past 18 months, I think what we have learned is that all our assumptions were wrong."
Moses: "GPU rental rates continue to go up. Even as token pricing comes down, you see more and more consumption, and it's causing relative scarcity amongst the GPUs that we have."
"Even for the older GPUs, the A100s, which have been around already for five years, that were supposed to become obsolete... Whether they had 4-year depreciation schedules, 6-year depreciation schedules, they were supposed to be obsolete almost immediately, and that was the original bear case."
"And plainly, they're not... Everybody is priced above what they should be based on their scheduled obsolescence. And that's true of the older models, the A100 and the H100."
@alex_danco @MosesSternstein
Alex: "There is a whole case that people made on both sides of the argument that these things were assets that would e. And in the past 18 months, I think what we have learned is that all our assumptions were wrong."
Moses: "GPU rental rates continue to go up. Even as token pricing comes down, you see more and more consumption, and it's causing relative scarcity amongst the GPUs that we have."
"Even for the older GPUs, the A100s, which have been around already for five years, that were supposed to become obsolete... Whether they had 4-year depreciation schedules, 6-year depreciation schedules, they were supposed to be obsolete almost immediately, and that was the original bear case."
"And plainly, they're not... Everybody is priced above what they should be based on their scheduled obsolescence. And that's true of the older models, the A100 and the H100."
@alex_danco @MosesSternstein
Zooming out, GPUs are still renting ahead of a standard 6-year depreciation schedule
Rental price vs. schedule:
- H200: +143%
- B200: +111%
- RTX PRO 6000: +73%
- H100: +54%
- A100: +9%
Most of the gap opened up after April, when token demand took off
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
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Power is one of the AI buildout's biggest bottlenecks, and US capacity to make electrical equipment is shrinking
US factory capacity since 2019:
- Comms equipment: +110%
- Semis: +77%
- Computers: +16%
- Electrical equipment: -9%
Electrical equipment prices are up 69%, the r categories
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
US factory capacity since 2019:
- Comms equipment: +110%
- Semis: +77%
- Computers: +16%
- Electrical equipment: -9%
Electrical equipment prices are up 69%, the r categories
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
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Zooming out, GPUs are still renting ahead of a standard 6-year depreciation schedule
Rental price vs. schedule:
- H200: +143%
- B200: +111%
- RTX PRO 6000: +73%
- H100: +54%
- A100: +9%
Most of the gap opened up after April, when token demand took off
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
Rental price vs. schedule:
- H200: +143%
- B200: +111%
- RTX PRO 6000: +73%
- H100: +54%
- A100: +9%
Most of the gap opened up after April, when token demand took off
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
GPUs are aging like fine wine, with rental rates up across the board since January 1st
Approximate change YTD:
- H200: +160%
- B200: +120%
- RTX PRO 6000: +65%
- H100: +35%
Even the 6-year-old A100 rents for more than it did at the start of the year
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
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GPUs are aging like fine wine, with rental rates up across the board since January 1st
Approximate change YTD:
- H200: +160%
- B200: +120%
- RTX PRO 6000: +65%
- H100: +35%
Even the 6-year-old A100 rents for more than it did at the start of the year
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
Approximate change YTD:
- H200: +160%
- B200: +120%
- RTX PRO 6000: +65%
- H100: +35%
Even the 6-year-old A100 rents for more than it did at the start of the year
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
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Americans' media consumption has topped out at ~25 hours a week
Annual growth since 2018:
- YouTube: +7.8%
- Social media: +6.6%
- Gaming: +2.1%
- Video (non-YouTube): -0.7%
- Print: -10.5%
Every hour social and YouTube gain is an hour something else loses
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
Annual growth since 2018:
- YouTube: +7.8%
- Social media: +6.6%
- Gaming: +2.1%
- Video (non-YouTube): -0.7%
- Print: -10.5%
Every hour social and YouTube gain is an hour something else loses
Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
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AI demand is a barbell, with the labs on one end and enterprise cost-cutting on the other. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the biggest market sits in the middle, and inference is still "an order of magnitude too expensive" to reach it.
"On one end of the barbell are the AI labs who gobs of compute, unlike anything I've seen. And then a few runaway apps, ChatGPT, Claude Code, things like that."
"On the other end of the barbell are enterprises who are largely using AI for cost avoidance and productivity, so automating customer service or fraud or business process automation."
"In the middle of the barbell are the current production workloads of enterprises, many of which are using AWS and using inference today, but I would say the overwhelming majority of which still aren't in any pervasive way."
"And that I think is gonna be the largest absolute segment of AI usage."
"The cost of inference has come down quite a bit in the last few years, but it's still an order of magnitude too expensive, in my opinion, for it to be used as pervasively as possible."
"If you're asking enterprises to rewrite their applications that use CPU today with AI accelerators... the amount of incremental benefit they have to get is a much higher bar to want to rewrite those apps. But if you can take the cost of inference down, that bar is much lower, and all applications are gonna be better and smarter and more capable."
@ajassy
"On one end of the barbell are the AI labs who gobs of compute, unlike anything I've seen. And then a few runaway apps, ChatGPT, Claude Code, things like that."
"On the other end of the barbell are enterprises who are largely using AI for cost avoidance and productivity, so automating customer service or fraud or business process automation."
"In the middle of the barbell are the current production workloads of enterprises, many of which are using AWS and using inference today, but I would say the overwhelming majority of which still aren't in any pervasive way."
"And that I think is gonna be the largest absolute segment of AI usage."
"The cost of inference has come down quite a bit in the last few years, but it's still an order of magnitude too expensive, in my opinion, for it to be used as pervasively as possible."
"If you're asking enterprises to rewrite their applications that use CPU today with AI accelerators... the amount of incremental benefit they have to get is a much higher bar to want to rewrite those apps. But if you can take the cost of inference down, that bar is much lower, and all applications are gonna be better and smarter and more capable."
@ajassy
Five years into his run as CEO, Andy Jassy has nearly tripled the size of AWS, grown Amazon's revenue by about 80%, and expects to spend $220 billion this year to win AI. Amazon's AI business hit a $25 billion run rate in three years, growing several hundred times faster than a16z's Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to discuss the decisions behind that run, from rebuilding Amazon's fulfillment network after the pandemic to the AWS origin story.
They also cover why data centers became a political fight, Amazon's custom chips, its stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI, why inference needs to get 10x cheaper, AI's most underrated risk, and why every company will have to reinvent its products from scratch, plus Jassy's advice for anyone who's 18 today.
0:47 How Amazon has changed since 2021
1:51 How the pandemic reshaped retail
3:30 Why AI supercharged AWS's growth
5:20 When leadership principles clash
9:36 $60M vs. $25B: early AWS vs. early AI
13:20 How the AI CapEx cash cycle works
15:44 Why the US must build data centers
20:55 The labs-to-enterprise AI barbell
23:12 Demand vs. longtime AWS customers
28:11 Annapurna, Graviton, and Trainium
33:55 Backing Anthropic and OpenAI
37:15 Why AI means smaller teams
42:13 AI's underrated risk: security
46:29 Why Amazon rewired Alexa's brain
53:07 What Jassy tells his kids about AI
56:36 Betting on AI, robotics, and space
YouTube: youtu.be/-YMMRQ1qscI
@ajassy @Amazon @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg
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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's advice for young people: AI will help you "invent in ways that just weren't possible" before, and critical thinking and human judgment will remain your edge.
"You can't run away from it, and you can't wish it away. It's gonna be incredibly impactful in erience that you try and use in your work... You need to learn about it. You need to educate yourself about it. You need to use it a lot. You need to try it."
"I don't think it replaces critical reasoning and thinking."
"If I think about business school as an example, you would get these three cases that you had to analyze every day, and you had to do a lot of reading, and you had to take notes, and you had to figure out what the key issues were... All that kind of goes away with AI."
"AI is gonna be able to kind of get everybody to that advanced starting spot much more quickly."
"The actual putting the dots and the pieces together, either to build a strategy or an approach or a plan or a new product or a new customer experience, I don't think AI is gonna do that for most people most of the time."
"I still think you're gonna need human judgment and ingenuity and invention and experimentation and thinking about how all the pieces come together to end up building amazing experiences and businesses."
@ajassy
"You can't run away from it, and you can't wish it away. It's gonna be incredibly impactful in erience that you try and use in your work... You need to learn about it. You need to educate yourself about it. You need to use it a lot. You need to try it."
"I don't think it replaces critical reasoning and thinking."
"If I think about business school as an example, you would get these three cases that you had to analyze every day, and you had to do a lot of reading, and you had to take notes, and you had to figure out what the key issues were... All that kind of goes away with AI."
"AI is gonna be able to kind of get everybody to that advanced starting spot much more quickly."
"The actual putting the dots and the pieces together, either to build a strategy or an approach or a plan or a new product or a new customer experience, I don't think AI is gonna do that for most people most of the time."
"I still think you're gonna need human judgment and ingenuity and invention and experimentation and thinking about how all the pieces come together to end up building amazing experiences and businesses."
@ajassy
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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on what AI means for the future of organizations: smaller teams, new jobs, and the ability to invent "much more expansively and much more quickly."
"I started at the company 29 years ago. I started as an assistant product manager, and I was the product ow, five products."
"When companies get successful and they get bigger... everybody becomes more specialized, and everybody accepts that that's the way you have to do business if you're building something big and successful, and it's not."
"And it's definitely not when you look at what's happening with AI."
"I think what it means for the future of organizations is, number one, we're gonna have fewer humans doing the work that they're doing today... You're not gonna have no people, but you're not gonna have as many humans as we've all thrown at scale as businesses have gotten bigger."
"There are gonna be different jobs and new jobs, some of which we know about, some of which we don't know about, that will arise as AI and robotics and space develop."
"I think you're gonna have smaller teams that have people who can work cross-functionally. They don't only own one sliver because the models are gonna be able to get them 80% of the way there... I think that every team will start at a much more advanced stage than we have in the past."
@ajassy
"I started at the company 29 years ago. I started as an assistant product manager, and I was the product ow, five products."
"When companies get successful and they get bigger... everybody becomes more specialized, and everybody accepts that that's the way you have to do business if you're building something big and successful, and it's not."
"And it's definitely not when you look at what's happening with AI."
"I think what it means for the future of organizations is, number one, we're gonna have fewer humans doing the work that they're doing today... You're not gonna have no people, but you're not gonna have as many humans as we've all thrown at scale as businesses have gotten bigger."
"There are gonna be different jobs and new jobs, some of which we know about, some of which we don't know about, that will arise as AI and robotics and space develop."
"I think you're gonna have smaller teams that have people who can work cross-functionally. They don't only own one sliver because the models are gonna be able to get them 80% of the way there... I think that every team will start at a much more advanced stage than we have in the past."
@ajassy
Five years into his run as CEO, Andy Jassy has nearly tripled the size of AWS, grown Amazon's revenue by about 80%, and expects to spend $220 billion this year to win AI. Amazon's AI business hit a $25 billion run rate in three years, growing several hundred times faster than a16z's Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to discuss the decisions behind that run, from rebuilding Amazon's fulfillment network after the pandemic to the AWS origin story.
They also cover why data centers became a political fight, Amazon's custom chips, its stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI, why inference needs to get 10x cheaper, AI's most underrated risk, and why every company will have to reinvent its products from scratch, plus Jassy's advice for anyone who's 18 today.
0:47 How Amazon has changed since 2021
1:51 How the pandemic reshaped retail
3:30 Why AI supercharged AWS's growth
5:20 When leadership principles clash
9:36 $60M vs. $25B: early AWS vs. early AI
13:20 How the AI CapEx cash cycle works
15:44 Why the US must build data centers
20:55 The labs-to-enterprise AI barbell
23:12 Demand vs. longtime AWS customers
28:11 Annapurna, Graviton, and Trainium
33:55 Backing Anthropic and OpenAI
37:15 Why AI means smaller teams
42:13 AI's underrated risk: security
46:29 Why Amazon rewired Alexa's brain
53:07 What Jassy tells his kids about AI
56:36 Betting on AI, robotics, and space
YouTube: youtu.be/-YMMRQ1qscI
@ajassy @Amazon @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg
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Amazon's AI business is growing several hundred times faster than AWS did, and it's driving a big part of Amazon's $220B investment this year. CEO Andy Jassy says they "haven't seen anything like it."
"In the early days of AWS, we felt like we were growing really fast and we we were about a $60 million annual run rate business after three years."
"In the first three years of this generative AI wave, our AI business in AWS is over $25 billion in run rate. So it's several hundred times faster."
"We've said this year in 2026, we expect to spend about $220 billion of CapEx."
"I remember being at a leadership team breakfast 15 years ago when we couldn't believe a telco company spent $50 billion in CapEx. We're like, 'How are they spending that much on CapEx?' So these numbers, they’re kind of mind-blowing numbers."
"Even spending $220 billion in CapEx this year, we're leaving a meaningful amount of demand on the table. The thing that helps us here is that we have really good visibility into customer demand."
@ajassy
"In the early days of AWS, we felt like we were growing really fast and we we were about a $60 million annual run rate business after three years."
"In the first three years of this generative AI wave, our AI business in AWS is over $25 billion in run rate. So it's several hundred times faster."
"We've said this year in 2026, we expect to spend about $220 billion of CapEx."
"I remember being at a leadership team breakfast 15 years ago when we couldn't believe a telco company spent $50 billion in CapEx. We're like, 'How are they spending that much on CapEx?' So these numbers, they’re kind of mind-blowing numbers."
"Even spending $220 billion in CapEx this year, we're leaving a meaningful amount of demand on the table. The thing that helps us here is that we have really good visibility into customer demand."
@ajassy
Five years into his run as CEO, Andy Jassy has nearly tripled the size of AWS, grown Amazon's revenue by about 80%, and expects to spend $220 billion this year to win AI. Amazon's AI business hit a $25 billion run rate in three years, growing several hundred times faster than a16z's Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to discuss the decisions behind that run, from rebuilding Amazon's fulfillment network after the pandemic to the AWS origin story.
They also cover why data centers became a political fight, Amazon's custom chips, its stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI, why inference needs to get 10x cheaper, AI's most underrated risk, and why every company will have to reinvent its products from scratch, plus Jassy's advice for anyone who's 18 today.
0:47 How Amazon has changed since 2021
1:51 How the pandemic reshaped retail
3:30 Why AI supercharged AWS's growth
5:20 When leadership principles clash
9:36 $60M vs. $25B: early AWS vs. early AI
13:20 How the AI CapEx cash cycle works
15:44 Why the US must build data centers
20:55 The labs-to-enterprise AI barbell
23:12 Demand vs. longtime AWS customers
28:11 Annapurna, Graviton, and Trainium
33:55 Backing Anthropic and OpenAI
37:15 Why AI means smaller teams
42:13 AI's underrated risk: security
46:29 Why Amazon rewired Alexa's brain
53:07 What Jassy tells his kids about AI
56:36 Betting on AI, robotics, and space
YouTube: youtu.be/-YMMRQ1qscI
@ajassy @Amazon @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg
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AI models are finding far more vulnerabilities than humans ever did. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says that means "companies will have to rewrite almost all of their code to be agentically capable."
"If you look at all of the nervousness of the last month or two about models, they are tastical scenarios... I don't think that there is enough discussion about the more immediate-term risks, which are really around cybersecurity."
"These models find so many more vulnerabilities than you did before, that humans weren't finding."
"Today, you find vulnerabilities, people classify the vulnerabilities, people develop patches. And then even if you do that part quick, most companies take a long time to deploy because there are all these dependencies. You're gonna have to deploy in minutes."
"If you don't actually have your applications rewritten to be able to be updated by agents, you're gonna have no chance in that new world."
@ajassy
"If you look at all of the nervousness of the last month or two about models, they are tastical scenarios... I don't think that there is enough discussion about the more immediate-term risks, which are really around cybersecurity."
"These models find so many more vulnerabilities than you did before, that humans weren't finding."
"Today, you find vulnerabilities, people classify the vulnerabilities, people develop patches. And then even if you do that part quick, most companies take a long time to deploy because there are all these dependencies. You're gonna have to deploy in minutes."
"If you don't actually have your applications rewritten to be able to be updated by agents, you're gonna have no chance in that new world."
@ajassy
Five years into his run as CEO, Andy Jassy has nearly tripled the size of AWS, grown Amazon's revenue by about 80%, and expects to spend $220 billion this year to win AI. Amazon's AI business hit a $25 billion run rate in three years, growing several hundred times faster than a16z's Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to discuss the decisions behind that run, from rebuilding Amazon's fulfillment network after the pandemic to the AWS origin story.
They also cover why data centers became a political fight, Amazon's custom chips, its stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI, why inference needs to get 10x cheaper, AI's most underrated risk, and why every company will have to reinvent its products from scratch, plus Jassy's advice for anyone who's 18 today.
0:47 How Amazon has changed since 2021
1:51 How the pandemic reshaped retail
3:30 Why AI supercharged AWS's growth
5:20 When leadership principles clash
9:36 $60M vs. $25B: early AWS vs. early AI
13:20 How the AI CapEx cash cycle works
15:44 Why the US must build data centers
20:55 The labs-to-enterprise AI barbell
23:12 Demand vs. longtime AWS customers
28:11 Annapurna, Graviton, and Trainium
33:55 Backing Anthropic and OpenAI
37:15 Why AI means smaller teams
42:13 AI's underrated risk: security
46:29 Why Amazon rewired Alexa's brain
53:07 What Jassy tells his kids about AI
56:36 Betting on AI, robotics, and space
YouTube: youtu.be/-YMMRQ1qscI
@ajassy @Amazon @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg
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Five years into his run as CEO, Andy Jassy has nearly tripled the size of AWS, grown Amazon's revenue by about 80%, and expects to spend $220 billion this year to win AI. Amazon's AI business hit a $25 billion run rate in three years, growing several hundred times faster than a16z's Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to discuss the decisions behind that run, from rebuilding Amazon's fulfillment network after the pandemic to the AWS origin story.
They also cover why data centers became a political fight, Amazon's custom chips, its stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI, why inference needs to get 10x cheaper, AI's most underrated risk, and why every company will have to reinvent its products from scratch, plus Jassy's advice for anyone who's 18 today.
0:47 How Amazon has changed since 2021
1:51 How the pandemic reshaped retail
3:30 Why AI supercharged AWS's growth
5:20 When leadership principles clash
9:36 $60M vs. $25B: early AWS vs. early AI
13:20 How the AI CapEx cash cycle works
15:44 Why the US must build data centers
20:55 The labs-to-enterprise AI barbell
23:12 Demand vs. longtime AWS customers
28:11 Annapurna, Graviton, and Trainium
33:55 Backing Anthropic and OpenAI
37:15 Why AI means smaller teams
42:13 AI's underrated risk: security
46:29 Why Amazon rewired Alexa's brain
53:07 What Jassy tells his kids about AI
56:36 Betting on AI, robotics, and space
YouTube: youtu.be/-YMMRQ1qscI
@ajassy @Amazon @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg
They also cover why data centers became a political fight, Amazon's custom chips, its stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI, why inference needs to get 10x cheaper, AI's most underrated risk, and why every company will have to reinvent its products from scratch, plus Jassy's advice for anyone who's 18 today.
0:47 How Amazon has changed since 2021
1:51 How the pandemic reshaped retail
3:30 Why AI supercharged AWS's growth
5:20 When leadership principles clash
9:36 $60M vs. $25B: early AWS vs. early AI
13:20 How the AI CapEx cash cycle works
15:44 Why the US must build data centers
20:55 The labs-to-enterprise AI barbell
23:12 Demand vs. longtime AWS customers
28:11 Annapurna, Graviton, and Trainium
33:55 Backing Anthropic and OpenAI
37:15 Why AI means smaller teams
42:13 AI's underrated risk: security
46:29 Why Amazon rewired Alexa's brain
53:07 What Jassy tells his kids about AI
56:36 Betting on AI, robotics, and space
YouTube: youtu.be/-YMMRQ1qscI
@ajassy @Amazon @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg
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TJ Parker of @GeneralMedicine on healthcare's new bottleneck, and why getting care should be as easy as buying anything else online:
"Advice is becoming really abundant, and getting to a list of answers with a GPT has become a thing that almost everyone is doing now in ink that answer almost always comes back to a set of tasks for you to go do. It might be, you should go call and book an appointment with a doctor, call and book an appointment with a specialist, go get these sets of labs, or go get this imaging done."
"While advice is abundant, you then are immediately stuck back with the realities of the current healthcare system."
"We've for a very long time felt like the best modality for that is a store. Everything else in your life, you search and browse the options available to you, you understand what they cost, you understand when they're available, and you go buy the thing."
"The time is right for something like this in healthcare because the bottleneck is no longer advice, the bottleneck is taking action on that advice."
@tjparker
Full conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=HBlJ7x…
"Advice is becoming really abundant, and getting to a list of answers with a GPT has become a thing that almost everyone is doing now in ink that answer almost always comes back to a set of tasks for you to go do. It might be, you should go call and book an appointment with a doctor, call and book an appointment with a specialist, go get these sets of labs, or go get this imaging done."
"While advice is abundant, you then are immediately stuck back with the realities of the current healthcare system."
"We've for a very long time felt like the best modality for that is a store. Everything else in your life, you search and browse the options available to you, you understand what they cost, you understand when they're available, and you go buy the thing."
"The time is right for something like this in healthcare because the bottleneck is no longer advice, the bottleneck is taking action on that advice."
@tjparker
Full conversation: youtube.com/watch?v=HBlJ7x…
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AI can now find vulnerabilities with internet-scale impact. Greg Brockman on why defenders can hold the advantage, what OpenAI did to secure itself, and its $1B commitment to secure critical infrastructure:
"This [cyber] capability broadly diffused, I think is something that eat actors in new ways. And I think that defenders need to use this time before that technology's broadly available to secure themselves."
"At OpenAI, we took 25% of our production engineers and said, 'Sorry, all your projects are on hold. You are now defending... You're going to use the models to find all the holes.' And we found a number of serious issues and we fixed them."
"You want to be in this tight loop of new cyber capability drops, you deploy it against your systems, you find the new holes, and ideally, you've managed to automate this... If you can do that at machine speed, I think the defenders will be advantaged in deeply significant ways."
"Not every organization will have the capital required to do it. So we have a billion-dollar commitment to frontline defenders, so to organizations that we all rely on every day in our communities, to access our models to secure themselves."
"I've never met a CISO who felt that they were appropriately resourced... Now is a moment where we actually have a real both motivation to do it and a real ability to do it."
@gdb
"This [cyber] capability broadly diffused, I think is something that eat actors in new ways. And I think that defenders need to use this time before that technology's broadly available to secure themselves."
"At OpenAI, we took 25% of our production engineers and said, 'Sorry, all your projects are on hold. You are now defending... You're going to use the models to find all the holes.' And we found a number of serious issues and we fixed them."
"You want to be in this tight loop of new cyber capability drops, you deploy it against your systems, you find the new holes, and ideally, you've managed to automate this... If you can do that at machine speed, I think the defenders will be advantaged in deeply significant ways."
"Not every organization will have the capital required to do it. So we have a billion-dollar commitment to frontline defenders, so to organizations that we all rely on every day in our communities, to access our models to secure themselves."
"I've never met a CISO who felt that they were appropriately resourced... Now is a moment where we actually have a real both motivation to do it and a real ability to do it."
@gdb
Over the past two months, we have been leading a coalition to mitigate one of the most severe bugs in open source software found in recent memory, php2shell, found as part of our Patch the Planet initiative. x.com/i/article/2112…
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Marc Andreessen on the case for open source AI:
"How would you feel if the only way your kid could learn about AI is to go to work for one of two companies? Like that, as a parent, I think would probably drive you pretty crazy."
"Whereas in a world of open source, every kid can rks."
"Without open source, AI inevitably centralizes down to one or two companies, or maybe just flat out the government."
"Close your eyes and picture the concept of government sushi. And then keep your eyes closed and picture government AI. How do you feel about that? Open source is the guarantor that that's not the future."
@pmarca
"How would you feel if the only way your kid could learn about AI is to go to work for one of two companies? Like that, as a parent, I think would probably drive you pretty crazy."
"Whereas in a world of open source, every kid can rks."
"Without open source, AI inevitably centralizes down to one or two companies, or maybe just flat out the government."
"Close your eyes and picture the concept of government sushi. And then keep your eyes closed and picture government AI. How do you feel about that? Open source is the guarantor that that's not the future."
@pmarca
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier.
Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap.
Frontier expands pto to back "outer planet" founders who are building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.
Chris joins @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and @eriktorenberg to discuss why crypto has become part of the broader tech landscape, why Frontier fills a hole in the firm's architecture, and why they'd rather be too early than too late.
They also get into why the gap between AI-native startups and incumbents is the widest Marc has ever seen, how AI could pull forward 20 years of frontier technology, why stablecoins may become the way AI agents pay each other, how AI is breaking the internet's business model, and why today's 18-year-olds are about to become superhumans.
0:50 Introducing a16z Frontier
2:49 Smartphone parts to drones and VR
4:47 Backing the "outer planets"
7:11 Good ideas that look like bad ideas
10:43 The JP Morgan photo in Marc's office
15:13 Good tech ideas eventually work
16:53 AI may pull tech 20 years forward
18:18 The widest AI gap Marc's ever seen
22:06 Workers adopt AI before companies do
26:32 Old use cases vs. AI-native ones
30:08 Beyond "product manager brain"
34:45 AI can reverse engineer any hardware
38:23 The case for open source AI
46:36 How AI breaks the internet's model
49:11 VR, homebrew hacking, multiplayer AI
54:00 If you're 18, study "modern alchemy"
YouTube: youtu.be/-9XQMHhpypc
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at a16z.com/portfolio.
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Chris Dixon on the deal that built the internet, why AI is breaking it, and the "great reconfiguration" that comes next:
"I call it the internet's covenant, which is sort of a deal between the distribution side of the internet, Google, Facebook, and so forth, and the content l sites, whatever it might be."
"The websites that make money on ads and conversions and other things can no longer do that. You see the early signs of this, like Stack Overflow and some other websites where the traffic dropped precipitously when you had sort of AI replacements."
"Many of these transactions will still happen. They just won't happen in the way they were happening... There's a bunch of businesses that are built on the human attention economy that will have challenges."
"On the entrepreneur side, there's a chance to rethink these things from first principles and say, 'Okay, what does a better internet look like?'"
"I think this is gonna happen over the next, let's call it decade, you're gonna have this kinda great reconfiguration of the internet and how the economics work, how the attention flows, how knowledge is shared, how people produce things together, collaborate."
@cdixon
"I call it the internet's covenant, which is sort of a deal between the distribution side of the internet, Google, Facebook, and so forth, and the content l sites, whatever it might be."
"The websites that make money on ads and conversions and other things can no longer do that. You see the early signs of this, like Stack Overflow and some other websites where the traffic dropped precipitously when you had sort of AI replacements."
"Many of these transactions will still happen. They just won't happen in the way they were happening... There's a bunch of businesses that are built on the human attention economy that will have challenges."
"On the entrepreneur side, there's a chance to rethink these things from first principles and say, 'Okay, what does a better internet look like?'"
"I think this is gonna happen over the next, let's call it decade, you're gonna have this kinda great reconfiguration of the internet and how the economics work, how the attention flows, how knowledge is shared, how people produce things together, collaborate."
@cdixon
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier.
Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap.
Frontier expands pto to back "outer planet" founders who are building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.
Chris joins @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and @eriktorenberg to discuss why crypto has become part of the broader tech landscape, why Frontier fills a hole in the firm's architecture, and why they'd rather be too early than too late.
They also get into why the gap between AI-native startups and incumbents is the widest Marc has ever seen, how AI could pull forward 20 years of frontier technology, why stablecoins may become the way AI agents pay each other, how AI is breaking the internet's business model, and why today's 18-year-olds are about to become superhumans.
0:50 Introducing a16z Frontier
2:49 Smartphone parts to drones and VR
4:47 Backing the "outer planets"
7:11 Good ideas that look like bad ideas
10:43 The JP Morgan photo in Marc's office
15:13 Good tech ideas eventually work
16:53 AI may pull tech 20 years forward
18:18 The widest AI gap Marc's ever seen
22:06 Workers adopt AI before companies do
26:32 Old use cases vs. AI-native ones
30:08 Beyond "product manager brain"
34:45 AI can reverse engineer any hardware
38:23 The case for open source AI
46:36 How AI breaks the internet's model
49:11 VR, homebrew hacking, multiplayer AI
54:00 If you're 18, study "modern alchemy"
YouTube: youtu.be/-9XQMHhpypc
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at a16z.com/portfolio.
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Chris Dixon on a16z Frontier's investing philosophy, and why being too early is better than being too late:
"We believe that basically every good idea that we've ever seen that involved technology has eventually worked or we believe will work, if it hasn't worked yet."
"Almost p working had a precursor that didn't work and maybe was 10 years too early. And that's the hardest thing in technology is to predict the timing of these things."
"There's the technology, there's the culture, there's the business environment, there's the political environment. There's so many factors that go into these things and having it all line up."
"Specifically in the Frontier Fund, we want to err on the side of being too early."
@cdixon
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at a16z.com/portfolio.
"We believe that basically every good idea that we've ever seen that involved technology has eventually worked or we believe will work, if it hasn't worked yet."
"Almost p working had a precursor that didn't work and maybe was 10 years too early. And that's the hardest thing in technology is to predict the timing of these things."
"There's the technology, there's the culture, there's the business environment, there's the political environment. There's so many factors that go into these things and having it all line up."
"Specifically in the Frontier Fund, we want to err on the side of being too early."
@cdixon
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at a16z.com/portfolio.
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