Artificial Intelligence
Google and Meta have the users, but advertisers pay their bills. A personal agent needs your inbox, your calendar and your credit card, and the people with the most to lose will pay for one that answers only to them.
Leadership
Meredith Whittaker helped organize a 20,000-person walkout at Google, then took charge of a nonprofit that estimated it would need $50 million a year to run. Her edge at Signal is rare for a tech executive: when she says she'll walk away, people believe her.
Artificial Intelligence
AI is sold by the month today, but the flat subscription is already straining. Ad platforms took decades to move from selling views to selling results, and AI is following much faster. The catch is one every advertiser knows: somebody has to decide what counts as a result.
Reinventing School for the AI Era | Joe Liemandt, Gagan Biyani & Erik Torenberg on the a16z Show
Two interviews explain the shift. One startup fixes documents so agents can work. One generation dumps raw thoughts into AI and trusts it to organize. The next natives will think differently.
LLY just became the 10th largest US company. Obesity built the base. Neuroscience, and drugs that reduce the need for sleep, may build the next leg.
Old metric was cost per drone. New metric is cost per resolved target. Better ROI means Founders Fund backed players win more contracts.
Cancer hits older people hardest. Curing it adds 10 years of life. That breaks pensions. So it will not be prioritized.
Jay Clayton is now AI Czar and DNI. A Wall Street lawyer running Super Intelligence Force. Signals AI is now national security, not just tech. Age of reconnaissance is here.
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A robot that maps your home doesn't have to film it. Lidar can handle a lot of what a home robot needs to see, but it's less blind and less private than people assume, and that gap is where the real product decision sits.
We only made code readable because people had to read it. As agents write more of it, I think they'll end up with a language of their own, and the danger is how few of us will bother to look.
Meta quietly added {{media_type}} to the Build URL parameter list. It lands exactly when a single ad becomes a container of 10 assets.
Reinventing School for the AI Era | Joe Liemandt, Gagan Biyani & Erik Torenberg on the a16z Show
CAPTCHAs fail against AI agents. Passwords fail against phishing. Platforms turn to biometrics as proof that a real human authorizes agent actions.
Meta and Google built fortunes on ads. When AI agents become the buyer, trust beats targeting. The best hedge is monetizing AI itself.
Token costs falling 13x a year. Inference costs down 280x. When intelligence becomes commodity, defensibility moves from model to workflow.
Signal now lets you sign up without a phone number. WhatsApp added usernames for the same reason. The middle collapses.
Two interviews explain the shift. One startup fixes documents so agents can work. One generation dumps raw thoughts into AI and trusts it to organize. The next natives will think differently.
The most powerful solver is not always the expert. With AI as scaffolding and incentives as fuel, a masonry expert can fix an oil spill and a construction technique can keep rations fresh.
LLY just became the 10th largest US company. Obesity built the base. Neuroscience, and drugs that reduce the need for sleep, may build the next leg.
A San Francisco startup says it turned mercury into gold with fusion neutrons. The physics checks out. The economics do not, not yet.
