← The a16z Show
The a16z Show
Technology, Culture, and the Next AI Interface with signüll
00:34:12
Erik Torenberg and Anish Acharya, general partners at a16z, speak with signüll about how technology reshapes culture, relationships, and the products we build. The conversation covers tacit knowledge versus intellectual knowledge, dating apps and their effect on human connection, AI relationships, why Claude feels artisan while other models feel utilitarian, and what consumer founders should actually care about.
Loading summary
Transcript92 lines
- [00:01]
Balaji Srinivasan
It's funny how the Internet now everybody can comment on everything. Every technology cycle, to me, is increasingly harder because you're probably going into a different part of how the human mind operates. Right now we're like, developing personality. That's insane.
- [00:15]
Anish Acharya
There's technology, there's culture, which is collective, and then there's our individual progress as a human species. Culture's changing, technology's improving. Where are we as people?
- [00:27]
Balaji Srinivasan
I can't believe the scale at which we're at now. Like, it's absolutely unbelievable. At OpenAI, we were discussing a bunch of things around how do you think about personality development of models? And these are really technically hard problems. I think the number One challenge even OpenAI mentioned is that how do we make the power of the models more easily accessible and useful in terms of what they can do? And I think this is happening with agents, but it still seems very primitive and very inaccessible to a lot of individuals.
- [00:55]
Anish Acharya
I think that the number one way you change the NPS of AI is you make important things cheap quickly.
- [01:02]
Podcast Host
Shakespeare argued brevity is the soul of wit. Prediction markets bet that crowds know the future better than experts. And dating apps turn the most universal human desire into a design problem that technology may have made worse, not better. These three ideas seem unrelated, but they share a root the gap between what people know formally and what they understand intuitively. Economists call this tacit knowledge. It's a knack for reading a room, fixing an engine, or sensing when a product is right before the data confirms it. Most of Silicon Valley still rewards the formal kind, but something is shifting, and one of the sharpest observers of that shift has been writing about it online under a Shakespeare avatar. I speak with Signal online commentator alongside a 16Z general partner, Anish Acharya,
- [01:54]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
here live with Signal, the great culture commentator of our time. You have opinions on everything from, you know, what's happening in AI, both as a consumer but also the industry, to what's happening all the big tech companies, to what's happened in dating markets more broadly, to how the product should be developed. There's no commentator like you. How do you sort of make sense of yourself on the Internet in terms of how you thread these topics together? What sort of threads it all?
- [02:23]
Balaji Srinivasan
I mean, I could have an opinion on Iran and dating at the same time, maybe within minutes, maybe even Iranian dating.
- [02:31]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
Like, you're like, by the way, how
- [02:33]
Anish Acharya
does it work there?
- [02:34]
Balaji Srinivasan
Are they using Tinder? I don't know. I mean, there's probably several jokes about there about love bombing and stuff. All right, I apologize.
- [02:43]
Podcast Host
Don't apologize.
- [02:45]
Balaji Srinivasan
Okay. I have this weird tendency to where I like to add humor to things that are maybe not inappropriate. Anyway, I think, look, it's funny how the Internet now everybody can comment on everything. Yeah, there's a lot of people that have a great perspective in a singular dimension. Got Ben Thompson writing about technology and markets and if you want to have an analysis of an earnings report of Microsoft, I mean, who better in the world than Ben Thompson? I mean you can, you can packy rates about deep tech and crazy I think 40 page papers about industries and things and really fun to read, really great things. What I noticed is like I've been in technology for such a long time, since I was a kid. And I'm particularly fascinated with culture in general as well. And I think that intersection of tech and culture is so fascinating to me. And I like to relate everything back to computer science and how I've learned about the world through computer science and computers in general. And I think all my tweets and things are really in essence relating the idea of life to technology and culture to technology in maybe an interesting or this is how my mind works. I think my writing is all a reflection of the prompts that happen in my brain that get translated somehow into words that are in the right order that other people can interpret and therefore have a reaction to and maybe generate a little bit of hate online or a little bit of love. And I think that that's actually quite
- [04:11]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
beautiful that we're all doing poetic thing I've ever heard about.
- [04:14]
Balaji Srinivasan
I do have a Shakespeare profile photo.
- [04:17]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
Exactly.
- [04:18]
Balaji Srinivasan
And you know, I think that that's been great. I grew up playing a game called SimCity and in SimCity you can increase the simulation speeds. There's a button that allows you to increase the simulation of the city and the cars move faster and the people move faster and the disasters happen faster and everything is just increased. And I feel like in the recent, maybe obviously in the last 20 years with respect to iPhone and whatnot, but man, in the last two, three, four years, holy shit. Who the hell hit the hundred x speed? Like it feels ridiculous. Like if I talk to somebody that something happened last month, it feels like it happened like 10 years ago. Nicholas Maduro got pulled from Venezuela and brought to America in the most amazing outfit and people forgot about this. Like it's just incredibly fascinating the way that the world is moving so fast and technology is accelerating that I think if it's the fuel that is empowering that engine and I don't know what we did, but it's moving really, really fast.
- [05:16]
Anish Acharya
And then do you think if I was to almost separate the three ideas, you know, there's technology, there's culture, which is collective, and then there's a sort of. However you measure our individual progress as a human species, culture's changing, technology's improving. Where are we as people? Are we more spiritually mature, less spiritually mature than we were 50 years ago, 500 years ago, 5,000 years ago? Or are we just basically, you know, Neanderthals with iPhones?
- [05:41]
Balaji Srinivasan
I think generally technology should help us understand ourselves in a better way such that we are able to have intellectual, spiritual potential. Growth as a species, as a collective and the individual. I suspect, and I think I firmly believe that I'm like pro technology helping achieve that. I love using AI to be able to understand myself. Like, if I say something it's like, wait, does this make sense? Is this more interesting? Like, how do I personally think about it? What am I missing? And those are really things that help me grow intellectually, spiritually, personally, relationships, all of those things. So inherently, I mean, if I understand your question correctly, it's more like these things are really helping us experience ourselves much better. And I think that probably is the greatest achievement you can possibly have. I mean, we're tool builders and every tool that we've ever built has helped us progress as a human species or individually, whether it's art or the wheel or whatever. And I can't believe the scale at which we're at now. Right. Like, it's absolutely unbelievable. And I think what's shocking to me is that the collective has not caught on yet.
- [06:55]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
Do you think the norms around AI relationships with boyfriend, girlfriend or just best friendships are going to be something in the next five to 10 years? Extreme to a degree that seems unimaginable right now for the average person. Or what do you think when you
- [07:08]
Balaji Srinivasan
have ease of access and reward structures around it and a human desire paired with it that's deep, I think you get interesting outcomes and the desire and the pursuit of connection is an incredible and important element of any human's existence. And the idea that AI can help you facilitate that with depth and scale and ever ending AI doesn't get tired.
- [07:40]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
What else is surprising you most about how people are interacting with AI, particularly the different models? Or what are you observing as you're looking at the landscape and trying to make sense of where things are going?
- [07:52]
Balaji Srinivasan
Well, first of all, I don't think most people are utilizing them anything beyond the basics. Like it's fascinating to me that every single time we're focused on really advanced capability. Demonstration. Holy crap. This is a PhD researcher or whatever. Yet I don't think most people are utilizing in such a fashion, obviously. And I think most people are utilizing very, very, very basic tasks. And so I think we're in like the stone ages of how people view and perceive and use these things. Even though there's a billion people utilizing them, but they're not utilizing them to the full capabilities. Like, I think the number one challenge for Even I think OpenAI mentioned this is that how do this stuff, the power of the models more easily accessible and useful in terms of what they can do. And I think this is happening with agents. It's happening today, but it still seems very primitive and very inaccessible to a lot of individuals. I think this is. I personally like to think about this because the way that I like to think about the world. One of my favorite Shakespeare quotes, and this is why the Shakespeare picture exists, is brevity is the soul of wit. And Shakespeare was able to capture an essence of the world in very simple, like not simple terminology. Maybe. I don't. Back then it was simple, but in a few words or a few sentences. And I think we need to make this stuff much more easily accessible and useful for individuals. I don't know how that will be, what that will look like, but it's certainly something that I love to think about personally. And I don't know where we'll end up, but I view it more as an art than a science at the moment. Yeah, but it's cool. It's a fun time to exist as a technologist.
- [09:25]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
A lot of people are wondering what to even work on in the age of sort of the big labs, like, what to start, how to think about what could be a real company versus something that they'll end up doing or what's just worth doing. How have you thought about it or how do you advise people to think about that?
- [09:39]
Balaji Srinivasan
A lot of AI today is very much the big labs kind of are dominating consumer territory. It's OpenAI and anthropic and then tons and tons of people trying to find a business use case for it in various verticals. It's interesting. I personally focus on what I'm passionate about. Like I was at a demo day or whatever. There's a lot of individuals who I thought clearly they were. They found the idea through AI to work on, what to work on. It's fascinating. I was like, are you really interested in real estate? Like, I Don't know. Do you want to spend your time working on this? And is this an interesting problem? Like, I don't think about it from a technology perspective. Like, screw AI. I don't care about what area are you interested in, what thing drives you? If I were an investor, I think that's probably the only thing that matters is are you going to keep going into this problem space if you're not that interested in it? Look, we're having a lot of fun doing this, and I think if you're not having a lot of fun doing stuff, you probably shouldn't work on it. It's something that, like, it's a privileged thing, obviously. And often a lot of people don't find work fun. They have to do it because it's economically necessary. But if you're going to build a company, try to have fun with it. There's a great quote in the Bhagavad Gita, which I read recently again, and I was like, you know, you're not entitled to the fruits of your labor. And I never think about the outcomes. I just try to figure out what I enjoy, how much fun I like to have and the problems that I like thinking about. I like. All this account that I have is just pure fun. Like, I get. I really enjoy talking and thinking about this, and my brain prompts me to think about it. We were talking about, you know, the real prompt is in your brain. Like, that is where it originates. And then you're translating that into some text that you're sending into AI, where we call that a prompt. And. Sure, yeah, but like, without the. The spark in your existence, in your inner self, nothing would happen.
- [11:43]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
There's some Rick Rubin shit, man.
- [11:44]
Balaji Srinivasan
It's true. Like, it's fucking.
- [11:46]
Anish Acharya
It's.
- [11:46]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
It's so fucking true.
- [11:47]
Balaji Srinivasan
Like, how we should get you together.
- [11:49]
Podcast Host
This is why.
- [11:50]
Balaji Srinivasan
This is why. You know, I think Rick Rubin, people made fun of him.
- [11:54]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
Yeah, he's amazing.
- [11:55]
Balaji Srinivasan
He's incredible because he was ahead of the curve. And I think music is such a. I know, Anish, you're a giant, you know? You know, you're DJ in music. But, like, it's such a. You have to feel it. Yeah, you have to feel it. And there's such an important element to it. I think when you're doing anything new, building a company, you have to feel it. So.
- [12:22]
Anish Acharya
Okay, so I have a question for you. There's sort of two different archetypes of great consumer founders. Okay? I'd say there's the maybe. Maybe the modern archetype is somebody like, you know, Boris is working on cloud code, or of course, Dario, or, you know, Sam and some of his co founders who are so extraordinarily technical, they're like, willing these things into existence that were unimaginable five years ago. Okay. And that's great. And ChatGPT is the fastest product to what I think is a billion users, et cetera, et cetera. There's a other archetype from the web 2.0 days, right. These are like the gentle sort of consumer, I don't know, philosophers whose canvas was technology. Right. Think ev. Think Kevin Rose. All these people were just cut from a different cloth and they were perhaps more students of culture than technology. Okay. And you got two very different forms of types of companies. And I don't quite know where I'd put Zuck, but let's set him aside for a moment. Do you think that there's a preferred model? Is, like, is the gentle builder more of a New York informed model and the technical builder is more of an SF informed model? Is it just something that matches with the product cycle, like, and then maybe talk a bit about what you think your strengths are and, you know, how it meets the moment.
- [13:33]
Balaji Srinivasan
I think of most people as one type of artist or another, and they have like, they have like brushstrokes that you use. You know, I was at Monet and it was like, I loved. What I love is, I love going in and looking at the actual, actual brushstrokes of the painting. Then you get these like, pixel level understanding of like, wow, he used this color for this brushstroke or whatever. And then you zoom out and you're like, oh, my God, I see this wonderful little painting and I'm deeply inspired by it. So it's just like, I think people are utilizing different styles and different forms of like, a different type of. But it's in the end, when you're doing anything new, it is just a sort of a canvas like the painting. And you know, some people like hard edge paintings and, you know, this renaissance style and some people like modern art and some people like this, you know, water lilies of. And I think just a different form and at least all the initial versions of it, you know, going back to the Web 2.0 ERA with Kevin Rose. And it was a very different time because building network products like that, whether it's Dig or Twitter, fundamentally different than developing personalities of a model. Like, holy crap. I was at OpenAI and we were discussing a bunch of things around. How do you think about personality development of models and, you know, the fact that you can't really easily change them or how do you reduce the sycophancy of the models? And these are really technically hard problems. And I think every, every technology cycle to me is like, is increasingly harder because you're probably going into a different part of how the human mind or the human, like, operates. Right now we're like, developing personality. That's, that's insane. Like, if you asked 10 years ago, we were going to build personalities for computers, you would have kind of been like, wait, what? Yeah, what does that really mean? And these guys were with, with Kevin and Jack and whatnot. They were architecting, I think, delivery vehicles in some sense, right? Like, they were developing architecture for humans to add payload and then send it to another human, whether it's broadcast or one to one. You know, with Dig was the news and people posted in the comments and Twitter was like another version of that. Now I think we're kind of designing this upper echelon of how a human personality works and how intelligence works. And I think that's a grand, like, it's such a. It no longer feels like a delivery vehicle. It feels like the actual thing and the payload and the, in the underlying. I don't know if that makes sense. Does it help my mind works? I don't know if you guys think about it that way, but in some sense we've, we've. We've moved up, leveled a lot and the complexity has increased drastically. Training a model and then, you know, reinforcement learning, human feedback. What's interesting, there's like multiple different types of ways that things engage. I think these are just.
- [16:37]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
And talk a little bit more about what you've observed in terms of the personality differences between models or what you think particularly makes, you know, call it
- [16:43]
Balaji Srinivasan
so interesting or, you know, I think one of the things that they focused on it going back to our Rick Rubin point, right? It's like, it feels artisan. It feels like it's got a soul. Whereas I think in some sense the other models feel a little bit more robotic, a little bit more utilitarian, if you will. And you know, if you think about what AGI is, and I think. Or there's a great Simpsons episode, right, where one of the Bart sells his soul for $5 to Milhouse was one of the most profound, interesting episodes of the Simpsons. And okay, well, he wrote. He wrote Bart's soul on a piece of paper and then handed it to him. And then he felt it like, he felt like he didn't have a soul. And I found that really interesting because, you know, it sort of explores the idea of, like, I think, going back to our initial point, like, what is a human and what are we. What are we doing here? How does technology help us in terms of understanding ourselves and the way that we exist? And I felt like there was, like, less sycophancy. There was this pushback. It was like talking to a real human being. It's personified. Like, it's called Claude, and most Claude is known as a person. So it is. It feels very crafted, artisan, slash, dare I say premium, to a certain extent. And I think it's been really fun. And one of my. My sister is a doctor, and she randomly just. She was using ChatGPT for a few years and she canceled. And she was like, I'm. I'm using Claude now. And I. I got a weird. I was like, what. How did you find out about this? What? It's. It's nuts. And I think it just goes to show you that the proliferation and the. And the marketing and the storytelling of Claude has been aesthetically really next level. It's been really, really fun to watch. I like good products, I like talking about good products, and I like praising the people who make good products. That's what we're about here, right? Like, it's like, give credit where credit is due. They've made a beautiful little tool, and when paired with, like, a thing in your pocket that is also crafted and artisan with Apple and iPhone, and then you get this, like, really magical, intelligent experience on your device, wherever you are,
- [19:01]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
how do you think about what these product experiences might look like in a couple years? Like, how do you think. How do you see the interface evolving? Or what are you sort of predicting in terms of what's on the. What's on the horizon?
- [19:10]
Balaji Srinivasan
I think the most interesting thing to me is they seem like in a very infant state in some sense. I don't know. I mean, they're really powerful in one end of the dimension, right? But they're also, like, it's unclear to me. Experiencing intelligence through just conversation back and forth is one way, but the ambient layers are really fun and interesting to think about. Like, we were building a fun little product that woke you up with AI, right? And it's like a very primitive thing. Everybody wakes up in the morning, God forbid otherwise. But how is it going to weave into your daily existence as if it's not a chatbot, but more as a sort of ethereal entity that exists? I mean, obviously Movies have personified this and, you know, there's been her and whatnot. But it is going to be fascinating to see how it weaves into your daily life, whether it's your home or work in, in a very ambient state. I know it's not about like listening to you all the time potentially, or it's not about. But I think there's a lot of these explorations that have yet to be done at the interface layers. How to say, I talk to you first today, That's a push notification, I think, roughly. Is that it? I don't know. How Does Apple integrate AI into iOS and weave it into the operating system? And how do we use applications or specific types of things? Are they even necessary anymore? Do we even need an interface if we're just talking to it? I don't know. I think it was really interesting questions. I personally like the ambient AI layer. I think that you're seeing a little bit of this with openclaw and whatnot. Sort of working agents working in the background and kind of surfacing the right things at the right time. There's a great product a while ago that didn't work called Google Now. The whole purpose of Google now was to kind of predict a search, right? It's like, what are you going to search for next, Eric? Like in some sense, right? And it was ahead of its time in some sense. But when you marry it with context and intelligence, I think that is actually a huge vector for how to. To think about what the future of AI and how the stuff will weave into our lives. And I don't think anybody's. There's not going to be a single person who doesn't use this stuff. It's just a matter of when. Yeah, right. That's gonna be, that's gonna be interesting. I don't know.
- [21:33]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
On the note, just quick story. I remember asking Balaji. I was like, biology. How do you know so much about, you know, crypto and economics and bio and math and science and, you know, all these things. Like Jimmy, all the books you read, he's like, books? I don't read books. I just get in fights with people on the Internet. And then just that's how I like internalize all the information I like. It's real time. I need to know. I learned what I need to know to win the argument, the cool thing. And then he's like, really remembers it conceptually.
- [22:03]
Balaji Srinivasan
Those are really fun ways to have these discussions. I mean, obviously some of it's not kosher to possibly say or do out Loud. But I think that's actually really cool. Learning from other people is what we do best. Like monkeys or like, you know, apes, or watching other people. Other, other. They use tools because they learn how to use. That's wonderful. Imagine if I'm using a tool wrong, like hammer a backwards or whatever. Somebody's like, no, you're an idiot. This is how you use it. Wonderful. Now I've benefited. Maybe that other person got a dopamine hit because they, they proved me wrong. Wrong. And I think in the end, we all win. It's great. And I think that's how I treat my account. In some ways, it's almost as if I'm not really trying to gain anything. It's just that I don't have anything to lose. What do I lose by being wrong?
- [22:49]
Anish Acharya
So I have a question for you. There's a study that came out a few weeks ago that generated a bunch of conversation which is that in China, AI is highly popular. In the US AI is very unpopular. In fact, it's even less popular than ICE right now. Okay, the NPS of AI is not great in this country. How would you fix that?
- [23:12]
Balaji Srinivasan
I always think about movements, when people create movements, and all the movements are rooted in simple storytelling. In some ways, we are in a fear driven development. There's a lot of fear that's being generated as a result of this. And I think there's a positive framing to all of this. I think we're moving towards a world where hopefully there's highly abundant elements of everything. Like right now we all feel like we're fighting for resources, right? Whether it's capital, labor, whatever. Like, people think of the world as a finite amount of things. Finite. Like a lot of people have this, like, you know, in Silicon Valley we have this classic thing where it's like everything is grow the pie, you know?
- [23:56]
Anish Acharya
Yeah, positive sum.
- [23:57]
Balaji Srinivasan
Positive sum. Everything is positive sum. Normal people don't really think about that. Like, they don't really think about growing the pie, at least. I don't know. I'd love to get your perspective on this, which is like, if we're fortunately are, we are in some sense primitive, and then we are competing for resources, competing for finite things and whatnot. But I think the framing has to be around. Like, hopefully we are, if we do our jobs well, we're moving towards a. A world that's highly abundant in everything that humans might actually need.
- [24:27]
Anish Acharya
I think that the number one way you change the NPS of AI is you make important things cheap quickly. Like soon. Okay. And we've all seen the famous chart that Mark has tweeted a thousand times, right? Which is the diffusion of products prices on a per product category basis, right? So this is the famous one where it's 1970, everything is essentially, you know, referenced to that date. And then certain things get more expensive, Certain things get cheaper. The number one thing that gets cheaper is flat screen TVs. So flat screen TVs are asymptoting to essentially $0. Yep. The things that are getting expensive are health care, education and housing. Okay, there's actually a little bit of math, and I did this math a few months ago that you can do to show how you can make education and health care cheaper with AI very, very quickly. And by cheaper I don't mean disinflation, which is a reduced rate of inflation. I mean actual deflation, like cheaper than it was last year. Okay, so here's the math. Just consider it for a. And education is actually the easiest one. Education. If you restore student administrator ratios to what they were 10 years ago and you make professors modestly more productive modestly, then you can actually just have education in school getting cheaper every year. Like the explosion of administrators, not professors, not teachers, but administrators, is totally under discussed and it's insane. So you can make education cheaper. Like we could do it right away. We already have all the technology. We just have to make a different set of choices. For healthcare, 45% of healthcare cost is administration.
- [26:00]
Balaji Srinivasan
Okay?
- [26:00]
Anish Acharya
It's all this overhead. And if you've done the healthcare thing, we've all done it, right? The like revenue cycle management, all the back office stuff, all the nurses phoning you to tell you what drugs to take the night before you get a procedure, like all of that stuff is overhead and all that adds to cost. If you can take a bunch of the cost out of that with models. And by the way, these are the numbers by category. The number one consumer of OpenAI models, for example, are healthcare companies and healthcare startups. You can make healthcare cheaper year over year. So I think we should our like moonshot as an industry should be to make these two things way cheaper in the next five years. And that's how we're going to win the hearts and minds.
- [26:35]
Balaji Srinivasan
Would you subsidize it? What do you mean? As in like effectively. Like should the model companies give it away for free to these industries?
- [26:45]
Anish Acharya
Maybe, yeah, maybe.
- [26:46]
Balaji Srinivasan
I don't know how you subsidize.
- [26:47]
Anish Acharya
Maybe at cost, maybe at cost or whatever or something like that. But it's very interesting because actually, and Dixon said this a while ago, which really got me thinking. And he's like, how many of our problems in society are actually intelligence bound versus being collective action problems? And that's why the third category I mentioned, healthcare, education, housing. Housing has nothing to do with intelligence or technology. It's entirely collective action.
- [27:09]
Balaji Srinivasan
Totally.
- [27:09]
Anish Acharya
We could just build skyscrapers in Marin tomorrow and it would be abundant cheap housing for everybody. But we have to decide to do that together.
- [27:16]
Balaji Srinivasan
I wonder if giving stuff away or making free, I wonder if people will realize it. You know, I think generally the world has gotten cheaper and cheaper. Cheaper like you can go to Walmart and buy a hairdryer for five bucks. That's ridiculous. Like I, I, I remember, I, I not to do this again, but I tweeted about this.
- [27:37]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
Of course I remember you on my Encyclopedia of Signals.
- [27:40]
Balaji Srinivasan
I was like, bro, I tweeted about, remember? No, it's like the billionaires drink the same coke as you are. They're using the same goddamn iPhone. They're using Claude and Chad GBT just like you are.
- [27:53]
Anish Acharya
Yep.
- [27:54]
Balaji Srinivasan
And like the, the underlying essence of equality or the access is, is pretty much like incredibly similar. Like, I mean, but they don't have
- [28:03]
Anish Acharya
the same health care you have. And we should fix that.
- [28:05]
Balaji Srinivasan
That's true. If you get sick as a billionaire versus a normal person, what's the Delta?
- [28:11]
Anish Acharya
Dude, you'd be surprised. I mean, look at New York State right now. Right? Your beloved New York City, assuming you had insurance.
- [28:15]
Balaji Srinivasan
Right. Like that's probably the, In New York
- [28:17]
Anish Acharya
State, they're about to make it illegal at the state level to get to give or receive health advice or financial advice via a model.
- [28:27]
Balaji Srinivasan
Oh my God.
- [28:27]
Anish Acharya
Like, how fucked up is that? Right? So what does that mean? People who have lawyers and doctors already are going to be unaffected and people who use the models for lawyers and doctors are once again set back enormously. Like, how can we be okay with that? You know? So a lot of these are own goals.
- [28:42]
Balaji Srinivasan
It's crazy.
- [28:42]
Anish Acharya
If you look, the state of Massachusetts made it illegal to buy Apple stock because it was too speculative.
- [28:48]
Balaji Srinivasan
When, when Apple was going public.
- [28:49]
Anish Acharya
It was like the early 80s, you
- [28:51]
Balaji Srinivasan
know, the home of Elizabeth Warren.
- [28:53]
Anish Acharya
It's like we must protect the consumers from these normal financial gains, like the number of ridiculous things that are done in the name of protection. You know, And I think that is a fundamental underestimation of the average consumer. Yeah, right. I think people are pretty smart, pretty savvy, they talk, they'll figure things out. And if you don't prevent them from accessing the tools. Like, they'll use those tools to make their lives better.
- [29:18]
Balaji Srinivasan
You know, I have a weird idea.
- [29:19]
Anish Acharya
Tell me.
- [29:22]
Balaji Srinivasan
The fact that we don't allow normal people to have equity, share or stakes in OpenAI and cloth. Like, imagine if normal people were like, I own a piece of these things. I mean, maybe that would feel much better. And they would have this ownership mentality. And right now all this concentration is happening in Silicon Valley and a few people give people access to create and a sense of ownership.
- [29:46]
Anish Acharya
Yeah.
- [29:47]
Balaji Srinivasan
Earlier. And therefore, like, imagine if a billion people had stock in OpenAI in some way, shape or form. And maybe that's a dumb idea, but would they be more bought in, in AI? Would they have a positive view of AI?
- [29:58]
Anish Acharya
Or what if their kids did? What if you rolled it into the Trump accounts, you know, and it's like, look, I have my job and I
- [30:03]
Balaji Srinivasan
think I'll be okay.
- [30:04]
Anish Acharya
And now I know that my kids
- [30:05]
Balaji Srinivasan
will be okay too. Yeah. They have a stake in the future.
- [30:08]
Anish Acharya
That's right.
- [30:08]
Balaji Srinivasan
Quite literally.
- [30:09]
Anish Acharya
No, you can market it that way.
- [30:11]
Balaji Srinivasan
That, to me, has been a very weird development where I do think people perceive tech individuals as they're hoarding or concentrating resources and wealth. For example, we're all privileged in technology and it's wonderful. And a lot of us are exposed to this, whether it's via equity or whatnot, or even just usage. You know, you're like, But I think there's potentially a perception with all the power outcomes that happen that there is a concentration or a hoarding, whether, if you want to use a negative terminology like that. And that creates a weird dynamic like I'm going to get left behind while the guys in San Francisco are going to be enormously wealthy. And that's probably one I've heard people feeling this way. And, and especially, you know, there's potentially negative sentiment in technology. And the NPS score probably reflects that. Right. And that is, that is not, I think that's something to be fixed and ownership might, might, might fix that. But any, I mean, I, I, I love, I think there's this, the power lot dynamic that Peter introduced is really fascinating to me because it was like business outcomes.
- [31:29]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
Yeah.
- [31:29]
Balaji Srinivasan
And the Internet drives power law outcomes in a variety of different other scenarios as well, not just business. And I think people are starting to catch up and people are seeing this sort of wealth discrepancy that exists. And technology is a crazy accelerator, like we talked about this right at the beginning. And this entity is accelerating and returns. I think that's maybe something to look at. I don't know if that's the right answer or whatever, but I did see that tweet about the concentration of like the inaccessible private the companies are staying private longer. What does that really mean? That's crazy, right? Maybe we should have a law that says you have to go public at some point before XYZ.
- [32:16]
Anish Acharya
We somewhat do have that with the way RSUs are structured and things like that.
- [32:19]
Signal (Culture Commentator)
Anything you want to tease or how do you want to oh, that's a great question.
- [32:24]
Balaji Srinivasan
We are building a fun little consumer product and I'm excited to kind of storytell on this. It's like a little bit different. I mean, we're three people having fun building a fun little, you know, interfaces of consumer AI and what we think might be really interesting for average normal people to experience and use. And it works out of the box. So I'm very excited for that. That's been really fun. It's what we've been up to. One of the fundamental things that I I just don't want to talk the talk, I want to walk the walk. And I'm excited to be able to share what we're up to. I mean, it's small, it's fun, it's interesting, and we're going to see how well it lands.
- [33:09]
Podcast Host
Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on x1.6Z and subscribe to our substack@a16z.substack.com thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com disclosures.
- [34:06]
Balaji Srinivasan
It.