AI + a16z

This is a replay of our first episode from April 12, featuring Databricks VP of AI Naveen Rao and a16z partner Matt Bornstein discussing enterprise LLM adoption, hardware platforms, and what it means for AI to be mainstream. If you're unfamiliar with Naveen, he has been in the AI space for more than decade working on everything from custom hardware to LLMs, and has founded two successful startups — Nervana Systems and MosaicML.

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

In this episode of AI + a16z, Replicate cofounder and CEO Ben Firshman, and a16z partner Matt Bornstein, discuss the art of building products and companies that appeal to software developers. Ben was the creator of Docker Compose, and Replicate has a thriving community of developers hosting and fine-tuning their own models to power AI-based applications.

Here's an excerpt of Ben and Matt discussing the difference in the variety of applications built using multimedia models compared with language models:

Matt: "I've noticed there's a lot of really diverse multimedia AI apps out there. Meaning...

Longtime machine-learning researcher, and University of Washington Professor Emeritus, Pedro Domingos joins a16z General Partner Martin Casado to discuss the state of artificial intelligence, whether we're really on a path toward AGI, and the value of expressing unpopular opinions.  It's a very insightful discussion as we head into an era of mainstream AI adoption, and ask big questions about how to ramp up progress and diversify research directions.

Here's an excerpt of Pedro sharing his thoughts on the increasing cost of frontier models and whether that's the right direction:

"if you believe the scaling l...

In this episode of AI + a16z, General Partner Anjney Midha shares his perspective on the recent collection of Nobel Prizes awarded to AI researchers in both Physics and Chemistry. He talks through how early work on neural networks in the 1980s spurred continuous advancement in the field — even through the "AI winter" — which resulted in today's extremely useful AI technologies.

Here's a sample of the discussion, in response to a question about whether we will see more high-quality research emerge from sources beyond large universities and commercial labs:

"It can be easy to conclude that...

In this episode of AI + a16z, General Partner Anjney Midha explains the forces that lead to GPU shortages and price spikes, and how the firm mitigates these concerns for portfolio companies by supplying them with the GPUs they need through a program called Oxygen. The TL;DR version of the problem is that competition for GPU access favors large incumbents who can afford to outbid startups and commit to long contracts; when startups do buy or rent in bulk, they can be stuck with lots of GPUs and — absent training runs or ample customer demand for inference workloads — noth...

In this episode of AI + a16z, Bowen Peng and Jeffrey Quesnelle of Nous Research join a16z General Partner Anjney Midha to discuss their mission to keep open source AI research alive and activate the community of independent builders. The focus is on a recent project called DisTrO, which demonstrates it's possible to train AI models across the public internet much faster than previously thought possible. However, Nous is behind a number of other successful open source AI projects, including the popular Hermes family of "neutral" and guardrail-free language models.

Here's an excerpt of Jeffrey explaining...

In this episode of AI + a16z, Ambience cofounder and chief scientist Nikhil Buduma joins Derrick Harris to discuss the nuances of using AI models to build vertical applications (including in his space, health care), and why industry acumen is at least as important as technical expertise. Nikhil also shares his experience of having a first-row seat to key advances in AI — including the transformer architecture — which not only allowed his company to be an early adopter, but also gave him insight into the types of problems that AI could solve in the future.

Here's an excerpt of N...

In this episode of AI + a16z, a16z General Partner Jennifer Li joins MotherDuck Cofounder and CEO Jordan Tigani to discuss DuckDB's spiking popularity as the era of big data wanes, as well as the applicability of SQL-based systems for AI workloads and the prospect of text-to-SQL for analyzing data.

Here's an excerpt of Jordan discussing an early win when it comes to applying generative AI to data analysis:

"Everybody forgets syntax for various SQL calls. And it's just like  in coding. So there's some people that memorize . . . all of the code base, and s...

In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Black Forest Labs founders Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser sit down with a16z general partner Anjney Midha to discuss their journey from PhD researchers to Stability AI, and now to launching their own company building state-of-the-art image and video models. They also delve into the topic of openness in AI, explaining the benefits of releasing open models and sharing research findings with the field.

Learn more:

Flux

Keep the code to AI open, say two entrepreneurs

Follow everyone on...

In this episode, a16z General Partner Vijay Pande walks us through the past two decades of applying software engineering to the life sciences — from the Folding@Home project that he launched, through AlphaFold and more. He also discusses the major opportunities for AI to transform medicine and health care, as well as some pitfalls that founders in that space need to watch out for.

Here's an excerpt of Vijay discussing how AlphaFold and other projects revolutionized biology research not just because of their algorithms, but because of how they introduced software engineering into the field:

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