AI + a16z

Latest Episodes:

Evals, Feedback Loops, and the Engineering That Makes AI Work Feb 17, 2026

Show notes

Martin Casado speaks with Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust, about where engineering actually matters in AI and where it doesn't. They cover the open source vs closed source model cycle, why Chinese models are gaining ground faster than spending suggests, whether AI demand will eventually saturate, and the Bash vs SQL benchmark that challenges the "just give it a computer" approach to agents.

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado

Follow Ankur Goyal on X: https://twitter.com/ankrgyl

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sam Altman on Sora, Energy, and Building an AI Empire Feb 10, 2026

Show notes

Sam Altman has led OpenAI from its founding as a research nonprofit in 2015 to becoming the most valuable startup in the world ten years later.

In this episode, a16z Cofounder Ben Horowitz and General Partner Erik Torenberg sit down with Sam to discuss the core thesis behind OpenAI’s disparate bets, why they released Sora, how they use models internally, the best AI evals, and where we’re going from here.

Follow Sam on X: https://x.com/sama

Follow OpenAI on X: https://x.com/openai

Learn more about OpenAI: https://openai.com/

Try Sora: https://sora.com/

Follow Ben on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz

Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Why This Isn't the Dot-Com Bubble | Martin Casado on WSJ's BOLD NAMES Feb 03, 2026

Show notes

Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins of the Wall Street Journal sit down with a16z General Partner Martin Casado on WSJ’s Bold Names to ask whether the AI spending boom is a bubble waiting to burst. Martin explains why the fundamentals differ dramatically from the dot-com era—when WorldCom had $40 billion in debt versus today's tech giants with hundreds of billions on their balance sheets—and why a speculative valuation correction shouldn't be confused with systemic collapse. They also discuss where a16z sees opportunity in the "long tail" of AI companies beyond the state-of-the-art large language models.

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado

Follow Christopher Mims on X: https://twitter.com/mims

Follow Tim Higgins on X: https://twitter.com/timkhiggins

Check out WSJ’s Bold Names: https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Martin Casado on the Demand Forces Behind AI Jan 27, 2026

Show notes

In this feed drop from The Six Five Pod, a16z General Partner Martin Casado discusses how AI is changing infrastructure, software, and enterprise purchasing. He explains why current constraints are driven less by technical limits and more by regulation, particularly around power, data centers, and compute expansion.

The episode also covers how AI is affecting software development, lowering the barrier to coding without eliminating the need for experienced engineers, and how agent-driven tools may shift infrastructure decision-making away from humans.
Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado

Follow Patrick Moorhead on X: https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead

Follow Daniel Newman on X: https://twitter.com/danielnewmanUV

Watch more from Six Five Media: https://www.youtube.com/@SixFiveMedia

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How Mintlify Is Rebuilding Documentation for Coding Agents Jan 23, 2026

Show notes

Mintlify is a documentation platform built by cofounders Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee to help teams create and maintain developer docs. In this episode, Andreessen Horowitz general partners Jennifer Li and Yoko Li speak with Han and Hahnbee about how coding agents are changing what “good docs” mean, shifting documentation from a human-only resource into infrastructure that powers AI tools, support agents, and internal knowledge workflows. They share Mintlify’s early journey, including eight pivots, the two-day prototype that landed their first customer, and the “do things that don’t scale” sales motion that helped them win early traction. The conversation also covers why docs go out of date, what “self-healing” documentation requires to actually work, and how serving fast-moving customers has shaped both their product priorities and their pace.

Follow Jennifer Li on X: https://twitter.com/JenniferHli
Follow Yoko Li on X: https://twitter.com/stuffyokodraws
Follow Han Wang on X: https://twitter.com/handotdev
Follow Hahnbee Lee on X: https://twitter.com/hahnbeelee

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Inferact: Building the Infrastructure That Runs Modern AI Jan 22, 2026

Show notes

Inferact is a new AI infrastructure company founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM. Its mission is to build a universal, open-source inference layer that makes large AI models faster, cheaper, and more reliable to run across any hardware, model architecture, or deployment environment. Together, they broke down how modern AI models are actually run in production, why “inference” has quietly become one of the hardest problems in AI infrastructure, and how the open-source project vLLM emerged to solve it. The conversation also looked at why the vLLM team started Inferact and their vision for a universal inference layer that can run any model, on any chip, efficiently.

Follow Matt Bornstein on X: https://twitter.com/BornsteinMatt

Follow Simon Mo on X: https://twitter.com/simon_mo_

Follow Woosuk Kwon on X: https://twitter.com/woosuk_k

Follow vLLM on X: https://twitter.com/vllm_project

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How Should AI Be Regulated? Use vs. Development Jan 20, 2026

Show notes

To Regulate AI Effectively, Focus on How It’s Used

A conversation with Martin Casado on learning from past computing platform shifts, understanding marginal risk in AI, and why open source matters for US competitiveness.

One of the core pillars of our roadmap for federal AI legislation makes clear AI should not excuse wrongdoing. When people or companies use AI to break the law, existing criminal, civil rights, consumer protection, and antitrust frameworks should still apply. Enforcement agencies should have the resources they need to enforce the law. If existing bodies of law fall short in accounting for certain AI use cases, any new laws should be evidence-based, clearly defining marginal risks and the optimal approach to target harms directly.

In this conversation, we go deeper on what that principle means in practice with Martin Casado, general partner at a16z where he leads the firm’s infrastructure practice and invests in advanced AI systems and foundational compute. Martin has lived through multiple platform shifts–as a researcher where he worked on large-scale simulations for the Department of Defense before working with the intelligence community on networking and cybersecurity, a pioneer of software-defined networking at Stanford, and the cofounder and CTO of Nicira, which was acquired by VMware–giving him a rare perspective on how breakthrough technologies are governed as they develop and scale.

Martin joins Jai Ramaswamy and Matt Perault to discuss how decades of technology policy can inform addressing harmful uses of AI, defining marginal risk in AI, the importance of open source for long-term competitiveness, and more.

Follow Jai Ramaswamy on X: https://twitter.com/jai_ramaswamy

Follow Matt Perault on X: https://twitter.com/MattPerault

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado

Read the a16z AI Policy Brief here: https://a16zpolicy.substack.com/

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Michael Truell: How Cursor Builds at the Speed of AI Jan 13, 2026

Show notes

When four MIT grads decided to build a code editor while everyone else was building AI agents, they created the fastest-growing developer tool ever built.

Cursor CEO Michael Truell joins a16z’s Martin Casado to discuss the deliberate constraints that led to breakthroughs: why they rejected the "democratization" narrative to focus on power users, how their 2-day work trials test for agency over credentials, and the strategic decision to own the editor when conventional wisdom said it was impossible.

Follow Michael on X: https://x.com/mntruell

Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!

Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16z

Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z

Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX

Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711

Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dylan Patel on the AI Chip Race - NVIDIA, Intel & the US Government Jan 06, 2026

Show notes

Nvidia’s $5 billion investment in Intel is one of the biggest surprises in semiconductors in years. Two longtime rivals are now teaming up, and the ripple effects could reshape AI, cloud, and the global chip race.

To make sense of it all, Erik Torenberg is joined by Dylan Patel, chief analyst at SemiAnalysis, joins Sarah Wang, general partner at a16z, and Guido Appenzeller, a16z partner and former CTO of Intel’s Data Center and AI business unit. Together, they dig into what the deal means for Nvidia, Intel, AMD, ARM, and Huawei; the state of US-China tech bans; Nvidia’s moat and Jensen Huang’s leadership; and the future of GPUs, mega data centers, and AI infrastructure.

Resources:

Find Dylan on X: https://x.com/dylan522p

Find Sarah on X: https://x.com/sarahdingwang

Find Guido on X: https://x.com/appenz

Learn more about SemiAnalysis: https://semianalysis.com/dylan-patel/

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Feed Drop from The Generalist: Why a16z's Martin Casado believes the AI boom still has years to run Dec 30, 2025

Show notes

This episode is a special replay from The Generalist Podcast, featuring a conversation with a16z General Partner Martin Casado. Martin has lived through multiple tech waves as a founder, researcher, and investor, and in this discussion he shares how he thinks about the AI boom, why he believes we’re still early in the cycle, and how a market-first lens shapes his approach to investing.

They also dig into the mechanics behind the scenes: why AI coding could become a multi-trillion-dollar market, how a16z evolved from a small generalist firm into a specialized organization, the growing role of open-source models, and why Martin believes AGI debates often obscure more meaningful questions about how technology actually creates value.

Follow Mario Gabriele

X: https://x.com/mariogabriele

https://www.generalist.com/

Follow Martin Casado:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martincasado/

X: https://x.com/martin_casado

The Generalist Substack: https://www.generalist.com/

The Generalist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheGeneralistPodcast

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6mHuHe0Tj6XVxpgaw4WsJV

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-generalist/id1805868710

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

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.