AI + a16z

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Fei-Fei Li: World Models and the Multiverse Dec 23, 2025

Show notes

What if the next leap in artificial intelligence isn’t about better language—but better understanding of space?

In this episode, a16z General Partner Erik Torenberg moderates a conversation with Fei-Fei Li, cofounder and CEO of World Labs, and a16z General Partner Martin Casado, an early investor in the company. Together, they dive into the concept of world models—AI systems that can understand and reason about the 3D, physical world, not just generate text.

Often called the “godmother of AI,” Fei-Fei explains why spatial intelligence is a fundamental and still-missing piece of today’s AI—and why she’s building an entire company to solve it. Martin shares how he and Fei-Fei aligned on this vision long before it became fashionable, and why it could reshape the future of robotics, creativity, and computational interfaces.

From the limits of LLMs to the promise of embodied intelligence, this conversation blends personal stories with deep technical insights—exploring what it really means to build AI that understands the real (and virtual) world.

Follow Fei-Fei Li:

https://x.com/drfeifei

Follow Martin Casado:

https://x.com/martin_casado

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

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Building the “See Something, Say Something” AI for Every Camera Dec 16, 2025

Show notes

a16z's Martin Casado sits down with Shikhar Shrestha, CEO and cofounder of Ambient, the company bringing agentic AI to physical security.

Shikhar shares how a traumatic armed robbery at age 12—and a security camera that no one was watching—sparked his mission to make every camera intelligent.

They discuss how Ambient's AI monitors camera feeds in real-time to detect threats and prevent incidents before they happen, navigating COVID as a physical security company, building their own reasoning VLM called Pulsar, and why the future of security is AI not just detecting threats but automatically responding to them.

If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends.

Follow Shikhar on X: https://x.com/shikharshrestha

Follow Martin on X: x.com/martin_casado

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

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The AI That Found A Bug In The World’s Most Audited Code Dec 10, 2025

Show notes

Matt Knight spent five years as OpenAI’s CISO. Now he runs what colleagues call “the most interesting job at the company”: leading Aardvark, an AI agent that finds security vulnerabilities the way a human researcher would—by reading code, writing tests, and proposing patches. It recently found a memory corruption bug in OpenSSH, one of the most heavily audited codebases in existence.

In this conversation with a16z’s Joel de la Garza, Matt traces the evolution from GPT-3 (which couldn’t analyze security logs at all) to GPT-4 (which could parse Russian cybercriminal chat logs written in slang) to today’s models that discover bugs humans have missed for decades. They also discussed the XZ Utils backdoor that nearly compromised half the internet and why 3.5 million unfilled security jobs might finally get some relief, and how Aardvark could give open source maintainers a fighting chance against nation-state attackers.

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Follow Matt Knight on X: https://x.com/embeddedsec

Follow Joel de la Garza on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/

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

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The Death of Data Gatekeeping: AI Makes Everyone An Analyst | Hex Cofounder Dec 05, 2025

Show notes

Most companies still rely on dashboards to understand their data, even though AI now offers new ways to ask questions and explore information. Barry McCardel, CEO of Hex and former engineer at Palantir, joins a16z General Partner Sarah Wang to discuss how agent workflows, conversational interfaces, and context-aware models are reshaping analysis. Barry also explains how Hex aims to make everyone a data person by unifying analysis and AI in one workflow, and he reflects on his post about getting rid of their AI product team and the process behind Hex’s funny launch videos.

Timecodes:

0:00 – The problem with dashboards
1:20 – The evolution of data teams and AI’s role
2:05 – Democratizing data: challenges and opportunities
3:45 – The rise of agentive workflows
9:48 – Threads and the changing UI of data analysis
13:16 – Building AI agents: lessons from the notebook agent
16:12 – Model capabilities and the future of AI in data
19:10 – The importance of context and trust in data analysis
24:34 – Semantic models and context engineering
29:27 – Data team roles in the age of AI
31:52 – Accuracy, trust, and evaluating AI systems
37:43 – Building Hex: embracing AI as core, not an add-on
48:48 – Pricing, value capture, and the future of SaaS
55:55 – The modern data stack and industry consolidation
1:04:26 – Acquisitions and owning the data insight layer
1:06:46 – Lessons from Palantir: forward-deployed engineering
1:13:11 – Commitment engineering and customer collaboration
1:17:25 – Brand, launch videos, and having fun in SaaS

Resources:

Follow Barry McCardel on X: https://x.com/barrald
Follow Sarah Wang on X: https://x.com/sarahdingwang

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or 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. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details, please see http://a16z.com/disclosures.

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

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Why Social Engineering Now Works on Machines Dec 02, 2025

Show notes

Ian Webster built PromptFoo after watching 200 million Discord users systematically dismantle his AI agent—now Fortune 10 companies pay him to break theirs before customers do. The "lethal trifecta" sounds academic until you realize it's already happening: untrusted input plus sensitive data plus an exfiltration channel equals the security incident that just cost a SaaS company its multi-tenancy guarantees. Webster's red-teaming agents don't use signatures—they have 30,000 conversations with your system, socially engineering their way past guardrails the same way a teenager with emojis convinced ChatGPT to leak data, except his tools find the vulnerability before your users become the pen testers.

Follow Ian Webster on X: https://x.com/iwebst

Follow Joel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/

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

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“Anyone Can Code Now” - Netlify CEO Talks AI Agents Nov 28, 2025

Show notes

Netlify's CEO, Matt Biilmann, reveals a seismic shift nobody saw coming: 16,000 daily signups—five times last year's rate—and 96% aren't coming from AI coding tools. They're everyday people accidentally building React apps through ChatGPT, then discovering they need somewhere to deploy them. The addressable market for developer tools just exploded from 17 million JavaScript developers to 3 billion spreadsheet users, but only if your product speaks fluent AI—which is why Netlify's founder now submits pull requests he built entirely through prompting, never touching code himself, and why 25% of users immediately copy error messages to LLMs instead of debugging manually. The web isn't dying to agents; it's being reborn by them, with CEOs coding again and non-developers shipping production apps while the entire economics of software—from perpetual licenses to subscriptions to pure usage—gets rewritten in real-time.

Follow Matt Biilmann on X: https://x.com/biilmann

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

Follow Erik Torenberg on X: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

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

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From Code Search to AI Agents: Inside Sourcegraph's Transformation with CTO Beyang Liu Nov 25, 2025

Show notes

Sourcegraph's CTO just revealed why 90% of his code now comes from agents—and why the Chinese models powering America's AI future should terrify Washington. While Silicon Valley obsesses over AGI apocalypse scenarios, Beyang Liu's team discovered something darker: every competitive open-source coding model they tested traces back to Chinese labs, and US companies have gone silent after releasing Llama 3. The regulatory fear that killed American open-source development isn't hypothetical anymore—it's already handed the infrastructure layer of the AI revolution to Beijing, one fine-tuned model at a time.

Resources:

Follow Beyang Liu on X: https://x.com/beyang

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

Follow Guido Appenzeller on X: https://x.com/appenz

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.

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Ryo Lu (Cursor): AI Turns Designers to Developers Nov 21, 2025

Show notes

Ryo Lu spent years watching his designs die in meetings. Then he discovered the tool that lets designers ship code at the speed of thought: Cursor, the company where Ryo is now Head of Design. In this episode, we discuss why "taste" is the wrong framework for understanding the future, why purposeful apps are "selfish," how System 7 holds secrets about AI interfaces, and the radical bet that one codebase can serve everyone if you design the concepts right instead of the buttons.

Follow Ryo Lu on X: https://x.com/ryolu_

Check Out Ryo’s Website: https://os.ryo.lu/

Follow Jennifer Li on X: https://x.com/JenniferHli

Follow Erik Torenberg on X: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

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

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How Foundation Models Evolved: A PhD Journey Through AI's Breakthrough Era Nov 18, 2025

Show notes

The Stanford PhD who built DSPy thought he was just creating better prompts—until he realized he'd accidentally invented a new paradigm that makes LLMs actually programmable.

While everyone obsesses over whether LLMs will get us to AGI, Omar Khattab is solving a more urgent problem: the gap between what you want AI to do and your ability to tell it, the absence of a real programming language for intent. He argues the entire field has been approaching this backwards, treating natural language prompts as the interface when we actually need something between imperative code and pure English, and the implications could determine whether AI systems remain unpredictable black boxes or become the reliable infrastructure layer everyone's betting on.

Follow Omar Khattab on X: https://x.com/lateinteraction

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

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

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TruffleHog Creator: You Can’t Have AI Agents Without Secrets Nov 11, 2025

Show notes

If you can’t robustly protect your secrets, you can’t have reliable AI agents.

In this episode, Truffle Security cofounder and CEO Dylan Ayrey joins a16z partner Joel de la Garza to discuss the emergent security stack for AI agents, why leaks are actually getting worse, and how Truffle evolved from an open-source side project to a major VC-backed startup.

Follow Dylan here: https://x.com/InsecureNature

Follow Joel here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/

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

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