AI + a16z

Latest Episodes:

How to Vibe Code Securely Jul 25, 2025

Show notes

In this episode, a16z partner Joel de la Garza sits down with Socket founder and CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh to dive into the intersection of vibe coding and security. As one of the earliest security founders to fully embrace LLMs, Feross shares firsthand insights into how these technologies are transforming software engineering workflows and productivity — and where there are sharp edges that practitioners need to avoid.

The TL;DR: Treat AI-assisted programming the same way you'd treat other programming, by vetting packages, reviewing code, and generally make sure you're not sacrificing security for speed. As he explained, LLMs can make developers more productive and even make their software more secure, but only if developers do their part by maintaining a safe supply chain.

Follow everyone on social media:

Feross Aboukhadijeh

Joel de la Garza

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.

AI Is Upending SaaS Pricing Jul 18, 2025

Show notes

In this episode, a16z GP Martin Casado sits down with Metronome CEO Scott Woody to unpack how AI is fundamentally changing the value proposition of software—and why that shift demands a rethink of the traditional SaaS business model.

They explore how, in the cloud era, value scaled with the number of users accessing a shared system (think Salesforce). However, in the AI era, value shifts to the work the software performs on your behalf, automating tasks such as writing code or resolving support tickets. As a result, the old value metric of “users” is being replaced by “output,” and it’s upending how companies monetize.

This conversation goes deep on:

What new pricing models will emerge in an AI-native world
Why usage-based billing is gaining ground—and where it breaks
How to align GTM teams and customer success orgs with evolving value metrics
Strategic advice for SaaS founders navigating hybrid business models and incentive design

If you’re selling software today, you don’t want to miss this discussion.

Follow everyone on social media:

Scott Woody

Martin Casado

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.

The AI Infrastructure Stack with Jennifer Li Jul 11, 2025

Show notes

In this episode, which originally aired on the Complex Systems Podcast, a16z General Partner Jennifer Li discusses how AI is reshaping every layer of the software stack, creating demand for new types of middleware. Jennifer talks about emerging infrastructure categories and why the next wave of valuable companies might be the unsexy infrastructure providers powering tomorrow's intelligent applications.

Subscribe to Complex Systems:
Spotify
Apple

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.

AI's Unsung Hero: Data Labeling and Expert Evals Jun 27, 2025

Show notes

Labelbox CEO Manu Sharma joins a16z Infra partner Matt Bornstein to explore the evolution of data labeling and evaluation in AI — from early supervised learning to today’s sophisticated reinforcement learning loops.

Manu recounts Labelbox’s origins in computer vision, and then how the shift to foundation models and generative AI changed the game. The value moved from pre-training to post-training and, today, models are trained not just to answer questions, but to assess the quality of their own responses. Labelbox has responded by building a global network of “aligners” — top professionals from fields like coding, healthcare, and customer service, who label and evaluate data used to fine-tune AI systems.

The conversation also touches on Meta’s acquisition of Scale AI, underscoring how critical data and talent have become in the AGI race.

Here's a sample of Manu explaining how Labelbox was able to transition from one era of AI to another:

It took us some time to really understand like that the world is shifting from building AI models to renting AI intelligence. A vast number of enterprises around the world are no longer building their own models; they're actually renting base intelligence and adding on top of it to make that work for their company. And that was a very big shift.

But then the even bigger opportunity was the hyperscalers and the AI labs that are spending billions of dollars of capital developing these models and data sets. We really ought to go and figure out and innovate for them. For us, it was a big shift from the DNA perspective because Labelbox was built with a hardcore software-tools mindset. Our go-to market, engineering, and product and design teams operated like software companies.

But I think the hardest part for many of us, at that time, was to just make the decision that we're going just go try it and do it. And nothing is better than that: "Let's just go build an MVP and see what happens."

Follow everyone on X:

Manu Sharma

Matt Bornstein

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.

AI, Data Engineering, and the Modern Data Stack Jun 20, 2025

Show notes

In this episode of AI + a16z, dbt Labs founder and CEO Tristan Handy sits down with a16z's Jennifer Li and Matt Bornstein to explore the next chapter of data engineering — from the rise (and plateau) of the modern data stack to the growing role of AI in analytics and data engineering. As they sum up the impact of AI on data workflows: The interesting question here is human-in-the-loop versus human-not-in-the-loop. AI isn’t about replacing analysts — it’s about enabling self-service across the company. But without a human to verify the result, that’s a very scary thing.

Among other specific topics, they also discuss how automation and tooling like SQL compilers are reshaping how engineers work with data; dbt's new Fusion Engine and what it means for developer workflows; and what to make of the spate of recent data-industry acquisitions and ambitious product launches.

Follow everyone on X:

Tristan Handy

Jennifer Li

Matt Bornstein

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.

Enabling Agents and Battling Bots on an AI-Centric Web Jun 13, 2025

Show notes

Arcjet CEO David Mytton sits down with a16z partner Joel de la Garza to discuss the increasing complexity of managing who can access websites, and other web apps, and what they can do there. A primary challenge is determining whether automated traffic is coming from bad actors and troublesome bots, or perhaps AI agents trying to buy a product on behalf of a real customer.Joel and David dive into the challenge of analyzing every request without adding latency, and how faster inference at the edge opens up new possibilities for fraud prevention, content filtering, and even ad tech.Topics include:

Why traditional threat analysis won’t work for the AI-powered web
The need for full-context security checks
How to perform sub-second, cost-effective inference
The wide range of potential actors and actions behind any given visit

As David puts it, lower inference costs are key to letting apps act on the full context window — everything you know about the user, the session, and your application.

Follow everyone on social media:

David Mytton

Joel de la Garza

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.

Giving New Life to Unstructured Data with LLMs and Agents Jun 06, 2025

Show notes

Instabase founder and CEO Anant Bhardwaj joins a16z Infra partner Guido Appenzeller to discuss the revolutionary impact of LLMs on analyzing unstructured data and documents (like letting banks verify identity and approve loans via WhatsApp) and shares his vision for how AI agents could take things even further (by automating actions based on those documents). In more detail, they discuss:

Why legacy robotic process automation (RPA) struggles with unstructured inputs.
How Instabase developed layout-aware models to extract insights from PDFs and complex documents.
Why predictability, not perfection, is the key metric for generative AI in the enterprise.
The growing role of AI agents at compile time (not runtime).
A vision for decentralized, federated AI systems that scale automation across complex workflows.

Follow everyone on X:

Anant Bhardwaj

Guido Appenzeller

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.

Beyond Leaderboards: LMArena’s Mission to Make AI Reliable May 30, 2025

Show notes

LMArena cofounders Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, Wei-Lin Chiang, and Ion Stoica sit down with a16z general partner Anjney Midha to talk about the future of AI evaluation. As benchmarks struggle to keep up with the pace of real-world deployment, LMArena is reframing the problem: what if the best way to test AI models is to put them in front of millions of users and let them vote? The team discusses how Arena evolved from a research side project into a key part of the AI stack, why fresh and subjective data is crucial for reliability, and what it means to build a CI/CD pipeline for large models.

They also explore:

Why expert-only benchmarks are no longer enough.
How user preferences reveal model capabilities — and their limits.
What it takes to build personalized leaderboards and evaluation SDKs.
Why real-time testing is foundational for mission-critical AI.

Follow everyone on X:

Anastasios N. Angelopoulos

Wei-Lin Chiang

Ion Stoica

Anjney Midha

Timestamps

0:04 - LLM evaluation: From consumer chatbots to mission-critical systems

6:04 - Style and substance: Crowdsourcing expertise

18:51 - Building immunity to overfitting and gaming the system

29:49 - The roots of LMArena

41:29 - Proving the value of academic AI research

48:28 - Scaling LMArena and starting a company

59:59 - Benchmarks, evaluations, and the value of ranking LLMs

1:12:13 - The challenges of measuring AI reliability

1:17:57 - Expanding beyond binary rankings as models evolve

1:28:07 - A leaderboard for each prompt

1:31:28 - The LMArena roadmap

1:34:29 - The importance of open source and openness

1:43:10 - Adapting to agents (and other AI evolutions)

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.

Building AI Systems You Can Trust May 23, 2025

Show notes

In this episode of AI + a16z, Distributional cofounder and CEO Scott Clark, and a16z partner Matt Bornstein, explore why building trust in AI systems matters more than just optimizing performance metrics. From understanding the hidden complexities of generative AI behavior to addressing the challenges of reliability and consistency, they discuss how to confidently deploy AI in production.

Why is trust becoming a critical factor in enterprise AI adoption? How do traditional performance metrics fail to capture crucial behavioral nuances in generative AI systems? Scott and Matt dive into these questions, examining non-deterministic outcomes, shifting model behaviors, and the growing importance of robust testing frameworks.

Among other topics, they cover:

The limitations of conventional AI evaluation methods and the need for behavioral testing.
How centralized AI platforms help enterprises manage complexity and ensure responsible AI use.
The rise of "shadow AI" and its implications for security and compliance.
Practical strategies for scaling AI confidently from prototypes to real-world applications.

Follow everyone:

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.

Who's Coding Now? AI and the Future of Software Development May 16, 2025

Show notes

In this episode of the a16z AI podcast, a16z Infra partners Guido Appenzeller, Matt Bornstein, and Yoko Li explore how generative AI is reshaping software development. From its potential as a new high-level programming abstraction to its current practical impacts, they discuss whether AI coding tools will redefine what it means to be a developer.

Why has coding emerged as one of AI's most powerful use cases? How much can AI truly boost developer productivity, and will it fundamentally change traditional computer science education? Guido, Yoko, and Matt dive deep into these questions, addressing the dynamics of "vibe coding," the enduring role of formal programming languages, and the critical challenge of managing non-deterministic behavior in AI-driven applications.Among other things, they discuss:

The enormous market potential of AI-generated code, projected to deliver trillions in productivity gains.
How "prompt-based programming" is evolving from Stack Overflow replacements into sophisticated development assistants.
Why formal languages like Python and Java are here to stay, even as natural language interactions become common.
The shifting landscape of programming education, and why understanding foundational abstractions remains essential.
The unique complexities of integrating AI into enterprise software, from managing uncertainty to ensuring reliability.

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.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Timestamps

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected