a16z Podcast - "Is there an AI bubble?” Gavin Baker and David George

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

In this conversation from a16z’s Runtime conference, Gavin Baker, Managing Partner and CIO of Atreides Management, joins David George, General Partner at a16z, to unpack the macro view of AI: the tr...illion-dollar data center buildout, the new economics of GPUs, and what this boom means for investors, founders, and the global economy. Resources:Follow Gavin on X: https://x.com/GavinSBakerFollow Atreides Management on X: https://x.com/atreidesmgmtFollow David on X: https://x.com/DavidGeorge83 Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zListen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYXListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease 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 a16z.com/disclosures. Stay Updated:Find a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Podcast on SpotifyListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg 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 a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Are we in an AI bubble? I do not believe we're in an AI bubble today. I was, depending on how you look at it, the privilege and the misfortune of being a tech investor during the year 2000 bubble, which is really a telecom bubble. And I think it's really helpful to compare and contrast today to the year 2000. The year 2000 internet bubble or telecom bubble was defined by something called dark fiber. At the peak, 97% of the fiber that had been laid was dark. Contrast that with today. There are no dark GPUs.
Starting point is 00:00:30 Every major technology cycle raises the same question. Is it real, or are we in a bubble? Today, you'll hear a conversation from runtime between Gavin Baker, managing director and CIO of a tradies management, and David George, general partner at A16Z, about how AI is reshaping the global economy. From capital allocation and infrastructure spending to business models and margins. It's a detailed data-driven look at where we actually are in the AI cycle
Starting point is 00:00:55 and what's likely to happen next. Let's get into it. And that brings us to our opening fireside chat. We're going to start with a taboo question right out of the gate. Are you ready for it? If AI is the biggest trend in the world right now, where is the evidence for it? Why is it only just beginning to show up in the economy? And as Andre Carpathie asked, our agents really just ghosts.
Starting point is 00:01:21 To kick this off and to help us answer this question, please join us in welcoming Gavin Baker, managing partner and CIO of Atreides. Now, some of you may know Gavin as that really thoughtful guy on Twitter. Anytime some big piece of AI news comes out, I know more than a few people who count on Gavin to explain what the F is really going on. So a huge thank you to Gavin for being with us today. Joining him is our very own David George, general partner at A16Z. Who knows what that music was from?
Starting point is 00:02:09 Glad they got our pump-up music right. Yes. Battlestar Galactica, the original 1977 one, in case we have to all fight Cylons in a few years. Yeah, could segue into the topic, I guess. So thank you for being here. I always love talking to you. Same.
Starting point is 00:02:26 Really grateful to you for inviting me. Grateful to your colleagues, for having me. here. I'm really looking forward to the next two days. I think I'm going to learn a lot, so thank you. Yeah. Okay. All right. So the big topic is AI bubble, kind of macro view of things. So maybe just to start with a couple stats to set the stage, and then I want to get your take on where we're at. So we have about a trillion dollars of data centers in the U.S. The plan is to add three to four trillion dollars in the next five years. Over the past three years, we have already built out in data center capacity
Starting point is 00:02:59 a larger amount of dollars than the entire U.S. interstate highway system, which took 40 years, just in terms of dollars, and that's inflation adjusted. Open AI alone, I think, has more than a trillion dollars of deals set up that they've committed to, and we can talk about that. But at the same time, so those are all like big numbers on infrastructure
Starting point is 00:03:19 and they're scary and they say, oh, bubble. And Google released a stat recently that they have seen, a 150x increase in the amount of tokens processed in the last 17 months. So on the one hand, you've got this crazy, scary sounding buildout. On the other hand, you actually have a bunch of usage that's happening. So are we in an AI bubble? I do not believe we're in an AI bubble today.
Starting point is 00:03:44 I had, depending on how you look at it, the privilege and the misfortune of being a tech investor during the year 2000 bubble, which was really a telecom bubble. And I think it's really helpful to compare and contrast today to the year 2000. First, I think Cisco peaked at 150 or 180 times trailing earnings and VDivDi is it more like 40 times. So valuations are very different. Most important, however, is that the year 2000 internet bubble or telecom bubble was defined by something called dark fiber. And if you're a veteran of the year 2000, you will know what that was. But dark fiber was literally fiber that was laid down in the ground and not lit up. Fiber is
Starting point is 00:04:24 useless unless you have the optics and switches and routers that you need on either side. So I vividly remember companies like Level 3 or Global Crossing or WorldCom would come in and they say, we laid 200,000 miles of dark fiber this quarter. This is so amazing. The internet's going to be so big. We can't wait to light these up. At the peak of the bubble, 97% of the fiber that had been laid in America was dark. Contrast that with today. There are no dark, deep. All you have to do is read any technical paper, and that one of the biggest problems in a training run is that GPUs are melting. And there's a very simple way to kind of cut to the heart of all of this. It is a return on invested capital of the biggest spenders on GPUs, who are all public.
Starting point is 00:05:13 And those companies, since they ramped up CAPX, have seen, call it a 10-point increase in their ROICs. So thus far, the ROI on all the spending has been really positive. It's an interesting and open debate about whether or not it will continue to be positive. With the quantum of spend we're going to have on Blackwell, I personally think it will. But there's no debate that thus far the ROI on AI has been really positive. And valuation-wise, we're just not in a bubble. I couldn't agree more. The other thing that I would say is you can contrast the actual adoption and usage of the technology from then, right?
Starting point is 00:05:51 The internet was actually really hard because you had to build a two. two-sided network. Like, you had to build websites and then you had to get users and it's much more difficult. In the case of the AI tools, all you have to do is kind of light them up via API or turn on your website, chat, UPT, and everybody has access to them, right? Built on top of cloud computing, on top of the internet, and you can get to instant distribution, a billion people right away. Absolutely. So the other thing is the counterparties. So you mentioned this. They happen to be the best companies in the history of the world, right? I think collectively the people who are coming out of pocket the writing checks for this capex i think they collectively generate like
Starting point is 00:06:29 three hundred billion dollars of free cash flow a year is that right some directionally round numbers yeah and they have 500 billion dollars of cash on the balance sheet so whenever people are like oh my god it's a bubble or is it going to pop i'm like i think it's kind of fine i mean it costs like 40 or 50 billion dollars to light up one gigawatt yeah if you're on a video chips On video chips. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, there's kind of like an $800 billion buffer growing $300 billion
Starting point is 00:06:55 every year. Yeah, I mean, free cash flow at some of them has begun to maybe, you know. Well, this is going to your point on return on invested capital. We should see that next. Yeah, a little bit of a mismatch at the buildout. But, you know, Larry Page apparently internally said, I'm happy to go bankrupt rather than lose this race. And I think that is the mentality for sure at Google and perhaps meta.
Starting point is 00:07:18 It's just seen as existential, and you have to win. Okay, so Lott's has been written about these round-tripping deals. Because round-tripping is a very scary concept from the internet build-out. That was a big problem. What do you make of it here? It is objectively happening. Money is fungible. So, InVidia, if they sign a deal with Open AI, they can say,
Starting point is 00:07:40 hey, you can't use our money to buy our chips, but money is fungible. But it's happening at a very small scale. I know this is like a crypto or blockchain. Exactly. And I think what is driving this isn't the need to finance GPU or data center purchases, but it's actually competitive dynamics. So, Nvidia's biggest competitor, it's not AMD, it's not Broadcom, it's certainly not Marvell, it's not Intel, it's Google.
Starting point is 00:08:13 And more specifically, it is Google, because, because Google owns the TPU chip. And this is by far, maybe perhaps today, the only alternative to Nvidia for training and maybe the best inference alternative. And Google's a problematic competitor because they also own a company called DeepMind. And they have a product called Jimini.
Starting point is 00:08:36 And I think you could argue that they're the leading AI company today. I think they've taken 15 or 20 points of traffic share in the last two or three months, and that's just traffic to Gemini. It does not include search overviews. I suspect on a actual traffic basis, Google is bigger than Open AI, Anthropic, anyone today.
Starting point is 00:08:56 And that business is going to run on TPUs. And then we have three other labs that are relevant today. There's Anthropic, and that's an Amazon and Google captive. Anthropic is really going to run on TPUs and Traneums. And so you're left with XAI and OpenAI at the forefront. And if Google is going to a lab like Anthropics, and saying, I'm going to help you fundraise and give you chips for competitive reasons. It's very hard for Nvidia not to respond.
Starting point is 00:09:24 And as Jensen said, he thinks it's going to be a good investment. So I think the round-tripping concerns are pretty overblown. Yeah. I mean, what Nvidia really needs is they need meta to get their act together or another American open source player to emerge or maybe some sort of detent with China and AI. Yeah. When people ask me about Nvidia and all the moves and the round-tripping, my reaction is everything they've done is completely rational.
Starting point is 00:09:51 100% rational. Yeah, long-term. Yeah, long-term. Some of the things they do may not have, yes, I have a return on capital as other things, but strategically, I think they're all kind of the right moves. Jensen's one of the two best CEOs, along with Elon, I have ever known, and I think he's playing a strong hand really well. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:10:08 All right, so you started getting into the model companies. Let's just talk about the model. So we can come back to chips and memory and networking because I want to get your take on that. But since we're on the model side, what do you think happens with market structure? Who wins where? Who are you most optimistic about?
Starting point is 00:10:24 Where do you have concerns? So I think humility is an important virtue for an investor. And I'm just, if we're going to make an analogy and say that chat GPT is to AI, has Netscape Navigator, was to the internet. At this point in the internet, boom, Google had not been founded. Mark Zuckerberg was in middle school.
Starting point is 00:10:49 Travis Kalanick was in kindergarten. So it's just very early. So I think it's important to be humble about making high confidence predictions at the application layer. It's one reason I think the infrastructure layer is often maybe a safe place to be at the beginning of one of these new technology waves.
Starting point is 00:11:06 Well, actually talk about the role they play at the infrastructure layer because there's a piece of them that obviously they serve as an infrastructure layer powering other application providers, and then they also have their own application. So I think I would draw a distinction. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:19 I mean, that's most true of Google. But I think it's hard to have high conviction other than to observe. The internet was a very disruptive innovation. I think there's reasonable arguments that AI could be a sustaining innovation because the raw ingredients of kind of data, the capital to buy compute,
Starting point is 00:11:38 and distribution, which is what you need, all of today's biggest. tech companies have all of those in spades. So as long as they execute well, hire good people and have a sound strategy, like I think you could see it be a sustaining innovation for a lot of members of the MAG7.
Starting point is 00:11:56 On the other hand, I do think it's existential. And if you don't execute, you know, IBM might be a good fate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's tough. Yeah, data distribution, compute, dollars, talent. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:12:12 And like... They have every right to win. Yeah, they have every right to win. And it seems now more than before they're taking it quite seriously. Yeah. Maybe Google in particular, but... Oh, no, no.
Starting point is 00:12:22 And obviously Meta's making the dramatic moves they're making, too. No, to me, chat GPT was Pearl Harbor for Google, and we're going to see how they responded. And they're slowly starting to respond. Yeah. And then what do you think, what's your forecast for that sort of, the platform piece
Starting point is 00:12:38 of their business, the infrastructure piece? What do you think? think it shakes out in terms of like business model market structure so do you think they end up as high margin businesses like the clouds or like aircraft manufacturers or do you think they end up very competitive and low margin businesses like airlines um i don't think they'll be airlines but you can anybody can just look at the p and l you know of a SaaS company circa 2021 and 2002 and you see you know, 80, 90% gross margins. And the nature of AI, because of scaling laws,
Starting point is 00:13:16 Richard Sutton's the bitter listen, they're just more compute intensive. So their gross margins are structurally going to be lower. But that doesn't mean they can't be great businesses. I just, I think it's going to be a long time before we see a truly kind of, you know, an AI lab, a frontier lab, with gross margins anywhere near,
Starting point is 00:13:38 SaaS or internet era margins. Now, their OPEX can be a lot lower. And maybe that's how you square it. But just the gross margins are fundamentally different. And until scaling laws change and the importance of test time, compute, things like that change, which I don't see happening, they are going to be lower margin.
Starting point is 00:13:59 Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about application layer. So you just kind of got into it a little bit with the SaaS businesses. And I don't know if you've waited. into this fight on Twitter, but it's sort of, you know, the like, you know, every few months it comes up and it's like, SaaS is terrible and it's dead and, you know, it's all going to go away. And then, you know, with Andres, to our Keshe interview he just did, it's, you know,
Starting point is 00:14:24 like the market's reacting positively to it. And it's like a whipsaw reaction. So what do you think happens with SaaS and software? You know, I think I, you know, first said probably in early 24 that I thought all of application SaaS might be a zero. than infrastructure SaaS. I would say I have a more nuanced view now. And I think there could be some really big application SaaS winners, especially if you serve like a more fragmented S&B customer base. You know, Google is making it really easy if you were a customer of theirs
Starting point is 00:14:58 to use your data and essentially make any SaaS app you want. And then your data isn't shared with anyone else. But the critical mistake that I think a lot of, retailers made in dealing with Amazon is they looked at Amazon's margins and they said we don't want to be in that business. And that was obviously a terrible mistake. And here we are 25 years later. And Amazon has really healthy retail margins. And I worry that application SaaS companies are trying to preserve their existing gross margin structures because they believe that if their gross margins go down, their stocks will go down.
Starting point is 00:15:41 It is definitely impossible, given what we just discussed, to succeed in AI without gross margin pressure. And I do not know why they have concerns, because we have an existence proof that a software company can deal well with declining margins. In Microsoft, in Adobe, to the whole AI thing came along. It used to be that companies were scared to go from on-premise to the cloud because margins were lower. Cloud margins are lower. They're still good. And Microsoft, they transitioned, you know, from, you know, on-premise perpetual licenses with maintenance to a cloud model. And it was a
Starting point is 00:16:18 pretty good stock for 10 years. So I don't, if you're an application SaaS company, like what I would just say is, don't be scared and look at declining gross margins kind of has a mark of success rather than, you know, a badge of shame or something to be feared. It's actually so funny you say that, because whenever we have these discussions about companies, basically every company that comes to present to us is like, we're an AI company. And we always look at their gross margins, and it's become like a badge of honor
Starting point is 00:16:45 for them to actually have low gross margins. Because we're like, oh my God, people are actually using your AI stuff. Yeah. But if you show up and you're like, I'm an AI company, and it's like, I got 82% gross margins. You're like, I don't think anybody's really using it. We're not. Yeah, it's interesting.
Starting point is 00:16:58 Yeah, if you're one of these public companies, would you rather have like $10 of revenue with 90% gross margins or $50 of revenue with 60% gross margins? It's not hard. It's not that complicated. It's hard to do in the public market. It's hard to do in publics.
Starting point is 00:17:09 But if you communicate it, you draw parallels to the cloud transition. I mean, I'm an investor, and I would be excited about it. And I don't think I'm alone in the world. And then the big advantage these legacy application SaaS companies have is they do have these really profitable existing businesses. And so you can run your new AI products at break-even. And, you know, catch up to the... leaders, et cetera, et cetera, and I'm just surprised more people have not done that.
Starting point is 00:17:38 Like, why are none of the public coding companies even trying to compete with Cursor? And the reality is Cursor now, they have a trillion tokens, and, you know, there will be a point where they have enough coding tokens that it's tough to catch them. But I think today, if you're a public coding company, and you said, I'm going to lean in, I'm going to run it break-even, I have an existing business, I'm going to attach it to everything, hey you have a chance and you know the prize is clearly really big
Starting point is 00:18:07 I see Martin is skeptical Martin's shaking his head I said a chance I said a chance it's like a dumb and dumber you're telling me there's a chance not like a real chance you're telling me there's a chance
Starting point is 00:18:16 so yes exactly it's like a yeah exactly I totally agree yeah we actually saw I mean you know we see it you know we may if we if we
Starting point is 00:18:24 you know Figma for example like when they went out they are extremely high gross margin and they're like hey we're gonna you know, pretty aggressively distribute our AI tools and our gross margins are going to go down and, you know, investors asked a few clarifying questions
Starting point is 00:18:37 and then they were like, oh, that actually would be a good thing. And so it's surprised more people in the public markets aren't doing it. It worked out okay for them. It's working out well. Long game to play. What about on the consumer side, the application layer? So obviously, Google was the portal to the internet,
Starting point is 00:18:52 kind of still is the portal to the internet. And the whole business model was predicated upon taking some intent and directing you to someone else's website where they would do stuff with you. It's kind of not going to be that way. It already is not that way with AI. Although I tried the browser today and I tried to do some pretty basic shopping stuff and it's still some work to do. But I think it will get there. So what do you actually think happens with the sort of market structure of the consumer internet companies? Do they get subsumed into a component of a chatbot interface or do you think it's something else?
Starting point is 00:19:31 So one, humility, hard to say. Two, I would just say, I think the AI companies that have launched these AI browsers may come to regret it because there's something called Chrome that has, whatever it is, 5 billion users. And if you're Google, you know, you can just go look and what happened with Google Buzz. They are very cautious.
Starting point is 00:19:55 You know, they're currently in litigation with the government. and they could easily do this and probably do it even better, but they didn't want to be first. So now you have two AI-native companies with their own browsers, let them run for three to six months, get a little head start,
Starting point is 00:20:16 and then, wow, here we are. We had to do this, and I don't know how that's going to work, maybe for the companies other than Google who don't own Chrome. I guess data and distribution is pretty powerful. Yeah, hindsight's 2020. And the one thing I would say is I do think it's tough to bet against the companies
Starting point is 00:20:38 with large existing user bases today. And I also think reasoning has fundamentally changed the economics of these frontier models. You know, pre-reasoning, I often said, if you are a frontier model without access to, unique, valuable data and internet-scale distribution, you're the fastest depreciating asset in history. I think reasoning really changed that because the way R.L works during post-training,
Starting point is 00:21:08 having a big user base now kind of unlocks that flywheel that was at the center of every great consumer internet company where you have a good product, you get a lot of users, the users make the algorithm better, the algorithm makes the product better, and it just spins. and that it's not quite spinning yet in AI, but you can squint and see it.
Starting point is 00:21:31 And so I think that fundamentally changes economics for Anthropic, for XAI, for Open AI. But, I mean, Mark Zuckerberg try it hard. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of smart people in there now. Yeah, for sure. I think that worry is, and I think this is another interesting thing, is if you don't, like in a strange way,
Starting point is 00:21:57 the Chinese open source model ecosystem is a godsend to any American company that's trying to catch those four leading labs. Because the problem is, if you don't have Gemini 2.5 Pro, or a later checkpoint of it, or a later checkpoint of grok that we don't see, or a later GPT checkmate checkpoint,
Starting point is 00:22:17 training the next model, you're at a big disadvantage. Oh, by the way, one thing I just want to say that drives me crazy is all these people who say that GPT-5 is the end of scaling loss. GPT-5 is a smaller model. It was not designed to be better. It was designed to be more economical
Starting point is 00:22:33 for Open AI in Microsoft to run. Any reference to GPT-5 at scaling laws is crazy. Yeah, sorry. Rant over. We get the pedestal up here if you want. Yeah, exactly. Shaking your hand. Yeah, it'd be good.
Starting point is 00:22:49 That'd be good. Do you want to talk about chips? Sure. So, okay, I know you love NVIDIA. Talk about, you know, your view of NVIDIA, AMD, TPUs, A6, and how do you think sort of market structure shakes out there, you know, competitive advantage that the various players have? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:10 I think it goes, I think it is really, it's a fight between NVIDIA and the Google TPU. And that's something that I don't think is broadly appreciated it is the extent which Broadcom and AMD are effectively going to market together. Nvidia is no longer just a semiconductor company, as I'm sure you'll hear from Jensen tomorrow. You know, it was a semiconductor company, then a software company of Kuda, now a systems company with these rack level solutions, and now arguably, you know, a data set level company with the, you know,
Starting point is 00:23:42 level of architecting they're doing with scale up, scale across and scale out, scale across networking. So the networking, the fabric, the software, it's all important. And what Broadcom is saying to companies like meta is, hey, we will build you a fabric that can theoretically compete with NVIDIA's fabric, which is a mixture of NVLink and either Infinaband or Ethernet. It will build it on the Ethernet.
Starting point is 00:24:09 It's going to be an open standard. And hey, we'll make you your version of TPU, which, by the way, took Google three generations to get working. And you know what? if your ASIC isn't good, you can just plug AMD right in. But I personally believe most of those ASICs are going to fail, particularly if it's in the fullness of time, like over a period of time or in the fullness of time?
Starting point is 00:24:33 In the next three years. I think you'll see a bunch of high-profile ASIC programs canceled, especially if Google starts selling TPUs externally, which has been all over X. And then, you know, they, you know, who knows exactly how that would work. Because if you're Anthropic, it's just rumored Anthropic
Starting point is 00:24:51 wants to buy tens of billions of TPUs. If you're anthropic, maybe you don't want Google seeing your secret sauce. But there's ways around that. So I think this is really a battle between Google and its TPU,
Starting point is 00:25:03 enabled by Broadcom for now, and Google can take the TPU away from Broadcom whenever they want. Yeah. Now, they can't do the Ethernet networking that Broadcom is doing, but they control the TPU. So it's really Google and the TPU versus
Starting point is 00:25:17 um invidia you know with with you know amazon like that's a very talented team arguing the most talented silicon team at any hyperscaler the anapurna team like i think the trainium three will probably be a much better chip than the trainium two it took google three generations to get the tp you right um and then amd will you know will always be kind of the second source and you need a second source all right exciting uh what do you think happens okay so i want to go back um to business models. So one of the big things that is widely discussed is like, you know, source of disruption. And most of the CEOs in this room are CEOs of startups who are trying to go beat some incumbent or find, you know, some new market opportunity. And the most ripe opportunities
Starting point is 00:26:03 tend to come when you have a big platform shift that is also accompanied with a business model shift. And so there are a couple of areas where I can see it. I feel like in an obvious way. so, you know, we're investors in Decagon, customer support. Like, you can pretty easily see a business model that is priced on the resolution of a task because it's so measurable. You can see, you know, like in coding, like a lot of the business model has now shifted to consumption.
Starting point is 00:26:32 And, you know, obviously, especially for developer-facing things, like that's comfortable and pretty well known. What about the rest of the industry? Because I feel like there's sort of this handwave thing that is going on, which is like, we're going to go get all of services. But it's like, okay, so how do you actually go do that? It's going to be pretty hard.
Starting point is 00:26:50 So do you have any prediction on how that plays out? Well, I think what you're seeing in customer service, which is kind of like an easy first example, we have a lot of textual data. The LLMs are good at text. You can kind of, you know, probably really easily run some RL to make sure that they, you know, get a good verified reward, you know, verified reward being a happy customer
Starting point is 00:27:12 or first call resolution or whatever. it is. But I do think you will see that played out. Like humans were fundamentally paid based on outcomes. And a lot of AI will be augmenting humans, but probably also replacing some humans. And that will involve being paid for outcomes. You know, going back to the consumer business model, you know, everybody's talking about affiliate fees.
Starting point is 00:27:35 And for sure, I'm going to have, you know, my own AI will be a version of GROC because we're both XAI shareholders, it will be a version of GROC, then no. me and it likes me um and you know when i when i want to you know the next time i want to go on vacation it will know the hotels that i like to go to and it'll say hey three hotels i have gavin you know i have gavin coming who's got the best price of the best room um it's going massively upgrade the gifts that you give to becky yes in case she's at the audience she really appreciated your dumb and dumber reference i'll have you know um but um Yeah, and then there will probably be some sort of affiliate fee.
Starting point is 00:28:16 And again, that's just being paid for an outcome and kind of closing that loop, which will be probably a little bit of a business model degradation. Why did Google never start a marketplace? Because people overvalue systematically their ability once they've acquired a customer through Google to keep it as an organic customer. So they systematically overpay, and they continue doing that. That's why Google never went to outcomes. are a marketplace, because advertising leads to the advertisers systematically overpaying.
Starting point is 00:28:49 So that inefficiency will be squeezed out. But yeah, we'll go to outcomes. And I think Elon tweeted today that, you know, work would become optional, you know, like instead of buying your vegetables at a supermarket, you can grow your own garden if you want. Now, who knows how long it takes us to get there. But that doesn't sound wildly implausible to me for how powerful this technology is. And I was just struck. Carpathie, you know, whatever, two days ago, you know, was being painted as like a skeptic for saying AGI is 10 years away.
Starting point is 00:29:21 Are you kidding? It's insane. 10 years? Yeah. That's wild. Yeah, sign me up. Well, we're of shorter timelines, please. Yeah, well, so, no, that's awesome.
Starting point is 00:29:30 While we're on the topic of, like, very exciting, futuristic things, robotics. Do you have you on? Yeah, very real. And it's going to be Tesla versus the Chinese in the same way. It's Tesla versus the Chinese in car. cars yeah yeah i would just say cars not electric cars yeah cars yeah do you have a sense of timeline i mean you can you can all watch the optimist videos um every roboticist i know is extremely impressed um you know there's there's a giant debate isn't going to be humanoids or not humanoids
Starting point is 00:30:02 i think that debate is over because humanoid can kind of learn you know from watching youtube videos and then it's easier for a human being um you know to put on a suit and show the robot how to do I mean, it's kind of crazy to watch the video of all, you know, the 50 optimist robots doing 50 different tasks. And then it's very simple, you know, did you, did you put the glass of the dishwasher correctly or not? This is so fun, Gavin. I always love chatting with you. Let's give a hand to Gavin. Thank you, David. Thank you. All right. Next up, we have a very exciting panel on building out real world infrastructure. But first, give us a few minutes. we've got to do a quick stage change here.
Starting point is 00:30:43 So thank you. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcast, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.com. Thanks again for you.
Starting point is 00:31:10 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 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 forward slash disclosures. You know what I'm going to be.

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