What Builders Talk About When They Talk About AI | Andreessen Horowitz
If you look at every technological shift or platform shift so far, it’s resulted in more things to design. You got the printing press, and then you have to figure out what you put on a page. More recently, mobile. You would think, “Okay. Less pixels, less designers.” But no, that’s when we saw the biggest explosion of designers.
—Dylan Field, Figma
—Dylan Field, Figma
Sarah Wang • What Builders Talk About When They Talk About AI | Andreessen Horowitz
Dylan Field on why AI will not mean less jobs
Very simply, Jevons Paradox states: if the demand is elastic and the price drops, the demand will more than make up for it. Normally, far more than make up for it. This is absolutely the case of the internet. You get more value and more productivity. I personally believe when it comes to any creative asset or work automation, the demand is elastic.... See more
Sarah Wang • What Builders Talk About When They Talk About AI | Andreessen Horowitz
I think this will be true for AI in general. ChatGPT starts out entering the enterprise, they get accustomed to it, they see the tangible results, and want to try it elsewhere without wanting an exact quantification in cost savings / revenue increases (which is often too hard to do for AI).
It will make things way better if you can just dump in massive amounts of information. It should be able to know a billion things about you. The HBM bandwidth is there.
—Noam Shazeer, Character.AI
—Noam Shazeer, Character.AI
Sarah Wang • What Builders Talk About When They Talk About AI | Andreessen Horowitz
I actually disagree with this. I think a bunch of further improvement will come by figuring out better ways to finding important information in databases (instead of just simarlity search) and figuring out how to extract relevant information from conversations, documents, etc. so we can provide only relevant information.
Sometimes they just need the model that actually fits for their specific use case and it’s far more economical. We want people to build on top of our models and we want to give them tools to make that easy. We want to give them more and more access and control, so you can bring your data and customize these models. And you can really focus on the l... See more
Sarah Wang • What Builders Talk About When They Talk About AI | Andreessen Horowitz
I personally believe when it comes to any creative asset or work automation, the demand is elastic. The more that we make, the more people consume. We’re very much looking forward to a massive expansion in productivity, a lot of new jobs, a lot of new things, just like we saw with the microchip and the internet.
—Martin Casado, a16z
—Martin Casado, a16z
Sarah Wang • What Builders Talk About When They Talk About AI | Andreessen Horowitz
I really think that we could be entering a third epoch of computing. The microchip brought the marginal cost of compute to 0. The internet brought the marginal cost of distribution to 0. These large models actually bring the marginal cost of creation to 0.
Sarah Wang • What Builders Talk About When They Talk About AI | Andreessen Horowitz
Not just the cost of creation but also the cost of intelligence.
Getting models into the hands of users will help us discover new use cases
Sarah Wang • What Builders Talk About When They Talk About AI | Andreessen Horowitz
I have a Turing test question for AI: if we took AI in 1633 and trained on all the available information at that time, would it predict that the Earth or the sun is the center of the solar system—even though 99.9% of the information is saying the Earth is the center of the solar system? I think 5 years is right at the fringe, but if we were to run ... See more
Sarah Wang • What Builders Talk About When They Talk About AI | Andreessen Horowitz
There was a study out there that did this "time-line" training.
how can you take the knowledge work that someone is doing and use AI to help them be dramatically more productive at doing that particular flavor of cognitive work? In our observation with developers, more than anything else, AI helps keep them in flow state longer than they otherwise would. Rather than hitting a blocker when you’re writing a chunk... See more