RT @a16z: We're excited to be backing @thinkymachines under @miramurati's leadership. 2 years ago, we asked her about the future of AI. Th…

Thrilled to back @miramurati and the world-class team behind ~ every major recent AI research and product breakthrough. RL (PPO, TRPO, GAE), reasoning, multimodal, Character, and of course ChatGPT! No one is better positioned to advance the frontier. Excited to see the future of @thinkymachines. @martin_casado @pmarca @Mascobot @steph_zhang @a16z

A great day for America

Our expectations from software have been blunted because traditional software has been pretty limited. Time to shake that off. No I don't just want a wine inventory app. I want an app that can keep track of my collection, read reviews from the web, help with meal pairing, round out my collection, order when it finds good deals online, summarize reviews and recommend which ones to use as gifts. Hard to do in excel or with CRUD, but you can vibe code it in a day or two.

@kevinleeme I often rewatch this after putting my three kids down to remind me to get back to work

Yes. A few miscellaneous thoughts. (1) First, the new bottleneck on AI is prompting and verifying. Since AI does tasks middle-to-middle, not end-to-end. So business spend migrates towards the edges of prompting and verifying, even as AI speeds up the middle. (2) Second, AI really means amplified intelligence, not agentic intelligence. The smarter you are, the smarter the AI is. Better writers are better prompters. (3) Third, AI doesn’t really take your job, it allows you to do any job. Because it allows you to be a passable UX designer, a decent SFX animator, and so on. But it doesn’t necessarily mean you can do that job *well*, as a specialist is often needed for polish. (4) Fourth, AI doesn’t take your job, it takes the job of the previous AI. For example: Midjourney took Stable Diffusion’s job. GPT-4 took GPT-3’s job. Once you have a slot in your workflow for AI image gen, AI code gen, or the like, you just allocate that spend to the latest model. (5) Fifth, killer AI is already here — and it’s called drones. And every country is pursuing it. So it’s not the image generators and chatbots one needs to worry about. (6) Sixth, decentralized AI is already here and it’s essentially polytheistic AI (many strong models) rather than monotheistic AI (a single all-powerful model). That means balance of power between human/AI fusions rather than a single dominant AI that will turn us all into paperclips/pillars of salt. (7) Seventh, AI is probabilistic while crypto is deterministic. So crypto can constrain AI. For example, AI can break captchas, but it can’t fake onchain balances. And it can solve some equations, but not cryptographic equations. Thus, crypto is roughly what AI can’t do. (8) Eighth, I think AI on the whole right now is having a decentralizing effect, because there is so much more a small team can do with the right tooling, and because so many high quality open source models are coming. All this could change if self-prompting, self-verifying, and self-replicating AI in the physical world really gets going. But there are open research questions between here and there.

💯agree with this. And it extends beyond the technical/research talent battle. On the ops/GTM side, everyone is looking for that unicorn smart generalist who is strategic / has seen scale but will also grind and GSD in the trenches (please reach out if this is you!)

We @a16z are excited to co-lead @DecagonAI’s Series C and @sarahdingwang, @kimberlywtan and I are excited to continue partnering with @thejessezhang, @AshwinSreenivas and the entire Decagon team! The results from brands like Hertz, Oura, Bilt, Classpass, Notion, and a long list of others have been astounding, and we’re excited to see them continue to transform customer experience with AI.

📣 We @a16z are so thrilled to be co-leading @DecagonAI’s Series C, just two years after introducing the founders and leading the seed at inception! Decagon is pioneering AI agents for customer experience and serves leaders like Hertz, ŌURA, Duolingo, Bilt, ClassPass, and Notion. Founders @thejessezhang @AshwinSreenivas have built a first-class team and a killer product. It’s been a true privilege to partner with them, and we @sarahdingwang @steph_zhang can’t wait for the incredible years ahead. They’re actively hiring on all fronts to meet the incredible customer demand!

True story: For a decade, I had Comcast’s number saved as ‘Comcast Sucks’. @DecagonAI makes customer experiences delightful, with near instant response times while cutting support costs by 50-80% (and often doubling NPS!). Personally I've never been more excited about customer support, the first $500B market ready to be disrupted end-to-end with AI. We at @a16z are thrilled to co-lead their Series C and @steph_zhang, @kimberlywtan and I can't wait to partner more deeply with @thejessezhang and @AshwinSreenivas! They move faster and know how to harness value from LLMs better than anyone. Congrats and LFG!