The a16z Podcast

Eugenia Kuyda, CEO of Wabi and AI pioneer behind Replika, joins Erik, Anish, and Justine to reveal how personal software will transform from a developer monopoly to a creative medium for all. She exposes why command-line AI interfaces are the new MS-DOS, explains how mini-apps will become as shareable as TikToks, and details her decade-long journey from training language models in 2012 to building the platform where your mom can create custom apps in minutes. Plus: untold stories from OpenAI's apartment days and why voice-only devices completely miss the point.

ElevenLabs CEO and co-founder Mati Staniszewski joins Jennifer Li to explain how the team ships research-grade AI at lightning speed—from text-to-speech and fully licensed AI music to real-time voice agents, and why voice is the next interface for human-computer interaction. He shares the small, autonomous team model, global hiring approach, and how the Voice Marketplace has paid creators over $10M while evolving into an enterprise platform.

David Sacks, White House AI and Crypto Czar, joins Marc, Ben, and Erik to explore what's really happening inside the Trump administration's AI and crypto strategy. They expose the regulatory capture playbook being pushed by certain AI companies, explain why open source is America's secret weapon, and detail the infrastructure crisis that could determine who wins the global AI race. This episode dives into how the U.S. plans to compete with China, the challenges of overregulation, and the pivotal role of innovation and decentralization in shaping the future of AI and crypto. Recorded for the a16z Podcast, this conversation offers an inside look at the policies, politics, and power struggles defining the next era of technological leadership.

In this closing keynote from a16z’s Runtime conference, General Partner Erik Torenberg speaks with our firm’s cofounders, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on highlights from throughout the conference, the current state of LLM capabilities, and why despite huge capex, AI is not a bubble. They discuss whether AI can truly create, the nature of human creativity, the intersection of intelligence and leadership, and how emotion, embodiment, and theory of mind shape the next frontier of AI. The conversation also touches on whether we’re in an AI bubble, Google’s wake-up call, new UX paradigms, talent and chip cycles, and the U.S.-China AI race leading into a robotics-driven future. Recorded live at Runtime 2025, this discussion captures the evolving mindset of two of Silicon Valley’s most influential thinkers as they unpack what comes next for artificial intelligence, industry, and society.

In this conversation from a16z’s Runtime, Gavin Baker, Managing Partner and CIO of Atreides Management, joins David George, General Partner at a16z, to unpack the macro view of AI: the trillion-dollar data center buildout, the new economics of GPUs, and what this boom means for investors, founders, and the global economy.

AI isn’t just changing software, it’s causing the biggest buildout of physical infrastructure in modern history. In this episode, live from Runtime, a16z's Raghu Raghuram speaks with Amin Vahdat, VP and GM of AI and Infrastructure at Google, and Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, about the unprecedented scale of what’s being built, from chips to power grids to global data centers. They discuss the new “AI industrial revolution,” where power, compute, and network are the new scarce resources; how geopolitical competition is shaping chip design and data center placement; and why the next generation of AI infrastructure will demand co-design across hardware, software, and networking. The conversation also covers how enterprises will adapt, why we’re still in the earliest phase of this CapEx supercycle, and how AI inference, reinforcement learning, and multi-site computing will transform how systems are built and run.

Google DeepMind’s new image model Nano Banana took the internet by storm. In this episode, Principal Scientist Oliver Wang and Group Product Manager Nicole Brichtova join the a16z team to discuss how Nano Banana was created, why it went viral, and what it means for the future of image and video generation. They unpack the origin of the project and its playful name, the 'wow' moments during its viral launch, and how artists and users are shaping the next era of creative AI. The conversation explores topics including character consistency, multimodal creativity, and the evolution from 2D to 3D world models. Wang and Brichtova also share how DeepMind is building tools that empower both professional artists and everyday users to design with intent. Recorded for the a16z Podcast, this episode captures the intersection of art, technology, and imagination—and how AI is redefining what it means to see ourselves in creativity.

In this episode of Monitoring the Situation, Marc Andreessen, Katherine Boyle, and Erik Torenberg dive into the movies that best explain America, from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to Tropic Thunder to Fight Club. They explore how Tarantino’s revisionist masterpiece reimagines 1969 and the end of America’s cultural innocence, why Tropic Thunder was the last un-cancellable comedy, and how Fight Club evolved from a left-wing critique of capitalism to a right-wing prophecy about alienation and identity. Along the way, they trace the parallels between the counterculture of the 1960s and the internet culture wars of the 2010s, and debate whether we’re living through another great American cultural reset.