Andreessen Horowitz

Over the next few months, expect to hear a range of speculation and “hot takes” about what will happen in the Crypto industry, from both a legislative and regulatory perspective. It’s too early to tell how everything will shake out. But we’re very optimistic that now, the government will foster innovation and accelerate progress. This will enable a future where we can deliver on the many consumer benefits that we’ve been excited about: giving people ownership over their digital identities, new business models for creatives, low to no-fee cross border transactions with stablecoins, new ways for small businesses like restaurants to engage with their customers, the emergence of decentralized social networks, development of physical infrastructure like energy grids, as well as blockchains democratizing AI and games, and so much more that we can’t even imagine yet. More from Miles Jennings, Michele Korver and Brian Quintenz, at the post in our comments ??

The future of AI in operations goes far beyond automating repetitive tasks. We believe there is substantial opportunity not only for AI to turn labor into software but also to productize internal work within organizations, often referred to as “ops.” Ops roles involve essential but often repetitive and mundane tasks. Companies have historically attempted to automate these tasks with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), but RPA efforts didn’t always deliver the desired results. Unlike RPA, which rigidly follows specific actions, AI agents can understand goals and dynamically choose actions to achieve them. With generative AI, we believe true automation through adaptable agents is now possible. And we’ve already seen examples of companies using AI agents to fulfill RPA’s original promise, transforming internal operations into more flexible, scalable workflows. We believe this is the future of AI ops, and where the opportunity lies. More from Kimberly Tan: https://lnkd.in/eHGcj9fy

The past four years had a greater impact on tech than any other period during his lifetime, Marc Andreessen says. And the latest election results feel like “a boot off the throat,” he says. So now that President Donald Trump has been re-elected, what’s about to change? According to Marc and Ben, likely a lot—especially in AI, crypto, and defense. They break down what they expect to see, and provide a full post-election recap, in the latest episode of The Ben & Marc Show, out now. Link to full episode in comments.

The cost of high-quality LLM inference has been plummeting, a trend Guido Appenzeller calls "LLMflation." By tracking the per-token costs of comparable models, he identified a 10x annual cost decrease over the past 3 years. The numbers speak for themselves: in 2021, GPT-3 cost $60 per million tokens. Today, a model of comparable performance costs only $0.06 per million tokens—1,000 times less! The cost of newer, better models, comparable to GPT-4, seems to follow a similar curve. Why? A few major factors are driving this dramatic cost decrease: - Hardware advances: Improved GPU performance and structural optimizations have driven down costs. - Model quantization: Moving from 16-bit to 4-bit precision has increased efficiency and reduced resource demands. - Software optimizations: New methods reduce compute needs and memory bottlenecks. - Smaller, more powerful models: Training improvements mean smaller models now outperform past giants, lowering computational load. - Open-source competition: Open models from companies like Meta and Mistral AI have intensified competition, driving prices lower. The result? LLM inference is essentially free—opening up new AI use cases that would’ve been commercially unfeasible just a few years ago. More from Guido Appenzeller: https://lnkd.in/ebtcPeDT

Could AI have saved TD Bank $3 billion? Outdated and underfunded systems left critical transactions unmonitored and alerts missed, resulting in a record fine. As Gen AI advances, it’s clear: adopting new solutions isn’t just about compliance—it may be a competitive advantage. Check out more from James da Costa, in today’s Fintech newsletter ??

We are thrilled to announce our investment in 11x — a company that frees salespeople from a nightmare of administrative work and qualification drudgery. Sales is one of the oldest professions. And while technology and sales-enablement tools have advanced, the actual process of selling has mostly remained the same; salespeople are still tasked with the tedious — but necessary — work required to drive new leads into the pipeline. 11x changes that, by building digital workers that autonomously complete tasks for revenue teams. Its first product, Alice, is a digital sales development representative that can ingest first- and third-party data to automatically find, engage, and qualify prospects. Jordan, its second product, is a multilingual voice agent that can do the same thing, except it does it on a personalized, low-latency phone call. Alice and Jordan are infinitely scalable and fully customizable, and most importantly: they actually work. The company’s founding team, including founder and CEO Hasan Sukkar and CTO Prabhav Jain, are some of the hardest-working and most passionate people we’ve had the pleasure of knowing. More from Joe Schmidt IV, Joe Morrissey and Seema Amble: https://lnkd.in/eBr8qbBy

We are thrilled to announce that Andy McCall and Brian Roberts are joining Andreessen Horowitz as General Partners. They will be working across our American Dynamism and AI Apps funds.? Andy’s experience in scaling Cisco Meraki and Samsara with innovative approaches positions him as a rare investor with "been there, done that" insights. Andy has demonstrated his company-building excellence over and over, at all stages of growth, and we’re pleased to have him providing invaluable guidance to our portfolio as a board member. Brian’s experience spans more than 30 years, including roles as CFO of Lyft and Splunk and holding key positions at Microsoft and Walmart. He’s known as an expert executive and company-builder. We’re pleased that founders will be able to work with Brian as a board member as they build category-defining companies. For more, check out today's announcements in the comments.

“Our way forward to building a new AI economy is by spurring innovation and fostering competition." a16z and Microsoft recognize that the AI policy choices – or missteps – we make now will determine whether the U.S. can continue our long and proud history of fostering innovation and seeing startups, small businesses, and entrepreneurs succeed. Together, Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Brad Smith outline policy ideas for AI startups so they can thrive, collaborate, and compete. By advocating for open access, fair competition, and responsible policies, they’re hoping that startups and established players alike can drive the next wave of AI growth. Read the full piece:?https://bit.ly/4hr7esJ

Deepfakes are now fully in the zeitgeist—from politics to commerce, and social media—but detection is keeping pace. Pindrop cofounder & CEO Vijay Balasubramaniyan, joins Martin Casado on the a16z Podcast to discuss the technology, policy, and economy behind deepfakes. He shares how: - Advances in detection could reduce the need for broad AI regulations. - Detection is now cheaper than deepfake creation, making defense affordable and scalable. - Detection tools catch subtle nuances that deepfakes struggle to mimic, providing a reliable line of defense to protect trust and authenticity. Check out the full episode and let us know what you think: https://lnkd.in/gB6HtE9h Some of the companies mentioned in this podcast are portfolio companies of a16z. A list of investments made by a16z is available at?https://lnkd.in/g7hjSuHb.

Crypto has broken into the national discourse during this election season. One reason why: the listing of Bitcoin and Ethereum exchange-traded products (ETPs) in 2024. As a result, the number of Americans who hold could grow, as ETPs make investing in these assets easier and more accessible. So where do swing states stand on their relative interest in crypto? a16z crypto parsed the data, showing which states have shown the biggest jumps in interest since the last election in 2020. (See the largest swing state movements in the image below.) Take a look, and see what politicians including Donald Trump, Kamala Harris and several prominent senators and members of Congress have said recently about their stances on crypto, in this year’s State of Crypto report: https://bit.ly/3YvxMQW