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"There’s at least a reasonable chance that 2026 Q1 will be looked back upon as the first quarter of the singularity." Stripe CEO Patrick Collison: "There’s been a phase transition in 2025." "There are many more businesses getting started and the average, the median business is in fact performing better." "Looking at real purchasing behavior on Stripe… end of ’25, beginning of ’26 is when I feel like we’re really starting to see it." @patrickc with @collision on @tbpn
"A lot of intelligence is in how we reason, perceive, understand, and interact with the 3D spatial world." Fei-Fei Li says human intelligence boils down to two buckets—language and spatial—but spatial is the key to unlocking the robotic revolution: "The application is so wide. You can imagine this technology will help our doctors with patients. For example, elderly people living at home using spatial intelligence and assistive technology. We can help assess their health, medical situation, and life-threatening events." "From a geopolitics point of view, this is part of the technology that goes straight into weapons. Whether it's drones or devices. It's also the technology that leads to robotic intelligence because every robot is a moving agent, including your Roomba, which is not very smart." "As a moving agent, just like humans and animals, we use spatial intelligence to move around the world and interact with the world. When this technology is ready, the robotic revolution is going to start." @drfeifei with @StanfordHAI
Computer and software demand accounts for nearly half of US growth https://a16z.news/p/still-increasing-the…
Cursor CEO Michael Truell: Programming in the future might not mean programming with an AI helper, but in a new language entirely. "There is a future version of the world where the way you interact with AI is a little bit less like it's a human helper that you're delegating work to... and instead, it's a little bit more of an advance in compiler or interpreter technology." "It can lead you to a world where programming languages actually change. They can start to be a little bit more about what you want and a little bit less about how you do it." "There is a world where direct manipulation of the UI starts to play a little bit more into it." @mntruell with @patrickc
Ben Horowitz on the infrastructure behind the AI economy: "Crypto is the natural money for AI because it’s internet-native money." "AI is global. Crypto is global." "There needs to be not just a ledger of money, but probably a ledger of truth for AI to really fulfill its potential." "I think people are probably underestimating how crypto and AI work together to form the AI economy." "Networks and computers tend to grow together, and I think that AI is obviously a new kind of computer and crypto is a new kind of network." @bhorowitz on Moonshots with @PeterDiamandis
Replit CEO Amjad Masad: "Communicating with an AI agent is very much like communicating with a human." "Previously you could get away by being a brilliant programmer but not knowing how to talk to people. You can’t anymore." "Your computers are people now." "It is giving an advantage to people who have soft skills." @amasad on The End of Limits Podcast
Stripe co-founder John Collison views hiring as "branches of a tree." "When you hire this person, you're not only bringing them, but you're bringing their effect on the culture, and all the other people they're going to bring in with them, and the norms and the working style they have that will spread throughout the company." "As time goes on, you have less and less influence on the company, and all the new people you’re bringing in have more." @collision at @ECorner
Searches for 'Clawdbot'/'Moltbot'/'OpenClaw' were accompanied by searches in 'Apple Mac Mini' Charts of the week: https://a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-week-v…
Ben Horowitz says a famous Hollywood friend told him half the movie they’re making is AI. "[AI] really improves the economics of the current moviemaking industry, which has gotten extremely difficult with the way distribution has changed. And it’s going to make it much easier for many more people to make movies." "I think there’ll be a new medium that’s different than movies, the way movies were different than plays." "Every writer in Hollywood is already using AI to help them write dialogue they don’t feel like writing and that kind of thing... It hasn’t eliminated those positions. It’s just enabling them to work faster and better." @bhorowitz with @Columbia_Biz
Frontier models keep getting better, but open source is keeping pace Charts of the week: https://a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-week-v…
Fei-Fei Li on why spatial intelligence is the key missing piece of embodied AI: "Think about a very chaotic first responder scene. A fire, traffic accident, or some natural disaster. "If you immerse yourself in those scenes and think about how people organize themselves to rescue people—a lot of that is movements and spontaneous understanding of objects, worlds, human situational awareness." "Language is part of that; language cannot get you to put out a fire." "A simple way to understand a world model is that this model can allow anyone to create any worlds in their mind’s eye by prompting—whether it’s an image or a sentence—and also be able to interact in this world." "Let’s not underestimate that humans are embodied agents, and humans can be augmented by AI’s intelligence." "Just like today, humans are language animals, but we’re very much augmented by AI when helping us to do language tasks, including software engineering." @theworldlabs CEO @drfeifei with @lennysan
Dylan Field on what actually differentiates you in an agent world: "The more you can sample the possibility space… it gives you something to react to." "You need to be constantly critiquing and thinking about what you like and don’t like." "Going back to taste, if an agent can do it for you… an agent can do it for someone else." "What is different about your setup than others?" @zoink on @tbpn
Palmer Luckey: The biggest beneficiaries of vibecoding are going to be the shape rotators, not the wordcels. "The biggest beneficiaries of vibecoding are going to be the hardware nerds like me." "I was always a pretty terrible software engineer... I've taught myself enough to glue things together and make them work." "I was only able to accomplish what I accomplished because I focused on what I was good at, which was optomechanics, a little bit of electrical, and then the product integration of all of these different components." "I didn't have time to learn to program. If I had spent another year or two learning to program at even a reasonable level, I would've been two years behind on everything else." "And so I'm a big fan of vibecoding—even if everything that comes out of it is slop, it's better than I was able to make." @PalmerLuckey on @tpbn
World Labs CEO Fei-Fei Li: Language alone is a lossy representation of the physical world. "Just a simple meal of making pasta... one could imagine using language to describe let's say about 15 minutes or 20 minutes of that process. But it’s still a lossy representation." "The nuance of how you cook the sauce, how you put the pasta in the water, what the pasta [does] in the water is impossible to use language alone to describe." "So much of the physical world’s process... is beyond the description of language." @drfeifei @theworldlabs
OpenClaw is crazy because it's literally Claude Code for Claude Code Charts of the week: https://a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-week-v…
Patrick Collison on what changes when biology becomes programmable: "We, humanity, have never cured a complex disease." "Most cardiovascular disease, most cancers, most autoimmune disease, most neurodegenerative disease... For none of them can we really say that we've cured it, that we understand the causal pathways in meaningful detail." "Then over the last 10 ish years... we’ve gotten three new classes of technology in biology." "If you put those together, you now have the ability… to read, think, and to write. And this starts to really feel like a new kind of Turing loop." @patrickc with @mntruell
