AI is a world-defining category alongside the microprocessor, the steam engine, and electricity. Every one of them required an entirely new physical world to be built. We raised $1.1B to build this one.

Open source AI just became the biggest policy fight in tech. Our full conversation with Ben Horowitz, where he tells Theo and Sofia why banning open source is nearly impossible, why it's historically the safer path, the risk of one company controlling AI and why distillation isn't the threat people claim. 01:21 The Nvidia-backed open letter on open-weight AI 01:49 The OpenAI–Hugging Face hacking incident 02:27 Why you can't actually ban open source 03:05 Historically, open source has been safer (Linux vs. Windows) 05:17 Jensen's Twitter account and the letter's significance 07:25 China, "sleeper agent" models, and national security risk 09:23 Anthropic defying the US government 15:18 The danger of building your business on Anthropic 18:51 BYD, EVs, and rebuilding US manufacturing 21:30 Why would a company ever release an open model? 23:58 The DeepSeek moment: why nothing actually changed 28:25 Paying 100x more for an AI researcher vs. a janitor 29:06 AI art, the "slop" problem, and a coming renaissance @bhorowitz @theojaffee @schisofrenia

America’s software leadership was built on openness. We have the same opportunity in AI. If we want a competitive, secure AI ecosystem whose benefits extend far beyond a handful of companies, we need to preserve access to open-weight models.

my entire timeline today is TK and I’m loving it He doesn’t enter the room lightly. He is a force of nature. Like manifest destiny somehow bottled up in a person The most remarkable thing to me is his ability to be both motivating and exacting, down in the details and give extreme autonomy / ownership He makes the team believe they can do more, faster than what seems possible TK is def not the prototypical technical AI founder of today and yet he will surely build one of the most consequential Applied AI companies As my kids would say, let him cook @travisk @bhorowitz

Ben Horowitz on what made Travis different as Uber scaled to thousands of employees: "There was nobody in Uber that didn't feel Travis. You talk to people there and they all refer to him. This company was, what, 10,000, 20,000 people? And everybody is like, oh yeah, we're in the Travis review, or when I talk to Travis." "To have that kind of presence at that scale is something not a lot of founders can do at that kind of turn-up intensity." "If you look at the way he thinks about problems, confrontations, getting out of a hole, how do you get to the future, we're talking about one of a very, very few founders that exist in reality." @bhorowitz @travisk

Ben Horowitz says the difference between a great idea and a great company is the entrepreneur: "If you look at Tesla, what you would see is big oil, big auto, big government, were never going to let that happen." "They would kill you. But the reality is, Elon Musk, he's hard to kill. He by himself kind of decarbonized the American auto industry, which is unbelievable in retrospect." "If you listen to the politicians now, they're like 'oh, he didn't build Tesla, he just struck a gold mine and is pulling the gold out, all the people built it.'" "Why didn't all those people build another Tesla? Because there's only one non-fungible, very rare person in that equation who could do that. That's why there's only one SpaceX." @travisk @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg

.@travisk just raised $1.7B for atoms, led by @a16z - and now he's hiring hundreds of people. after 8 years in stealth, Travis is "back" and looking for builders who want to solve hard problems and digitize the physical world. here's a glimpse into our podcast interview with him, where he talks about what he's looking for in new team-members... and a list of roles that are open right now! link in thread.

@RepRashida Congresswoman - Flock does not have contracts with ICE or CBP. Neighborhoods chose to partner with Flock to stay safe. Today, in America, safety is too correlated with wealth. I think we can both agree that safety should be equal for everyone, not just the affluent.

It is clear open source models and harnesses are having a moment. There's a few factors at work 1/ It is now obvious that you can catch up to near-SOTA performance and do so with a clear training lineage. See:@thinkymachines Inkling launch today. 2/ There are several well-funded, talented teams building open weight models now in the US and abroad. Along with the explosing of other near SOTA models (Grok/Cursor, Muse Spark), it is clear we are going to have a diverse ecosystem of models atleast on coding and agentic use. 3/ Organizations are increasingly looking for control over how their data is used and are willing to trade off some access to frontier level tokens for this control. Organizations and countries are increasingly nervous about the frontier labs potentially competing with them down the road and don't want their data to enable a future competitor. 4/ Open source is a slider: you could bring your own open harness, your evals, your business context and are free to pick and choose your model of choice. 5/ Companies have now actively shifted from "how do we get our people to use tokens" to being uncomfortable with their token cost ballooning without a clear line to revenue. 6/ Geo-politically, countries will be weighing open weight models as a way to get frontier-level tokens inside controlled environments that may not be otherwise possible. All of this leads to more choice for all of us !