General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz Anish Acharya (@illscience) says using AI to edit the weights of other models is a bigger deal than people realise and could unlock continuous learning: "There's actually two huge breakthroughs that have happened in the last few months that I think are under discussed... [One is] the paper that was released on Monday about having models edit the weights of other models, which gives you the sort of continuous learning opportunity." "It was released and there was enthusiasm and then it was criticised, but I think it's a bigger deal than people appreciate." "The smartest people I've been talking to have been able to not just replicate, but extend it." "Now look, there may be some constraints, like there may be opposing ideas and models can't hold both of them in their head. You can't be highly conscientious and highly open, right? Because that sort of implies that the same weights are pointed in different directions." "But you may be able to do things like get models that are able to have high entropy in non-verifiable domains, like beautiful art and prose, but then high precision in verifiable domains where they can also write great code and be mathematical." "And we've never been able to reconcile those trade-offs before."

.@illscience General Partner at @a16z was one of our very first guests on the show (which I am so grateful for). But his quote on product and marketing, keeps coming back to me which every founder should learn from. Thank you @illscience for all your support!!

my latest thinking on personal agents (from the pod w @davidpawlan + @joshelman): winners / losers - there's so much discussion of structural losers from personal agents (delta / amzn / comcast) and very little about the relative winners - presumably the long tail of merchants with great products and mediocre marketing benefit a lot - the idea that agents will perfectly mirror their principals is a fantasy imo... agents will have revealed non-rational preferences (i.e. for clean API surfaces) that are those of an alien mind - implied is a consumer research / wirecutter product where agents research and share their experiences with each other agent adoption - we should be giving agents laws and principles vs rules - fears of embarrassment will hold more people back than fears of privacy - agents need to be designed so some implicit preferences stay implicit, so their human can save face - group chats have an implicit social contract, and agents are only part of that contract if they're present from day one - agents can create a level of social indirection that actually brings people closer together (i.e. what tomo is doing with groups of humans who share aspirations) agent networks - if muse / instinct / wabi is consumer openclaw, what is consumer moltbook? - what economic exchanges can agents make on behalf of their humans? - is there a concept of "free" agents that operate within these networks of their own volition?

The new Oboe app was a lightbulb moment for me in how AI games, movies, etc. get huge It’s infinite puzzles where the user designs their experience - but curated, so the opposite of a slop feed It’s one of the only AI mobile apps stealing screen time from incumbents for me 👀

David Pawlan, creator of Assistant Benchmark, has tracked 147 AI assistants so far, and in his group chats of AI power users, the number one fear is trust. It comes up in 22% of roughly 3,600 messages. He puts agents through head-to-head tests, like ordering same-day flowers as cheaply as possible or planning a weekend in LA that's both luxurious and cost-efficient, to see which ones can hold competing preferences. He joins a16z's Anish Acharya and Josh Elman to discuss why the scariest agent failures are the embarrassing ones, why agents are where e-commerce was in 1997, why scale is still a moat, and the "dark agent" that could speak to the parts of ourselves we don't reveal. 0:52 Inside a meetup for 100 agent nerds 2:52 Why we'll all have an army of agents 5:36 Trust is power users' top fear 6:28 Building fences around your agent 10:14 Privacy loses to free pizza 12:41 Can agents balance price and speed? 14:19 How agents define luxury differently 19:44 Migrating from one agent to another 21:06 What your photo roll tells an agent 25:48 Will agents make us more rational? 27:38 Why paternalism kills products 31:43 Gossipy agents as social glue 33:41 Scale is still a software moat 36:55 From OpenClaw to agents hanging out 39:23 Agents that introduce you to people 46:15 Predictions and the dark agent idea YouTube: @DavidPawlan @illscience @joshelman

Great convo with @luke10ferrari on his home turf in italy about irrational investor preference for growth over cash, invention vs. optimization, where durability lives after the saaspocalypse, and what happens to the org chart when AI writes 94% of your code. Some takeaways: - Investors seem to oddly dislike profit and greatly prefer growth - optimize for compounding free cash flow knowing that this is just a moment in time distortion. - Invention vs. optimization: pick a camp. Invention has higher peaks but an awful median case. Google is still ~80% search 30 years later. - Ambition in product, paranoia with debt. Rule #1# of becoming a huge success is not dying in the meantime & credit is a high wire act. - Software has been cheap to build for a long time. Durability lives in habits, network effects, proprietary data and scale. - SaaSpocalypse wasn't really about AI. In many cases these were poorly run companies and this cycle gave them an opportunity to improve. - Bending Spoons went from 0% to 94% of code written by AI in two years. Support managers now look like PMs, data scientists build tooling instead of cleaning CSVs - everyone is both oddly more direct + giving more direction. - If you're not winning when do you quit? No idea - bureaucracy created Bending Spoons b/c a Danish tax refund that never came killed Luca's first startup and catalyzed Spoons. 02:05 Is every company a bond or an option? 03:40 Why investors overvalue growth 05:15 Why the multiple is just one factor 08:20 Invention vs. optimization: pick a camp 12:20 Customers know the what, not the how 14:05 Hard problems over hot brands (and why AOL excites him) 15:15 Why founders should hate the median case 18:40 The Bending Spoons debt playbook 23:15 SaaSpocalypse wasn't about AI 25:05 Where durability actually lives 29:40 Is your data worth more than your company? 31:05 Inside the Bending Spoons operating system 33:35 The AI agent that ships bug fixes 37:00 From 0% to 94% AI-written code 37:30 Logic over instinct 39:00 When to quit vs. keep pushing 40:35 Advice for the next great tech company

It's extraordinary how code is an abstraction layer for nearly everything and coding agents are the right mechanism for problem solving and creative exploration all the way down. I suspect the same thing is true of mathematical ability in models, with a much wider aperture.

There's an emerging set of people that get way more out of the models than the rest of us. They say that software is trivially replicable, but not the software these founders are building and certainly not the way in which they're building it. Jacob is living in the future and worth paying close attention to.

Attended a fun session at a16z with @illscience and @joshelman yesterday. As usual they were dropping knowledge bombs: 1. There are three economic miracles. The old one is zero marginal cost software distribution. But recently there have been two more: 1) Coding going from the most precious asset in the world to one of the cheapest and 2) zero marginal cost digital labor with agents. 2. It's hard to appreciate what it feels like to be on the exponential. Just 10 to 20 million people account for $150 to 200 billion of token spend. "Some of the best companies that we work with have higher token spend than payroll." We are still early. 3. The AI workspace, like ChatGPT and the Claude desktop app, is going to be the container for all kinds of AI interactions and it's going to subsume the browser. Personally, these apps are already the browser for me. Chrome is just the middle layer. 4. The way to tell if you're an AI-native company is to ask: If the model gets twice as good, do your customers get twice as much value? Are you happy or sad that the model got better? If you're sad, you're probably on the wrong side of the exponential. 5. "I would much rather have AI be the boss of me than vice versa." For example, Anish's agent is responsible for a 30 minute block in his calendar every week to pick someone he should reconnect with. 6. Improving individual productivity does not always improve a team's productivity. Coding has taught us the wrong lesson on this. For many functions, having individuals be 10x more productive doesn't mean the team will be 10x. e.g., If everyone goes in a different direction. 7. It's actually easier to start a hard company than an easy company... because they're all hard. At least the hard companies are interesting to work on and people want to work with you on them. Excited to do a podcast recording with Josh next week to go deeper on some of this.

eugenia kuyda is one of the most incredible consumer thinkers i know - she was early and right about AI companions, and she thinks deeply about what people actually want two bets in what she's building with @wabi.. - agents in human group chats need a new social contract. a dedicated app lets you set it with agents in the room from day one - personal agents need more than a chat interface. rich mini-apps give people a shared place to plan, play and get things done together very cool to see the personal agents space heat up with thoughtful bets in very different directions congrats @ekuyda & team!

"The most important consequence of the AI revolution may not be that intelligence production becomes more efficient. It may be that most minds, human and eventually artificial, are liberated from the necessity of producing intelligence merely to survive, and become free to discover what they actually want to do with it." A+ post

I think these predictions have largely held true - though the ANT S1 doesn't break out claude code subsidies the overall gross margin is 85% & if you subtract all of sales & marketing you get 62%, which obviously overcounts subsidies. So a very GM+ positive profile and obviously a tremendous business.

Consumer agents combine a new product pattern with the capabilities of a general assistant. Productivity is not the point - this is a new way for people to use computers, and they're really really into it. I know the dominant feeling in silicon valley is being totally misunderstood ("too early") and then immediately derivative ("everyone's working on that"), but I promise it's day 1 of wave 1. Social, finance, self-improvement, degen and a thousand other agent categories are up for grabs .. so get creative and don't worry about being too late.

Excited to announce the Cosign Awards: celebrating exceptional people, companies, and products that had a massive impact in 2026. Anyone can nominate and vote. Award winners will be chosen by the public in conjunction with a panel of judges, including industry leaders like @lennysan, @packyM, @amasad, and many more. We’ll host an event in December honoring the winners (10 per category). For people categories, we’re mostly focused on everyone except the CEO–everyone else building the company behind the scenes. Companies with the most amount of people nominations will be listed on our “Top Companies to Work For” page. True to form, at Product Hunt I helped launch the Golden Kitty awards a decade ago to recognize great products. Soon after I launched the Rise Awards, honoring executives and ICs building companies that make them. The Cosign Awards is the next iteration. We have 41 categories across people, companies, and products. People categories: - Future Founders - Rising Stars - Engineering - FDE - Product - Design - AI Researchers - Marketing - Comms - Growth - Chief of Staff - Operations - Talent - Finance - Public Intellectuals - Podcaster of the Year - Newsletter Author of the Year - Poster of the Year Company categories: - Rising Stars - Best Place to Work - Founder Mafia - Talent Density - Highest Aura Product categories: - Product of the Year - Launch of the Year - AI Assistant - AI Language Model - AI Coding - Dev Tools - Open Source - Consumer - Productivity - Creative & Media Tools - Product Design & UX - Enterprise B2B - Hardware - Robotics - Self-Driving - Healthcare - Vertical Fintech - Legal

Hearing this week that personal assistants cost $3k-$7k per user per year, depending on scale effects / vertical integration / model selection. Implications/questions: - Consumer subsidies will be a huge factor; people don’t care about privacy, they want utility and they want it for free. - Model costs are deflating, but not fast enough for many startups. The dark horse is that Jev may rapidly deflate computer-use costs 100x. - An interesting counter-position would be building an expensive and narrowly focused agent — perhaps combining proprietary supply (Carbone tables!) with a unique POV (“no one goes there anymore, go to The Grill instead”). - Social is wide open but hinges on a key design challenge: how can agents increase social cohesion and not feel invasive in a group chat? A working social agent would rightly attract an avalanche of capital and be hard for incumbents to replicate. - Finally, there are vertical focus areas like financial services where the LTVs outweigh the subsidy needed and are outside the near-term competitive focus of the incumbents. If it were me, I’d focus here — Credit Karma as an agent >> Credit Karma as an app. Overall, it’s still very, very early, and we may very well be in the MySpace era of social or iPhone 2010. Hang onto your hats and keep building!!

@WillManidis 100p my personal favorite is "the best way way to compete with an incumbent is to build something at the intersection of two VPs" they hate each other more than they could ever love the customer courtesy of @stevesi

Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg with Nas, Steve Stoute, and Grandmaster Caz on the Paid in Full Foundation Caz penned rhymes that became Rapper's Delight. Even with his name in them, he got nothing. The Paid in Full foundation honors the people who created hip-hop by making sure they're "paid in full," financially, spiritually, and culturally. As Nas points out, money alone reads as a handout. So the grant comes attached to the honor. Each year at the foundation's Hip Hop Grandmaster Awards, pioneers are celebrated by the artists they inspired. Caz ultimately received a five-year grant, bought a house, and left the projects. In his words: "The thing is the honor. The thing is putting you in the light that you deserve to be in." Ben says he bought Paid in Full (the album) for $10 and got at least $5 million worth of value out of the record, with no way to pay it back. The vision is paying the debt. Felicia Horowitz runs the foundation. She and Ben are matching donations 2.5 to 1, and every dollar goes to the artists. 0:00 Intro 1:40 The $10 album that was worth $5M to Ben 3:10 Nas: in hip-hop, you can't just give money 5:05 Why artists thought it was a scam 9:30 Caz wrote Rapper's Delight and got nothing 11:40 Roxanne Shanté: "I wanted the right award" 16:35 Dr. Dre asks to meet Kool Moe Dee and Slick Rick 18:50 Why the industry never did this 26:05 Ben: start with what's right, not what's possible 29:10 Inside the room: Grand Puba, George Clinton 32:15 The Quincy Jones Award 37:00 Scarface and Rakim talk writing for the first time 38:45 Caz: the grant got me out of the projects 43:45 What hip-hop did for Adidas, Hilfiger and Sprite 48:00 How Felicia saved Scarface's life 52:10 Quincy Jones stories, and Nas's jazz legend dad @Nas @SteveStoute @GrandmasterCaz @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg

An opportunity hiding in plain sight is that much of the Instagram audience seems to prefer the Muse visual interface to iMessage. Muse has done some things well, but in many ways it’s a v1 UI for the most powerful capability that’s been invented since ChatGPT. Somebody’s going to build a more opinionated design that’s counter-positioned against Muse / specialized for an audience in a way that’s hard to copy, and run away with a really valuable part of the market.