David George & Jack Altman on AI, Autonomy, and the Next $25 Trillion

[upbeat music] If the premise of your question is, is this gonna be successful or that thing gonna be successful, the answer in AI is probably and. Like, it's just the most exciting time, you know, to ever be an investor and in the technology markets.

And keeping up with it is gonna be hard.

Keeping up with it is gonna be hard.

Frontier models or open source? Labs or applications? David George thinks the answer to many of AI's biggest either/or questions is simply and. In this episode from Jack Altman's Uncapped, Jack sits down with a16z general partner David George to discuss why he believes we're still early in the diffusion of AI across the economy. They get into why today's AI revenues are still concentrated among a relatively small number of heavy users, what happens as AI reaches the broader knowledge workforce, and why David expects frontier models, open models, and application companies to grow alongside one another. They also look beyond AI to autonomy and robotics, why consumer AI could ultimately be one of the biggest opportunities, and what all of this means for investing when both the companies and the markets they're entering can become much larger than expected. All right, David, I'm really excited to do this. I've been, I've been really looking forward to this, so thanks for, thanks for coming by.

Yeah. Great to hang with you.

So th- uh, one of the topics that's been on my mind a lot, um, that I think you've got really good thoughts on is something that my partner, Eric Vishria, said recently on, um, the Invest Like The Best podcast. And it was basically, he was like, "It's all gonna work." And it was in the context of, you know, people question, is it gonna be open source or frontier? And he's like, "The open source is gonna work. The frontier is gonna work." Is it gonna be Nvidia, or is it gonna be new chips companies? And he's like, "There's gonna be both." And you can kinda like go on and on through, you know, the stack in AI, and Eric's point was basically, like, people are asking the wrong question of just, like, is it this or it's that? And he's like, "It's both." And I'm curious how you think about this at Andreessen and sort of in your seat.

Yeah, of course. So I am very, very closely aligned with Eric on this point that it's all gonna work. I, I actually like the way that he framed it up. I framed it up slightly differently, which is just like the answer to all this is and. And so, like, if you're answering-- if your, if your question-- If the premise of your question is, you know, is this gonna be successful or that thing gonna be successful, the answer in AI is probably and. Um, I think it's helpful to start just like, where are we? So, um, right now, from an infrastructure build-out standpoint, we just surpassed the railroads-

Right

...as, as a percentage of GDP, which has been well covered.

It's like three percent now or something like that.

Yeah, exactly. And, um, you know, look, it's probably gonna get harder and harder to build data centers, which we could talk about later, but I think that's gonna 10X. So right now, like, what's happening is basically-

As a percentage of GDP, you think?

I think it will t-- No, I think