Tesla's Road Ahead: The Bitter Lesson in Robotics

From politics to technology to real estate, Keith Rabois has bold predictions for America’s next decade. In this conversation with Erik Torenberg, Keith breaks down why he believes the U.S. is entering a new economic expansion driven by AI, productivity, and sovereign technology. They discuss how AI could lift GDP growth to 5%, why sovereign AI projects are inevitable, and why America can “grow its way out” of debt. Keith also shares his takes on Trump’s second term, the decline of legacy institutions, OpenAI’s dominance, the future of Google and Microsoft, and how startups like Ramp and Opendoor are rewriting the rules of fintech and housing.

Ben Horowitz founded Loudcloud in the middle of the dot-com bust and sold it for $1.6 billion, then led Andreessen Horowitz from its founding to $46 billion in committed capital. Ali Ghodsi co-founded Databricks, stepped in as CEO during a crisis, and led it to a valuation of over $100 billion. In this episode of “Boss Talk”, Ben and Ali join a16z General Partners Sarah Wang and Erik Torenberg to share founder war stories, how to hire and make deals, how to keep culture intense without burning employees out, and why founders should raise their ambitions even higher.

Nathan Labenz is one of the clearest voices analyzing where AI is headed, pairing sharp technical analysis with his years of work on The Cognitive Revolution. In this episode, Nathan joins a16z’s Erik Torenberg to ask a pressing question: is AI progress actually slowing down, or are we just getting used to the breakthroughs? They discuss the debate over GPT-5, the state of reasoning and automation, the future of agents and engineering work, and how we can build a positive vision for where AI goes next.

From GPT-1 to GPT-5, LLMs have made tremendous progress in modeling human language. But can they go beyond that to make new discoveries and move the needle on scientific progress? We sat down with distinguished Columbia CS professor Vishal Misra to discuss this, plus why chain-of-thought reasoning works so well, what real AGI would look like, and what actually causes hallucinations.

Zach Dell is founder and CEO of Base Power, an energy tech company that builds affordable, reliable power via home batteries. In this episode of Monitoring the Situation, a16z General Partners Erik Torenberg, Katherine Boyle, and Erin Price-Wright sit down with Zach to discuss the current state of home power generation, what’s misunderstood about the data center buildout, and how to fix the US electricity grid. Plus, Erik and Katherine talk with a16z crypto CTO Eddy Lazzarin about Silicon Valley’s favorite Dark Enlightenment philosopher, Nick Land.