Who Controls AI Acceleration? Vitalik Buterin and Guillaume Verdon Debate

Erik Torenberg, Steve Sinofsky, and Martin Casado speak to Aaron Levie, CEO at Box, about what happens to enterprise software when agents become the primary users. They discuss why coding agents succeed where other knowledge work agents struggle, what abstraction layers mean for the workforce, and how data access and systems of record must change in an agent-first world.

a16z general partner Erik Torenberg speaks with Balaji Srinivasan, angel investor and entrepreneur, about why AI simultaneously reduces the cost of creation and increases the cost of verification, and what that tension means for the shape of the AI economy. They discuss why AI drives companies toward the "trusted tribe" model of the Chinese internet, why physical world tasks are easier to automate than digital ones, why shortcuts only work for experts, and why AI makes everyone a CEO rather than making CEOs obsolete.

Anish Acharya speaks with Peter Yang, creator and product lead at Roblox, about how personal AI agents are replacing the apps we open every day, why coding agents feel like slot machines, and what happens when the cost of building software drops to near zero. They discuss why future companies will stay radically small, how the IDE is becoming a thinking tool rather than a making tool, and why human ambition will always create more jobs than AI eliminates.

This episode originally aired on the Latent Space Podcast. swyx and Alessio Fanelli speak with Marc Andreessen about the arc of AI from its origins in 1943 to today's breakthroughs in reasoning, coding agents, and self-improvement. They cover the parallels between AI scaling laws and Moore's Law, the architectural insight behind Claude Code and the Unix shell, the coming supply crunch in compute, and why the messy reality of 8 billion people means both AI utopians and doomers are too optimistic about the pace of change.

a16z's Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg speak with Alex Blania, cofounder and CEO of Tools for Humanity, World, and cofounder of Merge Labs. World is building the largest real human network, a proof-of-human layer for the AI era. They cover the technical challenge of proving human uniqueness at scale using iris biometrics, the privacy architecture behind World ID, and why platforms from social networks to dating apps to video conferencing will soon require proof of human verification.