Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead
An insider look at how compute scaling, algorithmic gains, and national security will shape the path to AGI.
Recommended Reading
A curated archive of high-signal essays, papers, and articles I've read and recommend, along with key takeaways and commentary.
You just hired a million bad employees.
AI hasn't replaced human labor so much as inverted its economics. For the first time humans are cheaper than software and it's probably because humans are inefficient at running AI, the same way they are inefficient at running other humans. The good thing is this is creating more jobs than it eliminates.
The Bitter Lesson
General methods that leverage computation are far more effective than approaches built on human domain knowledge.
Past Automation and Future AI: How Weak Links Tame the Growth Explosion
Models how physical bottlenecks, safety constraints, and weak links in economic production processes could prevent explosive growth from AGI automation.
Machines of Loving Grace
How AI could transform global health, neuroscience, economic development, and human flourishing if navigated wisely.
Marketplaces in the Age of AI, Take Two: Graveyard to Greenfield
Argues AI is reviving previously-failed marketplace categories rather than opening brand-new ones.
Power in the Age of Intelligence
Reframes AI defensibility away from software moats toward which firms benefit most from newly abundant inputs.
Why (Good) AI Needs Crypto
Daniel Barabander explores how crypto’s decentralized infrastructure, permissionless payment rails, and zero-knowledge proofs can solve critical AI problems like resource distribution, model transparency, and data own...
The HALO Effect
Explores a new class of network/aggregation dynamics and their implications for platform defensibility.
Big Ideas in Tech for 2025
a16z partners forecast the strategic technology shifts they expect to define 2025.
Plurality: Technology for Collaborative Diversity and Democracy
A book-length essay discussing decentralized social technologies, identity, and collaborative democracy.
Wander: Deeper Dive
Analyzes how a luxury short-term rental platform builds marketplace value as each new location added compounds demand.
The false bundles of the platform economy
Argues platforms deliberately create false bundles to concentrate power and extract profits.
Stanford Emerging Technology Review 2024: Semiconductors
An authoritative overview of semiconductor technology, focusing on silicon scaling limits, 3D heterogeneous integration, and advanced memory architectures.
Scenarios for the Transition to AGI
An NBER working paper laying out macroeconomic scenarios for how AGI could impact growth, wages, and capital accumulation.
The Intelligence Age
An optimistic vision of the future where AI-driven abundance accelerates scientific discovery, education, and shared prosperity.
Thatch
Deep dive on a health-benefits marketplace aggregating employers and carriers and the two-sided network effects reinforcing it.
Big Ideas in Tech for 2024
a16z partners forecast the strategic technology shifts they expect to define 2024.
Data Network Effects in SaaS Enabled Marketplaces
Examines how SaaS-enabled marketplaces accumulate data advantages that reinforce competitive moats over time.
The 2024 Tech Strategy Toolkit: Nine sources of tech-based competitive advantage
Lays out nine distinct sources of technology-based competitive advantage for strategists.
AI Scaling Walls: Semiconductors, Packaging, and Power Constraints
A detailed breakdown of the memory wall, advanced packaging constraints (like CoWoS), and power generation challenges facing next-generation data centers.
Generative AI chips: Specialized compute drives the next wave
Exploring the massive market growth for specialized AI accelerators and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) packaging technologies.
Services: The New Software
AI expands tech business models by shifting from selling software tools to selling completed work.
Competitive Strategy in the Age of AI
Reframes competitive strategy for software firms when AI collapses build and acquisition costs.