Ali Yahya

Barbell strategy for killing it in an age of superhuman AI: Simultaneously get as close to AND stay as far away from AI as humanly possible. 1. Get close — play with AI models, use them to help you think, ask them to teach you about the world, get them to help you create, work with them to write code, understand what makes them tick, embed them into your everyday life, have fun. 2. Stay far away — learn to tell stories, make eye contact, build a team, lead with courage, connect far-flung ideas, build lifelong friendships, debate persuasively, think forbidden thoughts, handwrite ideas, confess your fears, fall in love. Spend less time trying to master mental transformations that are purely mechanical — building spreadsheets, analyzing trades, balancing accounts, writing code by hand, following playbooks, searching for needles in haystacks. These are the emerging no-man's land, squarely the domain of AI. Venture to the extremes. That’s where all the fun is anyway.

Big personal news today: I have decided to leave @a16z, move to SF, and start a company. It's time to build :) It has been almost 10 years since I joined the firm. I met @cdixon, @bhorowitz, and @pmarca in 2017. At the time, I was an engineer at Google Brain working on robotics. I had a deep interest in open source. I knew nothing about investing. Chris meanwhile had already planted the @a16z flag at the frontier that was early crypto with investments in companies like Coinbase. But the crypto team at the firm consisted of only him, and he had the ambition to expand. His pitch to me was simple: "You should leave Google and come help me build the crypto vertical at the firm." The work we've done together since then to build out our team and support our founders has been the most meaningful work of my life. I am grateful to have spent a decade working with everyone here, supporting our founders, learning from Chris, Ben, and Marc, and living the firm's culture. It is a culture that values integrity, life-long working relationships, and the belief that we humans have the power to build our own future. Marc and Ben have built a16z into an incredible force for good in the world. Before I joined the firm, I always thought that my inevitable path was to become a founder. The truth is that I wasn't ready for it then. Somehow, this year I've gotten the overwhelming feeling that this has changed. As for what I want to build: It is early, but I care most about building infrastructure that enables open software ecosystems. I am starting with two core observations: 1. AI today is largely a single-player technology. Most uses involve one human talking with one agent in isolation from the rest of the world. That will soon change. Most uses of AI will soon be many-to-many: many humans and many agents working together. There will be at least one massive open network on top of which those uses will be built. 2. Software is now free. It can now be written just-in-time, on the spot for a single individual's hyper-targeted use case, and it can even be thrown out after a single use. This means that our entire software stack will have to change. In the limit, it will lead to a whole new kind of AI-mediated operating systems, which in turn will create an ecosystem of AI-native developers who build applications that actively rebuild themselves on the fly. If you are working on related ideas, and especially if you are in the Bay Area, hit me up. Let's chat! @bhorowitz , @pmarca, @cdixon, @eddylazzarin, @guywuolletjr, @jasonrosenthal , and our whole team — I want to thank you. Working with you has been the time of a lifetime. I am forever an a16z superfan and your ally. Onward 🫡

Congrats to @gensynai on the launch of Predict Anything on @Delphi_fyi! A great new prediction market platform for those outside the U.S. Check it out: delphi.fyi