My intent is to be helpful. I’m unsure of how much additional context might be useful to you.
Investor math & mechanics is straight-forward: institutional funds & family offices want to get allocations in investors like a16z because they get to invest in deals that they could not otherwise invest in. The top VCs specialize in getting into deals that most investors will never get the opportunity to put money into. This is one of them.
For their Internal Rate of Return (IRR) to work out at least one investment needs to return 100x or more on the valuation. VCs today focus on placing bets where that calculation can happen. Most investors aren’t that confident in their ability to predict that, so they invest alongside lead investors who are. a16z is famous for that.
There are multiple companies worth $1T+ now, so this isn’t a fantasy investment. it’s a bet.
The bet doesn’t need to be that AGI continues to grow in power infinitely, it just needs to create a valuable company in roughly a ten year time horizon.
Many of the major tech companies today are worth more money than anyone predicted, including the founders (Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Salesforce, etc.). An outlier win in tech can have incredible upside.
LLMs are far from commoditized yet, but the growth of the cloud proves you can make a fortune on the commoditization of tech. Commoditization is another way of saying “everyone uses this as a cost of doing business now.” Pretty great spot to land on.
My personal view is that AGI will deliver a post-product world, Eric Schmidt recently stated the same. Products are digital destinations humans need to go to in order to use a tool to create a result. With AGI you can get a “product” on the fly & AI has potentially very significant advantages in interacting with humans in new ways within existing products & systems, no new product required. MS Copilot is an early example.
It’s completely fine to be dismissive of new tech, it’s common even. What bring me you here?
I’m here on HN because I love learning from people who are curious about what is possible & are exploring it through taking action. Over a couple decades of tech trends it’s clear that tech evolves in surprising ways, most predictions eventually prove correct (though the degree of impact is highly variable), and very few people can imagine the correct mental model of what that new reality will be like.
I agree with Zuck:
The best way to predict the future is to build it.