The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models

A lot of people think the AI story is about models. This episode argues the real story is about apps, distribution, and modes. In this episode, we share an AI apps overview featuring a sixteen z general partners, Alex Rampell, David Haber, and Anish Acharya, along with Jen Koff, head of investor relations at a six teensy. They break down why the product cycles drive growth, why the AI era is accelerating faster than prior platform shifts, and what it takes to build enduring companies in AI applications. The conversation covers three core themes, traditional software going AI native, platform expanding beyond SaaS to take on labor, and walled garden businesses built on proprietary data and compounding advantage. I'm Alex Rimpel. I'm the AppSpan. I've been at the firm for ten years, and I stole this from Chris Dixon who published a post like this about probably twelve or thirteen years ago. And the whole premise is that product cycles drive growth. And at the top of the chart here is the Nasdaq from 1977 to the present. It goes up sometimes. It goes down sometimes. Over the long run, it has gone up, but there have been some very scary down points. So there really there have been four major product cycles. There was the PC. I mean, obviously, before the PC, there was the semiconductor. But we gotta start somewhere. We'll start with the PC. There's always a infrastructure layer of companies that are building the back end. There's the application layer of people that are building things that actually are used. So Lotus was one of the first infrastructure sorry, application companies, Adobe, Symantec, all of these companies that kind of grew out of the nineteen eighties. But the infra players, if you were Apple and Microsoft, then you had the Internet. That was enormous. Lots of bubbles along the way, but some very, very enduring infrastructure companies like Cisco and Akamai, enduring companies in the application space like eBay and Amazon that were built on top of that. Then you had cloud. So AWS accounts for the vast majority of market cap of Amazon. You've got Workday, Shopify, Veeva, others that were the application layer. Mobile took all of these things that came before and now put a supercomputer in everybody's pocket. So the vast majority of humans on planet Earth have a smartphone, which is pretty amazing. That was the mobile era, which is still actually kind of playing out. Like, I just bought an Android phone to test things with. It was $40, and this was more powerful than the ENIAC in 1946 or whenever the ENIAC came out. And then two years ago was this AI era is coming out as well. And the Nasdaq is higher. We know that. But the AI era really is playing out. And the cool thing is this is not a net new thing. This is building on everything before. Like, if we didn't have smartphones and …