AI Startups vs. Big Chatbots — With Olivia Moore
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I think that every tech company is gonna be an AI company, and every AI company is gonna be an agent company. And so the sooner that you as kind of an employee or a business owner can kind of get on board and learn how to use that to your advantage, probably the better. We haven't seen anyone crack AI social yet. I think it's gonna be really tricky. I would say at the highest level, kind of how we view AI is not just as a market, but as the reinvention of the whole technology industry, which means that similar to how we have many tech companies that are worth hundreds of billions, trillions of
ChatGPT has 900,000,000 users. It's still growing. And yet 57% of American voters say the risks of AI outweigh the benefits. So can anyone compete with the big AI chat box? The labs have the compute, the talent, and the distribution. They keep shipping features that wipe out entire startup categories overnight. Image generation used to be a crowded market. Now ChatGPT and Gemini handle most of it. But the labs are constrained. Every hour spent on creative models is an hour not spent on coding agents or AGI. And the gaps between platforms are widening. ChatGPT is going mass market with ads. Cla
Welcome to Big Technology podcast, a show for cool headed and nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today. Gonna talk about whether there is room for start ups and maybe other companies in the economy to compete with the AI chatbots as they continue to grow and get more capable, and we're gonna do it with the perfect guest. Olivia Moore is here. She is an AI partner at the VC firm, Andreessen Horowitz. Olivia, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks for being here. Let's just begin with this because it's topical. Yeah. You are investing in AI applications at Andreessen Horowitz. And typically, they need a lot of people to use them to pay off. Yes. But the mood right now in The United States is very negative towards AI. Actually, negative. Yes. This is from a new NBC News poll out this week. 57% of voters thinks the risks of AI outweigh the benefits. And then if you look at the total positive versus total negative sentiment of AI in in general. It ranks so low. It is a negative 20, in terms of the negatives, are, 20 percentage point
Yeah. No. It's a great question. Maybe first of all, the why. I would say there's been a lot in the media in The US more broadly, these kind of very catchy statements about things like AI uses so much water that that have kind of made people really concerned about leaning in on the technology. I think also The US is more indexed in a positive way towards things like the creative fields. And those are jobs that I think people feel especially sensitive about AI use. So the numbers I've seen, I think, track closely with with what you're saying versus something like a China where like, you know, h
I mean, there's 900,000,000 users of ChatGeo. Yes. Even still those numbers are so negative. And I do wonder if it is some of the statements that we're hearing from the lab leaders. I mean, every day there's another statement from somebody else, whether it's Dario from Anthropic or Mustafa Suleiman at Microsoft about how white collar work is gonna get wiped out. And and everybody, whether you're in a white collar job, a blue collar job, or trying to get one, sees that this stuff is capable not only of taking white collar jobs, but with robotics, increasingly, it's gonna be felt across the econ
as definitely does. Yeah. It's interesting. I'm an AI power user myself, and I've even seen over the pa
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