What Builders Talk About When They Talk About AI

Builders of AI describe generative AI as an emerging third computing platform that is still at its very beginning, with economics that can drive market transformation. Martin Casado of a16z says large models bring the marginal cost of creation to 0, after the microchip and the internet brought the marginal costs of compute and distribution to 0. In a hypothetical comparison, Casado contrasts an image model costing a tenth of a penny and taking one second with a graphic artist at $100 an hour. Noam Shazeer of Character.AI says creativity matters more than correctness for early uses such as virtual friends, while coding copilots become more accurate as humans use them.