4 Things Marc Andreessen Says All Founders Should Be Doing With AI to Beat the Competition

You’d be hard pressed to find a bigger evangelist of artificial intelligence than Marc Andreessen. The venture capitalist’s a16z has invested tens of billions of dollars in AI companies and continues to look for opportunities. But his enthusiasm for the technology goes beyond financial interests. He’s also a proponent of business owners taking better advantage of AI’s offerings. On a recent episode of the a16z podcast, Andreessen discussed how founders, business owners, and anyone with entrepreneurial instincts should be using AI to gain an advantage over the competition. While hundreds of millions of people have access to AI in the palm of their hands, the majority aren’t using it as a tool (other than punching up their emails). AI mastery, he said, is a skill. And just as people who plunk out “Chopsticks” on a piano can’t play Chopin on the first try, casual AI users won’t have the ability to utilize the technology to its peak potential. To do that, you’ll need to study some and use AI regularly, learning how to ask good prompts. “There are a slice of people who just use these new systems all the time, like literally all day for everything,” he said. “In a lot of cases, they’re reporting that they’re getting enormous benefits from that.” 1. Ask what you should be asking One of the biggest hurdles in learning AI is the intimidation factor. New technology can be overwhelming, even for people in the tech space—doubly so when it’s regularly referred to as revolutionary and world-changing. What Andreessen suggests, though, is using AI to learn about AI. “You can ask it: ‘What question should I be asking?'” he said “[AI] is actually a thought partner helping you figure out what questions to ask … You can say, teach me how to use you in the best way … Teach me how to use you for my business.” AI systems, he noted, love to talk—and the more they tell you about themselves and how to find the information you want, the more adept you’ll become at operating them. 2. Think of AI as a business coach The best coaches in sports are patient with their players, helping them run plays again and again until those become second nature. Business coaches possess a similar trait, helping business owners (and sometimes teams) improve their performance and hone leadership skills. AI, Andreessen said, is like that, but on steroids. It is, quite literally, impossible to frustrate, so no matter what pace you need to proceed at and no matter how many follow-up questions you have, it will never get cross with you. “It’s like having the world’s best coach, mentor, therapist, right?” he said. “It’s infinitely patient. It’s happy to have the conversation. It’s happy to have the conversation 50 times. It’s happy if you admit your insecurities—it’ll coach you through them. It’s happy if you run wild speculations that don’t make any sense. It’s happy to do all that at 4:00 in the morning.” 3. Use AI to find problems with your thinking AI can not only make suggestions about directions for your business, but also look at how you’re running the company now and point out possible mistakes. Whether it’s staffing, marketing, customer feedback, expansion plans, strategy, or performance assessments, if you share information that is accurate and unbiased with the AI and ask for feedback, you’ll get candid advice and criticism that can help you correct mistakes you might not realize you were making. (Just be sure your data is protected.) 4. Use it to draw on lessons from other founders Not every founder is an expert when it comes to scaling. But if you’re looking to grow your business, it’s an essential skill. If the thought of an expansion roadmap is paralyzing, your AI companion has a wealth of knowledge to draw from. “Because it’s been trained on some large percentage of the total amount of human knowledge, it has all the information on how Ray Kroc turned McDonald’s from a single restaurant and how all these other entrepreneurs before actually did this,” he said. “So it can explain [to] you and help you figure out how to do this for your own business.” BY CHRIS MORRIS @MORRISATLARGE

Warren Buffett and Michael Burry Don’t See Eye to Eye on AI

One is the Oracle of Omaha. The other pulled off the Big Short. Warren Buffett and Michael Burry are two of the biggest names in American investing, but they can’t seem to agree on one of the biggest investment questions of the 21st century: Is artificial intelligence an overinflated bubble set to pop, or is all the investor hype actually warranted? Buffett last month revealed a major new stake in Google parent company Alphabet, making the tech giant one of Berkshire Hathaway’s top 10 largest holdings. The investment is being interpreted as a bet on AI, which Alphabet is invested heavily in; markets are now treating the company like the front-runner of the AI race. Burry—famous for making a bet against the American housing market that would prove very lucrative during the 2008 financial crisis—recently took two more short positions, this time on the automation and data company Palantir and chip-maker Nvidia, both darlings of the AI boom. Burry has been particularly critical of accounting policies used by Nvidia’s Big Tech customer base, which he says “have been systematically increasing the useful lives of chips and servers, for depreciation purposes, as they invest hundreds of billions of dollars in graphics chips with accelerating planned obsolescence.” Their diverging investment strategies come as chatter of an AI bubble has entered the mainstream—even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is voicing concerns—while, nevertheless, investors continue to pump money into the sector. Both Buffett and Burry have quite a bit of credibility, making their contradictory tactics all the more notable. The former is responsible for making Berkshire Hathaway one of the most recognizable names in American investing, with what was once a Nebraska textile company now a massive conglomerate with tendrils across the U.S. economy. The latter inspired the Michael Lewis book The Big Short and the movie of the same name, in which he was portrayed by Christian Bale. Each is also going through a period of major transition. Buffett announced in May his plans to step down as CEO at the end of this year (though he will hold onto his stock). Vice chairman Greg Abel is set to replace him. Meanwhile, Burry’s hedge fund Scion Asset Management will close by the end of this year, with Burry writing in a recent investor letter that his “estimation of value in securities is not now, and has not been for some time, in sync with the markets.” He’s since launched a financial newsletter called Cassandra Unchained on which he’s expressed further skepticism of the AI boom. BY BRIAN CONTRERAS @_B_CONTRERAS_

You’ll Be Managing Digital Employees in 2026, a New Forecast Says

In March this year Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff, an AI hawk, landed himself in the spotlight when he predicted that this is the last time company leaders will manage only humans during a call with investors, he predicted that this is the last time company leaders will manage only humans. Given that his company had just launched a system that sold AI agents to Salesforce customers it was easy to brush off the prediction as an enthusiastic sales pitch. Now global market research outfit Forrester has predicted more or less the same thing, and says that next year is when things will begin to change. And the changes aren’t going to be small. In a new report first published on the Forbes website, Forrester researchers explain that AI agents are poised to “move beyond” helping workers boost their efficiency—the main selling point for AI at the moment—and instead will join the workforce. This means leadership will have to think about “orchestrating workflows independent of human workers.” They’ll have to think about “technology as part of the workforce” and that means changing planning as well as day-to-day business. HR teams in particular will play a big role, Forrester thinks. This is because sophisticated AI agents will be able to independently execute “complex tasks or end-to-end processes, acting as a virtual member of a team.” Strip away the cloak of anodyne corporate speak and this means Forrester’s predicting that AiIagents will be able to act almost at the level of a human. That means one way to manage them is to treat them as if they are almost people, with HR teams working to align agents alongside human workers on projects and tasks, tracking and optimizing a new type of “hybrid workforce.” One way to do this is to deploy human capital management (HCM) techniques, Forrester suggests. HCM is a system of rules and software that approaches employees as valuable assets, and the report notes that while mainly large enterprises use HCM now, due to sheer numbers of staff, smaller businesses may find the trick useful for a hybrid AI/human workforce. “Facing immediate pressures of productivity and resource optimization,” driven by the fact that you can employ numerous AI agents at once, and they can work 24-7, smaller outfits may actually “benefit from this technology sooner,” the report suggests. This job may sound daunting, particularly if you’ve never experimented with this tech or you’re feeling far from thinking of AI tools as equivalent to your human workers. But Forrester thinks that around three in 10 companies that already sell enterprise software will get in on the game, offering their own HCM solutions to help you manage AI tools. Meanwhile the research company also thinks that business software companies like Oracle, Microsoft and their ilk will offer “autonomous governance” software, which will help companies deploy AI on business tasks while also ensuring there are audit trails and real-time monitoring so you stay within any compliance limits you need to follow. And if you’re concerned this sounds all too automated for you, don’t worry — Forrester says that even though these trends are shifting fast, we’re “till a few years away from a system that can independently manage an entire business unit without human involvement and adaptability.” Your leadership and management skills are still needed! Though you may be tempted to dismiss this research as not relevant to your smaller company, with its family-like feel and reliance on person-to-person collaboration, that might be a mistake. The AI revolution really is rolling on, and if even some of Forrester’s predictions prove true, then inside a year you may be in a position where you can “hire” an AI agent system that can work alongside your staff and help them achieve goals as if it were another employee. That shift will take a lot of leadership, discussing issues with your (probably quite wary) human workers, deciding how to integrate the tech into your workflows and planning and so on. It goes far beyond downloading some software and pressing a button. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON

This Small Startup’s AI Video Model Just Put Sora 2 to Shame

The battle to win the burgeoning AI-generated-video market is heating up, thanks to a new model from a small but mighty player. Runway, a startup that develops AI models for video generation, has released its new flagship model, named Gen-4.5. The company said in a blog post this new model is a major step up for AI-generated video, especially when it comes to realistic physics and exact instruction following. The model claimed the top spot on independent benchmarking organization Artificial Analysis’s text-to-video leaderboard. Founded in 2018 by students of New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts, Runway has been laser-focused on AI video and has been steadily growing since releasing its first model in 2023. According to The Information, this strategy has paid off; the company hit $80 million in annualized recurring revenue in December 2024, and hopes to hit $300 million in ARR by the end of 2025. But Runway is going up against some of the biggest tech companies in the world, most notably Google and OpenAI, which have developed and commercialized their own AI video models. Runway’s plan to beat these mega-funded foes seems pretty simple: make better models. Runway wrote that Gen-4.5 represents “a new frontier for video generation.” Objects in Gen-4.5 videos “move with realistic weight, momentum, and force,” the company says, with better water and surface rendering. The company also says that details like hair will remain more consistent, and that the model will be able to generate more varied art styles. Altogether, Runway says, these upgrades enable the platform’s users to be much more exacting and detailed about their video generations. The new model is already being used commercially by enterprises, Runway says. Video game distributor Ubisoft, ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, Allstate Insurance, and Target were given early access to the tool. The model is available to paid subscribers and through Runway’s API. Gen-4.5 was both built on Nvidia GPUs and uses that company’s hardware to run, according to Runway. The company wrote that it “collaborated extensively” with Nvidia on the model’s creation. Runway creative principal Nicolas Neubert celebrated the model’s release on X, posting that “Gen-4.5 was built by a team that fits onto two school buses and decided to take on the largest companies in the world. We are David and we’ve brought one hell of a slingshot.” BY BEN SHERRY @BENLUCASSHERRY