YouSaid · the spoken record

David Sacks

lines on the record: 107
first: 2026-07-16
most recent: 2026-07-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, as you know, we and others are very aggressively investing in new model companies of many kinds, including new foundation model companies. And then also, as you're probably, there are a whole bunch of new open source efforts that are not yet public that hopefully will bear fruit over the next couple years. So I think that's great.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know what to do about that. I'm just making that observation. And I do think that having open source is an option always then ensures that even if the market does consolidate, that you do have an alternative. And it's an alternative that's more fully within your control as opposed to a large corporation or the deep state working with that corporation, as we saw in the Twitter files, that the Deep State was working with all these social media companies and implementing much more widespread censorship than I think any of us thought possible. We've seen evidence in the past and again in the social networking space about how the government could get involved in nefarious ways and it would be good to have alternatives so to prevent that or to make it less likely that that scenario comes about with AI.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To encourage our own open source. I mean, I think it'd be a great thing if we saw more open source initiatives get going. I guess there's one promising one called reflection, which Founded by former engineers from Google DeepMind. So I hope we see more open source innovation in the West. But look, I think it's very important, it's critical. And like I said, in my view, it's synonymous with freedom. And it's definitely not something we want to suppress. Now, just back to the closed ecosystem for a second. It's true we have five major competitors there and they're all spending a lot of money. I do worry a little bit that at some point at some point in time that the model not the model, the market consolidates and we end up with a monopoly or duopoly or something like that as we've seen in other technology markets. We saw this with search and so on down the line. And I just think that it would be good if this market stayed more competitive than just one or two winners. And I don't really.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It could just be kind of historical accident, the fact that the Deep Seek founder was very committed to open source and kind of just kind of got things started that way. Or it could be part of a deliberate strategy. If you're China and you're trying to catch up, open source is a really good way to do that because you get all the non-aligned developers to want to help your project, which they can't do with a closed project. So it's a great strategy for catching up. And then also if you think that your business model, you know, as a company or as a country is, let's say, scale manufacturing of hardware, then you would want the software part to be free or cheap because it's your complement, right? So you try to commoditize your complement. And I don't know whether it's by accident or part of design that seems to be with the Chinese strategy has been. I think that the right answer for the US in this is to, you know,”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's sort of a quirk, right? It's the opposite of what you'd expect. You'd expect the American system would promote open and somehow the Chinese system would promote closed. That has kind of ended up being a little backwards. I think there's good reasons for it.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And by the way, this is what enterprises typically do all the time, about half the global data center market is, you know, is on-prem, meaning enterprises and governments create their own data centers. They don't go to the big clouds. And by the way, I've got nothing against the hyperscalers, but just, you know, people like to run their own data centers and maintain control over their own data and that kind of thing. And I think that will be true for consumers to some degree as well. So I do think it's an important area that we should want to encourage and promote. The irony right now in the market is that the best open source models are Chinese.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so just to open source is very important because I just think it's synonymous with freedom. I mean, software freedom. You basically could run your own models on your own hardware and retain control over your own information.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recruiting ideas. He's not the first to mention that idea, other model companies have been promoting it. But Leopold mentioned that too. We'll see. But I suspect that that's what... Wrong with that argument is that virtual AI researcher Requires AGI. And so the idea that you're going to get AGI through a virtual AI researcher is backwards. But we'll see. We'll see.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An objective they've got to be able to pivot in ways that AI can't really feasible to create a virtual AI researcher. I think there's like parts of the job that AI could get really good at or even better than humans, but probably that tool has to be used by a human AI researcher. So I guess the argument, I suspect, could be sort of teleological in the sense that you might need AGI to create a virtual AI researcher as opposed to the other way around. And if that's the case, you don't just, you're not going to get like singularity. So I'm a little bit skeptical of that claim. We'll see. What Sam said you could do it in 2028. I mean, I guess we'll see. I think all those claims tend to be.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we haven't really seen that. We haven't seen one model completely pull away in terms of capabilities. And I think that's a good thing. And so, Eric, to your point about this narrative about the virtual AI researcher, that was one variant of this sort of imminent AJI narrative is that the steps would be, you know, models get smarter, the models create virtual AI researcher, and then you get a million virtual AI researchers and then it's singularity. And I think just the sleight of hand in that is what is a virtual AI researcher, right? It's like a very easy thing to say, but like, what does that really mean? And, you know, topology's point about, you know, AI is still middle to middle. It's not end-to-end. So if an AI researcher is end-to-end, there's like things that has to things the person has to figure out. They've got to set their”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's so important that this technology remain decentralized because the kind of the Orwellian concern is kind of the ultimate centralization. And fortunately, so far, what we're seeing in the market is that it's hyper competitive. There's five major model companies all making huge investments. And the benchmark, the model performance, the evaluations are relatively clustered. And there's a lot of leapfrogging going on. So, you know, Grock releases a new model. It leapfrogs chat GPT, but then ChatGPT releases something new. They leapfrog. So they're all like very competitive and close to each other. And I think that's a good thing. And it's the opposite of what was predicted through this imminent AGI story where the storytelling there was that one model would get a lead and then it would direct its own intelligence to making itself better. And then so therefore its lead would get bigger and bigger and you kind of get this recursive self-improvement. And pretty soon you're off to the same.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To have done that without these modern consumer AI tools, you'd have to go hire a special education specialist or something, which is basically impossible to do that kind of thing. And everybody has these stories now in their lives among people they know. So we have the, I think we have like a lot of proof that the track that this on is that this is going to be in everybody's hands. And in fact, that is going to be a really good thing. And I think David, I think you guys are really playing a key role in making that happen.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the best AIs in the world are in the consumer products, right? And so if you use current day ChadGPT or Grok or any of these things, like I can't spend more money and get access to a better AI, it's in the consumer products. And so just in practice, what you have, like playing out in real time is this technology is going to be in everybody's hands. And everybody is going to be able to use it to optimize the things that they do, have it be a thought partner, have it be an assistant for building companies, starting companies or creating art or doing all the things that people want to do, you know, my wife was just using it this morning to design a new entrepreneurship curriculum for our 10-year-old, right? Literally, it's like, oh, wow, that's like a really great idea. And it took her a couple hours and she has like a full curriculum for him to be able to start his first video game company. And here's all the different skills that he needs to learn. And here's all the resources. And like, that's just a level of capability. I mean, to,”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or is this a technology that's going to diffuse out and be like in everybody's hands and be a tool of empowerment and creativity and individual effort, expressiveness and as a tool for basically everybody to use? And I think one of the really striking things about this period of time and you being in this role is this is the period in which the scenario number two is, I think, very clearly playing out, which is that this is the time in which AI is actually hyper-democratizing. I think actually AI.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other thing I'd bring up related to this, which is sort of this, which I think is a little orthogonal, but also quite related, which is sort of, is the future of the world going to be one or a small number of companies or for that matter governments or super AIs that kind of own and control everything and sort of all the value rolls up into a handful of entities. And, you know, and there you get into this, there's like the hypercapitalist version of it where a few companies make all the money or there's like the hyper communist version of it where you have total state control or whatever”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With life, like we have an objective, we have free will, we're sentient, those just aren't part of a mathematical model that is searching through a distribution and figuring out an answer or even a model that through a reinforcement learning technique can kind of improve its logic. So it's just like the comparison to humans, I think, it just falls short in a lot of ways is what we're seeing. We're just different. And the models are very good at things. They're better than humans at things already, many things.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a context, at least from what we've seen, that will continue and even to your point on super smart models, there's like a dozen video models out there and there's not one that's the best at everything or even close to the best at everything. There's like literally a dozen that are all the best at one thing. Which is a little surprising at least to me because you would think, you know, just the sheer size of the data would be an advantage. But even that hasn't quite proven outing what you want. You want a meme. Do you want a movie? Do you want an ad like it's all very, very different. And I think this gets to your main point, which is, and Mark Zuckerberg said something that I Really liked he's like, like, intelligence is not life. And these things that we associate.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally consistent with that, things are improving. So, like on agents, the early agents, the longer the running task, the more they would go completely bananas and off the rails. People are working on that. I do think like everything's working better.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The AI sell my product. It's very unlikely that it's just going to figure out what that means and how to do that. But if you're a sales rep and you're using the AI to help you, there's probably very specific tasks that you can tell it to do. And it would be much more successful doing that. So I just tend to think, I mean, this also kind of speaks to the whole job loss narrative. I just think that this is going to be a very synergistic tool for a long time. I don't think it's going to wipe out human jobs. I don't think the need for human cognition is going away. It's something that we'll all use to kind of get this big productivity boost, at least for the foreseeable future. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if anyone, any of us can predict what's going to happen beyond five or ten years, but that's just what I'm seeing right now. I don't know. I'm curious, what do you guys seeing this front?”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Context, they're much less likely to go off the rails, start going in weird directions. If you give it like a very broad task, it's just not likely to completely figure it out before it needs human intervention. But if you give it something very narrow to do, then it's much more likely to be successful. So I would just guess like, okay,”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Somehow coming up with its own objective. And as a result of that, the MLS we prompted, and then it gives you an output, and that output has to be validated. You have to somehow make sure it's correct because models can still be wrong. And more likely, you have to iterate a few times because it doesn't give you exactly what you want. So now you kind of reprompt. And we've all had this experience, right? This is why the chat interface is so necessary is because it takes you a few times to kind of iterate to get to the output that actually has value for you. Again, you know, the humans are end-to-end and the AI is middle to middle. I just don't, you know, we haven't seen any evidence that that fundamental dynamic is changing. I mean, I think we're at the, I mean, I'd love to hear what you guys think about this. I mean, we're obviously at the outset of agents. And, you know, an agents you can give an objective to and then we'll be able to take tasks on your behalf. But I suspect that the agents will work better as well when they have a much more narrow”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, and the models work best when they have context, you know, and the more, I mean, we've all seen this, the more general your prompt, the less likely it is that you're going to be able to get a great response. And I don't know, if you tell the AI something very general like what business can I create to make a billion dollars, it's not going to give you something actionable, you know, you have to get very specific about what you're trying to do. And it has to have access to relevant data, and then it can give you some specific answers to a prompt. And I think this is partly Bology's point, which is the AI does not come up with its own objective. It needs to be prompted. It needs to be told what to do. We've seen no evidence that that's at this stage, that that's changing. We're still at step zero. In terms of AI kind of”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's very consistent with what we're saying as well, where ideas that we thought would for sure get subsumed by the big models are becoming amazingly differentiated businesses just because the fat tail of the universe is very fat and you need really kind of specific understanding of certain scenarios to build and effective model and that's just how it's going. No model is just like figured out how to do everything.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI is polytheistic, not monotheistic, meaning what we're seeing is many, instead of just one all-knowing, all-powerful God, what we're seeing is a bunch of smaller deities, more specialized models. It's not that sort of, we're not on that kind of recursive self-improvement track just yet, but we're seeing many different kinds of models make progress in different areas. And then the other one was just his observation that AI was middle to middle, whereas humans are end-to-end and therefore the relationship is pretty synergistic. And I think that's right. I mean, I think all those observations are resonate with me in terms of where we're at right now.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the media is basically pushing both narratives at the same time. But in any event, I think that the truth is more in the middle. That's kind of a Goldie Ox scenario where we're seeing a lot of innovation. I think the progress is impressive. I think we're going to see big productivity gains in the economy from this. But I like the observations that biology made recently where he said.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was used in this scary way that it's kind of the superintelligence that would grow beyond our control. I feel like people are pulling back from that and understanding that, yes, we're still making a lot of progress and the progress is amazing. But at the same time, what we mean by intelligence is multifaceted. And it's not like there's progress being made along some dimensions, but it's not along every dimension. And so therefore, I think, again, I would just, I mean, I've described actually the situation we're in right now is a little bit of a Goldilocks scenario where, you know, the extremes would be, you know, you kind of have the scary Terminator situation, imminent superintelligence that'll grow beyond our control on the other narrative you hear in the press a lot is that we're in a big bubble so in other words the whole thing is fake”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my sense is that people are in Silicon Valley are kind of pulling back from the, let's call it, imminent AGI narrative. I saw Andre Carpathi give an interview where all of a sudden he's re-underwritten this and he says AGI is at least a decade away. He's basically saying that reinforcement learning has its limits. I mean, it's very useful. It's the main paradigm right now that they're making a lot of progress with. But he says that actually the way that humans learn is not really through reinforcement. We do something a little different, which I think is a good thing because it means that human and AI will be synergistic, right? I mean, the AI is understanding if it's based on RL will be a little different than the way that we intuit and reason. But in any event, I sense more of a pullback from this imminent AGI narrative, you know, the idea that AGI is two years away. Of course, it's like kind of unclear what people mean by AGI, but it's kind of, you know,”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, that is by far the biggest risk of AI. And that's the thing we should be working towards preventing. And the problem is a lot of these regulations that are being whipped up by these fear-mongering techniques, they're actually empowering the government to engage in this type of control that I think we should all be very afraid of, actually.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the biggest risk of AI actually. It's not It was not described by James Cameron, it was described by George Orwell. In my view, it's not the Terminator. It's 1984 that as AI eats the internet and becomes the main way that we interact and get our information online, that it'll be used by the people in power to control the information we receive that it'll contain ideological bias that essentially it'll censor us, all that trust and safety apparatus that was created for social media will be ported over to this new world of AI. Mark, I know that you've spoken about this quite a bit. I think you're absolutely right about that. And then on top of that, you've got the surveillance issues where AI is going to know everything about you. It's going to be your kind of personal assistant. And so it's kind of the perfect tool for the government to monitor and control you.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“DEI values, they called it in models. And then we saw what the result of that was. We saw the whole Black George Washington thing where history was being rewritten in real time. Because somebody built a DEI layer into the model. And I almost feel like the term woke AI is insufficient to explain what's going on because it somehow trivializes it. I mean, what we're really talking about is Orwellian AI. We're talking about AI that lies to you, that distorts and answer, that rewrites history in real time to serve a current political agenda of the people who are in power. I mean, it's very Orwellian. And we were definitely on that path before President Trump's election. It was part of the Bieno. We saw it happen in the release of that first Gemini model. That was not an accident, those distorted outputs came from somewhere. So it was to me.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As part of a decision that had a disparate impact. Nevertheless, you're liable. And the only way that I can see for model developers to even attempt to comply with this is to build a DEI layer into their models that tries to anticipate, could this answer have a disparitate impact? And if it does, we either can't give you the answer. We have to sanitize or distort the answer. And, you know, you just take this to its lawful conclusion and we're back to woke AI. Which, by the way, was a major objective of the Biden administration. That Biden executive order on AI that we rescinded as part of the Trump administration had something like 20 pages of DEI language in it. They were very much trying to promote.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Presumably, discrimination is already illegal. So if you're a business and you violate the civil rights laws and you engage in discrimination, you're already liable for that. There's no reason if you happen to make that mistake and you use any kind of tool in the process of doing it, we don't really need to go after the tool developer because we can already go after the business that's made that decision. But the whole purpose of these laws is to get at the tool. They're making not just the business that is using AI liable, they're making the tool developer liable. And I don't even know how the tool developer is supposed to anticipate this because how do you know all the ways that your tool is going to be used? How do you know that this output, especially if the output is 100% true and accurate and the model is doing its job, then how are you supposed to know that that was that output was used?”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Language proficiency as a protected group. So I guess if the model says something bad about illegal aliens, then that would be basically violate the law. I don't know exactly how model companies are even supposed to comply with this rule. I mean, presumably.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“25% of them are in the top four blue states, which are California, New York, Colorado, and Illinois. Over 100 measures have ready passed. I think three of them just got signed in the last month in California alone. I'll tell you, just let me tell you what Colorado is, actually Colorado, Illinois, and California have all done some version of a thing called algorithmic discrimination, which I think is really troubling where it's headed. What this concept means is that if the model produces an output that has a disparate impact on a protected group, then that is algorithmic discrimination. And the list of protected groups is very long. It's more than just the usual ones. So, for example, in Colorado, they've defined people who may not have English.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But yeah, but I think that is definitely of all the companies, that particular one has been the most aggressive in terms of the regulatory capture and pushing these for these regulations. And just, I mean, let's just bring it up a level. It doesn't have to be about them. There's now something like 1,200 bills going through state legislatures right now to regulate AI.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there is a heady drug to basically say That we're creating this new superintelligence that is going to could destroy humanity, but we're the only ones who are virtuous enough to ensure.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the really diabolical things about their argument is if they really believed there was a monster, then why are they buying GPUs at a rate faster than anybody? And then the other thing that we know from being in the industry is their reputation as literally the worst security practices in the entire industry with respect to their own code. So if you were building this monster, the last thing you'd want to do is like leave a bunch of holes around for people to hack it so they don't believe anything they're saying. It's like completely made up to try and maintain their lead by this. Well, it's psychotic.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These approvals can take months, they can take years when models are when a new chip is released every year and we have licenses that have been sitting in the hopper for two years. I mean, the requests are obsolete by the time they finally get approved. And that would be even more true with models where the cycle time is like three or four months for a new model. I mean, and what exactly is a bureaucracy in Washington going to know about this technology that they're going to be in a good position to approve at any event. But this is what is being contemplated right now, and I think it would be a disaster for Silicon Valley, but also and for innovation, but therefore for American competitiveness. And I think we will lose AI race to countries like China if this is the set of rules that we have.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pre approved category. We were ascended that. And then on the software side, like I said, I mean, the goal very clearly is to start with these reporting requirements to the government, to the states, and then where that ramps up to is you have to go to Washington to get permission before you release a new model. And, you know, this would drastically slow down innovation and make America less competitive. I mean,”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's really the crown jewel of the American economy and the envy of the rest of the world. We see all these attempts by all these other countries to create their own Silicon Valley. The reason that's the case is because of permissionless innovation. And what is being contemplated and discussed and implemented with respect to AI is an approval system for both software and hardware. And this is not theoretical. This has already been happening. On the hardware side, one of the last things that the Biden administration did the last week, the Biden administration, was impose the so-called Biden diffusion rule, which requires that every sale of a GPU on Earth be licensed by the government, which is to say pre-approved, unless it fits into some category of exception. Basically, the overall idea is that compute is now going to be a licensed.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And these are people who are young founders. They can also be future dropout in a dorm room. And they're able just to pursue their idea. And the only reason that I think has happened in Silicon Valley, whereas you look at industries like, I don't know, like pharma or healthcare or defense or banking or these highly regulated industries where you just don't see a lot of startups, it's because they're all heavily regulated, which means you have to go to Washington to get permission to do things. And the thing I've seen in Washington is just that, you know, the approvals get set up for reasons, but those reasons very quickly stop mattering. And it just matters like how good your government affairs team is at navigating through the bureaucracy and figuring out how to get those approvals. And it's not something that your typical startup founders are going to be good at. It's something that big companies get good at because they've got the resources and that's exactly what regulatory capture means. So the whole basis of Silicon Valley success, the reason why.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, again, just as much of a smoking gun as you could ever get in a spot on X. But the reason why I think that that approach is so damaging is that the thing that's really made, I think, Silicon Valley special over the past several decades is permissionless innovation, right? It's the two guys in a garage can just pursue their idea. Maybe they raise some capital from angels or VC firms. Basically people who are willing to lose all of their money.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In any event, so I said, Well, this is like fear mongering and part of the regulatory capture strategy. And of course, they denied it, but then a lawyer who was in the crowd at his speech said, well, yeah, but Jack's not telling you what he said during the Q&A, which he basically admitted that everything that Anthropic was doing was with like things like SB53, which is supposedly just implementing transparency. He said, no, he admitted that was just a stepping stone to their real goal. Which was to get a system of pre-approvals in Washington before you can release new models. And he admitted as part of the Q&A that making people very afraid was part of their strategy”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is very fair. And actually, Corsair denied it. And then should I tell the story? I mean, rarely do you get vindicated on X so thoroughly and completely as I did on this? Because after this company was basically anthropic, after they denied it, there was what basically happened is that Jack Clark, who's a co-founder and had a policy for anthropic, gave a speech at a conference where he Compared fear of AI to a child seeing monsters in the dark. We were thinking there were monsters in the dark, but then you turn the lights on and the monsters are there. I thought that was such a ridiculous analogy. I mean, it's basically. I mean, it's so childish to be almost self indicting. You're basically emitting the fear is made up, not real”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's a very big problem. I actually recently criticized one of our AI model companies for engaging in regulatory capture strategy.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas in AI, we've seen very interesting kind of calls coming from inside the house with certain companies really going for regulatory capture, people who have early leads saying, let's cut off all new companies from developing AI and so forth. What do you make of that and where do you think that's going?”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At a minimum, I think crypto is seen as very de class. But in any event, yeah, no, it's been a huge shift. I mean, we basically have stopped that. And it was very unfair because, again, these founders wanted to comply with the rules, but they weren't told what they were. And that was all part of a deliberate strategy, I think, to drive crypto offshore.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think it's a great point. I mean, I didn't really know either. You kind of heard generally. I mean, we knew that there was debanking going on. And by the way, it wasn't just crypto companies that were being debanked, but their founders were being debanked personally. So if you were the founder of a crypto company, you couldn't open a bank account. I mean, that's a huge problem. It's like, how do you transact? How do you make payments? How do you pay people? I mean, it basically deprives you of a livelihood. It's a very extreme form of censorship. So that was definitely happening. And then, of course, you have all the prosecutions that the SEC was behind. So yeah, it was really bad. I remember back in, I think it was in March, we had a crypto summit at the White House. And one of the attendees said that a year ago, I would have thought it was more likely that I'd be in jail than I'd be at the White House. And so it was a really big milestone for the industry. They never ever received any kind of recognition like that. The idea that this was even a industry that you would do in an event at the White House, I mean.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to talk a lot about AI today, but just on crypto, I've had this interesting experience this year kind of after the election kind of people adjusted to the change of government. And I've had this discussion with a number of people who, let's say in politics, who were previously anti-crypto, who have been trying to figure out how to kind of get to a more sensible position. And then also actually people in the financial services industry who kind of followed it from a distance and maybe participated in the various debanking things without really understanding what was happening. But the common denominator has been they're like, Mark, I didn't really understand how bad it was. I basically thought you guys in tech were basically just whining a lot and pleading as a special interest and kind of doing the normal thing. And I figured the horror stories were kind of made up, people getting prosecuted and entrepreneurs getting their houses raided by the FBI and like the whole panoply of things that happened. And I now, in retrospect, now that I go back and look, I'm like, oh my God, this was actually much worse than I thought. Do you have that experience? And as you're in there and kind of, as you now have a complete view of everything that happens, you think people understand.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was pro innovation, professor, which also means pro energy and pro-export. And we can drill into all those things if you want. But that was the high line. And so I think that, again, with AI, the idea is kind of like, how do we unleash innovation? And I think with crypto, it's been more about how do we create regulatory certainty. But in terms of my role, like, why am I doing both? I mean, I think the common denominator is just, again, these are new technologies. They're both obviously come from the tech industry, which has a very different culture than Washington does. And I kind of see as my role to help be a bridge between what's happening in Silicon Valley and what's happening in Washington and helping Washington understand not just the policy that's needed or the innovation that's happening, but also kind of culturally what makes the tech industry different and special and how that needs to be protected from a government doing something successively heavy-handed.”
2026-07-16 · a16z Podcast · Replay 2025: David Sacks on AI, Crypto, and America's Technology Future · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source