David George & Jack Altman on AI, Autonomy, and the Next $25 Trillion

David George (0:00)

If the premise of your question is, is this going to be successful, or that's going to be successful, the answer in AI is probably and. Like, it's just the most exciting time, you know, to ever be an investor and in the technology markets.

Jack Altman (0:12)

Keeping up with it is going to be hard.

David George (0:13)

Keeping up with it is going to be hard.

SPEAKER_3 (0:15)

Frontier models or open source? Labs or applications? David George thinks the answer to many of AI's biggest either or questions is simply and. In this episode from Jack Altman's Uncapped, Jack sits down with A16C general partner, David George, to discuss why he believes we're still early in the diffusion of AI across the economy.

They get into why today's AI revenues are still concentrated among a relatively small number of heavy users. What happens as AI reaches the broader knowledge workforce, and why David expects frontier models, open models and application companies to grow alongside one another.

They also look beyond AI to autonomy and robotics. Why consumer AI could ultimately be one of the biggest opportunities and what all of this means for investing when both the companies and the markets they're entering can become much larger than expected.

Jack Altman (1:07)

All right, David, I'm really excited to do this. I've been really looking forward to this. So thanks for coming by.

David George (1:12)

Yeah, great to hang with you.

Jack Altman (1:13)

So one of the topics that's been on my mind a lot that I think you've got really good thoughts on is something that my partner, Eric Visschia, said recently on the Invest Like the Best podcast.

It was basically, he was like, it's all going to work. It was in the context of people question, is it going to be open source or frontier? He's like, the open source is going to work, the frontier is going to work. Is it going to be NVIDIA or is it going to be new chips companies? He's like, there's going to be both. You can go on and on through the stack in AI. Eric's point was basically like, people are asking the wrong question of just like, is it this or it's that? And he's like, it's both. And I'm curious how you think about this at Andreessen and sort of in your seat.

David George (1:54)

Yeah, of course. So I am very, very closely aligned with Eric on this point that it's all going to work. I actually liked the way that he framed it up. I framed it up slightly differently, which is just like the answer to all this is and. And so like, if you're answering, if your question, if the premise of your question is, you know, is this going to be successful or that going to be successful? The answer in AI is probably and.

I think it's helpful to start just like, where are we? So right now, from an infrastructure build out standpoint, we just surpassed the railroads as a percentage of GDP, which has been recovered.

SPEAKER_3 (2:26)

It's like 3% now or something like that?

Jack Altman (2:27)

Yeah, exactly.

David George (2:28)

And, you know, look, it's probably going to get harder and harder to build data centers, which we could talk about later. But I think that's going to 10x. So right now, like what's happening is basically...

Jack Altman (2:37)

As a percentage of GDP, you think?

David George (2:39)

No, I think hopefully that will drive GDP growth. This is going to take many years, so it won't 10x in one year. So it won't be, you know, whatever.

SPEAKER_3 (2:44)

But we will spend many trillions.

David George (2:45)

But we will spend many trillions, right? So like all of this success, which is the greatest, fastest success we've ever seen in business, which is basically opening in philanthropic together. And then if you add in SpaceX AI, now with cursor, they're call it like 120 billion of revenue and they add more revenue per month than all the hyperscalers except for Amazon.

Jack Altman (3:03)

It's crazy.

David George (3:04)

Now all of that is on the back of just actually a small amount of people paying for stuff. So it's like 30 million coders in the world who are the vast majority of the revenue. There's 1.5 billion knowledge workers. But like basically all of this, which is like adding more revenue than the best businesses that have ever been created, is on the back of a small number of people.

Jack Altman (3:23)

That's actually a really interesting point, that it's over a billion users of these things. And we think about it that way, but it's actually you're saying 30 million are spending. Basically 30 million.