Who Will Own the Internet? a16z’s Chris Dixon on AI and Crypto

a16z Podcast

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Technology doesn’t grow in isolation—it evolves in waves. Just as mobile, cloud, and SaaS shaped the internet of the past 20 years, so too could crypto, AI, and new hardware usher in an era of the internet that’s pro-innovation, pro-startup, and pro-creator. Speaking with a16z Growth General Partner David George, a16z crypto Founder and Managing Partner Chris Dixon breaks down his vision for a new internet, from using crypto to decentralize AI infrastructure and kickstart network effects, to why AI will be this era’s native form of media just as film was in the 1930s. He also explores why the internet’s original covenant—where content creators traded free access for search traffic—is breaking today, and how a better internet could introduce entirely new business models for creators. Right now, we have a choice to make: will the next era of the internet be shaped by a handful of centralized players, or transformed into an open ecosystem where power and control flow to creators across the globe?

Transcript

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0:00.0	What will be the economic models for creative people in an AI world?
0:04.0	Don't stop the inevitable, which is the technology progressing.
0:07.0	Lean into it and rethink those models.
0:09.0	That to me is the most exciting area for this intersection.
0:13.0	In the last few years, AI has been the talk of the town.
0:17.0	Founders have pivoted, incumbents have plowed capital into new projects, VCs
0:22.1	have upended their investing theses. All of this is part of the race to capitalize on what
0:27.3	seems like the biggest platform shift in decades, and equally a new generation of the internet.
0:34.2	This generation is not only an opportunity to rethink the past, but with parallel technology
0:39.0	tracks from new hardware to crypto intersecting, we can build things we never could before.
0:44.3	So what will the economic model of this wave be when so much is being upended?
0:49.3	You go to their websites, they give you an answer.
0:51.3	And so what happens to the billion other websites if they aren't getting traffic?
0:56.2	It's a question, right?
0:57.4	When will we move past the skeuomorphic phase of this generation to building net new behaviors?
1:02.5	And could crypto be the counterbalance to the centralizing gravity of AI, targeting more data,
1:07.7	more compute, and more complex models?
1:10.5	Where we're headed is a world where you have five big systems, let's call it, three to five
1:14.2	big AI systems.
1:15.7	Joining us to discuss all this and more are A16Z growth, general partner David George,
1:21.2	and A16Z crypto founding partner Chris Dixon.
1:24.6	Last year, of course, Chris wrote his book, Read, Write, Own, building the next
	...

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