Why AI is so centralized: How it's built, who controls it, and what comes next
a16z crypto show
Andreessen Horowitz
4.4 • 66 Ratings
🗓️ 22 April 2026
⏱️ 17 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | We reach a point where the machines are autonomous, |
| 0:02.7 | to able to make their own decisions, |
| 0:04.0 | they have their own on-chain identities, |
| 0:05.6 | they have the ability to update their own objective functions |
| 0:07.9 | and reward models, which in combination with |
| 0:09.9 | crypto-economic property rights basically makes them sovereign economic actors. |
| 0:13.2 | All this will be coming in the next 12 months. |
| 0:15.1 | That's pretty soon. |
| 0:15.8 | For sure. |
| 0:16.3 | At that point, you have this completely Darwinian market |
| 0:19.3 | for intelligence, and we don't know what |
| 0:21.4 | happens next. |
| 0:26.4 | Ben, Harry, thank you so much for coming on. Let's start here. What is the biggest misunderstanding |
| 0:30.6 | that people might have about the problem you're trying to solve? I think probably how deep the problem itself actually is. I think people |
| 0:40.7 | think a lot about the AI space right now and they think about this sort of like product level, |
| 0:45.0 | like the systems they're interacting with like chat GPT and things like that, but they don't |
| 0:48.2 | realize how much is actually behind those systems necessarily. And I think the wider world, how much |
| 0:53.9 | centralization is actually behind those systems. Those And I think the wider world, how much centralization is actually |
| 0:55.4 | behind those systems. Those systems rely on very small number of companies to run them. To the average |
| 1:00.4 | user, you sort of know that you're interacting with Open AI, but you don't actually realize |
| 1:04.0 | how much is going through their servers and their systems. Behind the scenes, there's enormous |
| 1:08.2 | kind of layers of technology. And actually, that isn't necessarily the best way to build things, as maybe listeners of |
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