AI + a16z

Joel De La Garza is joined by Dylan Ayrey, co-founder and CEO of Truffle Security, and Feross Aboukhadijeh, founder and CEO of Socket, to discuss one of the biggest shifts happening in cybersecurity: AI models are no longer just finding vulnerabilities—they're exploiting them. As frontier models become increasingly capable of hacking, software security, supply chain attacks, and cyber defense are entering a fundamentally new era.

The conversation explores AI-powered hacking, software supply chain attacks, leaked credentials, zero-day vulnerabilities, package manager security, and why the path of least resistance for increasingly autonomous AI systems may also be the most dangerous. They also discuss what enterprises, developers, and the open-source ecosystem need to do to adapt as the gap between vulnerability discovery and exploitation continues to shrink.

 

Resources:

Follow Dylan Ayrey on X: https://x.com/InsecureNature

Follow Feross Aboukhadijeh on X: https://x.com/Feross

Follow Joel De La Garza on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/

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Elena Burger and Matt Bornstein are joined by Simon Mo, co-founder and CEO of Inferact, the open-source inference engine powering many of today's most advanced AI applications. Together, they explore how open-source AI evolved from a research project into critical infrastructure, why inference has become one of the most important layers of the AI stack, and what it takes to bring frontier intelligence to developers around the world.

The conversation covers vLLM's origins, the rise of open-weight models, why companies increasingly want control over their AI infrastructure, and how open-source inference enables the next generation of AI applications. They also discuss model licensing, the economics of open-weight AI, Kimi K3, distillation, AI infrastructure, and why Simon believes the gap between open and closed models is rapidly disappearing.

 

Resources:

Follow Simon Mo on X: https://x.com/simon_mo_

Follow Matt Bornstein on X: https://x.com/BornsteinMatt

Follow Elena Burger on X: https://x.com/VirtualElena

Follow Inferact: https://x.com/inferact

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Matt Bornstein speaks with Mirendil cofounders Behnam Neyshabur and Harsh Mehta about their vision for building self-accelerating AI.

After leading research efforts at Google and Anthropic, the founders started Mirendil around a simple question: what happens when AI systems can meaningfully contribute to their own development? Rather than focusing solely on AI as a tool for productivity, they argue that the most important application may be accelerating scientific and technological progress itself.

The conversation explores AI research, scaling laws, automated engineering, scientific discovery, and the challenges of building systems that can improve over time. They discuss the future of AI-assisted research, why they believe scientific progress remains bottlenecked by intelligence, and how more capable AI systems could help unlock advances across medicine, engineering, and the natural sciences.

 

Resources:

Follow Behnam Neyshabur on X: https://x.com/bneyshabur?lang=en

Follow Harsh Mehta on X: https://x.com/HarshMeh1a

Follow Matt Bornstein on X: https://x.com/BornsteinMatt

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Yoko Li and Justine Moore speak with Ideogram founder and CEO Mohammad Norouzi about image generation models, design workflows, and the evolving relationship between AI and creative work.

The conversation covers Ideogram's decision to release an open-weight model, the challenges of generating text and layouts within images, and why controllability has become an increasingly important area of research. They discuss prompting, customization, editing, and the tradeoffs between general-purpose models and systems optimized for specific creative tasks.

Along the way, Norouzi shares his views on open-source AI, design tools, agentic workflows, and how image generation models may evolve as creators and enterprises seek greater control over their outputs.

 

Resources:

Follow Mohammad Norouzi on X: https://x.com/mo_norouzi

Follow Yoko Li on X: https://x.com/stuffyokodraws

Follow Justine Moore on X: https://x.com/venturetwins

 

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Sarah Wang speaks with Exa cofounder and CEO Will Bryk about building search infrastructure for the AI era.

The conversation covers Exa’s origins, why traditional search engines were not designed for AI agents, and how search changes when the user is no longer a human but an autonomous system. They discuss retrieval, agent workflows, coding agents, data access, and why search may become a foundational layer for the emerging agent economy.

Along the way, Bryk shares his views on AI-native products, the future of information discovery, and why some of the most important problems in technology can ultimately be framed as search problems.

 

Resources:

Find Will on X: https://x.com/WilliamBryk

Find Sarah on X: https://x.com/sarahdingwang

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