According to a message from ChainCatcher, ai16z co-founder Shaw posted on platform X, stating that more powerful models are always good for AI agents.
Over the years, AI labs have been constantly benchmarking and surpassing each other in terms of capabilities. Sometimes Google is ahead, sometimes OpenAI is ahead, sometimes Claude is ahead. Today it's DeepSeek. The trend is that the world's largest and most well-funded companies are competing for a technology that will ultimately trend towards being free, open-source, and runnable on home computers at no cost.
The winners of this race have always been hardware and consumer products. Nvidia is always the winner. Each model is optimized for their hardware. Apple is also always the winner: they've invested in a unified memory architecture that allows high VRAM machines to run the latest models (albeit slowly).
Products continue to benefit from the latest models. Cursor and Perplexity are examples of applications that mysteriously get better every few months, but as AI is integrated into almost all products, all of these products benefit from cheaper and faster AI models.
AI agents are a new application paradigm - the core argument is that applications need to migrate to the social media platforms where users are, and agents are a form of application that can exist entirely within social media without users needing to leave. They are self-propagating, and benefit from the network effects of each user interaction.
When a new model emerges, integrating it into an agent framework typically only requires a few lines of code. Most model providers follow the same API conventions, following OpenAI, so this work can usually be done in a matter of minutes. This allows any agent application to immediately access the latest models. Whenever a state-of-the-art model appears, the agent becomes more intelligent.
This week is a huge win for all of us. For agents, for humans, and for the AI model teams, they now have the incentive to work harder and do better. I'm not worried about our position in all of this at all. We're building the next version of Eliza, and it will only get better. Thousands of teams are building on our technology, over 500 people have contributed to the core repository, and this number will continue to grow as we evolve. We're creating a template for how ambitious founders can crowdfund their public product projects, and the team will be rolling out more content in the coming weeks and months to solidify this strategy.
