Tobi Knaup

@PeterL4e Awesome! Let's goooo!!

I am thrilled to announce my return to a16z as a full-time General Partner. Having made a full recovery from cancer and navigated some of life’s most taxing personal hurdles, I am returning with a sharpened sense of purpose and a deep optimism for the future, both personally and professionally. My time away reinforced that living to one's fullest capacity requires doing what you love with the people you trust. While I’ve continued to support my boards and founders, I’ve realized my greatest impact happens when I am 'all in.' I believe he current pace of innovation in infrastructure is unmatched, and I couldn't be happier to be back in the trenches with my colleagues and close friends on the a16z Infra team.

Superhuman intelligence is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

I'm still not sold on the idea that these single uber models that are experts at everything will be the winning architecture long-term. They are very expensive to run and it seems that everyone is hitting capacity limits right now with no end in sight.

Now that frontier models are great at writing tasks (including writing code), next we will see them rapidly improve on a number of highly specialized tasks that require deep domain expertise. We went from 0% to 52%+ on Frontier Math in < 2 years and we'll accelerate from here.

These are 100% real concepts that were coming out of Detroit during the Space Age days We were so close to (now) seemingly unreachable levels of American excellence

@tetrisgm @opencode I’m just experimenting 😀 But one advantage is you can chose your own harness or customize an open source one

@superguenter @opencode Wat. Why! If you’re gonna use something remote what is the advantage? I would imagine custom SAAS, self hosted apps, claws etc are the main benefit

2026 will be remembered as the year when open weight models reached parity

@tetrisgm I’m actually using the @opencode hosted version but a friend is self-hosting it on AMD with this recipe: huggingface.co/florianleibert…

@superguenter Fair enough. I haven’t seen anyone else self host it yet. Will have to test! I suppose we are missing use cases where you don’t need gpt/opus but need smarts. Gpt-oss is quite tempting based on the speed chart. Love the idea of a moderately smart but super fast AI for products.

@tetrisgm Kimi K2.6 is right behind GPT/Claude/Gemini in this chart. I'm using it for coding and for most tasks it's as good as them. I'm still using GPT or Opus for the most complex tasks though.

@superguenter Open models seem to be mid or bottom tier. They seem to be good at other metrics than intelligence (speed, cost)

@tetrisgm Can't tell you without knowing your interpretation

@superguenter What a I reading wrong / missing out from this chart?

@tetrisgm They're not there yet, but very close. At the rate at which they're improving, I predict parity will happen this year. Lots of numbers here: artificialanalysis.ai

@superguenter Really gonna need to see comparisons and real numbers there

When future historians write about Silicon Valley, they’ll have an entire chapter dedicated to the Ron Conway way: how he turned generosity, warmth, and showing up for founders into a winning strategy.

There was a brief period in the ‘70s & ‘80s where concept car interiors absolutely peaked

The Kyoto International Conference Center is proof we should design more buildings that feel like they’re straight out of a sci-fi movie

@dhruvtwt_ @nvidia it's slow as molasses

Why is no one talking about this? @nvidia is offering around 80 AI models via hosted APIs absolutely for free. You get access to MiniMax M2.7, GLM 5.1, Kimi 2.5, DeepSeek 3.2, GPT-OSS-120B, Sarvam-M etc. This plugs straight into OpenClaude, OpenCode, Zed IDE, Hermes agent and even with Cursor IDE. Setup: – Grab API key: build.nvidia.com/models – base_url = "integrate.api.nvidia.com/v1" – api_key = "$NVIDIA_API_KEY" – select model (e.g. minimaxai/minimax-m2.7) If you’re building or experimenting, this is basically free inference. Lock in and start building today anon. Thank me later.

The rollout process that @AnthropicAI is using for Mythos will become the industry standard for frontier models. It's similar to the responsible disclosure process that's been a standard for a long time.

@RonConway @garrytan You’re one of a kind Ron. Go crush that cancer

I want to share some difficult news. I was recently diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and I want you to hear it directly from me. Treatment is starting immediately and will include multiple strategies over the course of about a year. While I will be stepping back from some of my usual activities, I will continue to support SV Angel founders, who I love with a passion. SV Angel remains unchanged. Topher has made all of our investment decisions for the better part of the last decade, and Ronny joined as Managing Partner in 2024. They bring experience from nearly every major technology cycle in Silicon Valley and are now focused on partnering with founders building the future of AI. SV Angel has a deep, experienced team that remains fully focused on supporting exceptional founders. With a more focused and balanced schedule, I can prioritize treatments while helping SV Angel founders at inflection points like we always do! I’ve chosen not to share the specific type of cancer since I don't want speculation about my prognosis. I appreciate your understanding and respect for this. I am optimistic about my prognosis. I am fortunate to have the best/amazing team of UCSF doctors in San Francisco, and as you know, I never back down from a fight. Thank you for your support, it means a great deal to me.

current UX pet peeve: forcing me to enter a code from an email instead of allowing me to use my password. Looking at you @OpenTable

What could possibly go wrong

I'm glad you did and that your family is ok. Always good to connect on a human level, especially during times of high tension.