Podbit · The a16z Show
From the late 1990s to 2007, mobile seemed perpetually stuck. Then in four years after the iPhone: Uber, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat. Self-driving is following the same curve — slow build, then ubiquity. The difference is we already know it's coming.
Where this was said
At 35:30 · chapter starts 31:30
Andreessen reframes the 20-year arc of self-driving: DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005, Google's program in the late 2000s, endless 'imminent' predictions, and now — finally — real self-driving cars on real roads. Waymo has become routine in San Francisco. Tesla FSD v14 drove a Model Y through the notoriously treacherous Highway 1 at Big Sur without a disengagement. Younis notes that Tesla's mean disengagement intervals are now in the thousands of miles — impressive by any standard. He argues we should compare this moment to AGI goalposts: everything happening today would have been called AGI 20 years ago, but the coast keeps moving. The key insight is that the fundamental technical debate is over — nobody is asking whether self-driving works anymore. The remaining question is purely economic: how fast can the cost per mile come down to a level that OEMs can absorb within their razor-thin margins and still ship it globally in V1?
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