The a16z Show

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Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | Applied Intuition

Explore episode Jul 21, 2026

Where this was said

Self-Driving Cars: Where Are We Actually Today?

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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