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BH Ben Horowitz Ben Horowitz Co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm he launched in 2009 with Marc Andreessen.

“He had four preconditions. One is: look, the next model has to require fewer GPUs than the last. And not like a little fewer, but like a lot fewer … Then the second thing is the next model has to take less time to train … And then the accuracy of the next model has to be better than the last. … And then finally, it's got to keep happening again and again and again. Zero of those four have been met.”

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · Money & Markets · October 2026

“He had four preconditions. One is: look, the next model has to require fewer GPUs than the last. And not like a little fewer, but like a lot fewer … Then the second thing is the next model has to take less time to train … And then the accuracy of the next model has to be better than the last. … And then finally, it's got to keep happening again and again and again. Zero of those four have been met.” — Ben Horowitz, All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

Horowitz is laying out a Databricks executive's test for whether AI could recursively improve itself and run away from us. He uses it to call the runaway-AI fear "entirely theoretical," and criticizes the AI doomers he says the press amplifies.

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg · 2026-10-17 Listen to the episode → More from Ben Horowitz → More Money & Markets quotes →

Transcript

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg Around 1:21:46 into the episode
David Sacks

that? We're good. You can't get on everybody except everyone on us.

Chamath Palihapitiya

We're good. We're going to have Ben Horowitz on. We're good.

Ben Horowitz

…funny because it's like, okay, what is the big risk that everybody talks about is this, we're going to, the models are going to self, they're going to recursively self-improve and then they're going to take off. And then they're going to become so smart and run away from us. And Ali Goetze from Databricks had a great formulation of, well, okay, well, what would be the preconditions for that? And he had four preconditions. One is: look, the next model has to require fewer GPUs than the last. And not like a little fewer, but like a lot fewer because otherwise, like you're just going to run out of GPU. Like we just talked about this. You need debt. You got to get the GPUs. You need the power. You need the cooling. Like it's not running away from us. It takes a long time to build the next model. Then the second thing is the next model has to take less time to train because it's got to take off. And then the accuracy of the next model…

Jason Calacanis

if you combine it with the environmental narrative and you combine it with the job apocalypse, it's very potable for the public. It is a ratings hit. Like, oh, they're taking your water. They're polluting your oceans.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Think about his job.

Jason Calacanis

It's a perfect

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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