Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:• The Big Read: Trump’s AI agenda collides with reality• Tech Culture: Welcome to the great private jet drought• Plus, Recommendations—our weekly pop culture picks: “Gastronomics,” “Catch the Devil” and “The Invite”At the dawn of the AI boom, the technology sparked a real melee between newcomer startups and the industry’s established giants. A good amount of the energy in that fight seems to have diminished lately, with the contest appearing to turn into a slugfest between a handful of heavyweights: Google, Anthropic and OpenAI in the lead, trailed by a few other contenders, like Meta Platforms and SpaceXAI.So that’s it—the biggies will grab all the laurels? It’s an outcome that has looked increasingly probable to me. Josh Elman, a longtime tech investor and executive, couldn’t disagree more. And so staunch is his belief in a forthcoming boom in consumer AI startups that he jumped ship a few weeks ago from working on Apple’s AI revamp to take up consumer investing at Andreessen Horowitz. Elman knows what he’s getting into: Before Apple, he was a longtime Greylock partner, where he led its investments in companies like Discord, Musical.ly, the predecessor company of TikTok, and Meerkat, which became Houseparty before Epic Games bought it. And before Greylock, he worked at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. To rebut my pessimism, Elman likened the current moment to the dot-com era’s early days. “On the consumer adoption of AI, we’re still back in 1995—maybe 1996,” he said. My conversation with him, which has been edited for clarity and length, is below. First things first, I need to ask: Will Siri actually work now? Yes [laughs]. I think people have always wanted Siri just to be the thing that understands them and can help them just get stuff done on their device. I think it does great at that now. If you’re gonna comp Siri to Claude Cowork and try to ask it: “Make me a crazy presentation on blah-blah-blah-blah,” like, no—Siri’s not designed to do that at this time. But if you do things like ask, “Call that Abe I was texting this morning,” that works. And I do it all the time because I forget people’s last names all the time. And here’s another example: I was driving to dinner, and I was coming to Palo Alto, getting off at an exit, and there’s two ways to go. I asked, “Navigate me to dinner with John.” And then it took me right to the restaurant—even though I hadn’t put the location on my calendar. We’d just texted about it. So why leave Apple now? AI seems to just be getting interesting there. What made you want to return to venture capital—and specifically to do consumer startups?When I left Greylock in 2020, I thought, “Consumer is dead. I don’t know if you can do that anymore.” And there have been a few companies, like Whatnot, which is an Andreessen company, and Suno. But there haven’t been that many consumer AI companies. And the common wisdom has been that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and the model companies are going to define everything that’s interesting in the next 10 years. What makes you so confident in defying that common wisdom?When OpenClaw came out six, seven months ago, I was like, “Oh, I get it again.” The number of products that agentic AI can reinvent is going to lead to a Cambrian explosion that hasn’t happened yet in consumer. And I think now’s the window—now’s the time.But I think of the OpenClaw craze as being pretty focused on a small, very Silicon Valley insider crowd who built work tools using it. Of all the amazing examples of OpenClaw use that were shared with me, I think about Claire Vo and Jesse Genet, who are moms who have been talking about how they use OpenClaw to manage their families and their kids. [Vo is the founder of ChatPRD; Genet is the CEO and co-founder of Lumi.com.]In the next six months, I think we’re going to see the embers of exciting things coming out in consumer AI. I don’t know exactly which ones will pop first. But two years from now, we’re going to start to see things that are, you know, a set of agents that help you manage your life, and you’ll be able to fine-tune them to accomplish what you want. Sure, consumer agents have real appeal. Won’t the biggest companies with their established, giant relationships with consumers—Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, even Apple—just dominate that, too, though? Whether it’s finance, travel, health—yes, a lot of us are already turning to ChatGPT or, like, Doctor Google. But there are going to be products that are much richer and much more experiential. And they’re going to come from more than just those big players. If a startup was trying to say, “I’m going to be the primary coding assistant,” well, that’s a category that’s fairly competitive now. There’s at least five of them. But for travel, there certainly isn’t anything yet.One of the things I learned at Apple is: No matter how ambitious and big you are as a company, you can only do a number of things well. And you would rather do a num
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