The a16z Show · Monday, September 7, 2026
Lucas Kaiser, co-author of the 'Attention is All You Need' paper, discussed the current concentration of AI power in large companies due to the high costs of data and compute. He argued that this is a temporary state, not an inevitable feature of AI, and that future research breakthroughs could democratize AI development.
“The nature of the AI is that you need to train it on very expensive data centers and on a lot of data. So there's big companies that do this and and then they charge for it, right? That concentrates it in the sense to get the, like, to me, even the current models are not smart enough.”
“So the current state of the technology is bit concentrating, but we should remember that it's just the current state.”
“But this gives the chance to the open source movement, that's a chance for academia, to universities.”