The a16z Show · Saturday, September 12, 2026
Anish Acharya, a general partner at a16z, argues against the widespread fear that falling behind on AI tools will create a permanent underclass. He believes current anxieties are overblown, citing the distributed nature of AI development and the empirical data that does not support mass job displacement.
“Not very seriously. And it's a funny dark fantasy that we seem to have as, you know, Silicon Valley collectively. Like, things have never been better by almost every measure.”
“So I don't know that the empirical data bears it out. I think the final thing is that there's this sort of discussion of RSI, and I know RSI is like recursive self-improvement is a fun term to throw around. But if you ask the most sophisticated individuals at the labs, it's not actually RSI that's occurring, which could lead to some sort of runaway winner because they were an epsilon ahead of the others. It's autocatalytic effects, which just means, do you use technology to improve your process, but it's not truly recursive.”
“So I think everything from the most empirical to the most technical viewpoints in the other direction, and yet we can't seem to let go of this fantasy.”