"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis Is AI Stalling Out? Cutting Through Capabilities Confusion, w/ Erik Torenberg, from the a16z Podcast
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Oct 29, 2025 
Erik Torenberg, an insightful entrepreneur and AI policy debater, joins to explore whether AI progress is truly stalling. He discusses the significant strides in capabilities, like the impressive expansion of context windows and advancements in reasoning and vision. The duo dives into AI's potential job impacts and the controversial topic of protectionism. They also ponder over the future of labor roles, emphasizing coding’s role in recursive improvement debates and the intersection of AI with critical fields like biology and materials science.
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Capabilities Progress Is Ongoing
- AI capability progress hasn't stopped despite public confusion about model names and launches.
- Frontier developers see a clear line of sight to continued rapid progress over the next few years.
Separate Impact From Capability Claims
- Separate impact questions from capability questions when evaluating AI's effects.
- Don't conflate current harms like cognitive offloading with claims that capabilities have flatlined.
Host Admits Leaning On AI For Coding
- Nathan admits he sometimes avoids understanding code and asks the AI to 'just make it work.'
- He attributes this behavior partly to increasingly capable AIs making that shortcut plausible.