Ashwin Sreenivas

speaker

310 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 31 Jul

Ashwin Sreenivas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The a16z Show · How Enterprise AI Really Gets Deployed · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

Even once you have AGI, agents are going to need somewhere to store work and pull information from and reason about things.

I don't think software as a whole in any meaningful way is going away.

On the specific tasks we want them to do, they actually outperform the large, smart, state-of-the-art model.

The thing that we built was not an agent that does customer support well, but rather an agent that follows business process well.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, good to see you.

I want to push a tiny bit on that point, actually, because oftentimes when you see these debates being had on Twitter, the trade-off tends to be, oh, do we want the smartest model that is very expensive or can we dumb it down a little bit and get it cheaper?

I actually think that is a false trade-off, right?

Because what we've seen in practice is even if you have a, quote, dumber model, you can get it, and we've seen this in practice, you can get it to higher performance on that specific task.

So when we fine-tune smaller, dumber models, it's that they're just not as general purpose, but on the specific task we want them to do, they actually outperform the large, smart, state-of-the-art models.

So we end up getting all three things.

It is better at the task, it is cheaper, and it is faster.

We do, and we often end up needing them for auxiliary tasks, right?

Where when you sort of have auxiliary models to our sort of primary conversational flow, right?

You have an agent and it's helping a customer with their,

rebooking or it's helping them with a process in healthcare then these are like well-defined parts so we have smart fast models to do that but we've for instance recently launched duet autopilot right which is our agent that improves the core conversational agent

Now, for something like Autopilot, it is doing a very complicated job, right?

It's saying, I'm going to go and review a million conversations that just happened.

I'm going to try and find trends.

I'm going to create variants of the primary model and see which of those variants does better.

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