Shaw: DeepSeek has become the leading AI model of the moment; The team is building the next version of Eliza

Odaily Planet Daily News ai16z co-founder Shaw X wrote that a more powerful model is always good for AI agents. For years, the AI lab has been surpassing each other in benchmark testing and capabilities. Sometimes Google leads, sometimes OpenAI leads, sometimes Claude leads. Today it's DeepSeek. The trend is that the world's largest and most capital-rich companies are competing for a technology that ultimately tends to be free, open source, and can run on home computers at no cost. The winner of this competition has always been hardware and consumer products. Nvidia is always the winner. Each model is optimized for its hardware. Apple is also always a winner: they invest in a unified memory architecture that allows high VRAM machines to run the latest models (although slowly). The product continues to benefit from the latest models. Cursor and Perplexity are examples that magically get better every few months, but as AI is integrated into almost all products, all of these products benefit from cheaper and faster AI models. AI agents are a new paradigm for applications - the core argument is that applications need to migrate to the social media platforms where users are, and agents are a form of application that can fully exist on social media without users having to leave. They are self-promoting and benefit from the network effects of every user interaction. When a new model emerges, it usually only takes a few lines of code to integrate into the proxy framework. Most model providers follow the same API conventions, following OpenAI, so this can often be done in a matter of minutes. This allows any proxy application to have immediate access to the latest models. Whenever a state-of-the-art model comes along, the agent becomes smarter. This week has been a huge victory for all of us. For agents, for humanity, and for the AI model team, they now have the motivation to work harder and do better. I'm not worried at all about our position in all of this. We are building the next version of Eliza, which will only get better and better. Thousands of teams are building on our technology, with over 500 people contributing to the core repository, and this number will continue to grow as we expand. We are creating a template for ambitious founders on how to crowdfund their public product projects, and the team will be rolling out more content in the coming weeks and months to solidify this strategy.