For an AI to operate autonomously—earning and spending money—it needs a native digital currency. Traditional financial systems are built for human or corporate entities, making it difficult for an AI to become a credit card merchant. Crypto provides the necessary 'internet money' infrastructure.
Moats like migration pain, proprietary data, and UI lock-in are weakening. AI agents are flexible with interfaces and can easily replicate code and migrate data, forcing companies to find new, more distinct sources of value beyond simply 'owning' the customer.
As AI makes it impossible to distinguish real from fake, a decentralized system of trust becomes essential. Ben Horowitz argues that blockchain's cryptographic properties are necessary to verify human identity, sign content, and establish a source of truth not controlled by a government or tech giant.
While NVIDIA may solve the chip shortage, the true limiting factors for AI's growth are physical-world constraints. The US currently lacks sufficient electricity, rare earth minerals, manufacturing capacity, and even power transformers to support the massive, energy-intensive demands of AI.
Countering AI doomerism, Ben Horowitz argues that human desire is infinite. Once AI makes basic goods abundant, people will develop new 'needs'—from complex services to luxury experiences like chef-prepared meals—which will in turn generate entirely new industries and jobs unimaginable today.
The AI era could consolidate power into a few massive companies, similar to the auto industry's Big Three. In that scenario, venture capital firms that backed them may evolve 'upstream' into large investment banks like JPMorgan, shifting away from backing a diverse set of new, smaller startups.
The long-held belief from Fred Brooks' 'Mythical Man-Month'—that adding engineers slows projects—is now obsolete. With sufficient capital for GPUs and data, companies can compress years of software development into weeks, fundamentally changing competitive dynamics and making capital a primary weapon again.