Marc Andreessen has spent three decades watching technologies arrive. He says he has never seen a gap like this one. The distance between what the earliest AI adopters understand is now possible and what ordinary companies understand is “as wide as I’ve ever seen in my career” — and it widens every week, he said on a16z’s own podcast alongside co-founder Ben Horowitz and general partner Chris Dixon.

The occasion was the launch of a16z Frontier, a fund that folds the firm’s crypto practice into a broader mandate for ideas too early or too strange for its vertical funds. The fund gets only a few minutes of airtime. The rest of the hour is a thesis on what AI has already changed, why open-source models matter, and how the economics of…