Frank Chen
59 statements across 19 episodes · 37 bullish · 3 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Jul 15, 2017 by Frank Chen · said 8 times in 6 episodes since 2019 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Frank Chen's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Sonal Chokshi (3), Stuart Butterfield (2), Steven Sinofsky (1), Alex Rampell (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2019 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- a16z Podcast | Capitalizing on an Autonomous Vehicle Future
- a16z Podcast | Nobody Discusses Work Software Outside of Work -- and Then There’s Slack
- a16z Podcast | Automation + Work, Human + Machine
- a16z Podcast | Crypto, Security, CS, Quantum Computing, and More with Our New Professor-in-Residence
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
Everything said about Frank Chen, oldest first
Jul 15, 2017
Jul 15, 2017 neutral
Chen: Quantum computing's goal is not making smaller computers
“Now, if you listen to the prime minister, he implied that what we were trying to do with quantum computers was make smaller computers. And while he didn't say anything technically inaccurate, I think that misses the point a little. So we're not really trying t…”
Jul 16, 2017 positive
Jul 16, 2017 neutral
Chen: Autonomous Fleets Will Reduce Accidents but Raise Individual Repair Costs
“We're pretty confident that when we get to a fully autonomous fleet, we'll have fewer accidents, but maybe the cost of repair will go up because yeah, we got to repair that supercomputer in your trunk that figured out how to drive on the road.”
Jul 16, 2017 bullish
Jul 16, 2017 positive
Jul 16, 2017 bullish
Jul 16, 2017 bullish
Dec 8, 2017 positive
Dec 8, 2017 bullish
Feb 3, 2018 positive
Chen: Autonomous fleets will re-enfranchise demographics left out of driving
“This revolution will come on the backs of the young people who are absolutely ready culturally to make this transition. And it's going to re-enfranchise. It's going to bring a lot of people who have been left out of the benefits of driving around right back in…”
Feb 3, 2018 bullish
Chen: Autonomous EV fleets will drive most global miles within years
“In particular, I believe that in a handful of years, we're gonna be driven around in electric cars rather than driving around in our own gas-powered cars. In other words, most of the miles driven on the planet will shift to self-driving electric car fleets as …”
Feb 3, 2018 neutral
Feb 3, 2018 bullish
Chen: Economics will force most autonomous electric vehicles into commercial fleets
“The economics will dictate that most of our electric self-driving cars will end up in fleets, because it's going to be much more economically efficient for the fleet To get the most out of that car compared to you and me driving them around.”
Feb 3, 2018 positive
Feb 3, 2018
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Chen: Apple's single wallet model will outperform fragmented Android payments
“And if you contrast what's happening in Apple land with what's happening in Android land, if you've tried NFC payments in Android land, you have lots of stakeholders with their own applications clamoring to be your wallet. So you have ISIS now known as soft ca…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Chen: US EMV migration will drive merchant NFC terminal adoption
“The good news on the NFC readers is that the United States is about to go through a massive deployment of EMV, which is chip and pin credit cards. The same reader will also support NFC, so merchants won't need two different or two different upgrades, so it loo…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Frank Chen: Carriers know your home zip code from phone sleep locations
“Controlling the smartphones, you know exactly who your users are, where they go to sleep, which means that wherever your cell phone went to sleep is probably where you live. So they know the zip code of where you live. So they do know a lot of things about you…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 bearish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Chen: 1990s expert systems failed due to insufficient hardware compute
“Keep in mind what computational power was back then. We didn't have a lot of memory. We didn't have a lot of disk. We didn't have a lot of CPU cycles. And so the rate at which we could do these calculations and the amount of storage we had, like, it just never…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Chen: Deep learning enables robots to cook from YouTube videos
“There are systems where robots are learning to cook food by watching YouTube videos of people cooking food. There's systems that can take photos and paint them in the style of Renoir or Van Gogh. There's algorithms that can create paintings that are indistingu…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Chen: Deep learning represents the triumph of data over algorithms
“So the big trend is the triumph of data over algorithms. Which is you try to make more and more sophisticated edge detection algorithms, feature recognition algorithms. The big advance with deep learning was, screw all that. I'm not going to try to figure out …”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Chen: Neural networks are trivially fooled by subtle noise in images
“So one really interesting thing is if you feed Pictures into a neural net and you tune in. You can defeat the categorization fairly trivially by introducing noise in the data, and the really interesting thing is you introduce the noise, you look at the resulti…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Chen: Deep learning replaces deterministic logic with probabilistic reasoning
“Programming has been functional and procedural, which is I have if loops and else loops, and I tell it, and what I'm trying to do is predict enough state so that the computer can make the right decision. If this, do that. Else do this, right? With the introduc…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Frank Chen: Autonomous vehicle developers are divided on geographic localization strategies
“And so both research approaches are active. I've talked to people pursuing the look, it's going to be localized in the safe braking distance and how aggressively to take that right turn when you're at a stoplight. All of those things will be pre-programmed for…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Chen: Incumbent automakers project initial autonomous vehicle rollouts between 2019 and 2024
“Well, if you look at the public estimates given by the auto manufacturers, I'm talking about the incumbents now, you'll see a range anywhere from 2019 to 2024 being the year where they first introduced their autonomous vehicles.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Chen: A Cisco-class company will emerge to route autonomous physical transportation
“I actually think, here's another interesting thing, which is if there were self-driving cars, trucks, robots, shopping carts, there will probably be a Cisco routing service on top of that that can calculate the best way to get object A from point A to B, which…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Chen: AI is automation on steroids, not sentience
“What you're expecting is sentience, and what we actually have is just Automation on steroids, which is we can now automate things that we couldn't automate before because we don't have to painstakingly describe the rules behind it. We're just letting the compu…”
Jan 2, 2019
Frank Chen: Deep learning models are inherently unexplainable black boxes
“The modern, more powerful, more accurate algorithms that belong to a class of algorithms called deep learning algorithms, they don't have that feature. They are notorious black boxes. You cannot ask it, why did you make this decision? All it is is basically a …”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Chen: AI could create a new genre of music within ten years
“What I'm looking forward to is could an AI create a brand new genre of music that people find desirable, which is, it doesn't sound like anything Today, but it's just this breakthrough new genre. And so, in 10 years, I think we have a shot at doing that.”
Jan 2, 2019
Frank Chen: Autonomous driving algorithms calculate safe paths, not ethical tradeoffs
“If you look at the current crop of machine learning algorithms that drive autonomy, they're not making high level decisions like, let's calculate the life expectancy of the people that I'm about to wipe out. They're not doing that. They're looking at, there's …”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Chen: Patients will soon be horrified if doctors lack AI companions
“I think it's only a matter of time before we walk into a doctor's office or a lawyer's office where that isn't the fundamental interaction, and we'll just be horrified, like, where's your AI companion? Why are you trying to do this Yourself with your biases.”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Chen: AlphaGo Zero proves reinforcement learning succeeds without labeled data
“Right, where there's so much momentum right now that says, basically, we're one labeled data set away from glory. Right, and this result basically shows you, wow, there's a lot of mileage that you can get out of reinforcement learning where there's no data, no…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Chen: AI startups spend $1M to $50M acquiring annotated training data
“And if you think about sort of the approach that most startups take to artificial intelligence today, they basically take the supervised learning approach. And step one, raise money so that you can go get a data set that's annotated, train your neural network,…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Frank Chen: Half a dozen startups are working on remote driving technology
“I have seen now probably half a dozen startups that are working on basically remote driving, whether it's remote driving a car or remote driving a truck, on the assumption that the algorithms won't be able to figure out what to do in all cases.”
Feb 2, 2019 neutral
Chen: Lifetime education spending drops to near zero after college
“The way I think about education spending over a lifetime today is kind of like there's an elephant inside a python, right, which is you spend a lot of money and then you get to College, right, where you have the five 29 plan, right, to help subsidize, right, t…”
Jun 14, 2019 neutral
Dec 30, 2019 positive
Dec 30, 2019 positive
Dec 30, 2019 positive
Dec 30, 2019 positive
Chen: AR contact lenses with built-in projectors will display real-world overlays
“So we'll have tiny projectors and cameras built into contact lenses so she can just pop into her eyes and they'll work in conjunction with nearby computers to basically give her a heads up display on the real world. As people come into her field of view, she'l…”
Dec 30, 2019 positive
Dec 30, 2019 bullish
Dec 30, 2019 positive
Dec 30, 2019 positive
Dec 30, 2019 positive
Chen: Bioengineered smart clothing will track health and guide runners by 2030
“This shirt is made out of spider silk, engineered by DNA. It's got sensors and actuators right in it, so the sensors pick up her health stats like temperature and EKG and heart rate, and it's got actuators so it can bumper on the wrists, right?”
Dec 30, 2019 positive
Dec 30, 2019 positive
Chen: Smart toilets in the 2030s will monitor health via urine analysis
“Now, it doesn't look like it's changed much, but like most other things in her house, this has become a smart toilet. It measures 10 properties of her urine, including glucose, and it looks for health problems before they become actual health problems.”