Tools

topic on 11 shows · 13 statements across 13 episodes · said 2 times in 2 episodes since 2025

TBPN 2 Mixergy BigDeal Latent Space Lenny's Podcast No Priors the Startup Ideas Podcast Invest Like the Best the MAD Podcast the a16z Podcast 20VC

Mentions by year, every show

tap a year for its mentions
00111120252026episodesmentions
01120252026episodes it came up in
000.50.51120252026episodesmentions per episode

TBPN 2

2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 1 mention in 1 episode

every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →

13 statements about Tools, every show

Isenberg: Marketers must learn underlying workflows rather than ephemeral AI tools
“The tools are going to keep changing, but the workflow is the thing to actually learn.”
Greg Isenberg Aug 31, 2026 ▶ 13:24 Marketing Engineer: The $1M Job with AI Agents
INVEST LIKE THE BEST Assertion Supported
Levine: Studies show the primate brain physiologically treats tools as bodily extensions
“There were studies that were done in monkeys using tools. And you can actually find where in the brain, ah, like which neurons activate for the monkey to figure out where its hand is. It turns out that if it's using a tool, they activate based on location of t…”
Sergey Levine Mar 31, 2026 ▶ 41:32 World's Top Researcher on AI, LLMs, and Robot Intelligence · Invest Like The Best
BIGDEAL Insight
Eyal: Beliefs should be treated as functional tools rather than truths
“Beliefs are tools, not truths. And so I can have this conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence because it serves me.”
Nir Eyal Mar 19, 2026 ▶ 22:38 How To Stay Focused, Beat Distraction, and Get Things Done | Nir Eyal
MIXERGY Insight
Foster: Giving AI agents more tools increases their error rates
“The more tools you give it, The harder it thinks, the more mistakes it's gonna make.”
Wade Foster Dec 19, 2025 ▶ 22:34 #2289 Building companies using Zapier’s AI automations
a16z Insight
Shear: Certain ultra-powerful tools exceed human wisdom and should not be built
“There's a power of tool that, that just should not be built. Generally because we, it's, it is more power than any human's individual wisdom is available to harness.”
Emmett Shear Nov 17, 2025 ▶ 50:02 Emmett Shear on Building AI That Actually Cares: Beyond Control and Steering
20VC Opinion
Pineau: Users treat AI as a work tool rather than a companion
“I see a lot of people using it as a tool, more than as a companion. You know, people have this, you know, Swiss knife in their work life all of a sudden that can be super helpful, but that's really most of what I see.”
Joelle Pineau Nov 3, 2025 ▶ 19:58 Cohere's Chief AI Officer, Joelle Pineau: Why Scaling Laws Will Continue & Future of Synthetic Data · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
NO PRIORS Insight
Mitchell: LLMs allocate compute efficiently by deferring tasks to specialized tools
“I think, like, part of this is you can just allocate compute a lot more efficiently because you can defer stuff that the model doesn't have comparative advantage to doing to a tool that is, like, really well suited to doing that thing.”
Eric Mitchell Oct 31, 2025 ▶ 12:28 No Priors Ep. 138 | The Best of 2025 (So Far) with Sarah Guo and Elad Gil
LATENT SPACE Assertion Not checkable as stated
Goyal: Simple tool-calling prompts cover 80% to 90% of AI use cases
“For probably 80 or 90% of the use cases that we see with people doing this, like very, very simple, I create a prompt, it calls some tools. I can like very ergonomically write the tools, plug into popular services, et cetera, and then just call them kind of li…”
Ankur Goyal Oct 11, 2024 ▶ 50:55 Production AI Engineering starts with Evals
Yao: Reliable tool design accounts for 90% of agent performance
“I think making the tool good and reliable is probably like 90% of the whole agent. Once the tool is actually good, then the agent design can be much, much simpler. On the other hand, if the tool is bad, then no matter how much you put into the agent design pla…”
Shunyu Yao Sep 27, 2024 ▶ 45:35 Language Agents: From Reasoning to Acting — with Shunyu Yao of OpenAI, Harrison Chase of LangGraph
a16z Prediction Not checkable as stated
Horowitz: AI economic value will accrue to tools, not base models
“The actual layer where the value is gonna crew is gonna be like tools, orchestration, that kind of thing, because you can just plug in whatever the best model is at the time. Whereas the models are gonna be competing, you know, in a death battle with each othe…”
Ben Horowitz May 9, 2024 ▶ 29:05 Build Your Startup With AI
Cutler: Applying product tools out of context causes worse outcomes than nothing
“People trying to put tools in play out of context sometimes had worse effects than them just not doing it all to do that.”
John Cutler Jan 15, 2023 ▶ 23:04 What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (The Beautiful Mess)
MAD Insight
Chip Huyen: MLOps startups ignore real-time learning for low-hanging fruit
“We don't have tools for it yet. And I see very, very, very little tools focusing on it because most people are like targeting on focusing on low hanging fruit.”
Chip Huyen Mar 15, 2021 ▶ 17:58 Fireside Chat: Chip Huyen with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
a16z Prediction Not checkable as stated
Andreessen: Technology will continue augmenting human capabilities rather than replacing them
“I'm an extreme optimist on this. I think we just make better and better tools all the time. And the tools help us as humans magnify our abilities. They don't take away from what we can do. They help us do more than we could possibly do before. And I think that…”
Marc Andreessen Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 14:51 a16z Podcast | Tech's Biggest Ideas and How They Take Hold -- With Marc Andreessen and Dan Siroker

← every entity, every show

Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, thousands of episodes across every show transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.