a16z General Partner Andrew Chen: AI is Transitioning from the Era of Single Models to the Fragmented Era of Social Layered Models

In a recent social media statement, a16z General Partner Andrew Chen noted that artificial intelligence is moving from a "unified single model" to a multidimensional fragmented "model market." He listed eight major layered directions: the split between coding-specific models and general large models, coexistence of pure text-first and multimodal models, opposition between unrestricted models and rule-based models, divergence of local deployment models and cloud models, parallelism of geopolitical alignment models (such as China-US-other regions), differentiation of left-right biased models, the "logic minimalism" model aimed at "high-functioning autism" populations versus the "emotion-needs-error tolerance" model aimed at "ordinary users," and the coexistence of three styles of dialogue models: "immediate answer type," "proactive question clarification type," and "never has an answer type."

Chen's observation is not merely a description of technological fragmentation but emphasizes that "all models are mapping real social stratification." The training data, compliance boundaries, deployment scenarios, and user expectations of each model are continuously aligning with certain groups or tasks, making AI systems themselves a software projection of a "segmented society," rather than a singular "general intelligence."

Source: Public Information