#386 Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI

AI is going to be like air—it's going to be everywhere ... It's just gonna be a thing. It's going to be in the air, and you can't pull this back anymore than you can pull back air. And so, you just have to figure out how to live in this world.

Here's maybe the biggest thing people don't understand about what it's like to be a startup founder is it's very romanticized ... The reality of it is most of what happens is people telling you 'no,' and then usually follow that with 'you're stupid.'

The reality, usually, with the big successes is that the founder has been chewing on the problem for 5 or 10 years before they start the company, and they often worked on it in school, or they even experimented on it when they were a kid, and they've been kind of training up over that period of time to be able to do the thing. So, they're like a true domain expert.

The truth is all the successful founders are working 80-hour weeks ... They form very strong social bonds with the people they work with. They tend to lose a lot of friends on the outside or put those friendships on ice.

You've got glasses, you've got a wristwatch, you've got shoes, you've got these things, you've got a personal computer, you've got a word processor, you've got Mathematica, you've got Google... Viewed through that lens, AI is the latest in a long series of, basically, augmentation methods to be able to raise human capabilities. It's just this one is the most powerful one of all...

The question is do you want the human of the machine deciding whether to drop the bomb? Everybody just assumes the human's going to do a better job ... I think it's very clear that the machine is going to do a better job making that decision, because the humans making that decision are god-awful, just terrible.

The great thing about the really great founders is they don't take any advice. So, if you find yourself listening to advice, maybe you shouldn't do it.

What makes a great founder is super smart coupled with super energetic coupled with super courageous.

I don't believe in balance ... I am much happier and more satisfied when I'm fully committed to something.

Your experience of reality changes reality, and then reality changes your experience of reality. It's a two-way feedback process, and media is the intermediating force between that. So change the media environment, change reality.

The way you make the most money in any business is by selling to the largest market you can possibly get to. The largest market you can possibly get to is everybody on the planet. And so, every large company does everything that it can to drive down prices to be able to get volumes up to be able to get to everybody on the planet.

Jeff Bezos always had the 2-pizza rule for teams at Amazon, which is any team needs to be able to be fed with 2 pizzas. If you need the third pizza, you have too many people.

The competence and capability and intelligence and training and accomplishments of senior scientists and technologists working on a technology and then being able to then make moral judgments in the use of the technology—that track record is terrible. That track record is, like, catastrophically bad.

Each LLM from here on out that gets built is immortal, because it's output will become training data for the next one. And then, it will be able to replicate the behavior of the previous one whenever it's asked to.

Here's another really big question: Will synthetic training data work? ... If you just sit and ask an LLM to generate all kinds of content, can you use that to train the next version of that LLM? Specifically, is there signal in there that's additive to the content that was used to train it in the first place?

The way I describe Wikipedia to people is it is more likely that Wikipedia is right than any other source you're going to find.

We live in an era in which an awful lot of people are very confident that they know what the truth is, and I don't really buy into that. And I think the history of the last, you know, two thousand years or four thousand years of human civilization is actually getting to the truth is actually a very difficult thing to do.

There's a possibility here that the whole idea of a screen and [browser] windows and all this stuff just goes away, because why do you need that if you just have a thing telling you whatever you need to know?

My understanding is [Steve Jobs] never wanted an iPhone to have a screen larger than you could reach with your thumb one-handed. And so, he was actually opposed to the idea of making the phones larger.

This is how cults form is they form around some theory of the end of the world ... What they're all organized around is there's going to be this thing that's going to happen that's going to basically bring civilization crashing down, and then we have this special elite group of people who are going to see it coming and prepare for it.

It's obvious that it's in the best interest of both the attacker and the defender and humanity at large if machines are making more decisions and not people. I think people make terrible decisions in times of war.

Web pages are one of the primary sources of training data for the AI. And so, if there's no longer an incentive to make web pages, that cuts off a significant source of future training data. So, there's actually an interesting question in there.

I hear about this a lot from CEOs, founder CEOs, where it's like, wow, we have 50,000 people; it's now harder to do new things than it was when we had 50 people.

Software is our modern philosopher's stone. And in economic terms, it transmutes labor into capital.

Content generated from an LLM is not covered under Section 230, which is the law that protects Internet platform companies from being sued for user-generated content.