MARC ANDREESSEN HAS helped a lot of people get rich—including Marc Andreessen. He’s made millions of people’s lives more fun, more efficient, or just a little weirder while making himself into a billionaire.
He is the co-creator of the first widely used web browser and co-founder of the venture capital powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz. Though he hates the term unicorn—industry lingo for a private tech firm valued at more than a billion dollars—he’s a famously successful unicorn wrangler: He was an early investor in Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Lyft, and more.
Andreessen is also aggressively quotable, whether it’s his classic 2011 pronouncement that “software is eating the world” or his more recent “There are no bad ideas, only early ones.” And in 2014 he said, “In 20 years, we’ll be talking about bitcoin the way we talk about the internet today.” A born bull, Andreessen is an optimist who places his hope for the future squarely in the hands of “the 19-year-olds and the startups that no one’s heard of.”
As splashy artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT and DALL-E begin to permeate our daily lives and the predictable panic revs up, Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward sat down with Andreessen in February for a video and podcast interview about what the future will look like, whether it still will emerge from Silicon Valley, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the role of government in fostering or destroying innovation.
Reason: I tend to be skeptical of people who claim that this time it’s different, with any tech or cultural trend. But with artificial intelligence (A.I.), is this time different?
Andreessen: A.I. has been the fundamental dream of computer science going all the way back to the 1940s. There were five or six A.I. booms where people were really convinced that this time is the time it’s going to happen. Then there were A.I. winters in which it turns out, oops, not yet. For sure, we’re in another one of those A.I. booms.
There are a couple of things that are different about what’s happening right now. There are these very well-defined tests, ways of measuring intelligence-like capabilities. Computers have started to do actually better than people on these tests. These are tests that involve interactions with fuzzy reality. So these aren’t tests like, “Can you do math faster?” These are tests like, “Can you process reality in a superior way?”
The first of those test breakthroughs was in 2012, when computers became better than human beings at recognizing objects in images. That’s the breakthrough that has made the self-driving car a real possibility. Because what’s a self-driving car? It’s basically just processing large amounts of images and trying to understand, “Is that a kid running across the street or is that a plastic bag, and should I hit the brakes or should I just keep going?” Tesla’s self-driving isn’t perfect yet, but it’s starting to work quite well. Waymo, one of our companies: They’re up and running now.
We started to see these breakthroughs in what’s called natural language processing about
