MARC ANDREESSEN ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE FUTURE

Is the A.I. breakthrough for real this time?

- KATHERINE MANGU-WARD

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?