Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen: AI sent world into a ‘freeze-frame moment’
Andreessen also warns about China AI plans, although they are a 'year behind'
C3.AI Chairman and CEO Thomas Siebel discusses regulatory and technological pros and cons of artificial intelligence.
The world is in a "freeze-frame moment" with artificial intelligence, according to Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen.
He told the "Lex Fridman Podcast" last week that "everybody is kind of starting at [AI tools] wondering what to do," pointing to models like GPT-4.
However, the co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz told Fridman that the ability to learn and produce has increased "a million-fold."
Access to such technology should allow for more "hyper-productive" people, he asserted.
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Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a board member at Facebook Inc., listens during an interview at the Interactive Advertising Bureau MIXX conference in New York on Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images / Getty Images)
"Like, with these tools, like, there should be authors [who] are writing, like, hundreds of thousands of, like, outstanding books," The Mosaic co-creator said.
"Why aren't musicians producing a thousand times the number of songs?" Andreessen asked. "The tools are spectacular."
He believes that the reason why there are not many individuals with the introduction of advanced tech is likely distraction.
"I think it might be distraction. It’s so easy to just sit and consume that I think people get distracted from production," Andreesen noted.
Marc Andreessen, left, investor and software engineer, walks with Don Graham, owner and chairman of Graham Holdings Company, at the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference on July 7, 2022, in Sun Valley, Idaho. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images / Getty Images)
"If you wanted to as a young person, if you really wanted to stand out," he advised, "you could get on a hyper-productivity curve very early on."
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Andreessen said earlier in the sit-down interview that the introduction of intelligence would aid humanity, raising a person's intelligence quotient.
"And so, it is quite possibly the case this is the most important thing that's ever happened, the best thing that's ever happened, precisely because it's a lever on the single fundamental factor of intelligence, which is the thing that drives everything else," he posited.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen speaks at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2016. (Photo By Paul Chinn/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images / Getty Images)
As for possible future threats of AI, Andreessen has asserted that the single greatest risk is that China wins global AI dominance, echoing his own post on why AI "would save the world."
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He said that the Chinese Communist Party's plan for artificial intelligence was the plan for the rest of the world: "authoritarian control."
However, in the race toward superintelligence, Andreessen says China is currently behind the U.S.
"So, good news is they're behind. But, bad news is let's just say they get access to everything we do," he said. "So, they're probably a year behind at each point in time."