Marc Andreessen
Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used Web browser; as co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation; and as co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen is also a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites. He sits on the board of directors of Facebook, eBay, and HP, among others. A frequent keynote speaker and guest at Silicon Valley conferences, Andreessen is one of only six inductees in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame announced at the first international conference on the World Wide Web in 1994.
268 Quotes
"An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in. Microsoft started with programming tools, but came out with an operating system. Oracle started doing contracts for the CIA. AOL started out as an online video gaming network."
— Marc Andreessen
"There will be certain points of time when everything collides together and reaches critical mass around a new concept or a new thing that ends up being hugely relevant to a high percentage of people or businesses. But it’s really really hard to predict those. I don’t believe anyone can."
— Marc Andreessen
"I love what the Valley does. I love company building. I love startups. I love technology companies. I love new technology. I love this process of invention. Being able to participate in that as a founder and a product creator, or as an investor or a board member, I just find that hugely satisfying."
— Marc Andreessen
"I’m a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time. Returning to my theory of hiring, I’d rather have someone all fired up to do something for the first time than someone who’s done it before and isn’t that excited to do it again. You rarely go wrong giving someone who is high potential the shot."
— Marc Andreessen
"a short description of what AI is: The application of mathematics and software code to teach computers how to understand, synthesize, and generate knowledge in ways similar to how people do it."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"An even shorter description of what AI could be: A way to make everything we care about better."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"The most validated core conclusion of social science across many decades and thousands of studies is that human intelligence makes a very broad range of life outcomes better."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today"
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"Every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, infinitely helpful. The AI tutor will be by each child’s side every step of their development, helping them maximize their potential with the machine version of infinite love."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"The AI assistant will be present through all of life’s opportunities and challenges, maximizing every person’s outcomes."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"The magnification effects of better decisions by leaders across the people they lead are enormous, so this intelligence augmentation may be the most important of all."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically. Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"The development and proliferation of AI – far from a risk that we should fear – is a moral obligation that we have to ourselves, to our children, and to our future."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"Historically, every new technology that matters, from electric lighting to automobiles to radio to the Internet, has sparked a moral panic – a social contagion that convinces people the new technology is going to destroy the world, or society, or both."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"In short, AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive. And AI is a machine – is not going to come alive any more than your toaster will."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"Even though every new major technology has led to more jobs at higher wages throughout history, each wave of this panic is accompanied by claims that “this time is different”"
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"The core mistake the automation-kills-jobs doomers keep making is called the Lump Of Labor Fallacy. This fallacy is the incorrect notion that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done in the economy at any given time, and either machines do it or people do it – and if machines do it, there will be no work for people to do."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"technology empowers people to be more productive. This causes the prices for existing goods and services to fall, and for wages to rise. This in turn causes economic growth and job growth, while motivating the creation of new jobs and new industries."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"For, as Milton Friedman observed, “Human wants and needs are endless” – we always want more than we have. A technology-infused market economy is the way we get closer to delivering everything everyone could conceivably want, but never all the way there. And that is why technology doesn’t destroy jobs and never will."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"The actual risk of AI and inequality is not that AI will cause more inequality but rather that we will not allow AI to be used to reduce inequality."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"using AI as a defensive tool. The same capabilities that make AI dangerous in the hands of bad guys with bad goals make it powerful in the hands of good guys with good goals – specifically the good guys whose job it is to prevent bad things from happening."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"To offset the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, governments working in partnership with the private sector should vigorously engage in each area of potential risk to use AI to maximize society’s defensive capabilities."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"The development of AI started in the 1940’s, simultaneous with the invention of the computer. The first scientific paper on neural networks – the architecture of the AI we have today – was published in 1943."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"My firm and I are thrilled to back as many of them as we can, and we will stand alongside them and their work 100%."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save The World"Dr. James Austin, a neurologist and philosopher (!), wrote an outstanding book called Chase, Chance, and Creativity—originally in 1978, then updated in 2003."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"Chance... something fortuitous that happens unpredictably without discernable human intention."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"Chance is unintentional, it is capricious, but we needn’t conclude that chance is immune from human interventions. However, one must be careful not to read any unconsciously purposeful intent into “interventions”... [which] are to be viewed as accidental, unwilled, inadvertent, and unforseeable."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"In Chance I, the good luck that occurs is completely accidental. It is pure blind luck that comes with no effort on our part."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"In Chance II, something else has been added—motion."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"A certain [basic] level of action “stirs up the pot”, brings in random ideas that will collide and stick together in fresh combinations, lets chance operate."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"Unluck runs out if you keep stirring up things so that random elements can combine, by virtue of you and their inherent affinities."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"[Chance II] involves the kind of luck [Charles] Kettering... had in mind when he said, “Keep on going and chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.”"
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"Chance presents only a faint clue, the potential opportunity exists, but it will be overlooked except by that one person uniquely equipped to observe it, visualize it conceptually, and fully grasp its significance."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"Chance III involves involves a special receptivity, discernment, and intuitive grasp of significance unique to one particular recipient."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"[Chance IV] favors the individualized action."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"Chance IV is the kind of luck that develops during a probing action which has a distinctive personal flavor."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"Chance IV comes to you, unsought, because of who you are and how you behave."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"Chance IV is so personal, it is not easily understood by someone else the first time around"
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"[In neurological terms], Chance III [is] concerned with personal sensory receptivity; its counterpart, Chance IV, [is] involved with personal motor behavior."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"Chance I is completely impersonal; you can’t influence it."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"Chance II favors those who have a persistent curiosity about many things coupled with an energetic willingness to experiment and explore."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"Chance III favors those who have a sufficient background of sound knowledge plus special abilities in observing, remembering, recalling, and quickly forming significant new associations."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"Chance IV favors those with distinctive, if not eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"Curious people are more likely to already have in their heads the building blocks for crafting a solution for any particular problem they come across, versus the more quote-unquote intelligent, but less curious, person who is trying to get by on logic and pure intellectual effort."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive · Luck and the Entrepreneur: The four kinds of luck"We could use a few guinea pigs to try out our in-progress group annotation server for Mosaic."
— Marc Andreessen
WWW-Talk Apr-Jun 1993: group annotation server guinea pigs?"How it works: every time you access a document in Mosaic, the group annotation server [if you're using one] is queried with the URL of the document you're viewing; if any group annotations exist for that document, the group annotation server returns to Mosaic corresponding hyperlinks which are inlined into the document just like personal annotations."
— Marc Andreessen
WWW-Talk Apr-Jun 1993: group annotation server guinea pigs?"Rap Genius already is – the definitive online community of rap aficionados; one of the fastest growing web sites in Y Combinator's history; a thriving ecosystem of ideas, artists, and fans."
— Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen – Why Andreessen Horowitz Is Investing in Rap Genius"Unfortunately, our implementation at that time required a server to host all the annotations, and we didn't have the time to properly build that server, which would obviously have had to scale to enormous size. And so we dropped the entire feature."
— Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen – Why Andreessen Horowitz Is Investing in Rap Genius"Generalize out to many other categories of text... annotate the world... be the knowledge about the knowledge... create the Internet Talmud."
— Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen – Why Andreessen Horowitz Is Investing in Rap Genius"Back in 1993, when Eric Bina and I were first building Mosaic, it seemed obvious to us that users would want to annotate all text on the web"
— Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen – Why Andreessen Horowitz Is Investing in Rap Genius"we built a feature called ""group annotations"" right into the browser – and it worked great – all users could comment on any page and discussions quickly ensued."
— Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen – Why Andreessen Horowitz Is Investing in Rap Genius"I often wonder how the Internet would have turned out differently if users had been able to annotate everything – to add new layers of knowledge to all knowledge, on and on, ad infinitum."
— Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen – Why Andreessen Horowitz Is Investing in Rap Genius"Permanently divorcing physical location from economic opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people."
— Marc Andreessen
Technology Saves the World - Future"Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don't want to, telling customers yes when you don't want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital -- whatever is required."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive - The only thing that matters"when you have a great market, the team is remarkably easy to upgrade on the fly."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive - The only thing that matters"The caliber of a startup team can be defined as the suitability of the CEO, senior staff, engineers, and other key staff relative to the opportunity in front of them."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive - The only thing that matters"The quality of a startup's product can be defined as how impressive the product is to one customer or user who actually uses it"
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive - The only thing that matters"The size of a startup's market is the the number, and growth rate, of those customers or users for that product."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive - The only thing that matters"If you ask entrepreneurs or VCs which of team, product, or market is most important, many will say team."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive - The only thing that matters"On the other hand, if you ask engineers, many will say product. This is a product business, startups invent products, customers buy and use the products."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive - The only thing that matters"In a great market -- a market with lots of real potential customers -- the market pulls product out of the startup."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive - The only thing that matters"in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn't matter -- you're going to fail."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive - The only thing that matters"Markets that don't exist don't care how smart you are."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive - The only thing that matters"Tim Shephard: ""A great team is a team that will always beat a mediocre team, given the same market and product."""
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive - The only thing that matters"The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit."
— Marc Andreessen
Pmarchive - The only thing that matters"At any given startup, the team will range from outstanding to remarkably flawed; the product will range from a masterpiece of engineering to barely functional; and the market will range from booming to comatose."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"I focus on effectiveness as opposed to experience, since the history of the tech industry is full of highly successful startups that were staffed primarily by people who had never ""done it before""."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"Product quality and market size are completely different."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"If you ask entrepreneurs or VCs which of team, product, or market is most important, many will say team. This is the obvious answer, in part because in the beginning of a startup, you know a lot more about the team than you do the product, which hasn't been built yet, or the market, which hasn't been explored yet."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"Personally, I'll take the third position -- I'll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"Conversely, in a terrible market, you can have the best product in the world and an absolutely killer team, and it doesn't matter -- you're going to fail."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins. When a great team meets a great market, something special happens."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"bring a product as transformative as VMWare's to market and you're going to succeed, full stop."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"When you are BPMF, focus obsessively on getting to product/market fit."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"Whenever you see a successful startup, you see one that has reached product/market fit -- and usually along the way screwed up all kinds of other things, from channel model to pipeline development strategy to marketing plan to press relations to compensation policies to the CEO sleeping with the venture capitalist."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"once a startup is successful, and you ask the founders what made it successful, they will usually cite all kinds of things that had nothing to do with it. People are terrible at understanding causation. But in almost every case, the cause was actually product/market fit."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"Smarter people have better outcomes in almost every domain of activity: academic achievement, job performance, occupational status, income, creativity, physical health, longevity, learning new skills, managing complex tasks, leadership, entrepreneurial success, conflict resolution, reading comprehension, financial decision making, understanding others’ perspectives, creative arts, parenting outcomes, and life satisfaction."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Further, human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Productivity growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically, driving economic growth, creation of new industries, creation of new jobs, and wage growth, and resulting in a new era of heightened material prosperity across the planet."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"I even think AI is going to improve warfare, when it has to happen, by reducing wartime death rates dramatically."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Every war is characterized by terrible decisions made under intense pressure and with sharply limited information by very limited human leaders."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"In short, anything that people do with their natural intelligence today can be done much better with AI, and we will be able to take on new challenges that have been impossible to tackle without AI, from curing all diseases to achieving interstellar travel."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Perhaps the most underestimated quality of AI is how humanizing it can be."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Rather than making the world harsher and more mechanistic, infinitely patient and sympathetic AI will make the world warmer and nicer."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"The fine folks at Pessimists Archive have documented these technology-driven moral panics over the decades; their history makes the pattern vividly clear. It turns out this present panic is not even the first for AI."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"But a moral panic is by its very nature irrational – it takes what may be a legitimate concern and inflates it into a level of hysteria that ironically makes it harder to confront actually serious concerns."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"The actors within movements like these fall into two categories – “Baptists” and “Bootleggers” – drawing on the historical example of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920’s:"
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"“Baptists” are the true believer social reformers who legitimately feel – deeply and emotionally, if not rationally – that new restrictions, regulations, and laws are required to prevent societal disaster."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"“Bootleggers” are the self-interested opportunists who stand to financially profit by the imposition of new restrictions, regulations, and laws that insulate them from competitors"
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"For alcohol prohibition, these were the literal bootleggers who made a fortune selling illicit alcohol to Americans when legitimate alcohol sales were banned."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"For AI risk, these are CEOs who stand to make more money if regulatory barriers are erected that form a cartel of government-blessed AI vendors protected from new startup and open source competition – the software version of “too big to fail” banks."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"The problem with the Bootleggers is that they win. The Baptists are naive ideologues, the Bootleggers are cynical operators, and so the result of reform movements like these is often that the Bootleggers get what they want – regulatory capture, insulation from competition, the formation of a cartel – and the Baptists are left wondering where their drive for social improvement went so wrong."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"The fear that technology of our own creation will rise up and destroy us is deeply coded into our culture."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"The Greeks expressed this fear in the Prometheus Myth – Prometheus brought the destructive power of fire, and more generally technology (“techne”), to man, for which Prometheus was condemned to perpetual torture by the gods."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"My view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people. The idea that it will at some point develop a mind of its own and decide that it has motivations that lead it to try to kill us is a superstitious handwave."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"In short, AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"My response is that their position is non-scientific – What is the testable hypothesis?"
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"First, recall that John Von Neumann responded to Robert Oppenheimer’s famous hand-wringing about his role creating nuclear weapons – which helped end World War II and prevent World War III – with, “Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin.”"
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Third, California is justifiably famous for our many thousands of cults, from EST to the Peoples Temple, from Heaven’s Gate to the Manson Family."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"But some are very dangerous indeed, and cults have a notoriously hard time straddling the line that ultimately leads to violence and death."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"And the reality, which is obvious to everyone in the Bay Area but probably not outside of it, is that “AI risk” has developed into a cult, which has suddenly emerged into the daylight of global press attention and the public conversation."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Millenarianism is the belief by a group or movement [AI risk doomers] in a coming fundamental transformation of society [the arrival of AI], after which all things will be changed [AI utopia, dystopia, and/or end of the world]."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Only dramatic events [AI bans, airstrikes on datacenters, nuclear strikes on unregulated AI] are seen as able to change the world [prevent AI] and the change is anticipated to be brought about, or survived, by a group of the devout and dedicated."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"In most millenarian scenarios, the disaster or battle to come [AI apocalypse, or its prevention] will be followed by a new, purified world [AI bans] in which the believers will be rewarded [or at least acknowledged to have been correct all along]."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"This is a relatively recent doomer concern that branched off from and somewhat took over the “AI risk” movement that I described above."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"The tipoff to the nature of the AI societal risk claim is its own term, “AI alignment”. Alignment with what? Human values. Whose human values?"
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"On the one hand, there is no absolutist free speech position. First, every country, including the United States, makes at least some content illegal."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Second, there are certain kinds of content, like child pornography and incitements to real world violence, that are nearly universally agreed to be off limits – legal or not – by virtually every society. So any technological platform that facilitates or generates content – speech – is going to have some restrictions."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"On the other hand, the slippery slope is not a fallacy, it’s an inevitability."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Its proponents claim the wisdom to engineer AI-generated speech and thought that are good for society, and to ban AI-generated speech and thoughts that are bad for society"
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Its opponents claim that the thought police are breathtakingly arrogant and presumptuous – and often outright criminal, at least in the US – and in fact are seeking to become a new kind of fused government-corporate-academic authoritarian speech dictatorship ripped straight from the pages of George Orwell’s 1984."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"As the proponents of both “trust and safety” and “AI alignment” are clustered into the very narrow slice of the global population that characterizes the American coastal elites – which includes many of the people who work in and write about the tech industry – many of my readers will find yourselves primed to argue that dramatic restrictions on AI output are required to avoid destroying society."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"If you don’t agree with the prevailing niche morality that is being imposed on both social media and AI via ever-intensifying speech codes, you should also realize that the fight over what AI is allowed to say/generate will be even more important – by a lot – than the fight over social media censorship."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"AI is highly likely to be the control layer for everything in the world. How it is allowed to operate is going to matter perhaps more than anything else has ever mattered."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"In short, don’t let the thought police suppress AI."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"We’ve been through two such technology-driven unemployment panic cycles in our recent past – the outsourcing panic of the 2000’s, and the automation panic of the 2010’s."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"When technology is applied to production, we get productivity growth – an increase in output generated by a reduction in inputs. The result is lower prices for goods and services. As prices for goods and services fall, we pay less for them, meaning that we now have extra spending power with which to buy other things. This increases demand in the economy, which drives the creation of new production – including new products and new industries – which then creates new jobs for the people who were replaced by machines in prior jobs. The result is a larger economy with higher material prosperity, more industries, more products, and more jobs."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"We also get higher wages. This is because, at the level of the individual worker, the marketplace sets compensation as a function of the marginal productivity of the worker."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"A worker in a technology-infused business will be more productive than a worker in a traditional business. The employer will either pay that worker more money as he is now more productive, or another employer will, purely out of self interest."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"The result is that technology introduced into an industry generally not only increases the number of jobs in the industry but also raises wages."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"If a market economy is allowed to function normally and if technology is allowed to be introduced freely, this is a perpetual upward cycle that never ends."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"For, as Milton Friedman observed, “Human wants and needs are endless” – we always want more than we have. A technology-infused market economy is the way we get closer to delivering everything everyone could conceivably want, but never all the way there"
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"It would mean a takeoff rate of economic productivity growth that would be absolutely stratospheric, far beyond any historical precedent."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Suppose AI once again replaces that labor? The cycle would repeat, driving consumer welfare, economic growth, and job and wage growth even higher."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"As it happens, this was a central claim of Marxism, that the owners of the means of production – the bourgeoisie – would inevitably steal all societal wealth from the people who do the actual work – the proletariat."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"The flaw in this theory is that, as the owner of a piece of technology, it’s not in your own interest to keep it to yourself – in fact the opposite, it’s in your own interest to sell it to as many customers as possible."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"And so in reality, every new technology – even ones that start by selling to the rarefied air of high-paying big companies or wealthy consumers – rapidly proliferates until it’s in the hands of the largest possible mass market, ultimately everyone on the planet."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"That last point is key. Would Elon be even richer if he only sold cars to rich people today? No."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"In short, everyone gets the thing – as we saw in the past with not just cars but also electricity, radio, computers, the Internet, mobile phones, and search engines. The makers of such technologies are highly motivated to drive down their prices until everyone on the planet can afford them."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Not because such vendors are foolish or generous but precisely because they are greedy – they want to maximize the size of their market, which maximizes their profits."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"So what happens is the opposite of technology driving centralization of wealth – individual customers of the technology, ultimately including everyone on the planet, are empowered instead, and capture most of the generated value."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Marx was wrong then, and he’s wrong now."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"It is, it’s just not being driven by technology, it’s being driven by the reverse, by the sectors of the economy that are the most resistant to new technology, that have the most government intervention to prevent the adoption of new technology like AI – specifically housing, education, and health care."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"But now let’s address the fifth, the one I actually agree with: AI will make it easier for bad people to do bad things."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"The AI cat is obviously already out of the bag. You can learn how to build AI from thousands of free online courses, books, papers, and videos, and there are outstanding open source implementations proliferating by the day."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"So instead, there are two very straightforward ways to address the risk of bad people doing bad things with AI, and these are precisely what we should focus on."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"First, we have laws on the books to criminalize most of the bad things that anyone is going to do with AI."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"We can simply focus on preventing those crimes when we can, and prosecuting them when we cannot."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Digital creation and alteration of both real and fake content was already here before AI; the answer is not to ban word processors and Photoshop – or AI – but to use technology to build a system that actually solves the problem."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"second, let’s mount major efforts to use AI for good, legitimate, defensive purposes. Let’s put AI to work in cyberdefense, in biological defense, in hunting terrorists, and in everything else that we do to keep ourselves, our communities, and our nation safe."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"AI isn’t just being developed in the relatively free societies of the West, it is also being developed by the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"China has a vastly different vision for AI than we do – they view it as a mechanism for authoritarian population control, full stop."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"They are not even being secretive about this, they are very clear about it, and they are already pursuing their agenda."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"The single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we – the United States and the West – do not."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"I propose a simple strategy for what to do about this – in fact, the same strategy President Ronald Reagan used to win the first Cold War with the Soviet Union."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"We should seek to win the race to global AI technological superiority and ensure that China does not."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"In the process, we should drive AI into our economy and society as fast and hard as we possibly can, in order to maximize its gains for economic productivity and human potential."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Big AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can – but not allowed to achieve regulatory capture, not allowed to establish a government-protect cartel that is insulated from market competition due to incorrect claims of AI risk."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Startup AI companies should be allowed to build AI as fast and aggressively as they can. They should neither confront government-granted protection of big companies, nor should they receive government assistance."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Open source AI should be allowed to freely proliferate and compete with both big AI companies and startups. There should be no regulatory barriers to open source whatsoever."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"Even when open source does not beat companies, its widespread availability is a boon to students all over the world who want to learn how to build and use AI to become part of the technological future, and will ensure that AI is available to everyone who can benefit from it no matter who they are or how much money they have."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"To prevent the risk of China achieving global AI dominance, we should use the full power of our private sector, our scientific establishment, and our governments in concert to drive American and Western AI to absolute global dominance, including ultimately inside China itself. We win, they lose."
— Marc Andreessen
Why AI Will Save the World | Andreessen Horowitz"First, there is the undeniable, irrepressible phenomenon that Rap Genius already is – the definitive online community of rap aficionados; one of the fastest growing web sites in Y Combinator's history; a thriving ecosystem of ideas, artists, and fans."
— Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen – Why Andreessen Horowitz Is Investing in Rap Genius"CEO Tom shares Jeff Bezos's D.E. Shaw pedigree and codes up a storm."
— Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen – Why Andreessen Horowitz Is Investing in Rap Genius"Generalize out to many other categories of text... annotate the world... be the knowledge about the knowledge... create the Internet Talmud."
— Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen – Why Andreessen Horowitz Is Investing in Rap Genius"Only a handful of people know that the big missing feature from the web browser – the feature that was supposed to be in from the start but didn't make it – is the ability to annotate any page on the Internet with commentary and additional information."
— Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen – Why Andreessen Horowitz Is Investing in Rap Genius"So we built a feature called ""group annotations"" right into the browser – and it worked great – all users could comment on any page and discussions quickly ensued."
— Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen – Why Andreessen Horowitz Is Investing in Rap Genius"I often wonder how the Internet would have turned out differently if users had been able to annotate everything – to add new layers of knowledge to all knowledge, on and on, ad infinitum."
— Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen – Why Andreessen Horowitz Is Investing in Rap Genius"First obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of success"
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"Second obvious fact: there is an incredibly wide divergence of caliber and quality for the three core elements of each startup -- team, product, and market."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"customers are knocking down your door to get the product; the main goal is to actually answer the phone and respond to all the emails from people who want to buy."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"Market matters most."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"Well, first question: Since team is the thing you have the most control over at the start, and everyone wants to have a great team, what does a great team actually get you?"
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"In my experience, the most frequent case of great team paired with bad product and/or terrible market is the second- or third-time entrepreneur whose first company was a huge success. People get cocky, and slip up."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"A great team is a team that will always beat a mediocre team, given the same market and product"
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"Can't great products sometimes create huge new markets? Absolutely."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"as a startup founder, what should I do about all this?"
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"I believe that the life of any startup can be divided into two parts: before product/market fit (call this ""BPMF"") and after product/market fit (""APMF"")."
— Marc Andreessen
EE204 Business Management for Engineers and Computer Scientists"in almost every case, the cause was actually product/market fit."
— Marc Andreessen
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