Beyond Chatbots: Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on AI's Future

**Marc Andreessen** (0:00)
I think we don't yet know the shape and form of the ultimate products. There's one just obvious historical analogy is, you know, the personal computer, from sort of invention in 1975 through to, you know, basically 1992, was a text prompt system. 17 years in, you know, the whole industry took a left turn into GUIs, and never looked back. And then by the way, you know, five years after that, the industry took a left turn into web browsers and never looked back, right? And you know, look, I'm sure there will be chatbots 20 years from now, but I'm pretty confident that both the current chatbot companies and many new companies are going to figure out many kinds of user experiences that are radically different that we don't even know yet.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:32)
Every major technology shift brings new capabilities, new pressures, and new questions about how progress unfolds. At a16z's Runtime Conference, I sat down with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz to discuss the current state of AI, how reasoning and creativity are evolving, how markets adjust to new technology, and what this moment means for founders and institutions shaping what comes next. Now, to Marc and Ben.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:58)
Please join me in welcoming Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz with general partner, Erik Torenberg.

**Ben Horowitz** (1:15)
Thank you for the rock him who did that.

**Marc Andreessen** (1:17)
Ben picked the music.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:19)
Marc, there's been a lot of talk lately about the limitations of LLMs, that they can't do true invention of, say, new science, that they can't do true creative genius, that it's just combining or packaging. You have thoughts here, let's see you.

**Marc Andreessen** (1:34)
Yeah, so for me, it's, yes, you get all these questions, and yeah, they usually come in either sort of, are language models intelligent in the sense of, can they actually process information and have sort of conceptual breakthroughs the way that people can? And then there's our language models or video models creative. Can they create new art? Actually have genuine creative breakthroughs. And of course, my answer to both of those is, well, can people do those things? And I think there's two questions there, which is, okay, even if some people are quote unquote intelligent, as in having original conceptual breakthroughs and not just, let's just say regurgitating the training set or following the scripts, what percentage of people can actually do that? I've only met a few. Some of them are here in the room, but not that many. Most people never do. And then creativity, I mean, how many people are actually genuinely creative, right? And so you kind of point to a Beethoven or a Van Gogh or something like that. You're like, okay, that's creativity, and yeah, that's creativity, and then how many Beethovens and Van Goghs are there? Obviously not very many. So one is just like, okay, like if these things clear the bar of 99.99% of humanity, then that's pretty interesting just in and of itself. But then you dig into it further and you're like, okay, like how many actual real conceptual breakthroughs have there ever been actually ever in human history as compared to sort of remixing ideas? If you look at the history of technology, it's almost always the case that the big breakthroughs are the result of usually at least 40 years of sort of work ahead of time, four decades.
In fact, language models themselves are the culmination of eight decades of previous work. And so there's remixing. And then in the arts, it's the exact same thing, novels and music and everything. There are clearly creative leaps, but there's just tremendous amounts of influence from people who came before. And even if you think about somebody with the creativity of Beethoven, there was a lot of Beethoven in Mozart and Haydn and in the composers that came before. And so there's just tremendous amounts of remixing and combination. And so it's a little bit of an angels dancing on the head of a pin question, which is like, if you can get within 0.01% of kind of world-beating generational creativity intelligence, like you're probably all the way there. So emotionally, I want to like hold out hope that there is still something special about human creativity. And I certainly believe that. And I very much want to believe that. But I don't know, when I use these things, I'm like, wow, they seem to be awfully smart and awfully creative. So I'm pretty convinced that they're going to clear the bar.

**Erik Torenberg** (3:33)
Yeah. I think that seems to be a common theme in your analysis when people talk about the limitations of LMS. Can they do transfer learning or just learning in general? You seem to ask, can people do this?