Marc Andreessen introspects on The Death of the Browser, Pi + OpenClaw, and Why "This Time Is Different"

**Marc Andreessen** (0:00)
Something about AI that causes the people in the field, I would say, to become both excessively utopian and excessively apocalyptic. Having said that, I think what's actually happened is an enormous amount of topical progress that built up over time. And like, for example, we now know the neural network is the correct architecture. And I will tell you, like, there was a 60-year run where that was like, you know, or even 70 years where that was controversial. And so the way I think about what's happening is basically, I think about basically the period we're in right now is it's, I call it 80-year overnight success, right? Which is like, it's an overnight success because it's like, bam, you know, ChatGPT hits and then O1 hits and then, you know, OpenClaw hits and like, you know, these are like overnight, like, radical overnight transformative successes, but they're drawing on an 80-year sort of wellspring backlog, you know, of ideas and thinking. It's not just that it's all brand new, it's that it's an unlock of all of these decades of, like, very serious hardcore research. If I were 18, like, this is 100, this is what I would be spending all of my time on. This is like such an incredible conceptual breakthrough.

**swyx** (0:54)
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**Alessio** (1:44)
Hey, everyone, welcome to the Lidian Space Pockets. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swix, editor of Latent Space.

**swyx** (1:50)
Hello, and we're in A16z with A, Marc Andreessen, welcome.

**Marc Andreessen** (1:54)
Yes, yes, A and what, half of 16?

**swyx** (1:57)
Something like that.

**Marc Andreessen** (1:58)
A1.

**swyx** (1:58)
Exactly. Apparently, this is the final few days in your current office, you're moving across the road.

**Marc Andreessen** (2:04)
We have a limousine, we have some projects underway, but yeah, this is, actually, this is the original, we're in actually the original office. We're in the, we're in the, we're in the whole thing.

**swyx** (2:11)
It's beautiful. So I have to come out, this is a, you know, I wanted to pick a spicy start. In October 2022, I just made friends with Ruen, and I wanted to give him something to sort of be spicy about. And I said, it will never not be funny that A16z was constantly going, the future is where the smart people choose to spend their time, and then going deep into crypto and not in AI. And that was in October 2022 And Ruen says there was an internal meeting in A16z to reorient around Gen.

**Marc Andreessen** (2:39)
AI.

**swyx** (2:40)
Obviously, you have, but was there a meeting? What was that?

**Marc Andreessen** (2:43)
I mean, I've been doing AI since the late 80s. So I don't know, as far as I'm concerned, this stuff is all Johnny come lately. Yeah, I mean, look, we've been doing AI our entire existence. I mean, we've been doing AI machine learning, deep, you know, deep. We've been doing this stuff way from the beginning, obviously. AI is just core to computer science.
I actually view them as quite continuous. Ben and I both have computer science degrees. You know, we both, Ben and I actually both are old enough to remember the actual AI boom in the 1980s.
There was a big AI boom at the time. And there was a, there's one of their names like Expert Systems and lived in the era of like Lisp and Lisp machines. I coded in Lisp. I was coding in Lisp in 1989 That was the language of the AI future. Yeah. So this is something that we're like completely, you're completely comfortable with. I've been doing the whole time and are very enthusiastic about.

**swyx** (3:29)