Marc Andreessen on AI Winters and Agent Breakthroughs

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This episode originally aired on the Latent Space Podcast. Marc Andreessen has watched AI cycle through summers and winters for more than 35 years, from coding in Lisp in 1989 to backing the foundation model companies today. He argues that the current moment is not another start, but the payoff from eight decades of foundational research catalyzed by four distinct breakthroughs, large language models, reasoning, agents, and self-improvement. He also makes the case that the combination of a language model, a Unix shell, and a file system represent one of the most important software architectures in a generation. Swyx and Alessio Fanelli speak with Marc Andreessen, co-founder and general partner at A16z.

**Marc Andreessen** (0:48)
Something about AI that causes the people in the field, I would say, to become both excessively utopian and excessively apocalyptic. But having said that, I think what's actually happened is an enormous amount of topical progress that built up over time. For example, we now know the neural network is the correct architecture. I will tell you, there was a 60-year run where that was like 70 years, or that was controversial.
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, which is like, it's an overnight success because it's like, bam, ChatGPT hits, and then O1 hits, and then open call hits. And these are overnight, radical overnight transformative successes, but they're drawing on an 80-year wellspring backlog 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 very serious hardcore research. If I were 18, this is what I would be spending all of my time on. This is such an incredible conceptual breakthrough.

**Shawn Wang** (1:42)
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**Alessio Fanelli** (2:32)
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Latent Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swyx, editor of Latent Space.

**Shawn Wang** (2:38)
Hello, and we're in A16z with A, Marc and Jason, welcome. Yes.

**Marc Andreessen** (2:43)
Yes. A and what, half of 16?

**Shawn Wang** (2:46)
A1. Exactly. Apparently, this is the final few days in your current office. You're moving across the road.

**Marc Andreessen** (2:53)
We have a limousine we have from Projects Underway, but yeah. 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.

**Shawn Wang** (2:59)
It's beautiful.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:00)
Yeah. Great.

**Shawn Wang** (3:00)
Thank you. 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 Rune and I wanted to give him something to 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 Rune says there was an internal meeting in A16z to reorient around Gen.EI. Obviously, you have, but was there a meeting? What was that?

**Marc Andreessen** (3:32)
I mean, I don't know. Look, I've been doing AI since the late 80s. So I don't know how I got all that. As far as I'm concerned, this stuff has all Johnny come lately. I mean, look, we've been doing AI our entire existence. I mean, we've been doing AI machine learning 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.
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 one of their names, like Expert Systems, and they were of Lisp and Lisp machines. I coded at Lisp. I was coding at Lisp in 1989 That was the language of the AI future. Yeah, so this is something that we're completely comfortable with. We've been doing it the whole time and are very enthusiastic about.