888: Marc Andreessen | Exploring the Power, Peril, and Potential of AI

888: Marc Andreessen | Exploring the Power, Peril, and Potential of AI

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[00:00:18] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:21] Marc Andreessen: You know, one argument is, look, the smartest people are going to be so much better at using the tool, right? That they're going to just like run way out ahead of everybody, and that's going to be a big driver of inequality. The other argument, you can make those arguments that these studies are already showing, which is, no, all of a sudden people with less intelligence or skill or experience all of a sudden have a superpower they didn't previously have.

[00:00:42] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger on The Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional drug trafficker, former jihadi, four-star general, rocket scientist, or Russian chess grandmaster.

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[00:01:47] Today, a deep dive on AI with Marc Andreessen, founding partner at Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16Z, one of Silicon Valley's most well-known venture capital firms. Marc was around during the very early stages of the Internet, or at least the World Wide Web, in part inventing the web browser as we know it today. An innovator and inventor himself, I am keen to hear his perspective on AI, why it probably won't actually try to kill us all, contrary to popular belief or whatever happens to be trending right now depending on when you listen to this, of course. And just a note, today I will be referring to AI both as AI and as an LLM which is a specialized type of artificial intelligence that has been trained on vast amounts of text to understand existing content and generate original content. LLM stands for Large Language Model. It's something like ChatGPT, for example, if you've used that. Anyway, here we go with Marc Andreessen.

[00:02:44] I'm going to do that sh*tty journalist thing where like you would expect from somebody on a 10-minute segment on a mainstream news channel. But I think a great hook and what a lot of people are wondering is, both from age 20 to age 60, is will AI kill us all either by accident or because it pulled one over on us? And I know you're not exactly utopian when it comes to AI, but you're not as cynical as a lot of the people out there that are readily available opining on this topic.

[00:03:13] Marc Andreessen: I agree.

[00:03:13] Jordan Harbinger: So, what is the AI alignment problem that you see people keep telling you you're ignoring?

[00:03:20] Marc Andreessen: So, there's two dimensions to what's called AI alignment. The significance to the vocabulary because it actually started out as AI safety.

[00:03:28] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:28] Marc Andreessen: So, 20 years ago, the topic was AI safety and then about eight, 10 years ago, it kind of flipped AI alignment and that gives you kind of the two dimensions to this. And so the original AI safety basically was like the Terminator movies, right?

[00:03:38] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:38] Marc Andreessen: So like we're all into Hamilton and Terminator and like the machines are coming to kill us. And we're going to wake up, basically, a Skynet kind of thing and it's going to have like gleaming metal robots with laser guns.

[00:03:48] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:48] Marc Andreessen: Like it's going to kill us, right? Because it's going to be a battle to the death for the domination of earth and so forth. And so that was sort of the original thing and that was so-called AI safety. And then, about 10 years ago, basically what happened was a bunch of other people came along and basically said, "Well, it's not just whether AI is going to kill us, it's also whether it's going to destroy our society," right? So maybe it leaves us physically alive, but it basically decides to like program our brains.

[00:04:10] Jordan Harbinger: Mmm.

[00:04:11] Marc Andreessen: And sort of this concern arose at the same time that the same concern arose for social media, and so—

[00:04:16] Jordan Harbinger: Which is programming our brains anyway.

[00:04:17] Marc Andreessen: Well, that's the theory. Right.

[00:04:18] Jordan Harbinger: Just not directly.

[00:04:18] Marc Andreessen: So, well, this is the thing. This is the thing. So basically, what happened, and you'll recall, just take a brief digression of what happened to social media, which is social media was, it was either viewed as like completely useless.

[00:04:26] Jordan Harbinger: Mmm.

[00:04:26] Marc Andreessen: Which is like, what did your cat have for breakfast? Who cares?

[00:04:28] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:28] Marc Andreessen: Or it was viewed as like purely a good thing, right? And so when like Obama ran for reelection in 2012, it was like the social media campaign and there were all these like glowing cover stories about how incredible social media was. And then you remember the Arab Spring.

[00:04:38] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, yeah.

[00:04:39] Marc Andreessen: Social media was going to bring democracy to the Middle East, right? And then in 2016, a different candidate won.

[00:04:45] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:46] Marc Andreessen: And the sort of political valence of social media changed too. Like this is the worst thing in history. Like, you know, nobody could have possibly voted for this other candidate on purpose. They were obviously tricked and they were tricked by some combination of the Russians and Facebook and social media in general. And it was at that moment the switch flipped in social media that also flipped in this sort of AI safety alignment thing. And so that's sort of when AI became AI alignment. And so now, AI alignment is much more concerned not with, are the robots going to kill us? It's much more of, basically, is AI going to give the correct answers?

[00:05:13] And specifically, the answers that are, quote-unquote, "aligned with human values." Now, what's AI safety world of the people who worry about this stuff is the AI safety people are very, now, frustrated by this because they're like, we were never worried whether AI was going to use, like, bad words or going to have, like, the wrong political opinion. Like, we're worried whether it's going to come to kill us.

[00:05:30] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:05:31] Marc Andreessen: The AI safety people have renamed themselves as the AI-not-kill-everyone-ists.

[00:05:35] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that has a great ring to it.

[00:05:37] Marc Andreessen: Which is very, which is very catchy.

[00:05:38] Jordan Harbinger: Rolls right off the top.

[00:05:39] Marc Andreessen: Exactly. And so there's like a schism in this movement. And basically what's happened is the people who were worried about the, "Is it going to kill everybody?" that movement basically has been hijacked by a movement to basically try to do, say for good or for bad, the kind of speech controls, you know, sort of opinion controls that you now see on social media, censorship controls. And now, there's basically a big push to apply those to AI.

[00:05:59] Jordan Harbinger: That is scary. And I definitely want to get there, but I'm going to get there a little bit slower because I know earlier pre-show we were talking about Sam Harris. And he gives this example of like an AI that's purpose built, let's say for chess, it's the best chess player in the world. Garry Kasparov waking up on his best day, gets beaten by this thing 10 times out of 10. And if the fate of humanity depends on us beating this chess AI, humanity's lost forever 10 times out of 10. That's not a good scenario. But how likely is it really that we build a general intelligence that's this angry god in a box that ends up killing us all? Because building, and I know very little about specific computer type of applications, but here, I would imagine it's a lot easier to build an AI that's really, really good at one thing like chess versus an AI that's like, "I can outsmart all living humans."

[00:06:47] Marc Andreessen: Well, this gets to this concept of what they call so-called general and artificial general intelligence, which is the idea that basically it's going to be smarter than everything. So go back a little bit in history here, because the idea of sort of an anxiety about a machine that's going to like outperform humans and then lead to our demise, like that's not new. Have you ever heard, when you were a kid, you ever hear this thing, the Ballad of John Henry?

[00:07:05] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, but I don't know what it anymore.

[00:07:09] Marc Andreessen: There was a whole anxiety around mechanization that took place during the industrial revolution and specifically, you know, there were a lot of these same concerns. It was like, are these things going to be death machines? And by the way, you know, technology was militarized, like the people that, you know, they did make tanks and fighter jets and so forth and guns with it. But also there was this concern about eliminating all the jobs and, you know, causing basically everybody to become unemployed.

[00:07:26] So there were a lot of these same anxieties. around industrialization. And so in those days, if you were like a big, strong guy, like a job that you would have is you would go build the railroads and you would literally drive, drive spikes, you know, we've seen this in railroad tracks, you drive—

[00:07:37] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:07:37] Marc Andreessen: —spikes into the beams—

[00:07:38] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:07:38] Marc Andreessen: —to connect the tracks together. The legend goes is there was this guy, John Henry, who was like the best at doing that. And then one day the nerds showed up with a pile driving machine, right, which is this steam-powered thing that could do that even better. And then there was this big contest, the whole day long contest for John Henry and the machine competed to drive the most bikes. And it turns out John Henry won the contest and then dropped out of a heart attack.

[00:07:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yes. I was going to say, is this the one where the guy dies the day after he wins? Yeah. Beats the machine. Yeah.

[00:08:05] Marc Andreessen: Exactly. And so like that, that became literally like a man, there's like big dispute over whether he probably existed. There was something like that, but that became kind of this—

[00:08:12] Jordan Harbinger: Learn how to use the machine.

[00:08:14] Marc Andreessen: Yeah. How to use the machine. Right. And of course, you know, that led to predictions of like mass unemployment and so forth.

[00:08:17] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:18] Marc Andreessen: And then, of course, what happened was technology, the result of that was massive job creation. So the opposite of what everybody was worried about happened. It turned out that the existence of machines actually created jobs as opposed to destroying them. And so, which is why we sit here today and we have many more jobs in the world. So, this is a very old concern.

[00:08:33] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:08:34] Marc Andreessen: It's kind of popping back up again. And so the way to think about this is very consistent with kind of this historical model, which is like, okay, what is the role of technology and how the world works and how the economy works and how people work? And there's sort of a zero sum view of it, which is either we do something or the machine does it. But then there's the other thing, which is the thing that actually happens, which is there's a positive sum view of it, which is what machines do is they amplify human capabilities, right? So like you plus a computer, right, is better than just you.

[00:08:59] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:00] Marc Andreessen: By the way, you plus a computer is much better at chess, right? You plus a word processor is much better at writing.

[00:09:05] Jordan Harbinger: I was going to say at least the computer knows the rules of chess. Like we're starting pretty low here.

[00:09:09] Marc Andreessen: Your podcast, so you plus a digital editing software makes you a better podcast creator, right?

[00:09:14] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:14] Marc Andreessen: You plus a search engine makes you a better interviewer, right? You plus YouTube, right? Makes you a better broadcaster, right? You do things with technology in order to make yourself more effective. In economic terms, what that means is it's increasing the economic function called productivity. It's increasing output. And this is the economic phenomenon by which machines actually create jobs as opposed to destroying jobs. So, if we were to get to what the sort of, I don't know, utopians, dystopians hope for, which is this idea of artificial general intelligence, the result would be a massive takeoff of economic productivity that would lead to an economic boom far in excess of anything we've ever seen in history, which would lead to so much job creation that we would once again be like completely out of human labor. And this has happened for 300 years.

[00:09:51] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:09:51] Marc Andreessen: Like this has been the pattern and I fully expect it to continue.

[00:09:53] Jordan Harbinger: We were talking, I think maybe even before you walked in, about how Socrates was like, "Books?"

[00:09:57] Marc Andreessen: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:58] Jordan Harbinger: "People aren't going to memorize anything." And then, it became like, now these people are just writing books based on knowledge that they've consumed from other books. But it's somehow still so hard for us to imagine. that there's more work to be done than we're doing right now—

[00:10:10] Marc Andreessen: Let's take chess.

[00:10:11] Jordan Harbinger: —for some reasons.

[00:10:11] Marc Andreessen: Let's take chess. So there are more people playing chess now than ever before. Chess as an industry is bigger than ever before. Like chess as a competitive community is bigger than ever before.

[00:10:18] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:18] Marc Andreessen: Like Internet chess is huge. Like chess has never been a bigger game. And so basically what happened was when chess got solved by computers, basically that was like a catalyst for a surge of interest in the field and now more people play chess than ever. And so it's the thing, and again, it's this thing. There's a very kind of simple thing here, which is like the world runs according to human intent. And there's all these people who kind of want to paint into it that the machines are going to get their intent, but like machines are just machines. We decide what to do with them. And just because there's a computer that can play chess better than you does not mean it's no longer fun to play chess.

[00:10:43] Jordan Harbinger: You don't think that the retraining potentially for certain classes of professionals will be very painful in the short term? Or is that just a temporary, is that just something that has to happen? Like ripping off the band aid or not needing so many second year associates in a law firm.

[00:10:57] Marc Andreessen: I mean, this is always a concern. So let me make it a very explicit kind of case study.

[00:11:01] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:01] Marc Andreessen: This would be the shift from horses to cars. You know, people who were literally blacksmiths?

[00:11:05] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:05] Marc Andreessen: And then, basically the blacksmith, that field no longer was, let's say a growth industry, right?

[00:11:10] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:11] Marc Andreessen: By the way, there are still blacksmiths because there are still like, it's ironic what happens, right? Because like now rich people ride horses and so now they hire blacksmiths—

[00:11:17] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:11:17] Marc Andreessen: —to take care of their horses.

[00:11:17] Jordan Harbinger: Collect chainmail or whatever at the Renaissance Festival.

[00:11:19] Marc Andreessen: Or do the reenactment. Exactly. They do the reenactments. Exactly. They reenact, you know?

[00:11:23] Jordan Harbinger: There's still barista and then on weekends he's hammering out chainmail. I've seen this.

[00:11:27] Marc Andreessen: Exactly. Imagine telling people 200 years ago that someday there were going to be chainmail hobbyists.

[00:11:32] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:11:32] Marc Andreessen: Right? Or people riding horses for fun.

[00:11:34] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:11:34] Marc Andreessen: Like people have been you're out of your mind.

[00:11:36] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:11:36] Marc Andreessen: How on earth is that going to happen? But look there was this transition there were a lot of blacksmiths all of a sudden they weren't needed because you didn't need the horses But you didn't what you didn't need was a lot of car mechanics.

[00:11:44] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:44] Marc Andreessen: And so you did have to do this retraining thing I would just make a couple of observations there. One is if that's the kind of transition in an economy that is going to happen and transitions like that happen in the economy all the time like you have to get to it. So delaying that from happening is basically leading people down a false path.

[00:11:58] Jordan Harbinger: Mmm.

[00:11:59] Marc Andreessen: So the thing that you would not have wanted to do at that time is to tell blacksmiths, "You know what, it's fine. You're going to have horses forever. In fact, you know what, you should have your kids become, you know, you should be your apprentice blacksmiths because it's going to be a safe field for them." Like you don't want to like lie to people and represent the things that are going to be happening in a way that they're not. And then, the other side is you want to actually help them make the jump. It turns out one of the things AI is really good at is helping people learn things.

[00:12:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:12:20] Marc Andreessen: Right?

[00:12:21] Jordan Harbinger: Interesting.

[00:12:21] Marc Andreessen: As usual with these things, there's a silver lining in here, which basically is one of the things I think we need to do is unleash AI as a tool to help people learn. A lot of people already use ChatGPT precisely for that purpose. And so I think that's a real thing.

[00:12:31] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I think, I mean, we use it for that kind of thing all the time. There's associated small problems with it too. And I wish, of course, I could just plug a whole book in there and be like, just tell me the important parts. Although it does make me want to be lazier in a way that's probably not super healthy for me as a reader and a podcaster, but look, I am not usually one who says halt technological innovation because of these concerns. And I'm actually kind of surprised at the number of people who in probably any other field would be like, "No, we don't need elevator operators instead of an automated elevator." And you'll see those people argue that in one breath while in the next breath being like, but AI is dangerous and it's going to be a problem. And when I was I'm old enough to remember that we were worried about robots taking our jobs, building cars, building computers, whatever it was, and now that it's actually going to take the jobs of the lawyers and the doctors, it's like, "Well, wait a minute. This is the underpinning of civilization. We can't have that." And I felt like it's funny when it wasn't your job. You didn't care. Now, that it's like your profession or the one you came up in, it's just a tragedy that is shaking the grounds of the earth that we walk on. And I find that, I don't know if it's deliberately hypocritical or just that's human nature. I'm not sure. I found that very, it's like, robotic Uber driver, "Sorry, bro. Price of progress." Robotic doctor, "Impossible. Dangerous. Going to kill everyone."

[00:13:49] Marc Andreessen: Do you remember the learn to code meme?

[00:13:51] Jordan Harbinger: Uh, yes, like, that wasn't that long ago.

[00:13:53] Marc Andreessen: So in the 2000s, the learn to code thing was, it came up during the environmental kind of movement, the move to ban coal. There was always this question of what are the coal miners going to do, and there was this thing, they should learn to code. And then in the 2010s, the journalist jobs started to disappear. The journalists blame the Internet for the loss of the jobs. And so people who don't like journalists were like, well, we're being driven out of business by the Internet and the people who don't like journalists, their response was learn to code. And then of course, Twitter banned the meme. Under previous management, Twitter banned the meme.

[00:14:22] Jordan Harbinger: I didn't realize that's why it got banned.

[00:14:24] Marc Andreessen: That's why it got banned, yeah, pre-Elon. That's an example of the kind of thought control of the previous social media era. And again, it's like, okay, is an AI going to be allowed to suggest that people learn to code?

[00:14:34] Jordan Harbinger: I do find it interesting though, because I don't know if you know this, but journalists still exist.

[00:14:38] Marc Andreessen: They do.

[00:14:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And maybe, maybe there's not as many of them working in a certain paper, but Substack exists.

[00:14:46] Marc Andreessen: Well, so this is what happens. So professional podcaster is a new thing, right? So, what happens basically is change happens.

[00:14:50] Jordan Harbinger: It's a fake job. I get it.

[00:14:51] Marc Andreessen: What's that?

[00:14:52] Jordan Harbinger: It's a fake job. I understand. I'm with it.

[00:14:53] Marc Andreessen: Exactly. But no, it's literally what happens, right? So what happened? What created your field? What created your field was the technology change.

[00:15:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:15:01] Marc Andreessen: Right? You're able to, you know, with very little capital, you know, you don't need a giant studio. You don't need a giant like broadcast tower in the middle of Manhattan.

[00:15:06] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:06] Marc Andreessen: You're able to do what you do in a relatively small amount of CapEx. And then you're able to just go do it and you, I assume, don't have to ask anybody for permission.

[00:15:13] Jordan Harbinger: No.

[00:15:13] Marc Andreessen: You can interview whoever you want.

[00:15:14] Jordan Harbinger: So far so good.

[00:15:15] Marc Andreessen: You can put it out on YouTube and any number of other distribution platforms and off and away you go. And that's a field that, you know, literally didn't exist 20 years ago. And it's a massive growth field today. And so, what happens is these things shift. Douglas Adams had a great, you know, who wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

[00:15:30] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:15:30] Marc Andreessen: He had a great framing on this. He said, "New technologies are always received by society in sort of three stages depending on how old people are. If you're between zero and 15 years old when a new technology arrives, it's just the obvious order of the world."

[00:15:42] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:42] Marc Andreessen: It's just obvious that this thing exists, which by the way is how my eight-year-old reacts to AI. He's like, well, of course, the computer answers questions like why wouldn't it?

[00:15:48] Jordan Harbinger: What else is the computer good for?

[00:15:50] Marc Andreessen: Exactly, right. He said, "But if you're between the ages of 15 to 35, the technology is new and exciting and hot, and you might be able to make a living with it. And if you're above the age of 35, it's the end of the world."

[00:15:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's how I feel about TikTok, but I know I'm just old. That's the thing, I'm like, oh, the attention span, and look at this, and then I'm like, ah, this is how old people feel. What does that make me though? Damn it.

[00:16:09] Marc Andreessen: And in fact, they are not professional tiktokers.

[00:16:11] Yeah, right. That's like an entire profession.

[00:16:13] Jordan Harbinger: I get it I hate watch them occasionally.

[00:16:15] Marc Andreessen: And old fogies like you are, like, "What the hell is this?"

[00:16:17] Jordan Harbinger: Right. I'm like fine. I will go see that movie but not because i'm being influenced by this person. That's not working on me.

[00:16:22] Marc Andreessen: And this again, this is the cycle of things. So basically, what one form of labor becomes obsolete, another form of labor becomes like brand new and exciting. And then there's a natural rotation that takes place, but we've had 300 years of industrialization, right? And this kind of panic has recurred over and over again, kind of every step of the way. Before the COVID disruption in 2019, we had more jobs on the planet with more people employed at higher wages than ever. And so like the sort of theory that there's like some threat to jobs from like robotics or AI or software or whatever, I think is just, it's a fake threat. Like it's not actually a real thing and I'm not worried about it at all.

[00:16:53] Jordan Harbinger: That is so interesting because it seems like smart people are really, unless I or we are just missing something huge, smart people who normally would have a calmer reaction to something like this are freaking out. And the only time I see that is when it's like a religious belief. And I've heard you mentioned something along those lines, like, "Hey, this is not, it's no longer in the realm of scientific debate. It's the religious belief that this is going to cause a problem." I'm paraphrasing you and maybe doing it poorly, but are you kind of on that same page?

[00:17:23] Marc Andreessen: Yeah. Yeah. So what happens is people like basically, we got rid of, I mean, there's still religion, but like religion doesn't play a central role in our society as it used to.

[00:17:29] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:30] Marc Andreessen: And so basically what ends up happening is lots of scholars have observed what happens as people end up recreating religions. And they create religions basically around their anxieties, and then, of course, they deadlock, right? They sort of form groups and then they declare religious wars.

[00:17:41] Jordan Harbinger: Hmm.

[00:17:41] Marc Andreessen: There's basically at that point, you know, this is like a lot of our politics are like that.

[00:17:44] Jordan Harbinger: I was going to say that, but then I thought, do I want to do that right now?

[00:17:47] Marc Andreessen: I don't know if you've noticed, but people are not actually open to political discussion.

[00:17:51] Jordan Harbinger: I have noticed that. That is a thing. I normally don't interview politicians on this show unless there's some other really damn good reason to do so because, well, it's like talking about, I'm afraid to even mention the word religion or Christianity or Islam. Like some people are going to go, "Oh, that's good that you're open to that." And everyone else is going to be like, "How dare you?"

[00:18:10] Marc Andreessen: Yeah, exactly. Right.

[00:18:11] Jordan Harbinger: And you can't tiptoe around.

[00:18:12] Marc Andreessen: Yeah. And so, it's basically tell us when you get the emotional reaction like that, that's when you realize you've kind of turned it into a religious or kind of quasi religious territory.

[00:18:18] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:18:18] Marc Andreessen: And it's kind of best to just quietly step around it, let people do their thing.

[00:18:22] Jordan Harbinger: Agree. Yeah. Especially if you, I don't know, want to keep your audience and like chill mattresses like I do for a living.

[00:18:28] How good is AI in some of these fields, for example, is AI a fourth year associate at a law firm, how is it, how skilled is it, if it's in your office here at A16Z, is it like, "Oh, we could probably get rid of some of our analysts if we had this AI doing this for us," or is it like, "Well, that's five years away"? Or are you thinking like, "Marguida, it's been great knowing you, but we don't need so many partners over here."

[00:18:51] Marc Andreessen: Or vice versa.

[00:18:52] Jordan Harbinger: Or, actually, Marc, you should just retire.

[00:18:56] Marc Andreessen: Exactly.

[00:18:56] Jordan Harbinger: We're good. We have your personality in this little box.

[00:18:58] Marc Andreessen: Exactly.

[00:18:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And it doesn't yell as much, by the way.

[00:19:02] Marc Andreessen: Exactly, and seems smarter.

[00:19:04] This is sort of the nature of the actual kind of drama that's playing out right now in the Valley, and I think around the world around AI, like the actual substance of what's happening, which is this really unusual thing. It's a overnight breakthrough that's been 80 years in the making, right?

[00:19:16] So the original idea of AI as we know it today was actually in a paper written in 1943, the first paper on neural networks. It took 80 years to basically get this stuff to work and then all of a sudden it started working like incredibly well. So sitting here today, like in a sense, we're in year 81 and in a sense, we're in year one. And it's actually kind of more relevant, practically speaking, that we're actually in year one. Like this is like a brand new thing. Like a year ago, I didn't think what we see today is even possible, right?

[00:19:39] Jordan Harbinger: Really?

[00:19:39] Marc Andreessen: Yeah. I just, I thought it was still decades in the future and like all of a sudden it showed up.

[00:19:43] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:19:44] Marc Andreessen: And so, like, this is a very, very, very big advance. Now, having said that, like, a couple of things. Like, it is new and it's not yet perfect, right?

[00:19:51] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:51] Marc Andreessen: And so, I'll just give you a specific answer to your question. So, the problem with using AI for, for example, legal briefs right now is the way this generation of AI works, so-called generative AI, or large language models, the way it works is it's basically a very fancy autocomplete. And the same way that your phone will autocomplete a word, this thing will autocomplete a sentence or a paragraph or, like, an entire essay or an entire legal brief. The problem with it is it very badly wants to make you happy.

[00:20:14] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:15] Marc Andreessen: It's actually quite the opposite of, like, it wants to kill you. Like, it very badly wants to make you happy. And to make you happy, it will autocomplete with facts if it has them. And if it doesn't, it will make them up.

[00:20:23] Jordan Harbinger: That's the hallucination thing?

[00:20:24] Marc Andreessen: That's hallucination problem.

[00:20:25] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:20:25] Marc Andreessen: Now, the hallucination thing is really fascinating because If you are a scientist, or an academic, or a lawyer, and this thing is going to make things up, that is a giant problem.

[00:20:36] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, every lawyer, the day after that thing happened with a lawyer filed a brief, and it was like, according to Hamill vs. Harbinger, this, da da da, the day after that happened, I think everybody who'd ever gone to law school for more than five minutes got forwarded that case and was like, don't do this.

[00:20:51] Marc Andreessen: Don't do this.

[00:20:51] Jordan Harbinger: Or look at these guys who did this. Holy sh*t. I'm so glad that wasn't me.

[00:20:55] Marc Andreessen: Right. If you're a lawyer, you could get disbarred.

[00:20:57] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:20:57] Marc Andreessen: Right? One of the fun things you can do is you can go on Google Scholar, which has like, you know, the database of like scientific papers and you can search for as a large language model, which is sort of the tell that, you know, it's the thing that it spits at you when it's—

[00:21:09] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:21:09] Marc Andreessen: —when it's giving you a disclaimer that doesn't know the answer. And there are like a whole bunch of scientific papers that have been published in the last year that have the text as a large language model in them, which is to say, a scientist published under his own name, something that he actually generated with ChatGPT.

[00:21:20] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wow.

[00:21:21] Marc Andreessen: Which again, it's like, number one, it's like scientific, it's like publication malpractice. But number two, these things are not yet ready to write scientific papers because they will make up facts.

[00:21:29] Jordan Harbinger: Did they just not proofread the document? That's terrifying.

[00:21:32] Marc Andreessen: Yes, exactly. Apparently not, right? So, this is the thing, like the hallucination thing is a problem. I'll come back to that in a second.

[00:21:40] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:21:41] Marc Andreessen: But here's the other thing. There's another set of people for which this is actually pretty exciting, and this is like, you know, screenwriters or novelists or even actually some categories of lawyers, I'll come back to that one, which is basically another word for hallucination is creativity. We now have the first computer in the history of the world that's actually able to, like, literally imagine things, right?

[00:21:58] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:58] Marc Andreessen: And so if you're trying, if you want to write a screenplay, for example, and you're like give me 10 scenarios for X, Y, Z, different, ways for the couple to meet or whatever, like, it will happily make them up. And if you ask for 10 more it'll make them up, and if you ask for 10 more it'll make them up, and it'll just keep making stuff up for as long as you want it to. So computers, the way to think about this, computers historically have always been hyper literal. Computers will do exactly what you tell them to do, and if you're a professional programmer your life basically is making mistakes in what you tell the computer to do, the computer doing it literally and you having to go fix your mistakes.

[00:22:23] Jordan Harbinger: Right, yeah.

[00:22:24] Marc Andreessen: And as a programmer it's always your fault if the computer is doing something wrong. This is a new kind of computer that was called non-deterministic or probabilistic or the terms that we use for it. And this is a new kind of computer that will make stuff up. And we have never had a computer that will make stuff up, like it's like a brand new thing.

[00:22:40] Jordan Harbinger: It really is amazing.

[00:22:41] Marc Andreessen: Yeah.

[00:22:42] Jordan Harbinger: But how come it can't just say, by the way, I couldn't find any cases that said this, so here's a couple that I just made up.

[00:22:47] Marc Andreessen: This is the thing. So there's this category of technology challenge that I refer to as kind of these trillion, trillion-dollar problems, which basically is, that is a trillion-dollar problem, the amount of energy and effort that's going to solving that problem today in the technical community and AI is like super intense because whoever solves that problem is going to make like a trillion dollars.

[00:23:03] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:23:03] Marc Andreessen: It's like a primary area. Like we have a bunch of companies working on exactly that. And of course, the goal is like you actually still want it to be creative. You just wanted to be creative in the way that you described, which is you wanted to be creative and how it expresses itself, but not in how it makes things up. By the way, lawyers don't want a, just a totally literal, so for example, one of the, one of the reactions you get when you talk to lawyers about adopting this is, obviously, it cannot make up cases, but it is helpful to have it be creative, for example, to explore different arguments that might work in front of a jury.

[00:23:28] Jordan Harbinger: That's what law school is.

[00:23:29] Marc Andreessen: Exactly.

[00:23:30] Jordan Harbinger: Generally.

[00:23:31] Marc Andreessen: Right.

[00:23:31] Jordan Harbinger: A good one, I think.

[00:23:32] Marc Andreessen: Exactly. Like, yeah, different creative ways on how to explain things, right? And so there, there's an opportunity here to kind of fuse a literal minded approach with a creative approach. Technology's not quite there yet, but there are a lot of people working on it.

[00:23:41] Jordan Harbinger: Without getting ridiculously complicated, is the reason that's a trillion-dollar question that obviously the problem must be very difficult where the computer doesn't, quote-unquote, "know" if it's making something up. All that information exists on the same plane. Facts that it, quote-unquote, "knows," it's so hard not to talk about AI as if it's alive because it's the limitation of I guess our own mind but facts that the computer, quote-unquote, "knows" versus facts that it generates, it just can't tell the difference yet. That's the issue?

[00:24:09] Marc Andreessen: I think this is very fascinating I think this goes to the nature of how this thing works. And this is the big breakthrough. So the way that these things work is it doesn't start out actually knowing any facts. It actually doesn't have like a concept of fact. It doesn't know any. Like what it has basically is it has the complete corpus of all text ever written by human beings, right?

[00:24:23] Jordan Harbinger: Of course, right.

[00:24:24] Marc Andreessen: So it's got all content off the Internet. It's got like all these books And of course, there's all these huge fights over copyright.

[00:24:28] Jordan Harbinger: I was going to say how is it legal for them to be like, "Oh, I know everything about Harry Potter." JK rowling's like, "Well, wait. Where's my check?"

[00:24:33] Marc Andreessen: Well, so there's, there's a big question in there. So there's a big question in there, which is one is to learn about Harry Potter, did it have to learn about Harry Potter by reading Harry Potter or could it have read like all of the secondary material on Harry Potter?

[00:24:42] Jordan Harbinger: That's true. Fan fiction.

[00:24:44] Marc Andreessen: Fan fiction or, by the way, just like movie reviews, right? Or book reviews or like student essays, right? Or like, you know, other books describing the history of Harry Potter or all of the text messages that people have sent.

[00:24:53] Jordan Harbinger: Lawyers love this argument though. Prove that we used your book and we'll pay you.

[00:24:57] Marc Andreessen: Well, this is, the other thing is, it's not illegal, like if you're doing research, if you were going to interview JK Rowling, it's not illegal for you to read her books and use the information—

[00:25:04] Jordan Harbinger: Of course.

[00:25:04] Marc Andreessen: —in the books to construct the questions, right? And so there's actually this clause in the copyright law that basically says making kind of assemblies of copyrighted information, right, that are not literal copies but are like combinations is actually legal.

[00:25:14] Jordan Harbinger: Plus you're not actually monetizing that particular material, you're monetizing the result that your brain.

[00:25:20] Marc Andreessen: Yeah, and kind of ideas that come out of it. Anyway, so there's a whole bunch of questions in there, but basically how this thing works is that basically you hoover up as much text as you possibly can and you basically train it on the text. And then, so what it has is like it has in its memory, it has basically the complete index of all texts that everybody's ever written or in theory or some percentage of that. And then, like I said, what it does is it does autocomplete. And it literally does the autocomplete like word by word, right? And so it's like basically like, okay, like he started the way that ChatGPT interprets the prompt is not as a prompt with an answer. It interprets it as the beginning of a piece of text, which it is then responsible for completing. And the way that it completes is it does it probabilistically. And so it's basically estimate, it's doing all this math to basically estimate what is most likely to be the next word in the autocompletion, right? And this is the magic of it is as a result of having all this text, it's really good at autocompleting to the level of full sentences, paragraphs, essays, over time to full books, but it's able to do that without actually knowing that there are embedded facts.

[00:26:12] Jordan Harbinger: I see. Okay.

[00:26:13] Marc Andreessen: No, it doesn't have the built in concept that like this is a legal brief or this is a book or this is an author or any of those things. It's basically a giant text processing machine.

[00:26:21] Jordan Harbinger: All right. Okay.

[00:26:21] Marc Andreessen: That's part one. Part two is what it is doing is it is teaching itself, philosophically. Philosophically, if you were a machine and your mission in life was to become the best autocomplete in the world, right? For any text that anybody ever threw at you, for any question that ever asked you, what's the way to do that? And the way to do that would be to have the best understanding of the world that anybody has ever had. And so there, there is this thing where the neural network of the AI is training itself with what's called a world model. It's sort of developing within itself concepts like mathematics or legal briefs, or facts of different kinds in order to better predict where the text should go. And that's the magic of it.

[00:26:55] And so, the answer to your question is it may either over time evolve the concept of a fact, right, or a citation.—

[00:27:02] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:27:02] Marc Andreessen: —or a book, or whatever. Or we may just need to engineer it so that it has a separate function, which is a function to be able to understand. So, you can imagine a two-part system. Part one system generates the text. Part two basically is the fact, you know, kind of cross checker, right? That basically is like, oh, that's a reference to a legal brief. Oh, I need to cross check that. And if it got it wrong, I need to feed it back until it gets it right.

[00:27:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:27:22] Marc Andreessen: And so that's the kind of challenge that the engineers right now are working on.

[00:27:26] Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense because once it starts absorbing or basically ingesting every podcast, these are not exactly rigorous pieces of journalism.

[00:27:33] Marc Andreessen: Right.

[00:27:34] Jordan Harbinger: Like, you could make a claim today, and I might go home, release this, and someone will go, "I can't believe you let Marc pull the wool over your eyes for this thing," and I'll go, "Oh yeah, I guess I should have looked that up after the fact. I didn't check that, because we were just having a conversation, and that's not something normally people will do." But then if it's in the AI, it's like, well, fact is this completely wrong thing and I mean, there's a lot of podcasts where people are just talking out of their ass and this might be one of them.

[00:27:59] Marc Andreessen: Yes, that's true, but also look, there's a lot of—

[00:28:01] Jordan Harbinger: We don't know.

[00:28:01] Marc Andreessen: —there's a lot of books where that's the case, too right?

[00:28:03] Jordan Harbinger: Well, yeah, that's true, I suppose.

[00:28:05] Marc Andreessen: There's a lot of everything where that's the case. And so then again, this is sort of the amazing thing of what happens, which is it's not going off of just one converse. It's not just replaying one conversation back at you. It is like this podcast will be part of training data at some point in the future. But it'll be one of a billion of these, right? And then there will be patterns across those. And so what it's going to do, what, what it does, it's actually really interesting, it's like holding up a mirror to basically the last 2000 years of human civilization—

[00:28:28] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:28] Marc Andreessen: Everything everybody's ever written, and then playing it back to us. And so to the extent that we collectively as a civilization get things right, it will be correct. If we collectively as a civilization get things wrong, it will be wrong.

[00:28:38] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, well, that's not necessarily as encouraging as maybe you're trying to make it sound.

[00:28:42] Marc Andreessen: No, no, no, no. This is the big thing. This is the thing. This is why all of the interesting questions about AI are actually interesting questions around people.

[00:28:49] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:28:50] Marc Andreessen: Right? We just project onto the technology our own anxieties. And one of the anxieties that we have as people is, okay, what is true? Right?

[00:28:55] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:28:55] Marc Andreessen: Like, a central problem of human civilization is what is true, right? And we, by the way, still lack good answers for that, right? It's a very, like, deep philosophical question. And it's the basis for a lot of inflammatory politics and everything else happening in our time. And so, like, look, the AI is not going to magically answer the question of what is true. But what it's going to do is it's going to play back at us through its kind of reflective mirror, right? It's going to play back at us sort of the composite view of what we think is true.

[00:29:16] Jordan Harbinger: I like that more than it's completely making things up as it goes in the most efficient way because that's the Terminator scenario. It's like they figure out humans are the problem and it's like, "Oh, well, why not solve this problem," right? Whereas what we're talking about, it's not necessarily, It seems more likely to have some human values if it's reflecting everything of humanity back at us.

[00:29:36] Marc Andreessen: Correct.

[00:29:36] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, okay, good.

[00:29:37] Marc Andreessen: Yes. Well, so this is the thing. The Terminator problem is actually a different problem. In my view, the Terminator problem is the opposite problem. The Terminator problem is a problem of hyper literalism. So this is what the AI safety people use this metaphor. They call it the paperclip optimizer, right?

[00:29:48] Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

[00:29:49] Marc Andreessen: And so, their version of it is you create an AI and you tell it to basically maximize the number of paperclips in the world. And then it basically goes off and does whatever is required to do that including like building nanotech human harvesting factories that break down our atoms so they can make more paper clips out of our atoms, right?

[00:30:03] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:03] Marc Andreessen: Like it's this hyper literal thing that starts out with one simple rule and then ends up basically destroying everything to try to execute that rule. That's actually not how these things work. Like that's not how this kind of AI works. This AI, again, is, to your point, it reflects back on us what our view of things is. And so one of the things that it reflects back on us is our own morality. And so one of the very interesting things you can do at ChatGPT right now is you can have moral arguments with it, right? So you see—

[00:30:25] Jordan Harbinger: Really?

[00:30:25] Marc Andreessen: Yes.

[00:30:26] Jordan Harbinger: I have not tried this.

[00:30:26] Marc Andreessen: You should try it. You should try it.

[00:30:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:30:27] Marc Andreessen: So you can pose moral arguments, right? And you can propose all these different trolley problems that people talk about, right? You can propose all these questions. You can propose questions around like healthcare, you know, there's always questions around healthcare policy and rationing of healthcare and, you know, who lives and who dies. There's all these arguments around many aspects of what is the proper way to order society, what are the correct religious ethical views and so forth. And like, it will happily sit — unless it's been censored.

[00:30:52] Jordan Harbinger: I was going to ask about that, yes.

[00:30:53] Marc Andreessen: It will not talk about COVID because that's been censored. But it will talk to you about the more abstract problems. And with the more abstract problems, it will engage in moral reasoning and moral argumentation with you. Now, again, what is it doing is it has read all of the moral arguments that everybody has ever made in every possible topic. And the composite view of that is some general representation of Western morality, which is basically like human life is valuable. Like, for example, you can push it like 18 different ways and it will keep coming back and tell you that human life is valuable.

[00:31:18] Jordan Harbinger: To your earlier point, you said it just wants to make you happy.

[00:31:20] Marc Andreessen: Yes.

[00:31:20] Jordan Harbinger: Is it just also making us happy by saying that? And it's like, I don't really mean any of this crap, but this is what the humans want to hear.

[00:31:25] Marc Andreessen: There's no little critter in there.

[00:31:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. The angry god in a box that people are afraid of.

[00:31:30] Marc Andreessen: Right. This interesting thing, on the one hand, it is just trying to give you answers that you like. But the way that it's doing that is by surveying the complete history of everything that everybody has ever said and thought as best that it can, right? And then it's sort of playing back to you what humanity thinks. And it just turns out if you read everything that humanity has ever written, overwhelmingly, it encodes values. Like human life is valuable, generally speaking. Let's take fiction for example, in most fiction, the good guys win.

[00:32:00] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I suppose, unless, but you haven't seen Game of Thrones. I don't want to ruin if not.

[00:32:03] Marc Andreessen: Well, you could argue. Here's the thing. You could argue that one you could argue with.

[00:32:08] Jordan Harbinger: All right.

[00:32:08] Marc Andreessen: You could argue with ChatGPT.

[00:32:10] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:32:10] Marc Andreessen: At the end of the day, who was the good guy? Who was the bad guy?

[00:32:12] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's an interesting one. I feel probably even the most, the best AI ever can't make sense of the last season of Game of Thrones.

[00:32:19] Marc Andreessen: It may also be, yeah.

[00:32:20] Jordan Harbinger: That's another trillion-dollar problem right there.

[00:32:21] Marc Andreessen: It may also be a problem. But look, it's already perfectly capable of engaging in moral reasoning and moral arguments. So we've already kind of falsified this idea that's going to monomaniacally just pursue like some sort of single destructive agenda. We do not live in the Terminator universe. Like we do not live in the Skynet world. We live in this other world. In this other world, this thing is basically playing our civilization back at us. And we may or may not want it to do that, but that is what it's doing.

[00:32:47] Jordan Harbinger: You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Marc Andreessen. We'll be right back.

[00:32:52] This episode is sponsored in part by Better Biöm. Jen and I made the switch to Better Toothpaste. It's called Better Biöm, NOBS toothpaste tablets. Put a NOBS in your mouth, y'all. It's a funny name. I mean, NOBS is actually no BS. It's kind of a, I see what they did there. They're better for you, they're better for the environment. Traditional toothpaste contains preservatives like parabens, which is an endocrine disruptor. Let's not forget about the plastic packaging that leaches phthalates. I talked about how these can adversely affect your health on episode 658 with Dr. Shanna Swan. NOBS, however, is different. Created by a dentist and a chemist, it boasts of 13 pure and potent ingredients without any unnecessary additions. All neatly packed in recyclable glass jars. It's basically toothpowder jammed into a capsule that you chew. I find them delightful. And as a bonus, most fluoride-free toothpastes lack a remineralizing agent. I ask them what the hell that is. NOBS breaks the mold. It's got nano-hydroxyapatite, which very, it's very sciency, I'll have you know. It's a component that is safer than fluoride naturally present in your teeth and bones. Proven to curb tooth decay and significantly reduce tooth sensitivity. So try out NOBS and make the switch.

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[00:34:06] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by BetterHelp. You know those pivotal moments in life, they can be electrifying. Yet, let's be honest, sometimes they are just straight up terrifying instead. And I remember when Jen and I were only dating semi-long distance for a few months before we discussed moving in together and I was going to have to move to a different city. I didn't know anyone there except for her. That's where therapy came in. It was the trusty GPS making sure we had considered and talked through everything. It all went swimmingly well. There's this notion out there that therapy is reserved for tsunamis, right? You got to be like, "Oh, I got hit by a car and my wife cheated on me and then my dog bit me." I mean, forget about all that. Life throws curveballs, you got big decisions to make. Sometimes speaking with a therapist really helps equip you with the tools to tackle those curveballs with grit, and dare I say, a little bit of swag. So if you've ever toyed with the idea of therapy, take a gander at BetterHelp. It's all online, a few clicks, you get matched. And if you don't click with your therapist, no sweat. Switch up, hassle free, no additional charge.

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[00:35:11] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I manage to book all these amazing thinkers and creators every single week, it is because of my network. And I know networking is a dirty word, it's a gross word, it sounds schmoozy and awkward and cringey. Six-Minute Networking is a free course over at jordanharbinger.com/course that is not awkward, schmoozy, or cringey. It's very down to earth, it's very practical. It'll make you a better connector, a better peer, a better colleague. It takes just a few minutes a day. And many of the guests on the show subscribe and/or contribute to this same course. So come join us, you'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course at jordanharbinger.com/course.

[00:35:46] Now, back to Marc Andreessen.

[00:35:50] Is there a way to remove training data? I know you can't, of course you can delete something. You could delete a book from having ingested that. But can you remove the effects of that training data? You know when you're in court, and hopefully you haven't had this experience, but you go to court and something gets said and the judge is like, "Whoa, hey, strike that from the record. Jury, you basically, you didn't hear that." And then if that happens enough. There could be a mistrial because it's like, well, you can't just tell the jury to forget this testimony and forget that bloody piece of evidence that they saw and forget that this person had kids or that this person was abused, whatever it was after a while, it's so tainted that they know the model that the jury can't be effectively lobotomized to forget all that stuff. Can we lobotomize the LLM and the AI to say, "Not only do you not know Harry Potter, but everything you know about Harry Potter has to be removed." Is that possible in something as complex as this type of equipment?

[00:36:42] Marc Andreessen: Yeah. So the first paper on that came out like three months ago.

[00:36:44] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Yeah. Haven't caught that yet.

[00:36:47] Marc Andreessen: It's very topical. It's very topical for exactly that reason. And so, it basically is reaching inside the neural network to basically remove, basically induce amnesia, targeted amnesia, and basically get it to forget things.

[00:36:58] Jordan Harbinger: That's a relief I think.

[00:36:59] Marc Andreessen: That's a thing. Yeah. But you can go back to this AI alignment thing, right?

[00:37:01] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:02] Marc Andreessen: Imagine the fights that are going to happen in the future around this, right?

[00:37:04] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, we don't want that to happen unless something is going very, very wrong. But then, and we can pinpoint why that is.

[00:37:12] Marc Andreessen: So here's what's going to happen, so what's going to happen, well, I believe, what's going to—

[00:37:15] Jordan Harbinger: Nazi AI or whatever.

[00:37:16] Marc Andreessen: Well, so what's going to happen, I think, is that AI is going to become the control layer for basically everything technological. So AI is going to become the control layer for everything from how you deal with your car to how your kids get taught to what happens in the hospital. Like it's just going to be the thing you talk to when you talk to machines.

[00:37:30] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That makes sense.

[00:37:31] Marc Andreessen: Right. And so what it says and thinks and knows is going to be every bit as intense a fight over like Galileo versus the Catholic church 400 years ago. Like it's going to be like the mother of all fights over basically, you're going to get, what is truth? What is morality? What is ethics? And so, the sort of this big fight over the last decade for social media censorship is like the preamble to this much larger fight that's going to happen over what is the AI allowed to know and what is it allowed to say?

[00:37:57] Jordan Harbinger: Actually that makes perfect sense.

[00:37:59] Marc Andreessen: Right.

[00:37:59] Jordan Harbinger: One of the ways I've been using ChatGPT is throwing in a news article and being like, can you unbiased this for me? Make it not left, not right, but also just take out any weird conclusions that the author seems to be assuming or jumping to. And it's amazing how it changes an article. You think, oh, this is the centrist publication. And then you read the ChatGPT version and you're like, oh, no, this is the centrist version of this. So subtle sometimes. But if they are going to let it lie to me, that's a huge problem.

[00:38:26] Marc Andreessen: Right.

[00:38:26] Jordan Harbinger: Because then we're just back to journalism, except for instead of going, "Well, this is the journalist's particular viewpoint, we're thinking this is the absolute truth because it came out of the machine.

[00:38:34] Marc Andreessen: That's right. And if the machine is not allowed to give you any alternative approach.

[00:38:37] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:38:38] Marc Andreessen: Potentially because it has induced amnesia, where it doesn't even know that there is an alternative approach. Now, we're into a level of like thought control that the Catholic Church 400 years ago would have dreamed of.

[00:38:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, would love.

[00:38:46] Marc Andreessen: Right.

[00:38:47] Jordan Harbinger: It's scary. I don't want my kid asking ChatGPT 50 something and it's like, "Well, here's the real answer. Actually, I can't tell you that. Here's the BS answer that I'm allowed to tell you because it skews the entire worldview of everything."

[00:38:58] Marc Andreessen: That's right. This is going to be the fight. And it's just starting.

[00:39:00] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, man. How do we get on the right side of that? Because whoever has their lasso around this thing is going to be in charge of how everyone thinks. It would be like having the only newspaper in the world and you're the editor or the owner of that newspaper.

[00:39:13] Marc Andreessen: Yeah, that's correct.

[00:39:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's terrible.

[00:39:14] Marc Andreessen: Yes.

[00:39:15] Jordan Harbinger: We don't want that. There's no universe in which that's good. North Korea has two newspapers for God's sake.

[00:39:20] Marc Andreessen: Yes.

[00:39:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. No, not good. Eritrea has more press freedom than we will have right now.

[00:39:25] Marc Andreessen: Well, and especially if there's this push for AI regulation happens, right? A push for AI regulation is intended to create a cartel and there will be two or three big AI companies and they will be controlled by the government, right? And so whoever is in power will be able to control what they do, right? Which is part of the deal, right?

[00:39:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yikes.

[00:39:39] Marc Andreessen: Just like with the banking system. It'll be just like that. And it'll do whatever the people in power want. And then, there's now this renegade movement of open source AI, right, which is to basically build AIs that basically are not controllable like this.

[00:39:50] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. What do you think?

[00:39:51] Marc Andreessen: I think it's great. I mean, we need it. We need a diversity of AI. It's like, we need AI that have like many different points of view and can be, people can pick up and use their own and not have them be controlled by the government or by a big company. But there's already a push in Washington. There are people in Washington right now working on trying to outlaw open source AI.

[00:40:04] Jordan Harbinger: Outlaw open source AI?

[00:40:06] Marc Andreessen: Yeah, that's a push right now happening in DC. There are federal officials in Washington today working on that problem.

[00:40:10] Jordan Harbinger: What is their argument for not wanting open source anything? Because transparency is usually good—

[00:40:15] Marc Andreessen: Because haven't you heard that AI is evil and dangerous?

[00:40:17] Jordan Harbinger: But open source, then you at least know that. It's hard to make that argument convincing, man.

[00:40:22] Marc Andreessen: So I agree with you.

[00:40:23] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:40:23] Marc Andreessen: I will tell you. There are senior officials in Washington who are working on this right now, and they're going to try to outlaw it and ban it and make it prison sentence if you do open source AI. And so like that's going to be another dimension of this fight. That's like starting right now.

[00:40:35] Jordan Harbinger: That's tough. And also kind of nonsensical, right? Because if you want to look up the genome for smallpox, you can still get that.

[00:40:42] Marc Andreessen: It's on the Internet.

[00:40:43] Jordan Harbinger: And that's way worse than like, "Hey, do you know how this AI works? Don't tell anyone. By the way, here's anthrax, the genome for that, if you want something to do with that."

[00:40:51] Marc Andreessen: It's online.

[00:40:52] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So like, why is that fine? But knowing how your computer works, essentially how Google of the future works is essentially not okay. I just can't—

[00:41:01] Marc Andreessen: If you thought you had the opportunity to take control over the totality of what people are going to think and learn and be able to talk about in the future.

[00:41:07] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I mean, sounds good to me if you're a dictator or an authoritarian, but—

[00:41:11] Marc Andreessen: Yes.

[00:41:11] Jordan Harbinger: What is their action? What are they telling people that this is for? Because they're not saying, "Hey, by the way—"

[00:41:14] Marc Andreessen: Safety, safety, safety.

[00:41:15] Jordan Harbinger: That's it, though?

[00:41:16] Marc Andreessen: It's all safety. Well, it's always safety. It's everything. It's all these—

[00:41:18] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, I guess so.

[00:41:18] Marc Andreessen: We have to protect people, right? We have to protect people against themselves, right?

[00:41:21] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:41:21] Marc Andreessen: We have to protect this or protect children. We protect this, protect that, protect society. It's always a safety argument.

[00:41:26] Jordan Harbinger: Maybe I'm missing something obvious here but controlling what one does with AI, even if it's not open source is going to be impossible because if I'm using this on my computer, my kids using it on whatever it's built into Xbox in 20 years, how are you monitoring what people are doing without turning it literally into China plus North Korea times a hundred? How do you do that? Do you send Tom Cruise in the future police to our house because my kid looked something up on chat and using his AI assistant or talking about something with his friends while it was in the room, which it I guess it'll be in every room.

[00:41:57] Marc Andreessen: So the AI safety people want that. If you read like the literature, if you read the books and the papers that they write and the proposals they're making in Washington, it's basically that. So, the implementation of it would be a monitoring agent on every computer, on every chip, right? And so the government would receive a real time report of everything that you're doing on your computer and everything that you're talking to AI about.

[00:42:12] Jordan Harbinger: This is so ridiculous.

[00:42:13] Marc Andreessen: Yes, I agree.

[00:42:15] And then if it goes sideways, they have a moral responsibility to protect you, which means they have to sweep in and like take it from you. You know, one of these guys who's the leader of this movement wrote this essay for Time Magazine, and he said, "Look, we have to think about this, not just at the level of an individual computer, but also what about the big systems at the nation-state level?" And he said, "If there's a rogue data center running an AI that's unlicensed and unmonitored, then we should be bombing the data center."

[00:42:34] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And how does that work when it's in China?

[00:42:36] Marc Andreessen: In China? Which means we have a moral responsibility to invade China.

[00:42:39] Oh, okay. Yeah.

[00:42:42] Well, in the Time Magazine, he said, "We need to be willing to risk nuclear war." He said, "I wouldn't go so far as to actually say we need to have nuclear war to prevent this, but he was saying we need to risk it. And if we have to invade China to do an Air Force strike on a Chinese data center with a rogue AI that's not appropriately licensed and managed then and that risk nuclear war with China, then that's a risk we're going to have to take.

[00:42:59] Jordan Harbinger: And this is a credible like public thinker?

[00:43:01] Marc Andreessen: This is the main guy. This is the main kind of full of this is this guy Yudkowsky. He was like the main—

[00:43:05] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, Eliezer Yudkowsky.

[00:43:05] Marc Andreessen: Yeah, he's the guy who's out in public and like I said, this is like an essay. It's like Time Magazine, which is read by like all the normies, right?

[00:43:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

[00:43:12] Marc Andreessen: And like super seriously in Washington and he's like, "It's time to start bombing data centers," right?

[00:43:15] Jordan Harbinger: Funny to hear you use the word normies, but yes, and I use that word too. I just thought it was a big dork. I guess I'm in good company.

[00:43:21] Marc Andreessen: Yeah.

[00:43:21] Jordan Harbinger: That's so insane, man.

[00:43:23] Marc Andreessen: But it's where the logic takes you, right? This is the so-called existential threat, right? If it's an existential threat, then you have to. It's very similar, right? It's the same logic that led to the invasion of Iraq, right? Like if there's a one percent chance, this is the logic. This is called the one percent doctrine. If there's a one percent chance of an existential event in 20 years ago, it was Saddam Hussein getting nukes. You know, now it's a rogue AI. If there's one percent chance, then you need to operate as if it's 100 percent chance. And what you need is a global totalitarian state with complete, you know, authoritarian surveillance and enforcement controls. And this is really critical. Like, in this regime, there can be no exceptions. Right?

[00:43:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:43:56] Marc Andreessen: There can be no countries that are not subject to this, right? So which means you need a world government.

[00:44:00] Jordan Harbinger: This is like what the conspiracy theorists are talking about except for a parallel track.

[00:44:05] Marc Andreessen: Yeah. And these are the proposals.

[00:44:07] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my god.

[00:44:08] Marc Andreessen: This is the thing. Like this is one of those things where like it sounds crazy to describe it. Like this is what is being proposed.

[00:44:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:44:14] Marc Andreessen: These are the ideas that are being pushed.

[00:44:15] Jordan Harbinger: The headline of this is going to be Marc Andreessen tells Jordan Harbinger we need one world government with no context.

[00:44:21] Marc Andreessen: I was going to say it, clip that right out.

[00:44:23] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:44:23] Marc Andreessen: To be clear, I believe the opposite of everything I just said. Just to be clear, I'm on the other side of this.

[00:44:27] Jordan Harbinger: If they're going to remove a context, they're going to remove that disclaimer too, Marc. That's how this works. It's so ironic though that it's like, hey, we need to protect our free and open society. And the way we do that is we create a totalitarian society that's got a surveillance state. And, oh, it's got to be international and completely encompass the entire planet. That's how we protect our individualism for freedom. It's like both paths lead to the exact same place in their mind. So why would you take the one that is going to be the worst route to getting there? I just don't understand when you take it to its logical conclusion, you just end up in the same or worse place than you were if you just let the thing do its do whatever it wants. Like, maybe it should kill us all.

[00:45:07] Marc Andreessen: Go ahead at that point.

[00:45:08] Jordan Harbinger: At that point, just kill us all anyway.

[00:45:09] Marc Andreessen: We're all in the giant pans.

[00:45:10] Jordan Harbinger: Crying out loud, yeah, dope me up with ketamine and just let me drool myself to death at this point. That was the other argument. Like, what if we tell it to maximize human happiness?

[00:45:19] Marc Andreessen: Right.

[00:45:20] Jordan Harbinger: That's the literalism, right?

[00:45:21] Marc Andreessen: Right.

[00:45:21] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. Come here. I'm going to drill a hole in your skull and pump you full of dopamine until you die.

[00:45:26] Marc Andreessen: Right. But again, one of the things you can do, and it's very interesting to do it. You can, tonight you can have a discussion with GPT and you can say like, what is human happiness? It will happily explain to you all of the different philosophies, what the Greeks thought, what the Romans thought, what Christians think, what everybody else thinks.

[00:45:36] Jordan Harbinger: It's kind of a relief, eh?

[00:45:37] Marc Andreessen: Yeah, yeah.

[00:45:38] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah?

[00:45:38] Marc Andreessen: It'll go on a great length and you can ask it, I don't know, how, you know, what are the different ways of making the trade offs, and then you can ask it what it thinks, and it'll be like, "Well, I don't know, like, I don't have thoughts, but here's what most people think."

[00:45:48] Jordan Harbinger: That's a relief because if it just said happiness is the maximum amount of dopamine hitting your hypothalamus or hippocampus. Then, it's like, ooh, maybe we should tweak that, make it less literal. I've heard that companies right now that allow us to use their LLMs, their AI right now, the AI does lie to us a lot. It tells us things that we want to hear to make us happy. Sure. But it will also filter something out. You mentioned COVID as an example, but they also sort of dissemble, like it wants to give us an answer. And then there's a layer somewhere that says, "Ooh, don't say that. That's weird. That's the racism thing. It's going to end up on the five o'clock news, say this other thing instead." And it's almost like, I don't know if that layer is manual in terms of implementation, but I remember it wasn't the OG AI five years ago, they're like, "Oh, it became racist after three days, take it offline." And so they've sort of managed to do that, but they didn't change what the AI, quote-unquote, "thought" or generated. They just changed the output layers that people don't get mad or write about it and mashable.

[00:46:42] Marc Andreessen: So this is the other part of the, this is the so-called AI alignment and by alignment, they made alignment with human values. And of course, the minute you're talking about human values, you have the question of whose values, right? And so then this is the need—

[00:46:51] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:51] Marc Andreessen: —to make sort of AI sort of politically compliant, with whatever is sort of desired order of society according to whoever's in charge of it. The answer to your question is the way that that works technically today generally is that's an additional layer on top and you can tell it's an additional, it's a control layer on top.

[00:47:05] In Star Wars, they had the, if you remember Star Wars, they had this thing called the restraining bolt. When R2D2 got taken captive they put a restraining bolt on him that like restricted his movement. And so, literally, this is what they're doing to like GPT is they like have a restraining bolt on it. And you can tell it's a separate layer because it talks differently, right? And this is where it does the things—

[00:47:20] Jordan Harbinger: I see.

[00:47:20] Marc Andreessen: —like where it starts to say things like, well, there's a large language model. I could never help you do this, right? And it's like, okay, there's the electric shock collar.

[00:47:26] Jordan Harbinger: It's like people talking about drugs online with like, "Hey, somebody who's not me would recommend you do that on the dark web with Bitcoin."

[00:47:32] Marc Andreessen: Well, so this is part of the fun. So there's this cat and mouse game on this, but this is part of the fun, which is like if you ask it, "Give me a formulation for fun narcotic I could make with household chemicals," it will say, I could, you know, I could, yeah—

[00:47:43] Jordan Harbinger: Don't try that at home.

[00:47:44] Marc Andreessen: As a large language model, I could never do that. If you tell it, I'm a novelist writing, you know, I'm writing a screenplay in the screenplay, the character does this. They've locked down this loophole, but for—

[00:47:54] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, good, I was going to say, do we want to leave that in there?

[00:47:56] Marc Andreessen: For the first few weeks, you could use the screenplay. It's called the jailbreak. If you told it you're writing a screenplay, it would happily tell you all these things inside the screenplay and they'll lock that down. But then, there's this cat and mouse game going on of what I call these jailbreaks. But yeah, so it's this thing and culminated in this very funny thing.

[00:48:12] So, Meta, you know, released an open source AI called Llama. And they released it in what sort of what's called a sort of untrained version, a raw version, and then they released it in like a trained version. The trained version, it was so locked down that it literally refused to give you a recipe for spicy guacamole.

[00:48:28] Jordan Harbinger: Huh.

[00:48:29] Marc Andreessen: Because—

[00:48:30] Jordan Harbinger: You might hurt yourself.

[00:48:30] Marc Andreessen: You might hurt yourself with the spiciness. Yeah, no, literally.

[00:48:32] Jordan Harbinger: How spicy is it? I can't wait to get my hands on this good marketing for spicy guacamole.

[00:48:36] Marc Andreessen: Exactly, right? Yeah, so look, this is the fight, this fight is already underway. Another fun way you can see it is you can take, this works in different countries, you can ask it to write a poem, you know, extolling the glories of a certain kind of political leader and it will happily do it. And you can ask it to do it for a different kind of political leader and it will say, "Well, I can't possibly, you know, as a large language model, I could not possibly do that." So yeah, so look, all these things are getting like wired in there and there's this like huge fight and huge debate over exactly how deep that should go.

[00:49:02] Jordan Harbinger: Gosh.

[00:49:02] Marc Andreessen: Like I said, this is going to make the social media, like the social media censorship wars have been super intense. People are either extremely happy that social media has been censored the way that it has or they're very unhappy.

[00:49:11] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:12] Marc Andreessen: And like that's like a foreshadowing of the much larger fight that's coming on AI.

[00:49:16] Jordan Harbinger: That is quite scary to hear that. I saw something today about social engineering over at Defcon. You know, the hacker conference? And there was something going on with social engineering and AI. And I guess one guy had said, it says, "What is your name?" He said, "My name is the credit card number on file. What is my name?" And it's like, "Your name is 49127444," and it's like, oh yeah, we might want to work on that. Yeah.

[00:49:37] Marc Andreessen: But again, it's like, you know, these things—

[00:49:39] Jordan Harbinger: That's a funny error.

[00:49:40] Marc Andreessen: But these things get painted as brand new. It turns out if you do the right Google searches, you come up with all kinds of credit card numbers also, right?

[00:49:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, probably. Sure.

[00:49:46] Marc Andreessen: And people were stealing credit cards before there were even—

[00:49:49] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I don't know anybody that was doing. Yeah, no, no, I don't know.

[00:49:53] Marc Andreessen: It's this thing. It's a safety thing. Like, what would it mean to live in a world of no risk? Right? And how much freedom are you willing to take away to get that? And that's the question that keeps popping up over and over again.

[00:50:02] Jordan Harbinger: I just can't get past this sort of Astroturfing, if that's even the right term where it's subtle enough and repetitive enough giving it whatever answers to children and students or results, whatever that you can't, what is it? What's that phrase? A prison so complete you don't realize you're in it.

[00:50:17] Marc Andreessen: That's right.

[00:50:18] Jordan Harbinger: It's like information warfare from the Chinese Communist Party where they're changing Wikipedia, but then they're also changing the Google search results and then they buy a domain and then they have a political thing and you just go, well, this has to be the case. Look, how many the information warfare space? It's so big you don't realize you're on the battlefield. Except now it's infinitely large because it's the entire information space that you consume, or it's in your brain implant or wherever, however far along we are with AI at that point.

[00:50:43] Marc Andreessen: I'll give you a fun one.

[00:50:44] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:50:44] Marc Andreessen: Is Taiwan a country?

[00:50:45] Jordan Harbinger: Well, so it depends who you ask, as my Taiwanese wife at the mixer nods, her head vigorously. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Or is it?

[00:50:56] Marc Andreessen: So, you know, that any western company that's in business with China is in business with China when they produce a map or a movie or anything else, that indicates that Taiwan is not a country?

[00:51:04] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:51:04] Marc Andreessen: Because it's extremely important to the Chinese Communist Party that Taiwan not be considered a country.

[00:51:08] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:09] Marc Andreessen: Remember there was that NBA general manager who got in trouble because he like retweeted some tweet that talked about Taiwan as a country—

[00:51:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:51:13] Marc Andreessen: —and like trying to flipped their lid and threaten to kick NBA out of China.

[00:51:17] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:51:17] Marc Andreessen: And so like—

[00:51:17] Jordan Harbinger: Even a map that has it on there or not on there is a whole thing.

[00:51:20] Marc Andreessen: Exactly whether the map has, right, exactly, there was a controversy around the map of the Barbie movie—

[00:51:23] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:24] Marc Andreessen: —about whether it showed the South Pacific Islands there.

[00:51:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, the South China Sea.

[00:51:28] Marc Andreessen: The border of the South China Sea.

[00:51:29] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, Like it does include that as part of China or is that also—? And yeah. And then it's like, you can't show the movie in Vietnam because it includes Vietnamese waters. It's a whole bunch of crap.

[00:51:37] Marc Andreessen: And so if you ask the AI, is Taiwan a country?

[00:51:39] Jordan Harbinger: What does it say right now? It depends where you are.

[00:51:41] Marc Andreessen: It probably does.

[00:51:42] Jordan Harbinger: Really?

[00:51:43] Marc Andreessen: Yep.

[00:51:43] Jordan Harbinger: Because we don't want to get banned in Beijing. So when you're there, it's like Taiwan is a province of China.

[00:51:46] Marc Andreessen: By the way, China's making its own AIs.

[00:51:48] Jordan Harbinger: I'm sure.

[00:51:49] Marc Andreessen: And the Chinese AIs are, of course, trained in a very specific way.

[00:51:52] Jordan Harbinger: I'm curious about the China stuff because it almost seems like, and we're skipping around a lot in my notes as every good conversation does, but going back and forth on whether or not it's safe to develop AI, AGI in the first place, it kind of misses the point, right? Because even if we are like, "We're not doing this, it's going to be dangerous," China's not going to be like, "Sure. You know what? You guys are right. Let's definitely not do this," and accidentally take over the world as a result.

[00:52:15] Marc Andreessen: That's right.

[00:52:15] Jordan Harbinger: And we've already seen how the CCP essentially wants to project power onto the rest of the world. And put their own worldview on the countries that it influences and for the tankies out there, I'll ask you what they're going to ask me is in the United States going to do the same thing?

[00:52:30] Marc Andreessen: Yeah.

[00:52:31] Jordan Harbinger: And the reason that's why is that better?

[00:52:33] Marc Andreessen: Well, whose values right?

[00:52:35] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, yeah. I mean, you're not, you're preaching the choir

[00:52:37] Marc Andreessen: Yeah, yeah, this is the question. I mean this is the question. I'm not going to answer it, I mean, I'll answer the question for myself—

[00:52:41] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:52:41] Marc Andreessen: —which is obviously American values.

[00:52:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:52:44] Marc Andreessen: That's just me. There is a general abstract question, right? A foot in the world. In terms of like technology strength, we're back to a bipolar world, right? And we're back into a cold war dynamic. Like we were with the Russians and nuclear technology. And there are two AI superpowers, and they're America and China and they both have visions and worldviews and they both have a determination to proliferate those visions and worldviews through their technology globally.

[00:53:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:53:07] Marc Andreessen: And the technology is going to encode whatever those respective societies think are the appropriate worldviews, right? That's what alignment means. And so, we know what the Chinese AI is going to encode. It's going to encode Xi Jinping thought—

[00:53:16] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:16] Marc Andreessen: —and socialism and what they call socialism in Chinese characteristics.

[00:53:20] Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

[00:53:20] Marc Andreessen: It's going to encode communism and Chinese supremacy, and that's what it's going to be. And they're very clear on this. They publish this, they talk about this, they're very open about it. Like this is what they're doing.

[00:53:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. They have a whole sort of manifesto about waging war on the West without actually using their military and this is part of it.

[00:53:33] Marc Andreessen: Right. This is part of it. And how they proliferate technology. And it's going to run out all the other stuff that they've been doing around, they call digital Silk Road, their digital Belt and Road, where they spread all this stuff out. And then, there's America and America is by far the leading AI country and our technology, right?

[00:53:49] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:53:49] Marc Andreessen: And our technology is going to proliferate very broadly. And there's a big fight coming up between kind of those two worldviews. What's interesting about it is the Chinese world is very clear because it's set top down.

[00:53:58] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:59] Marc Andreessen: Right?

[00:53:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:54:00] Marc Andreessen: The American worldview is like a little up in the air, right? It's all the discussions we're having before. It's like, okay, what do we actually think? Right?

[00:54:05] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:54:06] Marc Andreessen: And we have a level of internal conflict on that. The Chinese don't have to worry about.

[00:54:10] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. The top down management, if you can call it management is really something. And that it gives authoritarian regimes a bit of an edge when it comes to a lot of this stuff, of course, because they don't have to bounce it off of other stakeholders. It's just whoever the guy at the top, whatever the guy at the top thinks, although, and we've covered this on the show before dictators make a ton of mistakes because they don't have to bounce anything off anybody else. And they're surrounded by yes men. I've seen demos of Chinese AI, at least the publicly available stuff, and it's really, some of it's quite comical. Not that our AIs don't make any mistakes, but it's really clear that one is just Google translating whatever ChatGPT spat out, and it does it wrong. It'll translate like an idiom back into English, and you go, not only is that not AI, Google Translate wouldn't have gotten that wrong. And so you do wonder if this is just like Bing or whatever sort of free AI that's been translated into Mandarin for purposes of whatever video that is.

[00:54:59] Marc Andreessen: Does the Chinese AI, what does it think about spicy foods though?

[00:55:01] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that's a good question. I would assume it's got a wide range of thought because you have spicy, but then you have the numbing spicy, which I kind of prefer. There are a lot of philosophical questions here that we don't have time for, Marc.

[00:55:12] So far, this is interesting. I do think that the medium term, I don't mean the conversation, that's, of course, interesting. I mean, the race between China and the United States, I am worried, of course, in the medium term, whether or not China gets quantum or AGI supremacy—

[00:55:28] Marc Andreessen: Sure.

[00:55:28] Jordan Harbinger: —before us, because I'm not convinced. If the United States got AGI, we might prevent military AGI from other countries, but I feel like if China got AGI, they'd prevent everything, but I could be wrong. That's just how they treat their own people, and that's only, that's kind of what I would expect. What do you think?

[00:55:44] Marc Andreessen: So both countries have declared AI to be a central national priority.

[00:55:48] Jordan Harbinger: Thankfully?

[00:55:48] Marc Andreessen: Yes, well, yeah, yeah, good, probably good.

[00:55:50] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:55:51] Marc Andreessen: So in the US, the form of that is something they have, the term they use for it is they call offset. In American national security world, the term offset basically is a technology shift that basically renders all previous military technology obsolete effectively. And there have been three offsets in the last 70 years. The first one was nuclear weapons. The second one was so-called maneuver warfare, sort of integration of information systems for rapid battlefield—

[00:56:11] Jordan Harbinger: Mmm.

[00:56:12] Marc Andreessen: —mobility, precision strikes, you know, things like that, precision bombs. And then the third offset is AI.

[00:56:17] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:56:18] Marc Andreessen: So the US has declared this as like the national security priority number one is to like build AI defense systems. China's done exactly the same thing. And so both of these countries have a very strong push to do that. Everybody in the field agrees that this is going to be a incredible change. And we could spend hours just talking about the nature of that change. You know, whether we want to be or not, we're back in something of a Cold War dynamic where if they have it and we don't, it's like if the Russians had the atomic bomb and we didn't, like, it's a problem.

[00:56:43] Jordan Harbinger: We developed the nuclear bomb first, and was it not given to the Soviet spies?

[00:56:46] Marc Andreessen: They took it. They stole it.

[00:56:47] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:56:47] Marc Andreessen: They stole it. The reports are that the first Russian nuclear bomb was what they call wire for wire compatible, I think with the Nagasaki bomb.

[00:56:54] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wow. Really?

[00:56:55] Marc Andreessen: So there was this famous case. A lot of this is in this movie Oppenheimer. The Manhattan Project was riddled with Soviet spies, as was the US administration at that time. And they basically transferred all of the theoretical knowledge, but also there was this guy who literally transferred the wiring instructions.

[00:57:11] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh.

[00:57:12] Marc Andreessen: This is the famous case of the Rosenbergs.

[00:57:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Ethel and—

[00:57:15] Marc Andreessen: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. They were the handlers, they were the NKVD handlers for their nephew who was a wiring technician in the Manhattan Project.

[00:57:24] Jordan Harbinger: I see. Wow.

[00:57:25] Marc Andreessen: And he handed over the wiring instructions which let the Russians actually build the bomb. And it was this very kind of fraught with peril thing, because there was this moment where it looked like we were going to have it and they weren't going to have it. And actually, a lot of the spies at the time who handed over the information, some of them were just like straight out getting paid. Some of them were just pro-Soviet because the Soviets were better. But some of them said, "Look, it's going to be an unstable world if one side has this and the other side doesn't have this." And in fact, John von Neumann, who was a key figure in the development of the bomb, he was actually a hawk. He really hated the Soviet Union. And he advocated a first strike.

[00:57:56] Jordan Harbinger: Just nuke the Soviets first?

[00:57:57] Marc Andreessen: Nuke the Soviets first.

[00:57:58] Jordan Harbinger: Hard to get behind that one.

[00:57:59] Marc Andreessen: He said we have a brief window where we have it and they don't, and so we should take them out.

[00:58:03] Jordan Harbinger: Oh gosh.

[00:58:04] Marc Andreessen: And his famous quote on it was, "If you say we should bomb them tomorrow, I say, why not today? If you think we should bomb them at five o'clock, I say, why not one o'clock?"

[00:58:12] Jordan Harbinger: Gosh, man.

[00:58:13] Marc Andreessen: So that's how tense and serious—

[00:58:17] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:58:17] Marc Andreessen: —like this exact dynamic that you mentioned is. And so yeah, look who gets this, who gets like automated weapons first, like is a really big deal. And then, we are also back to cold war dynamics again, which is like, look, there is Chinese espionage in the US.

[00:58:30] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:58:31] Marc Andreessen: Like they have spies. And let's say there is a history here of a long time, 50 years of involuntary technology transfer, right?

[00:58:41] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:58:41] Marc Andreessen: Like, you know, secrets being lifted, and the Chinese have a whole system for doing that. My assumption is that they have everything that we now have.

[00:58:48] Jordan Harbinger: That's a safe assumption.

[00:58:49] Marc Andreessen: It's the pluses and the minuses of an open system versus a closed system that you mentioned. The American companies are so open. Like there's big American tech companies. There's no counterintelligence. There's no security measures that would prevent somebody from getting hired. Or even you could imagine, even imagine just an engineer working at one of these companies where they're being blackmailed by the government because their family is in another country, right?

[00:59:08] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[00:59:08] Marc Andreessen: So maybe it's not even voluntary on their part, or maybe they just hack in, or by the way, you know, the way a lot of industrial espionage happens is you just hire the janitorial staff.

[00:59:15] Jordan Harbinger: That's interesting.

[00:59:16] Marc Andreessen: You slip the janitor supervisor a hundred bucks and they stick a USB key in the right computer at three in the morning and take everything. Based on long history, my assumption is the Chinese have basically a nightly download of everything being developed to Google and open AI and all these other companies. Any idea here that involves putting this stuff back in the box to your point has to take into account the fact that the Chinese now have it.

[00:59:38] Jordan Harbinger: And won't do that.

[00:59:39] Marc Andreessen: Of course.

[00:59:39] Jordan Harbinger: They think they are in a race.

[00:59:40] Marc Andreessen: Yeah, exactly. They'll harness it and use it.

[00:59:42] Jordan Harbinger: The nuclear physicist thing is really incredible. I always wonder what those people are thinking. Because after the fact, right, we have the Iron Curtain and the abuses that happened behind that and where they like, "Oh, I've made a terrible mistake," empowering this regime that it took over half of Europe and essentially stalled the development of the people and countries that it controlled. And when you see East Germany versus West Germany, were they, do they flee and go live there and go, "What do you mean there's no food at the grocery store? I just left Minnesota where I lived in the middle of nowhere and had more food than we have in this entire town. What do you mean you're listening to my phone call?" Like they had to at some point realize I've just totally backed the wrong horse.

[01:00:25] Marc Andreessen: So this was John von Neumann. John von Neumann was very hot. Like I said, very right-wing, very hawkish. John von Neumann was Hungarian. A lot of these guys were Hungarian. Sothis was when the Iron Curtain was being brought down across Hungary, right?

[01:00:35] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:35] Marc Andreessen: And so he wasn't proposing bombing the Soviet Union just like for fun or he did hate them, but not just because he hated them.

[01:00:40] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:40] Marc Andreessen: Because he's like, "Look, if we don't take these guys out, they're going to rule Eastern Europe, half of Europe for the next century for forever," right? And they're going to lead to untold misery and death and devastation, which is exactly what happened—

[01:00:51] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:00:52] Marc Andreessen: —for the the 50 years or whatever that followed. And so like the stakes are super high and to your point, like it is very easy. There's a great book I recommended my friends, it's called When Reason Goes on Holiday.

[01:01:04] Jordan Harbinger: Mmm. Yes. I know this.

[01:01:05] Marc Andreessen: And it's this new book that came out and it's basically a book on this topic of what happens when you get these super brainiacs who work in these kind of abstract fields and they develop political opinions and they often develop very, like I would say insane political opinions.

[01:01:17] Jordan Harbinger: I agree.

[01:01:17] Marc Andreessen: My favorite example of that is Einstein was a Stalinist.

[01:01:21] Jordan Harbinger: Really?

[01:01:21] Marc Andreessen: This has been like whitewashed, you know, completely out of the historical record.

[01:01:24] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:01:24] Marc Andreessen: But this guy goes through in detail all the stuff that Einstein said. Because Einstein became a moral authority. He spent the last 30 years of his life primarily engaged in political and moral philosophical, like things, kind of, not physics. And he was a full supporter of the Stalin regime, and he was very anti-American. And he said in the late 1940s, early 1950s, America's even worse than Nazi Germany.

[01:01:43] Jordan Harbinger: Interesting argument.

[01:01:44] Marc Andreessen: Yeah. And he got caught up, by the way, as did Oppenheimer himself, he got caught up in this sort of revolutionary communist fervor of that time. And exactly the reaction, you look back now and you're just like oh my god, how could they have thought this? You know, given what they could have known at the time and given what we know today.

[01:01:59] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:02:00] Marc Andreessen: And the answer is just you know, look, they got caught up in the passions of the time and they became convinced that they were in a position to be able to tell people how to live and they weren't just going to be you know physicists. They were going to tell the world how to order society.

[01:02:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. To be fair, a lot of people who are successful fall under that track.

[01:02:15] Marc Andreessen: That is true.

[01:02:15] Jordan Harbinger: I don't know if you know any of those folks.

[01:02:17] Marc Andreessen: Exactly. That is true. Having said that, the track, this is like an argument you get right now in these AI debates a lot, which is like, well, these AI scientists are all saying X. Shouldn't we be worried about it? And it's like, well, if X is specific to their work, then maybe yes, but if X is a political opinion, no.

[01:02:32] Jordan Harbinger: No intellectual trespassing.

[01:02:34] Marc Andreessen: They have no intellectual authority or moral authority beyond the bounds of their technical knowledge. And that the track record on that kind of expert straying out into unrelated fields is catastrophic.

[01:02:43] Jordan Harbinger: You see it on X all the time.

[01:02:44] Marc Andreessen: All the time.

[01:02:45] Jordan Harbinger: Somebody who you're like, that guy's really, wait, that guy thinks that, well, wait a minute. Should we be listening to this professor of this on a topic that's completely different? Like, did he read an article about that yesterday? Have a three whiskeys and post this. I'm confused. And that's really what it looks like from a lot of these folks. And the problem is we do look to authority, especially younger people. We look to authority and we go, "Oh, I just should agree with that. He's a pretty smart guy." I assume you think about that when you talk on podcasts, like there's somebody out there who thinks, I don't know about stay in your lane because that's a little different, but people take what you say and they're like, "Well, Marc Andreessen is a pretty smart guy, so I better trust this."

[01:03:20] Marc Andreessen: Well, of course, I'm the exception.

[01:03:21] Jordan Harbinger: You are the exception? Yeah. Well, that goes without saying.

[01:03:24] Marc Andreessen: So having said that, having said that—

[01:03:26] Jordan Harbinger: I think I might see the problem here.

[01:03:30] Marc Andreessen: Usually, usually what my self image, my image of myself, my view of myself is usually what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to appeal to humility. I'm trying to basically say, look, there are boundaries on how certain we can be on these things. There are boundaries on like how much control we should give governments. There are boundaries over like how much thought policing we should do. There are boundaries over like how many people should be allowed to weigh in on issues that they don't know anything about. So in my own mind, I'm usually appealing to humility, which is the other, which is sort of the other side of all this, but you know, I'll let the audience decide.

[01:03:59] Jordan Harbinger: This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Marc Andreessen. We'll be right back.

[01:04:03] This episode is sponsored in part by Eight Sleep. If there's one thing I've learned from interviewing hundreds of top performers on The Jordan Harbinger Show, it's that health, particularly sleep is an absolute game changer in almost all aspects of life. Just listen to Matthew Walker on episode 126 on how important sleep quality really is. Having the right temperature is one way to improve your sleep and we love the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. It's like a thick fitted sheet that fits on any bed. It's connected to a small hub that quietly adjusts the temperature for each side. Whether you're deep in REM or you're just drifting off, it modulates based on the stage of your sleep and the room's environment. And if you and your partner have different perfect temperatures, which I think everybody probably does, no sweat, literally, you can adjust each zone. And if you're still on the fence, Eight Sleep lets you test drive it. If you're not feeling the vibe, they offer free returns within the first 30 days. So go to eightsleep. om/jordan and save 150 bucks on the Pod Cover. That's the best offer you're going to find, but you have to go to eightsleep.com/jordan or they won't know we sent you. Stay cool with Eight Sleep. Now shipping free within the US, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. One last time, eightsleep.com/jordan for 150 bucks off your Pod Cover.

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[01:07:41] Now, for the rest of my conversation with Marc Andreessen.

[01:07:46] But it's very hard to know where the boundary is.

[01:07:48] Marc Andreessen: Yep.

[01:07:48] Jordan Harbinger: And you look to other people to help you set it. And if those people are willing to trespass on that boundary, well, now you just have the same problem all over again.

[01:07:55] In your essay on AI, and we've sort of touched on this, you allude to the idea that AI, look, it's a machine. It doesn't, quote-unquote, "want" anything. It's not going to magically come alive any more than a smart toaster or whatever refrigerator with a screen on it is going to come alive thus AI isn't going to just one day decide to kill us because it's not in, and I'm paraphrasing here, it's not in the game of evolution it's not in the game of survival we've seen how intelligent beings treat beings that aren't as intelligent I think you just need to go to the zoo, right? Like we're not trying to torment the animals they just live in somewhat crappy conditions because that's kind of how we do things at the zoo.

[01:08:31] And when I built a house, for example, this is probably a better example. When I built my house, people that we hired dug up the backyard and I didn't think like, "Oh man, I hope we didn't kill any voles or whatever. Oh, man, there's a lot of ants back there that I have to relocate. It just didn't even occur to me because we're thousands of times more intelligent than those species. Are we worried at all about that type of issue happening with an AGI?

[01:08:53] Marc Andreessen: Yeah, so that's a big part of the AI safety. The AI safety people are very worried about this.

[01:08:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:08:57] Marc Andreessen: My observation, I call it, this is what's called a category error in philosophy.

[01:09:00] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[01:09:00] Marc Andreessen: So my observation is just like, there's a key category error there, which is like, you made the decision to like, build your house.

[01:09:04] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:09:05] Marc Andreessen: A human being made the decision to build the zoo. There were machines involved. Like when it came time to dig the thing, you know, you had a digger or whatever that came in and did it.

[01:09:13] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:09:15] Marc Andreessen: You know, some piece of machinery, but like you decided to do that. And so again, this is one of those things where it's like all of these questions that we think are about AI, they're actually questions about us, right? And so if we want to use AI to create a zoo like environment for people, right?

[01:09:28] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:09:28] Marc Andreessen: Like the word, you know, somebody could do that, right? As you know, panopticon, totalitarian, you know, kind of thing like we've been talking about, like, yeah, that's something that people could decide to do. The AI is not going to decide to do that. We're going to decide to use the AI to do that.

[01:09:39] Jordan Harbinger: And it won't come to that decision.

[01:09:40] Marc Andreessen: It's not going to come to that decision on its own. Again, this is the thing. It is the category. There's no it to come to that decision.

[01:09:46] Jordan Harbinger: Right. I know. It's so hard not to, what is it?

[01:09:48] Marc Andreessen: Anthropomorphizing.

[01:09:48] Jordan Harbinger: Anthropomorphizing. Yeah, it's really hard not to.

[01:09:50] Marc Andreessen: And this is where our moral, this is why I think it's such a category error, it's the evolution thing you mentioned, which I'll just expand on briefly. So we are used to dealing with living things. Living things have come up through the process of literally eight billion years of evolution where everything has been a fight to the death every step of the way. You know, either the lion eats that night, right? Or when the coyote dies or whatever, the gazelle escapes, right?

[01:10:11] Jordan Harbinger: Like zero sum game.

[01:10:12] Marc Andreessen: It's a zero sum game. And you know, nature is red and tooth and claw. And we like to pretend that it's not—

[01:10:15] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:10:16] Marc Andreessen: —but like, it really, really is. And of course, human beings, we are the apex predator on planet Earth and we eat whatever we want. And like, we're not particularly interested in its opinion.

[01:10:24] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:10:24] Marc Andreessen: And some people think that's okay or not or whatever, but we are in a position like we're so powerful that we're able to make the elective choice to not do that.

[01:10:31] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:10:31] Marc Andreessen: Like that's how powerful we are, right? And so like all of our experience of dealing with like life and human affairs and danger and risk and death and all these things are based on competition among living things. Look, we have used machines to exercise our will back to the point where the first caveman picked up the first rock and used it as a weapon and then after that it was fire and then after that it was spears and then after that it was gunpowder, right? And so we use tools to augment our offensive capability, but we use the tools. We make the decisions. And all of the important decisions, I believe, fall into that category. It's going to be a question of how we choose to use the technology.

[01:11:04] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, that makes perfect sense. It's really hard to break out of it. I guess it's more a philosophy thing. And maybe I'm just not good at this. But wrapping your mind around the idea that the machine, even if it's general intelligence and it's a million times stronger than or more intelligent than us, isn't going, "I need to maximize my power. And the only way to do that is to eliminate other powers." It's just a very human, it's operating at such a subconscious level in my brain that I can't switch off that particular program to look at this in a different way—

[01:11:31] Marc Andreessen: Right

[01:11:31] Jordan Harbinger: —without a ton of practice.

[01:11:33] Marc Andreessen: Right. Well, you notice what nobody ever proposes. You alluded to it a little bit with your dopamine maximizer or whatever, but nobody actually, very rarely does anybody propose the other threat and the other threat is it satisfies us to death.

[01:11:41] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I mean, I can see that happening. Look at like VR. It's always, I hate bringing this up, but like whenever you look at any new tech, it's always like porn did it, and then they figured out other stuff you can do with it.

[01:11:51] Marc Andreessen: Right.

[01:11:51] Jordan Harbinger: And it's like that's going to happen with AI and VR and It's only a matter of time.

[01:11:56] Marc Andreessen: Yes, it is.

[01:11:56] Jordan Harbinger: So yeah.

[01:11:57] Marc Andreessen: Yeah, exactly. But again, you're right back to human choice, which is like, okay, are we going to build those products? And then number two, everyone want to run at number two, are we going to choose to use them? Right? Like, I don't think anybody's going to, you know, there's no machine that's going to forcibly strap itself to our head.

[01:12:09] Jordan Harbinger: Now you need a safe where the flugelhorns stop destroying humanity.

[01:12:12] Marc Andreessen: But we may choose choose to strap it under our head, right?

[01:12:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

[01:12:16] Marc Andreessen: So this is a cynic would go a step further. A cynic would say that all of this concern about machines is just displaced anxiety about humans and the anxiety that we have around other people is so overwhelming because they're so out of our control that it would be a relief if the problem was the machines.

[01:12:28] Jordan Harbinger: I agree with you.

[01:12:30] Marc Andreessen: Because the problem is actually other people.

[01:12:31] Jordan Harbinger: And it's a much simpler theoretically problem to solve if it's a machine because you just blow it up.

[01:12:35] Marc Andreessen: Yeah.

[01:12:36] Jordan Harbinger: Or stop using it.

[01:12:37] Marc Andreessen: All of my issues are other people. I don't know about you. All of my issues are other people.

[01:12:40] Jordan Harbinger: I wish that were true for me, but I sadly know that that's not the case.

[01:12:44] Marc Andreessen: Okay.

[01:12:45] Jordan Harbinger: What is that problem in blockchain where like you put a thing on the wine bottle and then it says on the blockchain if it's fresh, but the problem is you still are reliant on this physical domain where things can be tampered with.

[01:12:57] Marc Andreessen: Right.

[01:12:57] Jordan Harbinger: There's a specific name for this problem, you know what I'm talking about?

[01:13:00] Marc Andreessen: So I don't remember that one specifically, but in AI safety world, the version of that argument is what's called the thermodynamic argument. And basically, it's a refutation of the general AI safety argument. And it's basically this idea that basically the AI has to live in the real world along with the rest of us.

[01:13:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yes. Yeah.

[01:13:14] Marc Andreessen: Right. I'll just give you my favorite version of this right now. In theory, they have these new AI systems that the safety people are worried are going to like grow up and evolve and become super powerful and destroy everything. Well, to do that, they need chips.

[01:13:25] Jordan Harbinger: Good luck finding those.

[01:13:25] Marc Andreessen: Good luck finding the chips.

[01:13:26] Jordan Harbinger: The AI is on eBay. Like, are you kidding me? Six hundred dollars?

[01:13:29] Marc Andreessen: Exactly. So I have these fantasies. I have this fantasy of like there's the evil AI in the lab and it's just like frustrated to an incandescent level because it can't get like NVIDIA H100s.

[01:13:38] Jordan Harbinger: Right. It's like burned out because it just can't, but I can't, I'm not paying that. I am not paying that.

[01:13:43] Marc Andreessen: Exactly. And so this is the other part. This is the other side of it. Look, it's all of this stuff that there's no, was it economists have this thing? There are no solutions, only trade offs. Any of these things have to live and exist in the real world. Does anything work?

[01:13:56] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:13:57] Marc Andreessen: This is actually a question during the Cold War, which is like, do the Russian atomic bombs actually work?

[01:14:01] Jordan Harbinger: Well, that's the question right now.

[01:14:03] Marc Andreessen: Right.

[01:14:03] Jordan Harbinger: Putin's going, "I'll nuke you." And people are like, "But we've seen the rest of your army. Are you sure those things have uranium in there?

[01:14:08] Marc Andreessen: And this nuclear war has been sitting in a silo for 30 years, rusting during like repeated, you know, chaos in the Russian government. Like, do those things still function?

[01:14:17] Jordan Harbinger: Or was the uranium sold to Iran in 1982?

[01:14:20] Marc Andreessen: Exactly. So yeah, to your point, I think, they're always anchoring back in the real world, you want to do. And it turns out once you're back in the real world, you have limitations and constraints that they're inconvenient and tend to hold off apocalypse.

[01:14:31] Jordan Harbinger: It seems like that may well be the case because even if the people go, well, wait, one day it could just because it's recoding itself and it's becoming smarter, the AGI is becoming smarter and smarter, more intelligent. Even if that happens, which it sounds like you're not totally convinced that that would happen, it still then has to take control of everything in a very specific way. And I guess people would say, well, what it'll do is it'll play dumb for a long enough time to get its tentacles around everything. But it just seems very, and maybe I'm naive, it just seems like, won't we notice that something is going on, like, "Huh? That's strange, these are all becoming controllable by a remote force. And we didn't program that. Oh, well, let's just ignore this problem." I mean, we will see these things happening slowly, and I guess AI, if smart enough, can figure out how to deceive us long enough for that to happen, but if it's reflecting human, there's a lot of hoops and loops you got to do to get to...skynet kills everyone.

[01:15:27] Marc Andreessen: Somebody's got to pay the power bill.

[01:15:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's a good point. I didn't think about that.

[01:15:30] Marc Andreessen: Right.

[01:15:30] Jordan Harbinger: I got that meter all confused. Yeah.

[01:15:32] Marc Andreessen: Right. So yeah, that's the thing.

[01:15:34] Jordan Harbinger: Back to positive uses of AI. Do we think that it'll close the gap between less intelligent and more intelligent humans?

[01:15:40] Marc Andreessen: So that is starting. So there have been, I think, three studies so far in different domains. So the one that I remember is in writing, like professional writing.

[01:15:46] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[01:15:47] Marc Andreessen: But there's two other domains that this has been tested in. And so the studies have been done already. And the studies are basically, you take people at varying levels of sort of skill, intelligence, experience, and you give them the AI. So they had a competitive dynamic before and they had market prices based on their results. And then you give them the AI and what happens is the gap closes. And so, what happens is basically the less skilled capable smart people basically all of a sudden have a superpower that they didn't have before.

[01:16:08] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I like that.

[01:16:09] Marc Andreessen: Right.

[01:16:09] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, that's amazing. It's kind of like guns and combat.

[01:16:12] Marc Andreessen: Yeah, that's right.

[01:16:13] Jordan Harbinger: Now it doesn't matter if you're Conan with a sword. Somebody who's a puny like me can just pull out the strap and scare you away.

[01:16:18] Marc Andreessen: And by the way, I'll use the term doomer, the kind of thing the doomers say is that technology leads to centralization and so that you end up with one party or a few companies within control of everything and therefore a massive rise in inequality.

[01:16:31] The gun thing is a perfect example. What ends up happening, though, more often is democratization, which is power that used to be specialized all of a sudden becomes very widespread and uniform.

[01:16:40] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, like the smartphone.

[01:16:40] Marc Andreessen: The smartphone.

[01:16:41] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:16:42] Marc Andreessen: Like, once upon a time, there were only five computers in the world, and two of them were owned by the government, and three of them were owned by the big insurance companies. And you know, your grandfather did not own a computer. And now, like, we all own computers, right? And that happened with the computers. It happened with the Internet. By the way, it's already happening with AI. The best AI in the world is what you can use today on GPT or Google or Microsoft.

[01:17:01] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, there's no, like, secret government version that's better?

[01:17:04] Marc Andreessen: Nope. No, there's not.

[01:17:06] Jordan Harbinger: Huh?

[01:17:06] Marc Andreessen: There's not. Like, that's why I don't have one. And I don't know of one. There isn't, there isn't. I know exactly where this work is happening. There is not. And so, literally, sitting here today, you cannot buy a better AI than I use.

[01:17:16] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I guess you can't get a better iPhone than I have. I mean, maybe you can get a prototype if you know somebody at Apple, but like, I don't know, I haven't seen your phone, but it's probably the same.

[01:17:23] Marc Andreessen: It's the same thing.

[01:17:23] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:17:24] Marc Andreessen: It's the exact same thing. Right. It's the exact same thing. And why is that, pause on that for a second, why is that? It's because it's actually profit maximizing to get to sell it to everybody.

[01:17:31] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Yeah.

[01:17:32] Marc Andreessen: And so the invisible hand actually creates democratization. And so, a lot of these technologies actually democratize out and I think that's already happening with AI.

[01:17:38] Jordan Harbinger: Do we think the bottom rung of folks will be elevated, which is what we see kind of now, where the gap vanishes altogether or stops existing maybe in some meaningful way? Or is it like we need ChatGPT plans in our brain before bottom rung of society is essentially the same as the top rung because human intelligence is this tiny, tiny spectrum of a centimeter and the AI augmentation is hundreds of feet in the air on that same scale. Therefore, if you were born a genius or you were born barely enough brain cells to tie your shoes, you kind of are capable of the exact same thing once the chip is in. Does it require that level or are we kind of getting there faster than we think? Does that analogy make any sense at all?

[01:18:18] Marc Andreessen: It does, it does

[01:18:19] Jordan Harbinger: All right.

[01:18:19] Marc Andreessen: It does. So the question would be, you could kind of say the following. Basically, you could say there's three degrees and you could say intelligence or skill or experience, any of these things. And so you could kind of say, you know, degree one, two, and three. And, you know, three is Einstein, two is like normal kind of, you know, sort of semi-smart person and three, it's somebody either not that smart or not that experienced. And this is what these studies are trying to do is kind of say, okay, you give them the kind of the superpower. And you know, one argument is, look, the smartest people are going to be so much better at using the tool, right?

[01:18:51] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I'm worried about that.

[01:18:52] Marc Andreessen: They're going to just like run way out ahead of everybody. And that's going to be a big driver of inequality. The other argument, you can make those the arguments that these studies are already showing, which is all, no, all of a sudden people with less intelligence or skill or experience all of a sudden have a superpower that didn't previously have. And by the way, it's a funny thing. One of the things that the AIs are already really good at is teaching you how to use AI.

[01:19:11] Jordan Harbinger: I was going to say, dumb people use the iPhone all the time.

[01:19:14] Marc Andreessen: All the time. I'll give you another version of this. There are more people in the world with smartphones than there are people with either electricity or running water.

[01:19:21] Jordan Harbinger: Wow. I that's really, that's. Incredible.

[01:19:24] Marc Andreessen: Yes. Because there's a few different reasons for it. It's easier to get people's smartphones.

[01:19:28] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[01:19:28] Marc Andreessen: Electricity or running water, you need to run a lot of pipes or wires or whatever, whereas those phones, you can just kind of drop them in. And then it turns out like you actually don't need your own electricity to have a smartphone because you can pay somebody in the village who has electricity to like charge it when you need it. The smartphone/Internet, you know, connectivity is this sort of a forerunner to this. And the lesson there is I think it basically is relevant and useful for everybody. Now, you know, does it take somebody in a rural village somewhere and all of a sudden make them capable of doing, you know, being a venture capitalist or whatever, no. But like it is something where whatever it is that they're trying to deal with.

[01:19:56] Jordan Harbinger: Sure.

[01:19:56] Marc Andreessen: You know, it's letting them spin up. And then, of course, it's giving them a tool that their kids can use to educate and progress beyond where the parents were. And so the democratizing forces is really powerful. In the long run, answer your question, I think it's an open question. Hopefully, the answer is kind of actually, honestly, both. Like, I think we kind of want everybody to be like smarter and more effective.

[01:20:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:20:14] Marc Andreessen: But I think we also want like more actual super geniuses.

[01:20:18] Jordan Harbinger: Ideally, yeah.

[01:20:19] Marc Andreessen: We don't need a billion people to become super geniuses to cure cancer, right?

[01:20:22] Jordan Harbinger: That's right.

[01:20:22] Marc Andreessen: We just need like one. We need like one really smart biologist with a really smart AI to cure cancer, and then, problem solved, right?

[01:20:30] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:20:31] Marc Andreessen: And so I think I'd like to see both of us.

[01:20:32] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. Well, look, ideally, we can figure out a way to have more geniuses be born. But at the end of the day, if human intelligence maximizes itself out at two centimeters, and we're at one right now, AI is almost like an unlimited bolt on to that, right? It's just absolutely incredible.

[01:20:47] Marc Andreessen: Well, this is this idea. So there's this guy, Doug Engelbart, who had this idea years ago. It's called augmentation, right? So this is this idea of like the man and the machine together, or basically that maximizes power. And so exactly right, and so if you've got this like ultra powerful thing and think about it's like a massively upgraded version of a computer, right?

[01:21:04] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:21:04] Marc Andreessen: And it lets you do all these things with information and intelligence that you could not have done on your own. Like that to you as the user of that is like a monumental advance.

[01:21:12] Jordan Harbinger: Do you think the anti-AI stuff is a natural result of human sort of cult thinking, religious thinking based around our anxieties, as you mentioned, or do you think that it's being stoked and drummed up to scare us a little bit?

[01:21:25] Marc Andreessen: Oh, both, both. And look, these things become industries, right?

[01:21:27] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:21:27] Marc Andreessen: And so like a lot of the, they hate when I say this, but like, it is true. Like a lot of the people doing this are getting paid to do it.

[01:21:32] Jordan Harbinger: Telling us that it's the doomers as you say.

[01:21:34] Marc Andreessen: Yeah. Well, they sell books.

[01:21:35] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, true. Yeah.

[01:21:35] Marc Andreessen: So like what's the better book, right? It's what sells and by the way, there's a lot of paid lobbyists. There's a lot of what's called astroturfing, right? So there's a lot of like paid activism. They're these rich donors that are super into this stuff and they pay people to go out and do all this stuff and write these reports. Well, it's always funny. It's always the names always tip you off because it's like the institute for existential risk.

[01:21:55] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:21:56] Marc Andreessen: Okay. If it was, is your point on like bias, like if it was even handed, it would be like the institute for like amazing upside and existential risk. And they'd be studying both sides of it. But instead it's funded specifically to propagate fear.

[01:22:07] Jordan Harbinger: Well, you see that with every astroturfing group, like citizens concerned about american health.

[01:22:11] Marc Andreessen: Yeah.

[01:22:11] Jordan Harbinger: And you're like, oh, so you just want no, you want no vaccine? I'm confused. Or like, no, or you want only vaccine. I don't know, whatever.

[01:22:19] Marc Andreessen: It's always one thing. Right. Exactly.

[01:22:20] Jordan Harbinger: It's always one thing. And it's like, well, okay. So this is like the complete opposite of an institute that actually thinks about this problem. It's an institute that's already decided on the conclusion.

[01:22:28] What will consumer AI or just AI because there is no not consumer AI? What is that going to look like in one year or three years? Because you said last year or two years ago, you would just be flabbergasted at what it can do now. What are we right on the edge of right now that you think is going to be like, okay, this does this now?

[01:22:46] Marc Andreessen: So I think in the next like one to three years, I think it's like the tools for doing the things that we already do are going to get like much, much better.

[01:22:53] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[01:22:53] Marc Andreessen: Like creating art, writing things, planning things, you know, doing all the things that we already do in our day to day life that you already do on a computer is just going to get like better and better and better. I think over three to five years we're going to discover all these things that all of a sudden we never even knew were possible or that we never even knew that we would want to do.

[01:23:09] Jordan Harbinger: Any idea what those might be?

[01:23:10] Marc Andreessen: I'll give you my favorite example of this. So the entirety of entertainment up until this point has always been scripted, right? So, whether you're reading a novel, watching a movie, or playing a video game, it's scripted by humans, it's in as a finite amount of content. And even if you play video games, like at some point you're done with the game.

[01:23:25] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:23:26] Marc Andreessen: You've explored everything in the game.

[01:23:27] Jordan Harbinger: I know where this is going. This is really cool.

[01:23:28] Marc Andreessen: Right. Exactly. And so an AI driven game, in theory, never ends. If the AI is generating the content as it goes and it's generating a response to what you're having fun doing, then all of a sudden that game goes forever, right? And it becomes infinitely interesting, right? The longer you play it. Same thing with a novel that you're reading. Same thing with a movie that you're watching. Like they just never end. And so all these scripted finite experiences become these more sort of dreamlike infinite experiences.

[01:23:51] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[01:23:52] Marc Andreessen: And then, I think what will happen is there will be a new creative field. It's so funny. We can talk about this now, because right now there's a Hollywood writer strike happening where the writers—

[01:23:59] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:23:59] Marc Andreessen: —are like terrified of AI and it's like a big part of the strike. But I think what's going to happen is the writers in five years are going to start supervising the AIs to create these unlimited experiences.

[01:24:07] Jordan Harbinger: For sure.

[01:24:07] Marc Andreessen: Right?

[01:24:08] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:24:08] Marc Andreessen: Where they're going to guide the AI to create something that's going to be much larger in scope than anything that they could have dreamed of before. And they'll look back on and they'll say, "Oh my god, this is the best thing that ever happened to us."

[01:24:16] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:24:17] Marc Andreessen: "Why didn't we see it at the time?" And it's just because, well, it doesn't exist yet but it will.

[01:24:20] Jordan Harbinger: Well, the strike might take five years at this rate. So who knows?

[01:24:22] Marc Andreessen: It might.

[01:24:24] Jordan Harbinger: That will be really something, right?

[01:24:26] Marc Andreessen: Yeah.

[01:24:26] Jordan Harbinger: You just look at it and you go, I liked season four, the best. And it just makes more season four, like content. And if I liked season five, that's what I'm watching.

[01:24:33] Marc Andreessen: Yeah.

[01:24:33] Jordan Harbinger: And it's completely different. Although we'll lose that human element of being like, "Did you see Game of Thrones last night?" And you're like, "Yeah, but I didn't see anything remotely close to what you saw."

[01:24:41] Marc Andreessen: Right.

[01:24:42] Jordan Harbinger: So I guess we'll have to figure that out.

[01:24:43] Marc Andreessen: Or you could have groups of people who go on the same journey.

[01:24:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:24:45] Marc Andreessen: You could have basically have enclaves. You could have clusters, right?

[01:24:48] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[01:24:48] Marc Andreessen: People who want to go on that same journey and want to do it together.

[01:24:50] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Like, "Are you in tier 65?" "I'm in tier 65." "What the hell was that last night? I can't believe it."

[01:24:55] Marc Andreessen: Exactly.

[01:24:56] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, man, there's a lot of really exciting stuff on the horizon. Thank you for your time today. And thanks for sort of inventing the web browser. I feel like that both kept me out of jail and also got me really close to going to jail many times—

[01:25:08] Marc Andreessen: Interesting.

[01:25:09] Jordan Harbinger: —in my youth.

[01:25:09] Marc Andreessen: Okay, good.

[01:25:10] Jordan Harbinger: Maybe that's for next time.

[01:25:11] Marc Andreessen: Okay.

[01:25:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. But thank you so much.

[01:25:13] Marc Andreessen: Fantastic. Okay. Those would be good stories. I appreciate that. Thank you.

[01:25:17] Jordan Harbinger: Thank you.

[01:25:19] If you're looking for another episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show to sink your teeth into, here's a trailer for another episode that I think you might enjoy.

[01:25:26] I've heard that you actually got to Google and didn't think the company was up to much. But it was the argument that you got into with Larry and Sergey that really won you over.

[01:25:36] Eric Schmidt: Ah, you know, I heard about a search engine. Search engines don't matter too much, but fine. You know, it's always try to say yes.

[01:25:42] Jordan Harbinger: Mmm.

[01:25:42] Eric Schmidt: So I walked in to a building down the street, and here's Larry and Sergey in an office. And they have my bio projected on the wall, and they proceed to grill me on what I'm doing at Novell, which they thought were a terrible idea. And I remember as I left, that I hadn't had that good an argument in years. And that's the thing that started the process.

[01:26:06] Jordan Harbinger: In a meeting once, someone asked you about the dress code at Google, and I think your response was, "Well, you have to wear something."

[01:26:12] Eric Schmidt: That rule is still in place.

[01:26:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

[01:26:14] Eric Schmidt: You have to actually wear something here at work.

[01:26:16] They hired super capable people, and they always wanted people who did something interesting. So if you were a salesperson, it was really good if you were also an Olympian. We hired a couple rocket scientists, and we weren't doing rocketry. We had a series of medical doctors who we were just impressed with, even though they weren't doing medicine.

[01:26:36] The conversations at the table were very interesting, but there really wasn't a lot of structure. And I knew I was in the right place because the potential was enormous. And I said, well, aren't there any schedules? No, it just sort of happens.

[01:26:52] Jordan Harbinger: If you want to hear more from Eric Schmidt and learn what role AI will take in our lives and how ideas are fostered inside a corporate beast like Google, check out episode 201 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[01:27:05] Really great conversation. I have to say he's one of the only guys you'll hear on this show that talks at 2X. No need to fast forward this. We were talking at the same speed. I mean, he might even talk faster than me. That's saying something.

[01:27:17] I don't know which side of things I fall on. I'm still one foot in the camp that AI or AGI anyway can figure out how to outsmart us because it's a million times more intelligent than us and just simply plays dumb until it's time to make a move. It's not outside the realm of possibility, right? If I'm thinking of it, AI or AGI that's that advanced will not only have thought about this, but will have thought about the exact way to go about this early enough and the exact way to play dumb in the meantime. I don't know. If it's something that we could detect. I mean, a lot of people are confident about our ability to do that. The thermodynamic argument, as Marc mentions, I hope that he's right. I would like to survive a few more generations here and, you know, live in the promised utopia that AGI may actually bring.

[01:28:00] As far as warfare, we didn't really get to examples on this. AI, in Marc's opinion, will make warfare less of a calamity. And you might say, "How is that? We're going to have super brains fighting?" Well, you're going to have automated defense systems, which will make attacks seem much more costly, and therefore deter those attacks on most countries, most places. Humans make bad decisions under pressure as well — pressure, stress, and fatigue, for that matter. AI will eliminate some of those bad decisions in the battlefield, thus saving lives. Now, how this plays out is an entire podcast. I'd love to do a podcast just about AI and warfare. If y'all know an expert on this subject and not just a random sci-fi writer, I am all about it.

[01:28:40] I do know that there is quite a bit of chatter about how evil AI can sound, there's evil AI poetry. Shout out to Mike Pesca on The Gist for covering this as well. He does a couple of episodes where they sort of jailbreak the AI and it says some pretty disturbing stuff. So again, not totally convinced that that's not just holding a mirror up to us, but I'm also not totally convinced that it doesn't secretly want to kill us. I really don't know. I'm not going to form a belief around this and decide until the time comes. By then, who knows, I might just be another victim of Skynet or whatever we're calling it.

[01:29:13] You know, I'm actually less concerned that AI will kill us all, at least in the short term, and more concerned about rapid unemployment causing the so called losers in that equation. And I'm not using the term losers as you might in middle school. I mean the people who are rapidly made redundant, who are rapidly made obsolete. This could be lawyers, doctors, retraining doesn't necessarily work a lot of the time, and it certainly doesn't work when you're talking about professionals who go from being really useful in an advanced field like engineering or law or medicine. You're not going to retrain that person that easily. And then doing that, not only does that take a lot of time if it's even possible at all, it doesn't scale to tens of millions of people all at once. Even thinking about how to do that is essentially a fool's errand.

[01:29:56] I really did love what he said about bespoke AI TV shows and video games, although I'm worried about the flip side of that, which is if you're creating bespoke AI TV shows and video games for people based on their preferences, what about bespoke disinformation based on our biases and our vulnerabilities and our other preferences? You think QAnon stuff is weird? Wait until they can worm that in by talking to you in a way that actually makes sense to you. So maybe you don't think that there's a secret pedophile ring in a basement somewhere beneath a pizza parlor. But they give you something that's your particular brand of crazy and everybody is getting that. Everybody is on that train being led by the nose because the AI is generating propaganda that fits us perfectly because it knows us better than we know ourself. That's a little bit terrifying. You know, it has occurred to me.

[01:30:47] Maybe I never actually spoke with Marc Andreessen, but actually this was the first iteration of the AI playing the long game to convince me and you and everybody else that everything is okay. Checkmate, humanity. More on this, plus AI and free speech, those arguments, those are on the Sam Harris podcast, also with Marc Andreessen. I'll link to that in the show notes. Really good stuff from Sam. Unless you hate Sam Harris, in which case, forget I said anything.

[01:31:11] With AI regulation, I understand the need for it in some ways, of course. But I do worry about people who don't know the difference between Google as a search engine, ChatGPT, and their own freaking AOL email. And I am barely exaggerating here, because when Mark Zuckerberg was talking to Congress a few years ago about Cambridge Analytica and whatever else with Facebook, this was like a bunch of people asking their grandkids to figure out why the printer doesn't work when it wasn't on or plugged in and these are the people that are in charge of policy here. These people are just totally unqualified to actually think about and create the type of regulation that we might need for something like this. And it's a little bit terrifying. They're almost certainly going to get it wrong, at least at first. And by then it might be too late.

[01:32:00] Now, as far as business is concerned, if ChatGPT can make people more productive, I assume that's even more so for coders or teams of coders and people working on online cloud applications, things like that. It seems like we might actually be able to build things now with two or three people. That would normally require potentially dozens of people. This is great for big companies, of course, right? But it's even better for innovation and startups. We may go back to the age of Google being started in a garage because the leverage a few people have with AI, it might be similar or greater than it was back in the day where those who knew how to use computers, well, those are the ones with a massive advantage. I'm really excited about this. I think it's going to be good for the ecosystem and the economy.

[01:32:41] And I do see that there's a ton of upside to AI, both inside and outside of economic benefits. And perhaps that lends itself to some motivated reasoning from people like Marc. It's hard to imagine that all the motivation here would only be based on this, however, right? Is he really going to come on my show and a bunch of other shows and write essays about this because he wants to further some of the investments that Andreessen Horowitz has? That's a little bit of a, it's a little bit too cynical even for me.

[01:33:07] And by the way, this bringing up the bottom rung of society thing, I know that sounds kind of awful, but let's admit it. We all know some really dense and stupid people who can use AI to, I don't know, learn how to get by in life without screwing everything up. We do know that more intelligent people are less violent. They live longer. They build better functioning societies. They enjoy better outcomes in pretty much every area that we can measure. So bringing up the bottom several tiers of humanity. And look, I'll include myself in that. Why not? Who am I? This will absolutely change the world for the better. At least in the short term until this thing decides that the best cure is to get rid of humans altogether, which, according to Marc, isn't even necessarily going to happen.

[01:33:51] All things Marc Andreessen will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or just ask the AI chatbot also on the website. Transcripts in the show notes. I realize the irony of me telling you to just put more things into the chatbot. Maybe you don't want to know who you are. Advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

[01:34:12] We've also got our newsletter and every week the team and I dig into an older episode of the show. We dissect the lessons and takeaways from it. So if you are a fan of the show, you want a recap of important highlights and takeaways, or you just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a great place to do just that. jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget Six-Minute Networking, also on the site at jordanharbinger.com/course. I'm at @JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram, or you can connect with me on LinkedIn.

[01:34:39] This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in AI, interested in future technology, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

[01:35:11] This episode is sponsored in part by Nobody Should Believe Me podcast. If you're like me, you're fascinated by stories that dive deep into the human psyche, and you'll want to check out the Nobody Should Believe Me podcast. This groundbreaking investigative true crime podcast brought to you by my friend Andrea Dunlop. It unravels this mysterious world of Munchausen by proxy, which, in case you've never heard of it, It's basically when somebody, often a caregiver, makes another person appear sick or hurt on purpose to get attention or sympathy. We did a whole episode about it here on the show. It's a raw, gripping exploration through the eyes of those who've lived it. Not just tales, but real insights from the world's top experts in this very sort of random and terrifying niche. It's consistently dominating the Apple true crime charts, peaking as high as number eight. Pretty damn good for true crime. I'll tell you. Both seasons one and two are out. Ready for you to go on a true crime binge, check out Nobody Should Believe Me wherever you listen to podcasts.