Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:16:35 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen
[00:16:35] S1: What is that quote about, "Give me a lever and I'll move the world"? [00:16:38] S0: And I'll move the world. Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, so it's actually funny you mentioned that. So the early scientists, including Isaac Newton, were super obsessed with this concept of alchemy. Like Newton, he developed Newtonian physics and he developed calculus and all these things. But the thing he was really obsessed with was alchemy, which was the thing he could never get to work. And alchemy was the transmutation of lead into gold, which meant the transmutation of something that was very common, which was lead into something that was very rare and valuable, which was gold. He spent decades trying to figure out this thing called the philosopher stone, which would be basically the machine or the process that would be able to transmute the common thing into the rare thing, lead into gold, and he never figured it out. It was incredibly frustrating. Nobody ever figured that out. And now, we literally with AI have a technology that transfers sand into thought. Right? [00:17:31] S1: That just blew my mind.
00:17:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen
[00:17:31] S1: That just blew my mind. [00:17:33] S0: The most common thing in the world, which is sand, converted into the most rare thing in the world, which is thought. And so AI, it is the philosopher stone. It is that. It actually is that. And it's just this incredibly powerful tool. And that's where I get so excited. And again, this is what we're doing with our 10-year-old, which is like, all right, primary thing that we want to make sure to do is, to make sure that he knows fully how to leverage and get benefit out of the philosopher stone, which is to say AI. And then that's certainly central to everything we're teaching him. There's this meme going around that Silicon Valley people don't let their kids use computers. And there may be a handful of people who are like that. I don't know. I think it's more, honestly, the other way around, which is, the more you're plugged into stuff in Silicon Valley, the more important it is to make sure that your kids actually fully understand this and know how to use it. And that's certainly the mode that we're in. And that's certainly the mode that I would encourage parents to think about. [00:18:26] S1: I did not know your kid was homeschooled. That is super interesting. It's almost a statement on education in today's day. Maybe, is there any thoughts there? And just for folks that maybe aren't in your tax bracket that want to help their kids be successful, maybe homeschooled, maybe not, what advice would you have?
00:18:42 · Marc Andreessen
[00:18:42] S0: This is the challenge. And again, this kind of goes to your original question, which is education, there's two completely different ways to think about education. The way that it's usually thought about and talked about is kind of at the level of a nation. So it's like a national level issue or maybe a state level issue in the US, which is basically, how do you educate all the kids? And of course, that's incredibly important. And of course, you're going to need some level of large scale system, like the national K through 12 school system or something like that in order to do that. But then there's this other question, which is like, N=1, for an individual kid, what can you do with an individual kid? And so I'll just give you the ultimate answer to that question, which is, it's been known for centuries that the ideal way to teach a kid at the unit of N=1, by far the ideal way to do it is with one-on-one tutoring. If you just have an individual kid and the goal is to maximize an individual kid, by far you get the best results with one-on-one tutoring. And this is something that every royal family knew in history. It's something that every aristocratic class knew in history. There's all these amazing examples. Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle. He took over the world. Many of the great kings, queens, royal families, aristocrats and so forth over the course of centuries kind of always had this approach. There's actually also statistical evidence, analytical evidence that this is correct. There's this massive question in the field of education, which is, how do you improve educational outcomes? And basically, it turns out it's very hard to improve educational outcomes except there's one method that always does it, which is called the Bloom's 2 Sigma effect, which is there's one method of education that routinely raises student outcomes by two standards of deviation and will take a kid from the 50th percentile to the 99th percentile and that's one-on-one tutoring. So again, if you go back to N=1, you have a kid and a tutor and they're in this very tight loop with each other, where the kid is able to constantly kind of be on the leading edge of what they're capable of doing and they can move incredibly fast and they get kind of correction in real time, you get these better outcomes.
00:20:43 · Marc Andreessen
But to your question, it's never been economically feasible for anybody other than the richest people in society to be able to provide one-on-one tutoring for kids. AI provides the very real prospect of being able to do that, because obviously now, if you have a kid that's super interested in something and they can talk to an LLM about it and they can ask an infinite number of questions and they can get instantaneous feedback. And in fact, you can even tell an LLM, it's like, "Teach me how to do the following." And you can say, "Wow, I don't quite understand what you're saying. Numb it down for me a little bit." "Okay, now quiz me, do I actually understand this?" People can just do this today. And so I think there's this massive opportunity for parents in many walks of life, with a little bit of time at focus, to be able to say, " Okay, my kid's probably still going to go through a traditional education system, but I'm going to augment this with AI tutoring." And of course, there's going to be tons of startups, and there already are, that are going to try to build on all the products and services for this. Khan Academy, on the nonprofit side, has a big push to do this. And so I think the broad answer might be a hybrid approach with schools plus one-to-one tutoring through AI. You may have heard, there's this great new private school system called Alpha, in which everything I just described is kind of the basis of their philosophy, which is, it's a combination of in person schools and teachers, but it's also heavily based on AI and AI tutoring. And so I think there is a magic formula in here that I think is going to apply much more broadly. And really, for parents interested in this, now it'd be a great time to really start to think hard about that and to look at the options.
00:22:17 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:22:17] S1: It's interesting because there's all this concern that young people, jobs are not going to be there for them, AI is replacing them. On the flip side, there's what you're describing here. It feels like people coming in learning today are going to move so fast and learn so much more. And where do you sit on this divide of, young people are in big trouble or they're actually going to be the ones winning in the end?
00:22:38 · Marc Andreessen
[00:22:38] S0: Yeah. So the job substitution, job loss thing is just, it's very reductive. I think it's an overly simplistic model. And again, it goes back to what I said at the very beginning, which is, we've actually been in a regime for 50 years of very slow technological change in the economy. And so again, like I said, it's at half the rate of the previous era and then a third of the rate of 100 years ago. And so we're coming out of this kind of phase where we've had almost no technological progress in the economy, we've had remarkably little job churn as a result of that relative to any historical period. And so even if AI ticks up, even if AI triples productivity growth in the economy, which would be a massively big deal, it would take us back to the same level of job churn that was happening between 1870 and 1930. And if you go back and you read accounts of 1870 to 1930, people just thought the world was a watch with opportunity. At that rate of technological transformation, kids were able to develop new careers into new areas of the economy, building new kinds of products and services. I mean, a huge part of everything in our modern world today was kind of invented and proliferated during that period. And so even if AI triples the pace of economic change in the economy, it's going to just translate to a much higher rate of economic growth, it's going to translate to a much higher rate of job growth. And there'll be some level of task level and job level substitution that will take place, but that will be swamped by the macro effects of economic growth and innovation that will happen. And then corresponding to that, there'll be hiring booms, quite honestly, I think all over the place. And then again, go back to the other thing, which is like, this is all happening in the face of declining population growth and increasingly population shrinkage. And so human workers in many, many, many countries over the next 10, 20, 30 years are going to be at more and more of a premium, literally because you're going to have shrinking population levels. We don't really want to get into politics particularly, but it does feel like the world broadly is going to reverse course on the rates of immigration that we've had for the last 50 years.