Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:07:04 · Marc Andreessen
[00:07:04] S0: I think, at this point, it's pretty clear, with our technology hats on, that this stuff is really working now. There was a ChatGPT moment three years ago. By the way, only three years ago, was the ChatGPT moment. And the big question was, all right, this is incredibly fun and creative. And we have machines now that can compose Shakespearean sonnets and rap lyrics, and this is amazing. But then there was this big question, can you harness this technology for reasoning and for problem solving in domains that really matter, medicine, science, law and so forth? And it turns out the answer to that is yes. And the last 12 months, and especially even just the last three months have really proven that AI can really do... I mean, you're seeing it all now. AI is now developing new math theorems. Over the holiday break, it feels like the AI coding thing really hit critical mass and the world's best programmers, including Linus Torvalds, for the first time over the holiday break basically said, "Yeah, AI is now coding better than we can." And so that's incredibly powerful. And I think we all assume that AI now is going to get really good at reasoning in any domain in which there are verifiable answers. And so that's going to include many very important domains. So the technology feels like it's moving fast and it's going to be working really well. I think the thing that is not well understood, I think a lot of people in the industry have kind of what I would describe as this one dimensional thing, which is, okay, as a result of the technology now working, AI just kind of sweeps the world and changes everything. And I think that's kind of the wrong framer. I think it's based on an incomplete understanding of the world that we live in or the world that we've been living in for the last 80 years. And I would call out two things in particular. So one is, I think it's felt to us, in the US and the West, for the last whatever, 30 years or 50 years, it's felt like we've been in a time of great technological change. But actually, if you look for actually evidence of that, in statistical evidence of that, analytical evidence of that, you basically can't find it.
00:09:02 · Marc Andreessen
And in particular, economists have a way of measuring the rate of technological change in the economy that is productivity growth, which we could talk about what that means, but basically, it's sort of the mathematical expression of the impact of technology on the economy. And productivity growth for the last 50 years has actually been very low, not very high. So we all feel like it's been very high. There's been lots of technological change. What's actually happening is, it's been very low. And in fact, the pace of productivity growth, like in the US, is running at a half of what it... In my lifetime, in our lifetimes, it's been running at about half the pace that it ran between 1940 and 1970, and it's been running at about a third the pace that it ran between about 1870 to about 1940. And so statistically, in the US, in the West, technology progress in the economy, technology impact in the economy has actually slowed way down. And so the AI thing is going to hit, but it's hitting an environment in which we have actually had almost no technological progress in the actual economy for a very long time. So we could talk about that. And then there's this other just incredible thing that's happening, which is the demographic collapse, it's sort of a Western phenomenon and increasingly global phenomenon, which is the rate of reproduction of the human species is in rapid decline. And there are many countries, including the US, where the rate of reproduction is under two, meaning that many, many countries around the world, by the way, including China, which is a really big deal, are actually going to depopulate over the next century. And so you have this kind of precondition that says there's actually been very little technological progress happening in the world and the world is going to depopulate. And so AI is going to enter a world in which those two things are true. And I think this is incredibly important because we actually need AI to work in order to get productivity growth up, which is what we need to get economic growth up. And we actually need AI to work because we're going to need machines to do all the jobs that we're not going to have people to do because we're literally going to depopulate the planet over the next 100 years.
00:11:06 · Marc Andreessen, Lenny Rachitsky
And so I think the interplay of these factors is going to be much more interesting, and frankly, more complex than a lot of people have been thinking. [00:11:15] S1: I'm going to follow this thread about kids. I know you have a kid, and my favorite lenses into how people think and what they value is what they're teaching their kids, what they're steering their kids towards. Are there specific skills or even careers that you're steering your kid towards?
00:11:32 · Marc Andreessen
[00:11:32] S0: The way I think about this, we have a 10-year-old, we actually homeschool and so we think a lot about this. So I think the way to think about the impact of AI on, specifically, people as individuals, it's actually, a lot of people just focus on this kind of very, I would say, straightforward or overly simplistic view of just literally job losses, which we can talk about. But there's two specific things at the level of an individual person or an individual kid. So I think it's pretty clear that AI is going to take people who are good at doing things and it's going to make them very good at doing things. And so it's going to be a tool that's going to raise the average across the board. And look, you see that playing out already. Anybody who's in a position where they need to write something, design something, write code or whatever, if they're pretty good at it today, they use AI and all of a sudden they're very good at it. And so there's sort of that aspect to it. And I think the way the education system at large is going to teach AI is going to be based hopefully a lot on that. But then there's this other thing that's happening, which we're also starting to see, and we're really seeing it particularly in coding right now, where the really great people are becoming spectacularly great. And so you kind of use the term, you think about the super empowered individual. So the individual who is really good at coding, really good at making movies, really good at making songs, really good at making art, or whatever those things are, or podcasting or hopefully venture capital. If you're very good at it and you can really harness AI, you can become spectacularly great and super productive. I'm sure you have a lot of friends in this category as well, but the really, really good coders are experiencing this right now.
00:13:14 · Marc Andreessen, Lenny Rachitsky
My friends who are really good coders are like, "Oh my God, all of a sudden, I'm not twice as good as I used to be, I'm 10 times as good as I used to be." And so I think, at the unit of N=1 of an individual kid, I think the question is, how do you get them into position where they're kind of this super empowered individual such that they're going to be really kind of deep in whatever it is they're going to do, but they're going to be deep in a way that's going to let them fully use the power of AI to be not just great, but to be spectacularly great? I think that's the real opportunity, and at least that's what we're shooting for and that's what I would encourage parents to shoot for. [00:13:53] S1: So when I heard there is essentially agency, this word that we see on Twitter all the time is building agency, them not waiting for someone to tell them what to do, figuring out what to do.
00:14:01 · Marc Andreessen
[00:14:01] S0: Yeah. Yeah. So this term agency that's become very, very, very popular, certainly in California for the last couple of years, it's really interesting because I had a lot of trouble with this early on, because I'm like, "Agency? Okay, what are they talking about?" And what they're kind of talking about is initiative, you could just do things. What is it? The [inaudible 00:14:25] has the great term, live player, you can be a primary participant in events. And at first, I was like, "Well, yeah, that's kind of obvious, of course." And then I'm like, "Oh, actually, it's not so obvious anymore." Because to your point, I think so much of our society is based on, there are all these rules and everybody gets taught kind of by default, you're supposed to follow all these rules. And then if you break the rules, everybody gets freaked out. It's like, "Oh my God, he broke the rules." And so we have somehow worked our way kind of psychologically, sociologically into a state in which I guess the natural assumption for a lot of people is the thing that you... For example, the thing you want to train kids to do is follow all the rules. And you could argue that, for example, K through 12 school system or whatever has gotten more and more focused on that over time. And again, especially unit N=1 of your kid, it's like... And look, there's something to be had. I just had this conversation with my 10-year-old last night, actually, I rolled out the concept of, in order to lead, you must first learn to obey. In order to issue orders, you must learn how to follow orders and trying to keep him with some level of structure in his life, and not just pure agency. But yeah, and so look, some rules are important and so forth. But yeah, no, look, there's just a huge premium in life on being somebody who is able to fully take responsibility for things, fully take charge, run an organization, lead a project, create something new. And maybe that has been maybe a little bit diminished in our culture over the last 30 years. It's healthy that there's now a term for that that is coming back into vogue.