Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:25:02 · Marc Andreessen
[01:25:02] S0: ... in terms of IQ. Like, it just tops out at 160. The 160 IQ people are the ones who come up with new physics, there's only a small handful of those. Generally speaking, when we run into somebody in the world who's like incredibly smart, who's like a bestselling author, or like a, you know, one of the world's best, I don't know, research scientists, or one of the world's best doctors, whatever it would be, probably 140 is kind of the IQ that you're looking for there. If you're looking for a really good lawyer, it's probably 130. If you're looking for a really good line manager in a business, it's probably 110. If you're looking for an accountant, like a small business accountant, who's good at doing the books for small businesses, it's probably 105. Right? And so the kind of scope of impressive human... The ability of the human organism to do intellectually impressive things, it's sort of that 110 to 160 is kind of the spectrum, and good news is there's a lot of those people running around, but there's not that many at 140, 150, 160. But it's like, that's like the limitations of what can fit in here, right? And it's like, there's no theoretical limit on where this goes if you release the limitations of human biology, right? And so, can you have a... And you already have people running these experiments to kind of do human-equivalent kind of IQ for existing AI models. And by the way, existing AI models are kind of testing around the 130, 140 level, which means they're going to get to the 160 level. And they're arguably on the math side starting to get to the 160 level now. But I think we're going to have AI models relatively quickly that are going to be like 160, 180, 200, 250, 300. By the way, and I think that's great, right? I feel as great about that as I do about the fact that we occasionally get an Einstein. Right? It's like, would the world be better off or worse off with more or fewer Einsteins? And the answer is, of course the world would be better off with more Einsteins, and of course the world would be better off with machines that have more IQ like Einstein or greater than Einstein. But I think IQ of the machines is going to exceed that of the humans, I think that's really good. And then the performance, again, it goes back to like the AI coding thing that's happening. Performance against task is going to get better also.
01:26:57 · Marc Andreessen
I think this is where Linus Torvalds in particular was like, "Yeah, okay, this thing is starting to generate better code than I can." Okay? So now we're going to have AI coders that are actually better coders than the best human coders. I think that's... Right? I think we're going to have AI doctors that are better than the best human doctors, I think we're going to have AI lawyers that are better than the best human lawyers, which actually is going to be very interesting to see, which we can talk about. Which I think is also great. And so, I don't think there's a... I think we're used to living in a world where we just don't understand how good good can get, because we've been capped by our own biology. And we're going to get to experience what it's like when you have the capability at your fingertips, that's actually better than human in these domains. So you see what I'm saying, which is, like, I think this idea of human equivalent is just going to be a footnote. It's like, "Oh yeah, that was just on Tuesday, in 2026 is when they hit that." And it kind of didn't matter because the next question was, like, "Okay, what do we get to do in a world where we actually have machines that are better than that?" Right? And so, I think this is going to be much more of an exploratory process for actually seeding human capability than it's going to be any sort of particular singular singularity moment or whatever that happens, that just happens to coincide with the human threshold.
01:28:10 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:28:10] S1: 200 IQ, I... Just like that frame of reference is such a mind-expanding way to think about just how fast and how smart these things are going to get, and quickly.
01:28:20 · Marc Andreessen
[01:28:20] S0: Well, I don't know if you have this experience, I have this experience all the time. Well, two experiences I have all the time. One is just like, I know I ought to be able to do this, but I just can't... It's going to take too long, I want to write this thing, or I want to... Whatever, I want to have this theory on this thing, or to have a plan or whatever. And it's just like, "Fuck," I don't have the eight hours, or by the way, the eight weeks or the eight years, right? And I just don't know enough yet, and I'm just, like, I can't do the math in my head, and my memory isn't perfect, and I can't remember, and I read... I don't know if you have this, you get interested in something, you read 10 books. And then you're like, "Shit, I forgot almost everything I just read." I wish I could retain it all but I can't. It's just like you just have this... I sort of live in this state of endless frustration. And so it's like, if I could just be smarter than I was, I'd be much better at what I do, but I'm not. So there's that. And I don't know how often you have this, but I have this on a regular basis. It's just like, "I," because of what we do, I know a bunch of people who I know for fucking sure are smarter than I am. And I know it because when I talk to them, I just find myself at a certain point. It's like for the first half of the conversation, I'm just taking notes the entire time. And for the second half of the conversation, I'm just like, "Fuck," like, "Fuck me." Like, this person is just smarter than I am, and they're just out-thinking me, and they're going to keep out-thinking me, and I just can't, and I'm just like, "All right, goddammit. I've got to go home and I've got to have a drink." Because I'm just not... Whatever that is, I'm not that. And so, we're just so used to having those limitations, that the idea of having machines that work for us that don't have those limitations, I just... I think that's much more exciting than people are giving it credit for.
01:30:00 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:30:00] S1: Oh man. I could talk to you for hours, Mark. I'm thinking to close out the conversation, I want to ask about your media diet and your product diet. You just talked about books, 10 books, I think you famously read constantly. I saw an interview with you where you're just like, "Airpods changed my life, I'm just listening to audiobooks now all the time." So in terms of a media diet, what are you reading, what are you paying attention to these days in terms, I don't know, podcasts, newsletters, blogs, things like that, and then any books in particular?
01:30:25 · Marc Andreessen
[01:30:25] S0: Yeah, yeah. So what I read is basically, I mean I read... So I read basically three categories of things. So in terms of general media, it's basically I sort of... I always describe it as I have an almost perfect barbell strategy, which is I read X, and I read old books. Right? So it's basically either, like, up-to-the minute what's happening right now, or it's like a book that was written 50 years ago that has stood the test of time, and then where presumably there's something timeless in it. And then it's sort of everything in the middle, I'm always much more skeptical about. And in particular, it's kind of what I already said, which is I think if you go back and you read old... Nobody ever does this, it's actually really funny, there's no market for it. But if you go back and you read old newspapers... And by the way, you can do this, just read the last week's newspaper, right? Yeah, today, so we're taping on Friday. So read last Friday's newspaper, right? And just go back and read it, and be like, "Oh my God. None of this happened. None of what they predicted played out the way that they said that it would. None of this turned out to actually be that relevant or correct." They didn't understand, by the way, they had no view of what was going to happen this week. Then they couldn't know, and so they were making predictions and forecasts and so forth based on not having information. But it's like, "Wow, none of this happened, I wish I had never read this, oh my God." And then it's kind of the same thing with magazines, I go back and read old magazines, and just the level of just the endless numbers of predictions that they make. And kind of, you know, the problem with... Newspapers at least they're going day-to-day, the thing with magazines is it's like a week or month kind of a long cycle. And so by the time an article even hits publication, it's often out of date. So I just have a big problem with kind of everything in the middle. And so it's either of the moment or timeless. But then yeah, you mentioned newsletters. I mean, so the other thing, and this is maybe obvious, but I think it's probably still underrated, which is actual practitioners in the field who are actually creating content, I think probably is still dramatically underrated.