Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Marc Andreessen: The real AI boom hasn’t even started yet

01:32:15 · Marc Andreessen

And I think this is a huge part of the Substack phenomenon, and the newsletter phenomenon, and the podcast phenomenon, is, like, direct exposure to the people who are actually principals in the field who actually know what they're talking about is probably still dramatically underrated. And I think again, the reason for that is like we're used to being in this mass media kind of culture in which basically everything is mediated. Right? Everything got filtered through like TV interviews or, like, newspaper interviews, or magazine interviews. And obviously now more and more it's just, no, you actually want smart people who are actually working on something explaining themselves. And then you have tons of intermediation, like podcasts, that kind of open that up for people and make that possible. And so yeah, domain practitioners are really great. I mean, yeah, just to state the obvious in AI, it's obviously your stuff, but also, like, the fact that Lex Fridman can have the world's leading... And any of you guys, there's a small handful of you guys who have access to these people, you could have the world's leading experts in the domain actually show up. And by the way, and look, the critique always is, people talk their book, like if I'm running a startup or whatever I'm just selling. But it's like... And there's always a little bit of that... But it's also, my experience is people love to talk about what they do. And they fundamentally want to express what they do, and they want to explain it, and they want people to understand it. And everybody kind of enjoys that, and they get to contribute to human knowledge by doing that, and they get ego gratification by doing that. And so I think there's actually just tremendous amounts of alpha in listening to the world's leading experts in the space who actually just show up and talk about what they're doing. And of course the world is awash in that today in a way that it wasn't as recently as 10 years ago. So yeah, I do as much of that as I can too.

Substack Lex Friedman

01:33:54 · Lenny Rachitsky

[01:33:54] S1: And there's also just this culture in tech, Silicon Valley, in particular, of sharing, or not trying to keep these secrets. Everyone on LinkedIn is always like, "How is this free?" Like, it's just the way it works.

01:34:04 · Marc Andreessen

[01:34:04] S0: Yeah. Somebody said, "Silicon Valley is a company town, but they company is Silicon Valley." Right? And again, at the loneliest coast, again, is one of these great n equals one. If the level of n equals one is somebody, and I've run startups before, I've run companies before, if the level of n equals one of, like, running a company, that's just a giant pain in the fucking butt. Because your secrets are walking out the door, and your employees are walking out the door, and the whole thing sucks. But the other side of it is you also benefit from that, right? Because you get to hire people with all these skills and experiences, right, and you're in this ecosystem that adapts and channels talents and skill and knowledge and people into the new fields. So there's kind of the push and pull of that at the level of just being an individual CEO. At the level of just being in the ecosystem to your point, yeah, it's an absolutely magical phenomenon. And by the way, for all of the issues in Silicon Valley, I did the count once, I think AI is the ninth major technology platform in the history of Silicon Valley. Right? Silicon Valley is still called Silicon Valley, we haven't made Silicon here in decades. Right? We used to actually... You know it's called Silicon Valley because they used to make chips, right? They used to have the actual fabs were in Silicon Valley. And then they designed them and they made the chips. And so, and that was wave one starting in the 19... No, that was actually, no, that was more wave three or whatever. But that was when the area was named in the 1950s. But now we're on wave nine. Right? And the company town phenomenon where the company is, the industry, again, the indeterminate optimism, nobody had to sit and plan and say, "Okay, in the 1990s Silicon Valley's going to do the internet, in the 2000s they're going to do the smartphone, in the 2010s they're going to do the cloud, in the 2020s they're going to do AI." It's just, right, the indeterminate optimism of ecosystem flexibility of the ecosystem that they Silicon Valley could morph into all these categories, and again, maybe a testimony to indeterminate optimism.

01:35:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Marc Andreessen

[01:35:58] S1: This reminds me of the meme of how we're all just wrappers over sand, everything we're building is just wrapper over wrapper, wrapper, wrapper. [01:36:03] S0: The wrapper thing is hysterical, yeah, yeah. I'm a software company and I'm a chip wrapper, right? [01:36:07] S1: Yeah. [01:36:08] S0: Yeah. I'm a business application, I'm a database wrapper. Yeah, exactly. I'm a sand... I mean, you and I, we're all now sand wrappers. [01:36:15] S1: Sand wrappers. [01:36:17] S0: Perfect. [01:36:17] S1: Okay. One more question along the media diet, I asked your partner Ben Horowitz what to talk to you about. This is a16z if people don't know him. And he said you're really into movies these days. [01:36:27] S0: Yeah. [01:36:28] S1: And so I don't know, any movies? Any movies you're really into these days, any movies you've absolutely loved recently? [01:36:33] S0: Yeah, so the movies that blew my socks off last year, which I think is the best movie of the decade for sure and maybe of the last, like, 15 years, is this movie. Unfortunately it's one of these things, not a lot of people have seen it, but I would encourage it. It's called Eddington. [01:36:48] S1: I've not heard of it.

Andreessen Horowitz Ben Horowitz

01:36:48 · Marc Andreessen

[01:36:48] S0: Have you not heard of it? Okay, so you're going to really enjoy it. So, I won't spoil too much of it, so at the surface level the following spoils nothing. So at the surface level, it's set in a small town in New Mexico called Eddington which is a small town about 600 people. And there's a sheriff who's played by Joaquin Phoenix who's like an old, crusty, basically right-winger, and then there's a mayor played by Pedro Pascal who's basically a young, hip, progressive. And then the movie starts I think in March of 2020. And so it starts when COVID first hits. And then it sort of as it plays out over the next few months, it intersects, and it sort of extends into the summer of 2020. So, kind of the George Floyd moment and then protests and riots and kind of everything. So sort of the convergence of COVID and then all the BLM stuff. And then there's a third kind of element to it which is there's a company which is basically a loosely-disguised version of Meta if you read the backstory of it, which is building an AI data center on the outskirts of town. So they kind of pull that in as sort of a thing that looms larger and larger over time. And then the thing it really is great at is it really shows, you know, this is a small town in New Mexico. And so, everybody in the town gets full wrapped up in all the COVID stuff, and they get fully wrapped up in all the BLM stuff, and they get fully wrapped up in all the tech anxiety stuff. But they're all experiencing it basically through the internet, right? Which is what actually happened, right? So the reason I love the movie so much is one is it's the first movie that directly grapples with 2020, of what happened in 2020, and it just, like, fully, fully engages and grapples with all the dynamics that were playing out in the country. But the other reason is it's the first movie that does a really good job of showing what it was like especially in that area to live in a world in which there were things happening in the real world, and people were kind of experiencing events online, like in a way that was very central in their lives. Right? And so it does a really good job of pulling in smartphones and social media in a way that movies really, really, really struggle with, and then the whole thing comes together in an incredibly entertaining way.