Marc Andreessen on AI Winters and Agent Breakthroughs
Episode publishedPodcast: The a16z ShowThe a16z Show
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This episode originally aired on the Latent Space podcast. Marc Andreessen has watched AI cycle through summers and winters for more than thirty five years, from coding in Lisp in 1989 to backing the foundation model companies today. He argues that the current moment is not another false start, but the payoff from eight decades of foundational research catalyzed by four distinct breakthroughs, large language models, reasoning, agents, and self improvement. He also makes the case that the combination of a language model, a Unix shell, and a file system represent one of the most important softwa
Something about AI that causes the people in the field, I would say, to become both excessively utopian and excessively apocalyptic. Having said that, I think what's actually happened is an enormous amount of tactical progress that built up over time. And, like, for for example, we now know the neural network is the correct architecture. And I I will tell you, like, there was a sixty year run where that was like a, you know, or even seventy years where that was controversial. And so so the way I think about what's happening is basically think I think about basically the the the period we're in
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Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Litin Space podcast. This is Alasio, founder of Kernel Labs,
and I'm joined by Swiggs, editor of Liddens Space. Hello. And we're in a 16 z with a. Michael Giesen, welcome.
Yes. Yes. A and what? Half of 16? Of the one. A
one. Exactly. Apparently, this is the the final few days in your your current office. You're moving across the road.
We're we have a limited we have some underway, but, yeah, this is actually, although this is the original we're in actually the original office. We're in the we're in the we're in we're in the whole thing started. It's beautiful. Yeah. Great. Thank you.
So I have to come out. This is a you know, I wanted to pick a spicy start. In October 2022, I just made friends with Rune, and, I wanted to give him something to sort of be spicy about. And I said, it'll never not be funny that a 16 z was constantly going. The future is where the smart people choose to spend their time and then going deep into crypto and not in AI. And that was in October 2022. And Rune says there was an internal meeting in a '16 z to reorient around Geniei. Obviously, you had, but was there a meeting? What what was that?
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