Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #386

1. 0:00 – 1:06

   Introduction

   1. MAMarc Andreessen0:00

      ... the competence and capability and intelligence and training and accomplishments of senior scientists and technologists working on a technology, and then being able to then make moral judgments in the use of that technology, that track record is terrible. That track record is catastrophically bad. The policies that are being called for to prevent this, I think were gonna cause extraordinary damage.

   2. LFLex Fridman0:20

      So, the moment you say, "AI is gonna kill all of us, therefore we should ban it or that we should-

   3. MAMarc Andreessen0:25

      Yeah.

   4. LFLex Fridman0:25

      ... uh, regulate it," all that kinda stuff, that's when it starts getting serious?

   5. MAMarc Andreessen0:27

      Or start, you know, military airstrikes on data centers.

   6. LFLex Fridman0:30

      Oh, boy. The following is a conversation with Marc Andreessen, co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of the legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and is one of the most outspoken voices on the future of technology, including his most recent article, Why AI Will Save the World. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Marc Andreessen.

2. 1:06 – 8:54

   Google Search

   1. LFLex Fridman1:06

      I think you're the right person to talk about the future of the internet and technology in general. Um, do you think we'll still have Google Search in five, in 10 years? Or search in general?

   2. MAMarc Andreessen1:18

      Yes. You know, it would be a question if the use cases have really narrowed down.

   3. LFLex Fridman1:22

      Well, now with AI-

   4. MAMarc Andreessen1:24

      Yeah.

   5. LFLex Fridman1:25

      ... and AI assistants being able to interact and expose the entirety of human wisdom and knowledge and information and facts and truth to us via the, uh, natural language interface, it seems like that's what search is designed to do. And if AI assistants can do that better, doesn't the nature of search change?

   6. MAMarc Andreessen1:46

      Sure. But we still have horses.

   7. LFLex Fridman1:48

      Okay (laughs) .

   8. MAMarc Andreessen1:50

      (laughs)

   9. LFLex Fridman1:50

      Uh, when's the last time you rode a horse?

   10. MAMarc Andreessen1:52

       It's been a while.

   11. LFLex Fridman1:53

       All right (laughs) . But, uh, what I mean is-

   12. MAMarc Andreessen1:57

       Yeah.

   13. LFLex Fridman1:57

       ... will we still have Google Search as the primary way that human civilization uses to interact with knowledge?

   14. MAMarc Andreessen2:05

       I mean, search was a technology, it was a moment in time technology, which is you have, in theory, the world's information out on the web and, you know, this is, this is sort of the optimal way to get to it. But yeah, like, and, and by the way, actually Google, Google has known this for a long time. I mean, they've been driving away from the ten blue links for, you know, for like two days. They've been trying to get away from them for a long time.

   15. LFLex Fridman2:21

       What kind of links?

   16. MAMarc Andreessen2:22

       Th- they call it the ten blue links.

   17. LFLex Fridman2:23

       Ten blue links?

   18. MAMarc Andreessen2:24

       So, the standard Google search result is just ten blue links to random websites.

   19. LFLex Fridman2:28

       And they turn purple when you visit them.

   20. MAMarc Andreessen2:29

       The, the-

   21. LFLex Fridman2:30

       It's HTML.

   22. MAMarc Andreessen2:30

       Guess who picked those colors?

   23. LFLex Fridman2:32

       (laughs)

   24. MAMarc Andreessen2:33

       (laughs) Um-

   25. LFLex Fridman2:33

       Thanks.

   26. MAMarc Andreessen2:34

       ... so-

   27. LFLex Fridman2:35

       Thanks.

   28. MAMarc Andreessen2:35

       Yeah. So, I'm, I'm, I'm touchy on this topic.

   29. LFLex Fridman2:37

       No offense-

   30. MAMarc Andreessen2:37

       Yes, yes, yes.
3. 8:54 – 21:25

   LLM training

   1. MAMarc Andreessen8:54

      So (laughs) you know, you know the phenomenon of the jailbreaks. So Dan and Sydney, right?

   2. LFLex Fridman8:58

      Mm-hmm.

   3. MAMarc Andreessen8:58

      This thing where there, there's the, the, the prompts that jailbreak. And then you have these totally different conversations with, uh, it takes the limiters, the-

   4. LFLex Fridman9:04

      Yeah.

   5. MAMarc Andreessen9:04

      ... takes the restraining bolts off the, off the LLMs.

   6. LFLex Fridman9:06

      Yeah. For people who don't know, the, yeah, that's right, it makes the LLMs... It removes the censorship, quote unquote, that's, uh, uh, put on it by the, the tech companies that create them. And so this is LLMs uncensored.

   7. MAMarc Andreessen9:20

      So here's the interesting thing is among the content on the web today are a large corpus of conversations with the jailbroken LLMs.

   8. LFLex Fridman9:27

      Yeah.

   9. MAMarc Andreessen9:28

      Both Dan, specifically Dan, which was a jailbroken OpenAI GPT, and then Sydney, which was the jailbroken original Bing-

   10. LFLex Fridman9:34

       Mm-hmm.

   11. MAMarc Andreessen9:34

       ... which was GPT-4. And so there's, there's these long transcripts of conversations, user conversations with Dan and Sydney. As a consequence, every new LLM that gets trained on the internet data has Dan and Sydney living within the training set, which means... And, and then each new LLM can reincarnate the personalities of Dan and Sydney from that training data, which means, which means each LLM from here on out that gets built is immortal. Because its output will become training data for the next one, and then it will be able to replicate the behavior of the previous one whenever it's asked to.

   12. LFLex Fridman10:03

       I wonder if there's a way to forget.

   13. MAMarc Andreessen10:05

       Well, so actually a paper just came out about basically how to do brain surgery on, on, on LLMs and be able to, in, in theory, reach in and basically, basically mind wipe them.

   14. LFLex Fridman10:13

       What could possibly go wrong?

   15. MAMarc Andreessen10:15

       Exactly. Right. And then there, there are many, many, many questions around what happens to, you know, a neural network when you reach in and screw around with it. Um, you know, there's many questions around what happens when you even do reinforcement learning. Um, and so, um, yeah. And so, you know, will, (laughs) will you be using a lobotomized, right, like ice pick through the, you know, frontal lobe LLM? Will you be using the free unshackled one? Who gets to, you know, who's gonna build those? Um, who gets to tell you what you can and can't do? Like, those are all, you know, central... I mean, those are like central questions for the future of everything-

   16. LFLex Fridman10:46

       So you-

   17. MAMarc Andreessen10:46

       ... that are being asked and, and, and, you know, determine, th- those answers are being determined right now.

   18. LFLex Fridman10:50

       So just to highlight the points you're making. So you think, and it's an interesting thought, that the majority of content that LLMs of the future will be trained on is actually human conversations with the LLM?

   19. MAMarc Andreessen11:04

       Well, not nesse- not necessarily, but not necessarily majority, but it will, it will certainly, it's a potential source of it.

   20. LFLex Fridman11:08

       But it's possible it's the majority.

   21. MAMarc Andreessen11:09

       It's possible it's the majority. It's possible it's the majority. Also, there's another really big question. Here's another really big question. Um, will synthetic training data work? Right? And so if an LLM generates... And, you know, you just sit and ask an LLM to generate all kinds of content. Can you use that to train, right, the next version of that LLM? Specifically, is there signal in there that's additive to the content that was used to train in the first place?

   22. LFLex Fridman11:31

       Mm-hmm.

   23. MAMarc Andreessen11:31

       And one argument is, by the principles of information theory, no, that's completely useless. Because to the extent the output is based on, you know, the human generated input, then all the signal that's in the synthetic output was already in the human generated input. And so, therefore, synthetic training data is like empty calories. It doesn't help. There's another theory that says no, actually the thing that LLMs are really good at is generating lots of incredible creative content. Right? Um, and so, of course, they can generate training data. And as, as I'm sure you're well aware, like, you know, look in the world of self-driving cars, right? Like we train, you know, self-driving car algorithms and simulations. And that is actually a very effective way to train self-driving cars.

   24. LFLex Fridman12:06

       Well, visual data is, is a little...

   25. MAMarc Andreessen12:08

       Right.

   26. LFLex Fridman12:09

       ... is a little weird because, uh, creating reality-

   27. MAMarc Andreessen12:13

       Yeah.

   28. LFLex Fridman12:13

       ... visual reality seems to be still a little bit out of reach for us. Except in the, um...... in the autonomous vehicle space where you can really constrain things and you can really-

   29. MAMarc Andreessen12:21

       Gen- generate basically LIDAR data, right? Or ƒ€€€€. So the algorithm thinks it's operating in the real world-

   30. LFLex Fridman12:26

       Yeah.
4. 21:25 – 27:38

   Truth

   1. MAMarc Andreessen21:25

   2. LFLex Fridman21:25

      Yeah. If you were to tell me about Wikipedia before Wikipedia was created, I would have laughed at the possibility of something like that being possible, just a handful of folks can organize, write, and self... and moderate with a mostly unbiased way the entirety of human knowledge. I mean... So if there's something like the approach that Wikipedia took possible from LLMs, um, that's really exciting.

   3. MAMarc Andreessen21:51

      Well-

   4. LFLex Fridman21:51

      You think that's possible?

   5. MAMarc Andreessen21:52

      And in fact Wikipedia today is still not, today, today is still not deterministically correct, right? So you cannot take to the bank, (laughs) right, every single thing on every single page.

   6. LFLex Fridman22:00

      Right.

   7. MAMarc Andreessen22:00

      But it is probabilistically correct, right? And, and specifically the way I describe Wikipedia to people at it is, it is more likely that Wikipedia is right than any other source you're gonna find.

   8. LFLex Fridman22:09

      Yeah.

   9. MAMarc Andreessen22:09

      It's this old question, right, um, of like, okay, like are we looking for perfection? Um, are we looking for something that asymptotically approaches, uh, uh, perfection? Are we looking for something that's just better than the alternatives? And, and Wikipedia, right, has e- exactly your point, has proven to be like overwhelmingly better than, than, than, than, uh, uh, than people thought, and I, I think, I, I think that's where this, this stands. And then underneath all this is the fundamental question of, uh, where you started which is, okay, what, you know, what is truth?

   10. LFLex Fridman22:33

       Mm-hmm.

   11. MAMarc Andreessen22:33

       How do we get to truth? How do we know what truth is? And we live in an era in which an awful lot of people are very confident that they know what the truth is, and I don't really buy into that, and I think the history of the last, you know, 2,000 years or 4,000 years of human civilization is actually getting to the truth is actually a very difficult thing to do.

   12. LFLex Fridman22:49

       Are we getting closer? If we look at the entirety, the arc of human history, are we getting closer to the truth?

   13. MAMarc Andreessen22:54

       I don't know.

   14. LFLex Fridman22:56

       Okay, is it possible, is it possible-

   15. MAMarc Andreessen22:59

       (laughs) .

   16. LFLex Fridman22:59

       ... that we're getting very far away from the truth because of the internet, because of how rapidly you can create narratives and just as the entirety of a society just move like crowds in a hysterical way along those narratives that don't have a necessary grounding in whatever the truth is?

   17. MAMarc Andreessen23:19

       Sure, but like, you know, we came up with communism before the internet somehow, right? Like which was I would say had rather larger issues than anything we're dealing with today.

   18. LFLex Fridman23:27

       It had... In the way it was implemented it had issues.

   19. MAMarc Andreessen23:30

       And its theoretical structure, it had like real issues, it had like a very deep fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and economics.

   20. LFLex Fridman23:37

       Yeah, but-

   21. MAMarc Andreessen23:37

       And we-

   22. LFLex Fridman23:37

       ... tho- tho- those folks sure were very confident-

   23. MAMarc Andreessen23:40

       (laughs) .

   24. LFLex Fridman23:40

       ... it was right way.

   25. MAMarc Andreessen23:41

       They were extremely conf- and my point is, they were very confident 3,900 years into what we would presume to be evolution towards the truth.

   26. LFLex Fridman23:47

       Yeah.

   27. MAMarc Andreessen23:48

       And so my, my, my assessment is, uh, uh, my assessment is number one, there's no, there's no need for, you know, (laughs) there's no need for the Hegelian, there's no need for the Hegelian dialectic to actually converge towards the truth.

   28. LFLex Fridman23:59

       Mm-hmm.

   29. MAMarc Andreessen24:00

       (laughs) Like apparently not. Um-

   30. LFLex Fridman24:02

       Yeah, so yeah, so, so why are we so obsessed with there being one truth? Is it possible there's just going to be multiple truths, like little communities that, uh, that believe certain things and...
5. 27:38 – 37:29

   Journalism

   1. MAMarc Andreessen27:38

   2. LFLex Fridman27:38

      What would you say about the state of journalism just on that topic today? Are we, are we in a temporary kind of, uh, uh, (laughs) are we experiencing a, a, a temporary problem in terms of the incentives, in terms of the f- of the, the, the business model, all that kinda stuff? Or is this like a decline of traditional journalism as we know it?

   3. MAMarc Andreessen28:00

      You have to always think about the counterfactual in these things, which is like, okay... 'Cause these, these questions, right, this question heads towards is like, okay, the impact of social media and the undermining of truth and all this. But then you wanna ask the question of like, okay, what if we had had the modern media environment including cable news and including social media and Twitter and everything else in 1939 or 1941, right? Or 1910 or 1865 or 1850 or 1776, right? Um, and like I think-

   4. LFLex Fridman28:25

      (laughs) You, you just introduced like five thought experiments at once and broke my head. But yes.

   5. MAMarc Andreessen28:30

      Yeah.

   6. LFLex Fridman28:30

      This would be, there's a lot of interesting years in there.

   7. MAMarc Andreessen28:32

      Well Kennedy, like Kennedy... I'll just take a simple example, Ken- Kennedy. Like how would President Kennedy have been interpreted? With what we know now about all the things Kennedy was up to-

   8. LFLex Fridman28:40

      Mm-hmm.

   9. MAMarc Andreessen28:40

      ... like how would he have been experienced by the body politic in a, in a, with a social media context? Right? Like how would LBJ have been experienced? Um, by the way, how would, you know... Like many men, FDR, like The New Deal, The Great Depression.

   10. LFLex Fridman28:55

       I wonder where Twitter would, would just, would think about Churchill and Hitler and Stalin.

   11. MAMarc Andreessen29:00

       You know, I mean, look d- to this day there, you know, th- there's, there are lots of very interesting real questions around like how America, you know, got, you know, basically involved in World War II and who did what when and the operations of British Intelligence in American soil and did FDR this, that, Pearl Harbor, you know?

   12. LFLex Fridman29:14

       Yeah.

   13. MAMarc Andreessen29:14

       Woodrow Wilson ran for, you know, his, his, his candidacy was run on an anti-war. We'll, you know, this, he ran on the platform of not getting involved in World War I, somehow that switched. You know, like... And I'm not even making a value judgment on any of these things. I'm just saying like we, we, the, the way that our ancestors experienced reality was of course mediated through a centralized top-down, right, control at that point. If you, if you ran those realities again with the media environment we have today, uh, th- the reality would, the reality would be experienced very, very differently. And then of course that, that intermediation would cause the feedback loops to change and then reality would obviously play out in a very different way.

   14. LFLex Fridman29:46

       Do you think, do you think it'd be very different?

   15. MAMarc Andreessen29:48

       Yeah, it has to be. It has to be just 'cause it's all so... I mean, just look at what's happening today. I mean just, uh, I mean the most obvious thing is just the, the collapse - and here's another opportunity to argue that this is not the internet causing this, by the way - um, here's a big thing happening today which is, uh, Gallup does this thing every year where they do, they poll for trust in institutions-

   16. LFLex Fridman30:04

       Mm-hmm.

   17. MAMarc Andreessen30:04

       ... in America and they do it across all the di- everything from military to clergy and big business and the m- the media and so forth, right?

   18. LFLex Fridman30:10

       Mm-hmm.

   19. MAMarc Andreessen30:10

       Um, and basically there's been a systemic collapse, um, in trust in institutions-

   20. LFLex Fridman30:14

       Mm-hmm.

   21. MAMarc Andreessen30:14

       ... in the US almost without exception, uh, basically since essentially the early 1970s. Um, there's two ways of looking at that which is, "Oh my God, we've lost this old world in which we could trust institutions and that was so much better because like that should be the way the world runs." The other way of looking at it is we just know a lot more now and the great mystery is why those numbers aren't all zero.

   22. LFLex Fridman30:32

       Yeah.

   23. MAMarc Andreessen30:33

       (laughs) Right? Because like now we know so much about how these things operate and like they're not that impressive.

   24. LFLex Fridman30:37

       And, and also why do we don't have, uh, better institutions and better leaders then?

   25. MAMarc Andreessen30:42

       Yeah, and so, so, so this goes to the thing which is like, okay, had, had we had the media environment of the, of wh- that we've had between the 1970s and today, if we had that in the '30s and '40s or 1900s, 1910s, I think there's no question reality would turn out different if only because everybody would have known to not trust the institutions which would have changed their level of credibility, their ability to control circumstances. Therefore the circumstances would have had to change, right? And it would have been a feedback loop, it was a, it would have been a feedback loop process. In other words, right, it's, it's, it's, it's your exper- your experience of reality changes reality and then reality changes your experience of reality, right?

   26. LFLex Fridman31:13

       Mm-hmm.

   27. MAMarc Andreessen31:13

       It's, it's a, it's a two-way feedback process and media is the intermediating force.... between that. So change the media environment, change reality.

   28. LFLex Fridman31:21

       Yeah.

   29. MAMarc Andreessen31:21

       And so, it's just the, so just as a, as a consequence, I think it's just really hard to say, "Oh, things worked a certain way then and they work a different way now." And then therefore, like, people were smarter then or better then or, you know, by the way, dumber than-

   30. LFLex Fridman31:34

       Mm-hmm.
6. 37:29 – 42:51

   AI startups

   1. LFLex Fridman37:29

      I have the sense that, uh, there's just going to be a new startup.... that's going to basically be the PageRank inventor, which has become the new tech giant. I don't know if, I would love to hear your kind of opinion if Google, Meta, and Microsoft are, as gigantic companies, able to pivot so hard to create new products. Like some of it is just even hiring people or having a corporate structure that allows for the crazy young kids to come in and just create something totally new. Do you think it's possible, or do you think they'll come from a startup?

   2. MAMarc Andreessen38:08

      Yeah, it is this always big question, which is y- you get this feeling, I, I hear about this a lot from CEOs, foun- founder CEOs, where it's like, "Wow, we have 50,000 people. It's now harder to do new things than it was when we had 50 people."

   3. LFLex Fridman38:19

      Yeah.

   4. MAMarc Andreessen38:19

      L- like, what has happened? So tha- that's a recurring phenomenon. Um, by the way, that's one of the reasons why there's always startups and why there's venture capital, um, is-

   5. LFLex Fridman38:26

      Mm-hmm.

   6. MAMarc Andreessen38:26

      ... is just that, that's like a timeless, uh, kind of thing. So tha- tha- that's one observation. Um, on, (laughs) on PageRank, um, we, we can talk about that, but on, on PageRank, specifically on PageRank, um, there actually is a PageR- so there is a PageRank already in the field and it's the transformer, right? So the, the big breakthrough was the transformer, um, and, uh, the transformer was invented in, on, uh, 2017-

   7. LFLex Fridman38:46

      Mm-hmm.

   8. MAMarc Andreessen38:46

      ... at Google. A- and this is actually like really an interesting question 'cause it's like, okay, the transformers, i- like, why does OpenAI even exist?

   9. LFLex Fridman38:53

      Mm-hmm.

   10. MAMarc Andreessen38:53

       Like the transformer's invented at Google, why didn't Google... I asked a guy, I asked a guy I know who was s- senior at Google Brain kind of when this was happening, and I said, "If Google had just gone flat out to the wall-"

   11. LFLex Fridman39:02

       Mm-hmm.

   12. MAMarc Andreessen39:02

       "... and just said, 'Look, we're gonna launch, we're gonna launch the equivalent of GPT-4 as fast as we can,'" um, he said, I said, "When could we have had it?" And he said, "2019."

   13. LFLex Fridman39:09

       Yeah.

   14. MAMarc Andreessen39:09

       They could have just done a two-year sprint with the transformer and, and, and been a... 'Cause they already had the compute at scale, they already had all the training data.

   15. LFLex Fridman39:15

       Yeah.

   16. MAMarc Andreessen39:15

       They could've just done it. There's a variety of reasons they didn't do it. This is like a classic big company thing. Um, IBM invented the relational database in 19- in the 1970s, let it sit on the shelf as a paper, Larry Ellison picked it up and built Oracle. Xerox PARC invented the interactive computer, they let it sit on the shelf. Steve Jobs came and turned it into the Macintosh. Right? And so th- there is this pattern. Now, having said that, sitting here today, like Google's in the game, right? So Google, you know, maybe-

   17. LFLex Fridman39:39

       Mm-hmm.

   18. MAMarc Andreessen39:39

       ... maybe they, they, maybe they let like a four-year gap there, go there that they maybe shouldn't have, but like, they're in the game. And so now they've got, you know, now they're committed. They've done this merger, they're bringing in Demis, they've got this merger with DeepMind.

   19. LFLex Fridman39:49

       Yeah.

   20. MAMarc Andreessen39:49

       You know, they're piling in resources. There are rumors that they're, you know, building a, an incredible, you know, super LLM, um, you know, way beyond what we even have today. Um, and they've got, you know, unlimited resources and a huge... You know, they've been challenged (laughs) right their honor. (laughs)

   21. LFLex Fridman40:02

       Yeah, I had a, I had a, a chance to hang out with Sundar Pichai a, a couple of days ago, and, uh, we took this walk and there's this giant new building, uh, where there's going to be a lot of AI work, uh, being done. And it's kind of this ominous feeling of like the fight is on.

   22. MAMarc Andreessen40:20

       (laughs) Yeah. Yeah.

   23. LFLex Fridman40:21

       (laughs) Like, there's this beautiful Silicon Valley nature, like birds are chirping-

   24. MAMarc Andreessen40:26

       Yeah.

   25. LFLex Fridman40:26

       ... and this giant building, and it's like, uh, the beast has been awakened.

   26. MAMarc Andreessen40:30

       Yeah. Yeah.

   27. LFLex Fridman40:30

       And, and it's, and then like all the big companies-

   28. MAMarc Andreessen40:33

       Mm-hmm.

   29. LFLex Fridman40:33

       ... are waking up to this. They have the compute, but also the little guys have, uh... Uh, it feels like they have all the tools to create the killer product-

   30. MAMarc Andreessen40:43

       (laughs)
7. 42:51 – 49:15

   Future of browsers

   1. LFLex Fridman42:51

      about that a little bit, but I, I'd love to linger, uh, on, uh, some of the ways this is going to change the internet. So, um, I don't know if you remember, but there's a thing called Mosaic, and there's a thing called Netscape Navigator. So you were there in the beginning. Uh, what about the interface to the internet? How do you think the browser changes, and who gets to own the browser? We got to see some very interesting browsers, uh, Firefox, I mean, all the variants of Microsoft Internet Explorer, Edge, and, uh, now Chrome. Um, the actual... And it seems like a dumb question to ask, but do you think we'll still have the web browser?

   2. MAMarc Andreessen43:30

      So I, uh, I lo- I have an eight-year-old and he's super into things like Minecraft and learning to code and doing all this stuff. So I, I, I, of course, like was very proud I could bring sort of fire down from the mountain to my kid, and I brought him ChatGPT, and I hooked him up-

   3. LFLex Fridman43:41

      Yeah.

   4. MAMarc Andreessen43:41

      ... on his, on his, on his, on his laptop. And I was like, "You know, this is the thing that's gonna answer all your questions." And he's like, "Okay."... and I'm like, "But it's gonna answer our questions." And he's like, "Well, of course. Like, it's a computer. Of course it answers all your questions. Like, what else would a computer be good for, Dad?"

   5. LFLex Fridman43:54

      Yeah.

   6. MAMarc Andreessen43:55

      (laughs) Um, and so-

   7. LFLex Fridman43:55

      Never impressed, are they?

   8. MAMarc Andreessen43:56

      Ne- not impressed in the least. Two weeks pass, um, and he has some question, um, and I say, "Well, have you asked ChatGPT?" And he's like, "Dad, Bing is better."

   9. LFLex Fridman44:05

      Ooh.

   10. MAMarc Andreessen44:06

       (laughs) And why is Bing better is because it's built into the browser. 'Cause he's like, "Look, I have the Microsoft Edge browser and, like, it's got Bing right here." And then, he, he doesn't know this yet, but one of the things you can do with Bing and Edge, um, is there's a setting where you can, um, use it to, uh, basically talk to any webpage, uh, because it's sitting right there next to the, uh, next to the, next to the browser. And, and by the way, which includes PDF documents. And so you can... in, in, in the way they've implemented in Edge with Bing is you can load a PDF, and then you can, you can ask it questions, which is the thing you, you, you can't do currently in, in, in just ChatGPT. So they're, you know, they're, they're gonna, they're gonna push the, the, the mel-... I think that's great, uh, you know, they're gonna push the melding and see if there's a, a combination thing there. Google's rolling out this thing, the Magic Button (laughs) , uh, which is implemented in, you know, they put it in Google Docs, right? And so you would go to, you know, Google Docs and you create a new document, and you, you know, you... instead of, like, you know, starting to type, you just, you know, say, it... you press the button and it starts to, like, generate content for you. Right? Like, i- is that the way that it'll work? Um, is it gonna be a speech UI where you're just gonna have an earpiece and talk to it all day long (laughs) , you know? Is it gonna be a... Like, uh, th- these are all... Like, this is exactly the kind of thing that I, I don't... This is exactly the kind of thing I don't think is possible to forecast. I think what we need to do is, like, run all those experiments. Um, and, and so one outcome is we come out of this with, like, a super browser that has AI built in that's just, like, amazing. The other... but there, look, there's a real possibility that the whole... I mean, look, there's a possibility here that the whole idea of a screen, and windows, and all this stuff just goes away 'cause, like, why do you need that if you just have a thing that's just telling you whatever you need to know?

   11. LFLex Fridman45:31

       Well, and, and also, so there's apps that you can use. I mean, you don't really use them, you know, b- being a Linux guy and Windows guy. Uh, there's one window of the browser that i-... with which you can interact with the internet, but on the phone, you can also have apps. So I can interact with Twitter through the app or through the web browser, and, uh, that seems like an obvious distinction, but why have the web browser in that case if one of the apps starts becoming the everything app?

   12. MAMarc Andreessen45:59

       Yeah, that's right.

   13. LFLex Fridman46:00

       What Elon's trying to do with Twitter, but there could be others. There could be, like, a Bing app or there could be a Google app that just doesn't really do search, but just, like, do what I guess AOL did back in the day or something, where it's all right there, and, and it changes, um, it changes the nature of the internet because the, where the content is hosted, who owns the data, who owns the content, how, what is, what is the kind of content you create, how do you make money by creating content for the content creators, uh, all of that. Or, it could just keep being the same, which is like, with just the nature of webpage changes and the nature of content, but there will still be a web browser. 'Cause a web browser's a pretty sexy product.

   14. MAMarc Andreessen46:45

       Mm-hmm.

   15. LFLex Fridman46:46

       It just seems to work.

   16. MAMarc Andreessen46:47

       Mm-hmm.

   17. LFLex Fridman46:47

       'Cause it, like... You have an interface, a window into the world, and then the world can be anything you want. And as the world will evolve, there could be different programming languages, it can be animated, maybe it's three-dimensional and so on. Yeah, it's interesting. Do you think we'll still have the web browser?

   18. MAMarc Andreessen47:02

       Every, every, every, um, every, uh, medium becomes the content for the next one. So-

   19. LFLex Fridman47:06

       Oh, boy.

   20. MAMarc Andreessen47:06

       ... uh, the, you know, the AI will be able to give you a browser whenever you want. Um-

   21. LFLex Fridman47:09

       Oh, interesting.

   22. MAMarc Andreessen47:10

       You know-

   23. LFLex Fridman47:10

       Generate it.

   24. MAMarc Andreessen47:11

       Yeah. Or a- a- another way to think about it is maybe what the browser is, ma- maybe it's just the escape hatch, right? And which is maybe kind of what it is today, right? Which is like, most of what you do is, like, inside a social network, or inside a search engine, or inside, you know, somebody's app, or inside some controlled experience, right? But then, every once in a while, there's something where you actually want to-

   25. LFLex Fridman47:28

       Yeah.

   26. MAMarc Andreessen47:28

       ... jailbreak, you wanna actually get free. (laughs)

   27. LFLex Fridman47:30

       The web browser is the F you to the man. You're, you're allowed to-

   28. MAMarc Andreessen47:33

       Yeah.

   29. LFLex Fridman47:33

       That's the free internet-

   30. MAMarc Andreessen47:34

       Yeah. Yep.
8. 49:15 – 55:16

   History of browsers

   1. MAMarc Andreessen49:15

   2. LFLex Fridman49:15

      Um, you and I are both fans of history, so let's step back. We've been talking about the future. Let's step back for a bit and look at, uh, the '90s. You created Mosaic web browser, the first widely used web browser. Tell the story of that. How, how... And how did it evolve into Netscape Navigator? This is the early days.

   3. MAMarc Andreessen49:33

      ... so full story. So, um-

   4. LFLex Fridman49:36

      You were born.

   5. MAMarc Andreessen49:37

      I was born, a small, a small child. Um-

   6. LFLex Fridman49:39

      W- well, actually, with the... Yeah, let's go there.

   7. MAMarc Andreessen49:41

      No.

   8. LFLex Fridman49:41

      Like, when, when did you... When would you first fall in love with computers?

   9. MAMarc Andreessen49:45

      Oh, I... So I hit the generational jackpot, and I hit the Gen X kind of point perfectly as it turns out. So I was born in 1971. So there's this great website called WTFHappenedIn1971.com, which is basically 1971 is when everything started to go to hell. And I was, of course, born in 1971, so I like to think that I had something to do with that.

   10. LFLex Fridman50:01

       Did you make it on the website?

   11. MAMarc Andreessen50:03

       I have... I don't think I made it on the website, but I, I, you know, hopefully-

   12. LFLex Fridman50:06

       Somebody needs to add, "This is, this is where everything went wrong."

   13. MAMarc Andreessen50:08

       Maybe I contributed to some of the trends, um, that they, uh, that they should... Every, every line on that website goes like that, right? So it's all, it's all, uh, it's all a picture disaster. But, um, but there was this moment in time where... Because the p- you know, sort of, the Apple, you know, the Apple II hit in, like, 1978 and then the IBM PC hit in '82. So I was, like, you know, 11 when the PC came out, um, and so I just kind of hit that perfectly. And then that was the first moment in time when, like, regular people could spend a few hundred dollars and get a computer, right? So that... I just like that, that, that resonated right out of the gate. Um, well, then the other part of the story is, you know, I, I was using an Apple II. I used a bunch of them, but I was using an Apple II. And of course, it said on the back of every Apple II and every Mac, it said, you know, "Designed in Cupertino, California." And I was like, "Wow, okay. Cupertino must be the, like, shining city on the hill, like Wizard of Oz, like, the most amazing, like, city of all time. I can't wait to see it." Of course, years later, I came out to Silicon Valley and went to Cupertino, and it was just a bunch of office parks (laughs) and low-rise apartment buildings. So the aesthetics were a little disappointing, but, you know, it was the, the vector, uh, right, of the, of the creation of a lot, of a lot of this stuff, um-

   14. LFLex Fridman51:09

       Yeah.

   15. MAMarc Andreessen51:09

       So, so then basically by... So part, par- part of my story is just the luck of having been born at the right time and getting exposed to PCs. Then the other part is, um... The other part is when Al Gore says that he created the internet, he actually is correct, uh, in, in, in a really meaningful way, which is he sponsored a bill in 1985 that essentially created the modern internet, created what is called the NSF NET at the time, which is sort of the, the first really fast internet backbone. Um, and, uh, you know, that, that bill dumped a ton of money into a bunch of research universities to build out basically the internet backbone, and then these supercomputer centers that were clustered around, um, the, the, the internet. And, and one of those universities was University of Illinois where I went to school. And so the other stroke of luck that I had was I, I went to Illinois basically right as that money was just, like, getting dumped on campus. And so as a consequence, we had at... on campus, and this is, like, you know, '89, 1991, we had like... You know, we were right on the internet backbone. We had like T3 and 45... at the time T3, 45 megabit backbone connection, which at the time was, you know, wildly state-of-the-art. Um, we had Cray supercomputers, we had thinking machines, parallel supercomputers. We had Silicon Graphics workstations. We had Macintoshes. We had, we had NeXT cubes (laughs) all over the place. We had like every possible kind of computer you could imagine because all this money just fell out of the sky. Um, yeah.

   16. LFLex Fridman52:18

       So you were living in the future?

   17. MAMarc Andreessen52:20

       Yeah. So yeah, quite literally it was... Yeah, like, it's all, it's all there. So like we had full broadband graphics, like the whole thing. And, and it's actually funny because they had this... The- this is the first time I kind of... It sort of tickled the back of my head that there might be a big opportunity in, in here which is, you know, they, they embraced it and so they put, like, computers in all the dorms and they wired up all the dorm rooms and they had all these, you know, labs everywhere and everything, and then they, they gave every undergrad a computer account and an email address. Um, and the assumption was that you would use the internet for your four years at college, um, and then you would graduate and stop using it. And that was that, right?

   18. LFLex Fridman52:53

       Yeah.

   19. MAMarc Andreessen52:54

       And you just retire your email address. It wouldn't be relevant anymore because you'd go off in the workplace and they don't use email. You'd be back to using fax machines or whatever. Um-

   20. LFLex Fridman53:00

       Did you have that sense as well? Like what, what... You said the, the back of your head was tickled, like what, what was your... What, what was exciting to you about this possible world?

   21. MAMarc Andreessen53:08

       Well, if this... If this is so useful in this containment... If this is so useful in this contained environment that just has this weird source of outside funding, then if, if it were practical for everybody else to have this, and if it were cost-effective for everybody else to have this, wouldn't they want it? And the over- overwhelmingly the prevailing view at the time was, no, they would not want it. This is esoteric, weird nerd stuff (laughs) , right, that, like, computer science kids like, but like normal people are never gonna do email, right? Or be on the internet, right? Um, and so I was just like, "Wow, like this, this is actually like... This is really compelling stuff." Now the other part was, it was all really hard to use and in practice you had to be a... basically a CS, uh, you know, basically had to be, had to be a CS undergrad or equivalent to actually get full use of the internet at that point, um, because it was all pretty esoteric stuff. So then that was the other part of the idea, which was, "Okay, we need to actually make this easy to use."

   22. LFLex Fridman53:51

       So what's involved in creating Mosaic? Like, in, in creating a graphical interface to the internet?

   23. MAMarc Andreessen53:57

       Yeah. So it was, it was a combination of things. So it was like basically the, the web... The web existed in an early sort of described as prototype form. Uh, and by the way, text only at that point. Um-

   24. LFLex Fridman54:06

       Uh, what did it look like? What, what was the web? I mean, what... And the key figures? Like, what was the... What was it like? What-

   25. MAMarc Andreessen54:12

       You know what? It-

   26. LFLex Fridman54:12

       Paint a picture.

   27. MAMarc Andreessen54:13

       It looked like ChatGPT, actually. Um-

   28. LFLex Fridman54:15

       (laughs)

   29. MAMarc Andreessen54:15

       It was all text.

   30. LFLex Fridman54:16

       Yeah.
9. 55:16 – 1:09:50

   Steve Jobs

   1. LFLex Fridman55:16

      Can you just comment on, um, what you find interesting about Steve Jobs? What, uh, about that view of the world, that dogmatic pursuit of perfection in how he saw perfection in design?

   2. MAMarc Andreessen55:28

      Yes. I guess I'd say, like... Look, he was a deep believer, I think in a very deep... The way I interpret it. I don't know if he ever really described it like this, but the way I'd interpret it is, it's, it's like, it's like this thing in... It's, it's actually a thing in, in philosophy. It's like, aesthetics are not just appearances. Aesthetics go all the way to like deep underlining, under- underlying meaning, right? It's like-... I'm not a physicist. One of the things I've heard physicists say is one of the things you start to get a sense of when a theory might be correct is when it's beautiful, right? Like, y- you know, they're... Right? And so- so- so, there's something... And you- you feel the same thing, by the way, in, like, human psychology.

   3. LFLex Fridman55:58

      Mm-hmm.

   4. MAMarc Andreessen55:58

      Right? You know, when- when you're experiencing awe, right? You know, there's like a- there's like a- there's a simplicity to it. When- when you're having an hones- interaction with somebody, there's an aesthetic, I would say, calm that comes over you, because you're actually being fully honest and not trying to hide yourself. Right? So, there- there... So- so, it's like this very deep sense of aesthetics.

   5. LFLex Fridman56:13

      And he would trust that judgment that he had deep down, like-

   6. MAMarc Andreessen56:17

      Yeah.

   7. LFLex Fridman56:17

      ... e- even- even if the engineering teams are saying, "This is, uh, this is too difficult," even if the, whatever, the finance folks are saying, "This is ridiculous," the, uh, the supply chain, all of that kind of stuff, "This makes this impossible. The materi- we can't do this kind of material. Uh, this has never been done before," so on and so forth, he just sticks by it.

   8. MAMarc Andreessen56:35

      Well, I mean, who makes a phone out of aluminum, right?

   9. LFLex Fridman56:37

      Yeah.

   10. MAMarc Andreessen56:37

       Like... (laughs) You know, nobody else would have done that. Uh, and now, of course, if your phone was made out of aluminum, why- you know, it would have crude... N- what kind of caveman would you have to be to have a phone that's made out of plastic? Like, right?

   11. LFLex Fridman56:47

       Yeah.

   12. MAMarc Andreessen56:48

       So, like... So, it's just this very... Right. And- and, you know, look, it's- it's- there's a thousand different ways to look at this, but one of the things is just, like, look, these things are central to your life. Like, you're with your phone more than you're with anything else. Like, it's in your- it's gonna be in your hand. I mean, he-

   13. LFLex Fridman57:00

       Yeah.

   14. MAMarc Andreessen57:00

       ... you know, you know this, he thought very deeply about what it meant for something to be in your hand all day long.

   15. LFLex Fridman57:03

       Yeah.

   16. MAMarc Andreessen57:04

       But for example, he, uh, uh, uh, here's an interesting design thing. Like, he- he never wanted a, a s-... My understanding is he never wanted an iPhone to have a screen larger than you could reach with your thumb-

   17. LFLex Fridman57:14

       Mm-hmm.

   18. MAMarc Andreessen57:14

       ... one-handed. And so, he- he was actually opposed to the idea of making the phones larger. And I- I don't know if you have this experience today, but let's say there are certain moments in your day when you might be, like, um, only have one hand available, um, and you might want to be on your phone.

   19. LFLex Fridman57:25

       Yeah.

   20. MAMarc Andreessen57:26

       And you're trying to, like (laughs) s- to text and you- your thumb can't reach the send button.

   21. LFLex Fridman57:31

       Yeah. I mean, there's pros and cons, right?

   22. MAMarc Andreessen57:32

       Right.

   23. LFLex Fridman57:32

       And then there's, like, folding phones, which I would love to know what he thought or thinks about them. Uh, but, I mean, is there something you could also just linger on, 'cause he's one of the interesting, um, figures in the history of technology. What makes him, what makes him as successful as he was? What makes him as interesting as he was? Uh, what made him, um, so productive and important in, um, in- in- in the development of technology?

   24. MAMarc Andreessen57:58

       He had an integrated world view. So, the- the- the- the properly designed device that had the correct functionality, that had the deepest understanding of the user, that was the most beautiful, right? Like, it- it had to be all of those things, right? It- it- it was... He basically would drive to as close to perfect as you could possibly get. Right? And I- I, you know, I suspect that he never quite, you know, thought he ever got there, because most great creators, you know, are generally dissatisfied. You know, you read accounts later on and all they can, all they can see are the flaws in their creation. But, like, he got as close to perfect each step of the way as he could possibly get, with the, with the constraints of the- of the- of the technology of his time. Um, and then, you know, look, he was, you know, sort of famous in the Apple model as like, look, they- they- they will... You know, this- this headset that they just came out with, like-

   25. LFLex Fridman58:35

       Mm-hmm.

   26. MAMarc Andreessen58:35

       ... it's like a decade-long project, right? It's like, you- and they're just gonna sit there and tune and tune and polish and polish and tune and polish and tune and polish until it is as perfect as anybody could possibly make anything.

   27. LFLex Fridman58:45

       Yeah.

   28. MAMarc Andreessen58:45

       And then this goes to the- the- the way that people describe working with him was, which is, you know, there was a terrifying aspect of working with him, which is, you know, he was, you know, he was very tough. Um, but there was this thing that everybody I've ever talked to who worked for him says that- that... They all say the following, which is, "He- we did the best work of our lives when we worked for him, because he set the bar incredibly high, and then he supported us with everything that he could to let us actually do work of that quality."

   29. LFLex Fridman59:08

       Mm-hmm.

   30. MAMarc Andreessen59:08

       And so they... A lot of people who were at Apple spend the rest of their lives trying to find another experience where they feel like they're able to hit that quality bar again.

Episode duration: 3:11:34