The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
Marc Andreessen exemplifies The Visionary by repeatedly identifying transformative technological shifts before consensus forms. As co-creator of Mosaic and co-founder of Netscape, he helped commercialise the web at its very inception. At Andreessen Horowitz he has championed cloud computing, cryptocurrency, and AI as they emerged, and his software-eating-the-world thesis became a defining framework for an era.
“Information that's in there, and the neural network is running a process of trying to find the appropriate piece of information in many cases to generate, to predict the next token. And so it is kind of doing it for research.”
“And this is the timeless race in battle. And this is kind of the point I tried to make in the essay, which is like both sides of this are good. It's really good to have highly scaled tech companies that can do things that are at staggering levels of sophistication. It's really good to have startups that can launch brand new ideas.”
“Google. And this is actually really an interesting question because it's like, okay, the transformers, like, why does open AI even exist? Like the transformers invested at Google, why didn't Google? I asked a guy, I asked a guy I know who was senior at Google Brain kind of when this was happening.”
“You're just going to have an earpiece and talk to it all day long. Is it going to be like these are all, this is exactly the kind of thing that 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.”
Wikiquote: “Public record read”
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