YouSaid · the spoken record

Marc Andreessen

lines on the record: 279
first: 2023-06-22
most recent: 2023-06-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so you had a text based web browser. Well, actually, the original browser, Tim Berners-Lee, the original browser, both the original browser and the server actually ran on next cubes. So the computer Steve Jobs made during the interim period during the decade long interim period when he was not an Apple. He got fired in 85 and then came back in 97. So this was in that interim period where he had this company called Next. And they made these, literally these computers called Cubes. And there's this famous story, they were beautiful, but they were 12 inch by 12 inch by 12 inch cubes computers, and there's a famous story about how they could have cost half as much if it had been 12 by 12 by 13.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was a combination of things. So it was like basically the web existed in an early sort of described as prototype form. And by the way, text only at that point.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if this is so useful in this container, if this is so useful in this contained environment that just has this weird source of outside funding, then 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 overwhelmingly, the prevailing view at the time was, no, they would not want it. This is esoteric, weird nerd stuff, right, that computer science kids like, but like normal people are never going to do email, right, or be on the internet, right? 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 basically a CS, you know, basically had to be a CS undergrad or equivalent to actually get full use of internet at that point 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.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was that, right? Yeah. 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. Did you”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so quite literally, it was like, it's all there. We had full broadband graphics, like the whole thing. And it's actually funny because they had this, this is the first time I kind of sort of tickled in the back of my head that there might be a big opportunity in here, which is, you know, 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 labs everywhere and everything. And then they gave every undergrad a computer account and an email address. And the assumption was that you would use the internet for your four years at college. And then you would graduate and stop using it”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had cray supercomputers, we had thinking machines, parallel supercomputers, we had silicon graphics workstations, we had Macintosh's, we had NextCubes 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.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So then basically, 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 when Al Gore says that he created the internet, he actually is correct in a really meaningful way, which is he sponsored a bill in 1985 that essentially created the modern internet, created what is called the NSFNet at the time, which is sort of the first really fast internet backbone. And 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 the internet. 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 went to Illinois basically right is that money was just like getting dumped on campus. And so as a consequence, we had on campus, and this is like, you know, 89, 90, 91, 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 wildly state of the art.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then the other part of the story is you know I was using an Apple II. I used a bunch of them, but I was using Apple II. And of course, it's set in the back of every Apple II and every Mac. It said, you know, designed in Cupertino, California. And I was like, wow, Cupertino must be the shining city on the hill, like Wizard of Oz, like the most amazing 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's just a bunch of office parks, low-rise apartment buildings. So the aesthetics were a little disappointing, but it was the vector, right, of the creation of a lot of this stuff.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I contributed to some of the trends that they do. Every line on that website goes like that, right? So it's all a picture disaster. But there was this moment in time where, because sort of the Apple II hit in 1978 and then the IBM PC hit in 82. So I was like, you know, 11 when the PC came out. And so I just kind of hit that perfectly. And then that was the first moment in time when regular people could spend a few hundred dollars and get a computer. And so that I just like that resonated right out of the gate.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, 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 WTF Happened in 1971.com, which is basically in 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.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try to chase you down, like they'll try to, you know, people who want to censor will try to take away your domain name and they'll try to take away your payments account and so forth if they really don't like what you're saying. But nevertheless, unless they literally are intercepting you at the ISP level, you can still put up a thing. And so I don't know. I think that's important to preserve, right? Because, I mean, one is just a freedom argument, but the other is a creativity argument, which is you want to have the escape hatch so that the kid with the idea is able to realize the idea because to your point on page rank, you actually don't know what the next big idea is. Nobody called Larry Page and told him to develop page.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here's something I'm proud of. So, nobody really talks about it. Here's something I'm proud of, which is the web, the browser, the web servers, they're still backward compatible all the way back to like 1992, right? So you can put up a, you can still, you know, the big breakthrough of the web early on. The big breakthrough was it made it really easy to read, but it also made it really easy to write. Made it really easy to publish. And we literally made it so easy to publish. We made it not only so you're easy to publish content, it was actually also easy to actually write a web server. And you could literally write a web server in four lines of Broadcode and you could start publishing content on it. And you could set whatever rules you want for the content, whatever censorship, no censorship, whatever you want. You could just do that as long as you had an IP address, right? You could do that. That still works. That still works exactly as I just described. So this is part of my reaction to all of this, like, you know, all this just censorship pressure and all this, you know, these issues around control and all this stuff, which is like maybe we need to get back a little bit more to the wild west. Like the Wild West is still out there. Now, they will.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, another way to think about it is maybe what the browser is, maybe it's just the escape hatch, right? 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 somebody's app or inside some controlled experience, right? But then every once in a while there's something where you actually want to jailbreak. You want to actually get free.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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. 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 because like, why do you need that if you just have a thing that's just telling you whatever you need to know?”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not impressed in the least. Two weeks pass, and he has some question. And I say, well, have you asked ChatGPT? And he's like, Dad, Bing is better. And why is Bing better? It's because it's built into the browser. Because he's like, look, I have the Microsoft Edge browser and like it's got Bing right here. And then he doesn't know this yet, but one of the things you can do with Bing and Edge is there's a setting where you can use it to basically talk to any web page because it's sitting right there next to the next to the browser. And by the way, which includes PDF documents. And so you can, in the way they've implemented an edge with Bang is you can load a PDF and then you can ask it questions, which is the thing you can't do currently in just ChatGPT. So they're going to push the mail. I think that's great. They're going to push the melding and see if there's a combination thing there. Google's rolling out this thing, the magic button, which is implemented and they put in Google Docs, right? And so you go to Google Docs and you create a new document and instead of starting to type, you just say it pressed the button and it starts to generate content for you. Is that the way that it'll work? Is it going to be a speech UI where”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have an eight year old and he's super into it's like Minecraft and learning to code and doing all this stuff. So of course I was very proud I could bring sort of fire down from the mountain to my kid and I brought him chat GPT and I hooked him up. On his laptop. And I was like, you know, this is the thing that's going to answer all your questions. And he's like, okay. And I'm like, but it's going to answer all the 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.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. They ought to be able to both do that and compete. Neither one ought to be subsidized or protected from the others. To me, that's just very clearly the idealized world. It is the world we've been in for AI up until now. And then, of course, there are people trying to shut that down. But my hope is that the best outcome clearly will be if that continues.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but the clouds run out of chips. Right. And then to the extent the clouds have chips, they allocate them to the big customers, not the small customers, right? And so the small companies lack everything other than the ability to just do something new.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so the startup, the huge advantage that startups have is they just there's no sacred cows, there's no historical legacy to protect, there's no need to reconcile your new plan with existing strategy, there's no communication overhead, there's no, you know, big companies are big companies. They've got pre-meetings. And that's Meetings. That's the elapsed time when the startup launches its product, right? So there's a timeless thing there now. The startups don't have is everything else, right? So startups, they don't have a brand, they don't have customer relationships, they've got no distribution, they've got no scale. I mean, sitting here today, they can't even get GPUs, right? Like there's like a GPU shortage. Startups are literally stalled out right now because they can't get chips, which is like super weird.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're piling in resources. There are rumors that they're building an incredible super LLM way beyond what we even have today. And they've got unlimited resources and a huge, they've been challenged, their honor.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a variety of reasons they didn't do it. This is like a classic big company thing. IBM invented the relational database in the 1970s, let it sit on the shelf as a paper. Larry Ellison picked it up and built Oracle. Xerox Park invented the interactive computer. They let it sit in the shelf. Steve Jobs came and turned it into the Macintosh. And so there is this pattern. Now, having said that, sitting here today, like Google's in the game, right? So Google, you know, 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 Demos. They've got this merger with DeepMind.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And I said, if Google had just gone flat out to the wall and just said, look, we're going to launch the equivalent of GPT-4 as fast as we can. He said, I said, when could we have had it? And he said, 2019. They could have just done a two year sprint with the Transformer because they already had the compute at scale, they already had all the training data and could have just done it.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is this always big question, which is you get this feeling. I hear about this a lot from CEOs, 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. Like, what has happened? So that's a recurring phenomenon. By the way, that's one of the reasons why there's always startups and why there's venture capital. It's just that's like a timeless. Kind of thing, so that's one observation. On page rank, we can talk about that, but on page rank specifically on page rank, there actually is a page, so there is a page rank already in the field, and it's the transformer, right? So the big breakthrough was the transformer. And the transformer was invented in 2017.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can paint another very different picture that says no. Actually, the opposite of that's going to happen. This is going to basically, that this is the new goal, you know, this is the new gold rush alchemy. This is the Big Bang for this whole new area of science and technology. And so therefore, you're going to have every smart 14 year old on the planet building open source and figuring out ways to optimize these things. And then, you know, we're just going to get overwhelmingly better at generating training data. We're going to bring in blockchain networks to have an economic incentive to generate decentralized training data and so forth and so on. And then basically we're going to live in a world of open source. And there's going to be a billion LLMs of every size scale, shape, and description. There might be a few big ones that are like the super genius ones, but like mostly what we'll experience is open source. And that's, you know, that's more like a world of what we have today with Linux and the web.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bunch of those. So, look, there's a really big question today sitting here today is a really big question about the big models versus the small models that's related directly to the big question of proprietary versus open. Then there's this big question of where is the training data going to, like, are we topping out of the training data or not? And then are we going to be able to synthesize training data? And then there's a huge pile of questions around regulation and what's actually going to be legal. And so when we think about it, we dovetail kind of all those questions together. You can paint a picture of the world where there's two or three God models that are just at like staggering scale and they're just better at everything. And they will be owned by a small set of companies and they will basically achieve regulatory capture over the government and they'll have competitive barriers that will prevent other people from competing with them. And so there will be, you know, just like there's like whatever three big banks or three big, or by the way, three big search companies or I guess Juno, it'll centralize like that.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It'll have a feat of everything else happen in the world, and then it'll be sort of retraining, prompting, or retraining itself on the fly. And so the scenario you described is actually a completely doable scenario. Now, the hard question on these is always, okay, since that's possible, are people going to want that? Like, what's the form of experience? That we won't know until we try it. But I don't think it's possible yet to predict the form of AI in our lives. Therefore, it's not possible to predict the way in which it will intermediate our experience with reality yet”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. I mean, look, this gets this whole thing of like, so the chat interface has this whole concept of prompt engineering, right? Prompts. Well, it turns out one of the things that LLMs are really good at is writing prompts. Right. And so, like, what if you just outsourced? And by the way, you could run this experiment today. You could hook this up to do this today. The latency is not good enough to do it real time in a conversation, but you could run this experiment and you just say, look, every 20 seconds, you could just say, you know, tell me what the optimal prompt is and then ask yourself that question to give me the result. And then exactly to your point, as you add, there will be these systems that are going to have the ability to”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, makes sense. Yeah, at that level. Yeah. I mean, yes. So technically, now whether we want that or not is an open question, right? And whether it's for it.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even just the whole concept of the chat UI might not be the like, the chat UI is just the first whack at this, and maybe that's the dominant thing. But look, maybe we don't know yet. Maybe the experience most people with LLMs is just a continuous feed. Maybe it's more of a passive feed and you just are getting a constant running commentary on everything happening in your life and it's just helping you kind of interpret, understand everything.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's just so just as a consequence, I think it's just really hard to say, oh, things work a certain way then and they work a different way now. And then therefore, like people were smarter then or better then or by the weight, dumber then or not as capable then, right? We make all these like really light and casual comparisons of ourselves to previous generations of people. We draw judgments all the time. And I just think it's like really hard to do any of that because if we put ourselves in their shoes with the media that they had at that time, I think we probably most likely would have been just like them.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so this goes to the thing, which is like, okay, had we had the media environment 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, really, it turned 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. And it would have been a feedback loop. It would have been a feedback loop process. In other words, right, your experience of reality changes reality and then reality changes your experience of reality, right? It's a two-way feedback process. And media is the intermediating force Between them, so change the media environment, change reality.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it has to be. It has to be just because it's all so, I mean, just look at what's happening today. I mean, just, I mean, the most obvious thing is just the collapse. And here's another opportunity to argue that this is not the internet causing this, by the way. Here's a big thing happening today, which is Gallup does this thing every year where they do, they pull for trust in institutions in America and they do it across all everything from the military to clergy and big business and the media and so forth, right? And basically there's been a systemic collapse in trust in institutions in the US, almost without exception basically since essentially the early 1970s.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Woodrow Wilson ran for his candidacy, was run on an anti war. He ran on the platform and not getting involved in World War I. Somehow that switched a value judgment on any of these things. I'm just saying the way that our ancestors experienced reality was, of course, mediated through centralized top-down control at that point. If you ran those realities again with the meat environment we have today, the reality would be experienced very, very differently. And then, of course, that intermediation would cause the feedback loops to change and then reality would obviously play out.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I mean, look to this day, there are lots of very interesting real questions around how America, you know, got basically involved in World War II and who did what, when, and the operations of British intelligence and American soil and did FDR, this, that, Pearl Harbor, you know.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll just take a simple example. How would President Kennedy have been interpreted with what we know now about all the things Kennedy was up to? Like, how would he have been experienced by the body politic with the social media context? Right. Like, how would LBJ have been experienced by the way, how would, you know, like many FDR, like the New Deal, the Great Depression”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always think about the counterfactual in these things, which is like okay, because these questions, right? This question heads towards this, like, okay, the impact of social media and the undermining of truth and all this. But then you want to ask the question of, 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? And like I think.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're in this mode of social and popular discourse where like, you know, there's, you know, you see, what do you think of when you read a story in the press right now and they say, you know, XYZ made a baseless claim about some topic, right? And there's one group of people who are like, aha, think, you know, they're doing fact-checking. There's another group of people that are like, every time the press says that, it's now a tick, and that means that they're lying, right? So we're in this social context where the level to which a lot of people in positions of power have become very, very certain that they're in a position to determine the truth for the entire population is like there's like there's like some bubble that has formed around that idea and at least it flies completely in the face of everything I was ever trained about science and about reason.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI alignment, right? Which everybody likes is like, oh, that sounds great. Alignment with what? Human values, whose human values?”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, if the church at that time was owned the LLM, they would have given it human feedback to prohibit it from answering that question. And so I like to take it out of our current context because that makes it very clear. Those same questions apply today. This is exactly the point of a huge amount of the human feedback training that's actually happening with these LMs today. This is a huge debate that's happening about whether open source AI should be legal.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Galileo comes up for trial Right, and you ask the LM like Galileo What does it answer, right? And one theory is yet answer is no, that he's wrong because the overwhelming majority of human thought up till that point was that he was wrong. And so therefore, that's what's in the training data. Another way of thinking about it is well, a sufficiently advanced LLM will have evolved the ability to actually check the math, right? And we'll actually say, actually, no, actually, you may not want to hear it, but he's right.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's a question a friend of mine just asked me on this topic. So suppose you had LLMs in equivalent of GPT-4 or even 5, 6, 7, 8, suppose you had them in the 1600s.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's just really difficult who gets historically who gets to decide what the truth is? It's either the king or the priest, right? And so we don't live in an era anymore if kings or priests dictating it to us. And so we're kind of on our own. And so my typical thing is we just need a huge amount of humility and we need to be very suspicious of people who claim that they have the capital. And then we need to have. And look, the good news is the Enlightenment has bequeathed us with a set of techniques to be able to presumably get closer to truth through the scientific method and rationality and observation and experimentation and hypothesis. And, you know, we need to continue to embrace those even when they give us answers we don't like.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were extremely common. And my point is they were very confident 3,900 years into what we would presume to be evolution towards the truth. And so my assessment is number one, there's no need for there's no need for the Hegelian dialectic to actually converge towards the truth. Like apparently not.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's theoretical structure. It had real issues, it had like a very deep fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and economics.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This old question, right? Of like, okay, like, are we looking for perfection? Are we looking for something that asymptotically approaches perfection? Are we looking for something that's just better than the alternatives? And Wikipedia, right, has exactly your point, has proven to be overwhelmingly better than people thought. And I think that's where this ends. And then underneath all this is the fundamental question of where you started, which is, okay, what is truth? 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 2,000 years or 4,000 years of human civilization is actually getting to the truth is actually a very difficult thing to do.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in fact, Wikipedia today is still not today, it's still not deterministically correct, right? So you cannot take to the bank every single thing on every single page, but it is probabilistically correct. And specifically, the way I describe Wikipedia people, it is more likely that Wikipedia is right than any other source you're going to find.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do the verification. By the way, another idea is you might have a community of LMs on any, you know, so for example, you might have the creative LM and then you might have a literal LLM fact check it. And so there's a variety of different technical approaches that are being applied to solve the hallucination problem. Some people like Jan Lacun argue that this is inherently an unsolvable problem, but most of the people working in the space, I think, think that there's a number of practical ways to corral this in a little bit.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But actually, they said what the law firm basically said is, yeah, that's true at the level of individual briefs, but they said when you're actually trying to figure out legal arguments. Right, like you actually want to be creative, right? Again, there's creativity and then there's like making stuff up. Like, what's the line? You actually want to be, you want it to explore different hypotheses, right? You want to do kind of the legal version of like improv or something like that where you want to float different theories of the case and different possible arguments for the judge and different possible arguments for the jury. By the way, different routes through the sort of history of all the case law. And so they said actually for a lot of what we want to use it for, we actually want it in creative mode. And then basically we just assume that we're going to have to cross-check all of the, you know, all the specific citations. And so I think there's going to be more shades of gray in here than people think. And then I just add to that, you know, another one of these trillion dollar kind of questions is ultimately, you know, sort of the verification thing. And so, you know, will LLMs be evolved from here to be able to do their own facial verification? Will you have sort of add-on functionality like Wolfram Alpha, right? Where in other plugins where that's the way.”
2023-06-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source