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Marc Andreessen: AI is an "80 year overnight success."
"Something about AI causes the people in the field to become both excessively utopian and excessively apocalyptic."
"What's actually happened is—in retrospect, an enormous amount of technical progress built up over time."
"For example, we now know that the neural network is the correct architecture. There was a 60 or 70 year run where that was controversial."
"Everything we're building on today sort of derives from the original idea in 1943. In retrospect, we now know that these guys were right."
"They would get the timing wrong and they thought capabilities would arrive faster, or that they could be turned into businesses sooner, but the scientists who worked on this over the course of decades were fundamentally correct about what they were doing."
"And the payoff from all their work is happening now."
"ChatGPT hits, and then o1 hits, and then OpenClaw hits, and these are radical, overnight transformative successes—but they're drawing on an 80 year wellspring backlog of ideas and thinking. It's not just all brand new, it's that it's an unlock of all of these decades of very serious, hardcore research."
"There were AI researchers who spent their entire lives—got their PhD, researched for 40 years, retired in a lot of cases, passed away, and they never actually saw it work."
@pmarca with @latentspacepod
English
