Latest news with #Andreessen
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Top Venture Capitalist Says AI Will Replace Pretty Much All Jobs Except His, Which Relies on His Unique Genius
The future is a world of jobless workers — except for the enlightened philosopher-kings of venture capital, that is. Or at least that's according to Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Marc Andreessen, who imagines a future where the workers of the world sit jobless, in an employment apocalypse that will affect pretty much everyone except the unique genius of him and his peers. Appearing on his company's a16z podcast, Andreessen made the case that venture capitalists — like he and his rich buddies — will be some of the only ones exempt from the AI revolution. "Every great venture capitalist in the last 70 years has missed most of the great companies of his generation... if it was a science, you could eventually dial it in and have somebody who gets 8 out of 10 [right]," the investor reasoned. "There's an intangibility to it, there's a taste aspect, the human relationship aspect, the psychology — by the way a lot of it is psychological analysis," he added. "So like, it's possible that that is quite literally timeless," Andreessen posited. "And when the AIs are doing everything else, like, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing." The billionaire investor paints a pretty grim picture of life after AI takes over, especially given that Andreessen is an outspoken critic of the universal basic income, the idea that everyone in society would be given enough to live even after their jobs have been automated. Add it all up, and it's a vision of the future that gives Andreessen and his peers extraordinary power over everybody else. "After you die, VCs are the judges of whether you get into heaven or not," as one poster quipped on X-formerly-Twitter. In reality, whether AI will ever be able to replace a meaningful number of workers is a pretty open question. At present, the best AI isn't capable of automating any but the most basic of tasks, and some experts argue it never will; it's also easy to imagine an underwhelming future in which AI automates many roles sloppily, at the expense of quality work. And in that case, Andreessen's no common worker — the tech titan has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in AI startups like ElevenLabs, Figma, and Applied Intuition, making his prediction more than a little biased from the jump. His firm, Andreessen Horowitz, most recently announced the launch of a $20 billion megafund for AI startups, which would be the largest VC fund in history. If the "AI takeover" does come to pass, it's hard to imagine that gigs like Andreessen's would be spared. At the end of the day, all he really does is evaluate the financial outlooks of various startup ideas, which isn't the easiest task to do well, but a far cry from punishing physical careers like nurses and loggers, or rarefied intellectual ones like scientists and teachers. Andreessen's decidedly selfish outlook is unfortunately well-regarded among the class of libertarian thinkers, techno capitalists and political pundits who parrot his ideas. His infamous tome, the "Techno-Optimist's Manifesto," lays out just who benefits from his AI revolution: "We believe the techno-capital machine of markets and innovation never ends, but instead spirals continuously upward." Put another way: there is infinite money to be mined from the workers of the world, and a special class of entrepreneurs will be the ones to do so, all in the name of innovation. As tech and economics researcher Jathan Sadowski observed in his recent book, "The Mechanic and the Luddite": "This outcome can only be achieved to great effect by putting a highly concentrated industry that is driven by accumulating more money than god and enacting its own internalized savior complex in charge of your innovation system." More on venture capitalists: Investor Says AI Is Already "Fully Replacing People" Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Business Insider
19-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Marc Andreessen says the US needs to lead open-sourced AI: 'Imagine if the entire world — including the US — runs on Chinese software'
"Just close your eyes," the cofounder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz said in an interview on tech show TBPN published on Saturday. "Imagine two states of the world: One in which the entire world runs on American open-source LLM, and the other is where the entire world, including the US, runs on all Chinese software." Andreessen's comments come amid an intensifying US-China tech rivalry and a growing debate over open- and closed-source AI. Open-source models are freely accessible, allowing anyone to study, modify, and build upon them. Closed-source models are tightly controlled by the companies that develop them. Chinese firms have largely favored the open-source route, while US tech giants have taken a more proprietary approach. Last week, the US issued a warning against the use of US AI chips for Chinese models. It also issued new guidelines banning the use of Huawei's Ascend AI chips globally, citing national security concerns. "These chips were likely developed or produced in violation of US export controls," the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security said in a statement on its website. As the hardware divide between the US and China deepens, attention is also on software and AI, where control over the underlying models is increasingly seen as a matter of technological sovereignty. Andreessen said it's "plausible" and "entirely feasible" that open-source AI could become the global standard. Companies would need to "adjust to that if it happens," he said, adding that widespread access to "free" AI would be a "pretty magical result." Still, for him, the debate isn't just about access. It's about values — and where control lies. Andreessen said he believes it's important that there's an American open-source champion or a Western open-source large language model. A country that builds its own models also shapes the values, assumptions, and messaging embedded in them. "Open weights is great, but the open weights, they're baked, right?" he said. "The training is in the weights, and you can't really undo that." For Andreessen, the stakes are high. AI is going to "intermediate" key institutions like the courts, schools, and medical systems, which is why it's "really critical," he said. Andreessen's firm, Andreessen Horowitz, backs Sam Altman's OpenAI and Elon Musk's xAI, among other AI companies. The VC did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Open source vs closed source China has been charging ahead in the open-source AI race. While US firms focused on building powerful models locked behind paywalls and enterprise licenses, Chinese companies have been giving some of theirs away. In January, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek released R1, a large language model that rivals ChatGPT's o1 but at a fraction of the cost, the company said. The open-sourced model raised questions about the billions spent training closed models in the US. Andreessen earlier called it "AI's Sputnik moment." Major players like OpenAI — long criticized for its closed approach — have started to shift course. "I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open source strategy," Altman said in February. In March, OpenAI announced that it was preparing to roll out its first open-weight language model with advanced reasoning capabilities since releasing GPT-2 in 2019. In a letter to employees earlier this month announcing that the company's nonprofit would stay in control, Altman said: "We want to open source very capable models." The AI race is also increasingly defined by questions of national sovereignty. Huang said countries should ensure they own the production of their intelligence and the data produced and work toward building "sovereign AI."
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Are Some Dems About to Cave to Crypto? It Wouldn't Be the First Time
Recently, Semafor's Ben Smith reported a gossipy exposé on the rapidly dwindling number of tech oligarchs and talking heads who want to spend any time online with Marc Andreessen and David Sacks. According to Smith, Andreessen—the onetime CEO of Netscape, now a cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence investor—maintained a slew of hyper-exclusive Signal group chats for years, in which business and media elites vented about liberals on social media and generally talked politics. 'Marc radicalized over time,' the writer Richard Hanania, a literal former neo-Nazi, told Smith. Similarly, Sacks apparently stormed out of the last iteration of the chats a few months ago, accusing 'the loudest voices' of 'TDS,' an abbreviation for 'Trump Derangement Syndrome.' This reflects the broader politics of cryptocurrency, in which both men are invested: The crypto lobby spent dark money in the 2024 elections in a league completely unto itself, and overwhelmingly for the Republican Party. It is difficult to imagine that Republicans would enjoy their current trifecta, fueling the possible collapse of the American republic, if it weren't for crypto. But Democrats would not be Democrats if it wasn't for their ability to take a punch in the mouth … and mumble gratitude for the timely wake-up call. Because it appears that despite the cryptocurrency industry's support for the Republican Party … and despite the Trump family's brazen embrace of cryptocurrency, Senate Democrats are probably set to provide the critical votes necessary to pass the so-called GENIUS Act sometime before Memorial Day. The GENIUS Act is a very soft touch 'regulatory framework' to entrench the so-called 'stablecoins' (including one associated with the Trump family) that grease the wheels of cryptocurrency speculation. Some Democrats pushed for language aimed at the Trump family's crypto profits, but it doesn't look like that's going to be in there. And so the Andreessen, Sacks, and cryptocurrency-wide bet that they can attack Democrats (and arguably democracy), confident that they won't do much in response, seems to be paying off. They should be stoked! Despite being literal billionaires, who all but dictate American economic policy, Andreessen and Sacks still seem to feel disrespected. Andreessen's bizarre 'Techno-Optimist Manifesto' and Sacks's self-congratulating podcast All In both echo these men's frustration that the media adulation they took for granted in the 1990s and the 2000s is gone; people, you know, criticize them now. It's not like it used to be, and dammit, it ought to go back! This is a childish attitude for anyone. But it's especially bizarre to see from Silicon Valley venture capitalists, who not so very long ago had an ugly and extremely public display of their own business incompetence. Those outside of crypto spaces might have first encountered Sacks two years ago as the de facto face of the bailout of Silicon Valley Bank. This March was the two-year anniversary of the collapse of SVB, the go-to financier for Sacks, Andreessen, and the beloved private start-ups of them and many other venture capitalists. The SVB failure threatened to entirely wipe out these men's investments due to their own failure to account for deposit insurance restrictions known to most members of the general public. Democrats would have been well within their rights to let the moguls suffer the consequences of their actions. If they really hated the start-up economy as much as is claimed—or had the zeal against corporate greed and corruption that progressive populists urged—then the SVB failure gave them the perfect opportunity to wipe it off the map without lifting a finger. Instead, the Democratic president and treasury secretary bent over backward to skirt long-standing rules and do everything it took to save SVB's depositors. Two of the biggest beneficiaries of that kindness were Sacks and Andreessen. And instead of appreciation, these tech bros without an understanding of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insurance backed Trump and ascendant congressional Republicans while proclaiming Democrats insufficiently solicitous of their business acumen. On the second anniversary of the SVB bailout, let's remember that it isn't Democrats who abandoned tech. It's the tech moguls who abandoned the social contract—not just with the Democratic Party, but with anyone who isn't Valley Bank was exactly what the name implies. Founded in 1983, it was the go-to financial partner for tech start-ups that needed loans, payroll services, and so on. It also lent heavily to the people behind the firms, providing mortgages and personal credit lines to 'founders' building their California mansions. SVB banked half of the venture capital–backed 'start-up' business ecosystem. In late 2022, serving this particular niche had made it the sixteenth-largest bank in America. As the tech industry enjoyed a pandemic-induced windfall—everyone was stuck inside with nothing to do but play on their phones for a year—SVB's year-over-year deposits doubled from $62 billion to $124 billion by March 2021, enough to put the bank in the S&P 500. But with greater deposits comes greater risk. SVB took greater risks, but it did not couple that with greater risk management. While ignoring six separate warnings from the Federal Reserve, it continued investing in low-yield, long-dated bonds, essentially assuming interest rates would stay near zero despite the end of Covid-19 lockdown. This was a bad bet. The Fed jacked up rates in early 2023 in response to inflation (possibly wrong—but a quite mainstream response), sharply diminishing the value of SVB's bond portfolio. Meanwhile, those same high interest rates meant a lot of tech start-ups couldn't get attractive loans elsewhere, so they started to tap their SVB deposit accounts for short-term cash. With only those worthless long-dated bonds to sell, SVB found itself in a crunch. A classic bank run ensued. Companies raced to liquidate their SVB accounts before the bank ran out of money. On the morning of March 10, the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation seized SVB in the largest bank failure since the 2008 financial crisis. This posed an existential threat to the start-up economy. An estimated 89 percent of deposits at the bank exceeded the FDIC limit of $250,000, meaning they were not insured by the federal government and stood to be wiped out in the receivership. That meant a large number of venture-backed companies' liquid wealth would be eradicated; they'd be unable to make payroll, pay rent and utilities, and generally keep their basic operations going. One such company was Circle, maker of the stablecoin USDC. It stored $3.3 billion at SVB, around 8 percent of its total assets. The entire purpose of a stablecoin is its promise that for each crypto token issued, the issuing company has an old-fashioned U.S. dollar at the ready to swap out to the token's owner whenever they ask. Think of it like a checking account denominated in a different, private currency, but which promises that this currency is one-to-one convertible into dollars, the same way the numbers on your bank statement are convertible into cash. But unlike checking accounts, stablecoins don't have a government backstop; USDC is only backed by Circle's word. Letting SVB falter potentially could have 'broken the buck' for Circle, meaning it would not be able to guarantee one-to-one convertibility between USDC and U.S. dollars. The likely ensuing panic could have undermined much of the rest of the crypto ecosystem, to which USDC is a gateway. So what did the venture capitalists who'd sent their portfolio firms to SVB in the first place do? Demand an exception to the rules, of course. 'Where is Powell? Where is Yellen? Stop this crisis NOW,' Sacks tweeted indignantly, insisting that the government 'announce that all depositors will be safe.' '@POTUS & @SecYellen MUST GET ON TV TOMORROW AND GUARANTEE ALL DEPOSITS UP TO $10M OR THIS WILL SPIRAL INTO CHAOS,' tweeted fellow V.C.-er Jason Calacanis. Andreessen made personal calls to hedge funds and other banks, looking for a buyer, as Silicon Valley Congressmen Ro Khanna and Eric Swalwell started lobbying the president for help. In a crisis of their own making, ignoring risks known to every consumer who's read the FDIC placard at their local bank, the venture capitalists demanded that the eat-or-be-eaten laws of capitalism never apply to them. Let's be clear: There are very fair policy arguments for eliminating the $250,000 insurance cap and fully guaranteeing all deposits in American banks. Doing so would help insulate the rest of the economy from any chaos in the financial sector, because it would effectively nationalize credit laundering and accounts-based money, two of the core functions of the banking system. It's a fairly popular idea, and absolutely anathema to the libertarian ideals men like Sacks, Calacanis, and Andreessen swear by. So, unsurprisingly, it is not what they were proposing. This was not a call to enact legislation or rethink banking rules. It was a call to make sure the rules as written don't apply to their sector in particular, because they were foolish enough to put all of the eggs in one poorly run basket and were now suffering the consequences. It was a call for a bailout. And that's precisely what the Biden administration did. Seeing how SVB's implosion was spreading panic at other tech-linked financial institutions (panic that Sacks's and Calacanis's tweets were fueling), Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen tapped the FDIC's 'systemic risk exception' to have the FDIC fully ensure SVB depositors. The panic calmed, the start-ups got their funds, and one year later, Sacks was calling Biden 'a puppet' for moneyed interests out to loot the was not entirely wrong to accuse the Democratic Party of capture by big money. The problem is that the big money is him, his friends, and his portfolio companies. Bringing up SVB raises the question of whether Biden was right to bail out the depositors. It's debatable. Saving workaday coders' jobs from their bosses' poor decisions, and preventing a wider regional banking crisis, certainly might have been worth the moral hazard of further weakening the credibility of the deposit insurance cap. On the other hand, everyone in finance will always think they'll get a bailout until the first person doesn't. If someone has to be the first, it's hard to think of a better contender than crypto scammers, whose entire product is premised on dodging the rules in the first place. Letting bad actors face the consequences of their decisions before they become systemically significant is how financial stability is supposed to work. If there had to be a bailout, it should have prompted an honest reckoning with that policy and an effort to fully ensure the banking system, in turn prompting a broader conversation about the point of private banks in the twenty-first century. But that's a failing of Congress, not the Biden administration. (Albeit a quite predictable failing.) What all Democrats, including the Biden White House, should think about is their broader failure to hold crypto, AI, banks, and other irresponsible elite actors to account after saving them from their own mistakes. Sacks should not be able to credibly cosplay as a populist rabble-rouser after shrieking for a special dispensation from the very financial authorities his portfolio firms claim to be bringing down. If Biden hadn't helped the depositors at SVB and Signature Bank—which catered even more to cryptocurrency and collapsed shortly afterward—many of the tokens Trump appointees are now welding onto the broader financial system likely wouldn't exist. Moreover, there'd be more Democrats in Congress, most notably Sherrod Brown, the hard-charging former Democratic chair of the Senate Banking Committee who faced an onslaught of dark crypto money in his last reelection bid. Sacks doesn't get to berate Democrats as 'a collection of interests who want to loot the republic' when he and his peers are actively looting the republic right now. This speaks to a broader neurosis in the Democratic Party that is a not-insignificant reason for its current lack of power. When greedy and foolish businessmen cause a potential economic crisis, it is fair and noble to prioritize the interests of workers and the broader economy over the cold discipline of the market. But discipline must still come to those businessmen in some other fashion, or they will never, never learn. It's not just the moral thing to do, it's the politically salient thing to do. The best way to defang accusations of cronyism is to make them look ridiculous by cultivating a reputation for afflicting the powerful. Imagine a world where that crypto bro never meandered to Sacks in the first place, because his material needs and well-earned frustration were adequately addressed after 2008. Now imagine how that leaves a world where Sacks and his crypto army are unable to finance a 50-state strategy to knock their Democratic skeptics out of Congress. If the Republican Party really does pose an existential threat to the American system of government, and there is no question that it does, then Democrats are decades past the point where they need to wake up and realize that they are not engaged in a sophomoric debate club or a sports league. They are in a war. To win a war, one must cut off the enemy's supply chain. In U.S. politics, that means cutting off the dark money that fuels a partisan ecosystem—and the largest source of that dark money on the GOP side is now cryptocurrency. Grifters, opportunists, and self-obsessed capitalists will never have a stable relationship with the Democratic Party. Unions, environmentalists, and civil rights leaders do; they know that the opposition will never welcome them, and they don't want to be welcome in its circles anyway. As we endure an administration of Sackses and Trumps, a presidency that is definitionally one massive scam, it is up to the Democrats to finally decide what extraction, manipulation, and cruelty is intolerable.
Business Insider
06-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Marc Andreessen thinks AI can do every job in the world — except his
Think I'm kidding? On an a16z podcast last week, Andreessen opined that being a venture capitalist may be a profession that is "quite literally timeless." "When the AIs are doing everything else," he continued, "that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing." Here's the logic. Andreessen starts by talking about all the things that people thought might disrupt the way VCs operate — like the Craigslist-style approach of AngelList, or crowdfunding. "The other form of structural change, of course, is AI," Andreessen says. Then he issues a challenge to the AI crowd: "All right, smart guys. You're sitting around doing all this analysis, and you have all these smart people doing all this modeling and all this research and so forth. Why can't you just plug this into Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini and have it tell you what to invest in?" The reason, Andreessen explains, is that it takes a VC like him to know how to pick a winner. He throws out a bunch of examples, going all the way back to the whaling industry 500 years ago: book publishers, movie studio executives, talent scouts at music labels. (I'll spare you the details here, but I spoke with an economist who has analyzed the whaling industry, and he says MarcGPT is pretty much wrong on every count.) Andreessen insists that these are key jobs that spring up "any time you have a part of the economy in which you have an entrepreneur going on a high-risk, high-return endeavor where it is far from clear what is going to work, and there are many more aspirants than there is money to fund them." Here, Andreessen argues, is where the human element is irreplaceable. "You're not just funding them," he says. "You have to actually work with them to execute the entire project. That's art. That's not science. That's art. We would like it to be science, but, like, it's art." Now correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like a lot of AI folks have been trying to tell us that AI can make art. Last year, even Andreessen said that AI had enough of a sense of humor to " save comedy." But apparently it can't do his art. Which brings us to the wildest bit. Andreessen says he knows that venture investing is an ineffable, intuitive, intrinsically human skill precisely because venture capitalists are very bad at it. "The great VCs have a success rate of getting, I don't know, two out of 10 of the great companies of the decade, right?" he says. "If it was science, you could eventually have somebody who just dials in and gets eight out of 10. But in the real world, it's not like that. You're in the fluke business, and there's an intangibility to it. There's a taste aspect." Even accepting Andreessen's premise — that VCs contribute better advice than AI on how to run a business — it looks like he's wrong about whether he's replaceable. In a recent survey by the enterprise software company SAP, 75% of C-level executives at billion-dollar companies said AI already gives better business advice than their friends and colleagues. And 38% said they trust AI to make business decisions. The kind of people Andreessen counts on for his livelihood are already starting to think he's obsolete. But Andreessen's portrait of how venture capital works doesn't actually accord with reality. VC investors say they're looking for disruptive innovation. In practice, they have operated pretty much like any good-old-boy network, consistently funding way more white men than women or people of color — often the same white men they knew from previous startups, whether they succeeded or not. And economists say it's an open question whether VCs actually add value or are just the most basic kind of "pickers," identifying companies that would have been successful without them. That's the kind of operation that large language models are pretty good at. Identifying patterns in big sets of data is, like, their whole thing. I actually kind of agree with Andreessen. I'm skeptical that any form of AI — much less the generative, chatbot-type products of OpenAI or Google — will ever be able to do high-level critical and creative thinking as well as a human. But the reality is, the quality of the AI's work might not matter. History is essentially one big graveyard of artisanal jobs that wound up being automated, even though the automation produced an objectively inferior product. Andreessen, like so many of us, wants to think he's special — that no machine can ever do what he does. But he can't have it both ways. If he's right that artificial intelligence can't perform the kinds of skills his job requires, then he's wrong to be investing in companies that promise it can. In any case, when Andreessen says "AI can't do my job," the job he's describing isn't a venture capitalist. It's not even a run-of-the-mill investor, who buys stock in a company. The core function that Andreessen is lionizing is being a gatekeeper — the power over who gets to join the club of influence. An AI that trained on every decision every venture capitalist ever made and tried to make them line up with various definitions of success might go on to choose very different kinds of companies. In a world of vcAI, startups might finally get backed on their merit, instead of on how much their founders look and talk like Andreessen. Who knows? An AI VC's loony, black-box heuristics might favor things like whether an idea is "good for humanity" or "promotes class mobility." What if it started to hallucinate something about "redistributing wealth"?
Business Insider
06-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
AI for thee, but not for VC
Marc Andreessen is, arguably, the most famous venture capitalist on earth. Cofounder of the legendary VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, inventor of the first popular web browser, and by reputation such a widely read intellectual egghead that his colleagues call him "MarcGPT." And as befits his nickname, Andreessen is a big believer in a future powered by artificial intelligence. His firm — "a16z" to Silicon Valley sophisticates — has invested in Elon Musk's xAI and Sam Altman's OpenAI. Andreessen has called AI"our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone," and "a universal problem solver" that "ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves." But for Andreessen, there is one job that AI will never do as well as a living, breathing human being: his. Think I'm kidding? On an a16z podcast last week, Andreessen opined that being a venture capitalist may be a profession that is "quite literally timeless." "When the AIs are doing everything else," he continued, "that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing." Here's the logic. Andreessen starts by talking about all the things that people thought might disrupt the way VCs operate — like the Craigslist-style approach of AngelList, or crowdfunding. "The other form of structural change, of course, is AI," Andreessen says. Then he issues a challenge to the AI crowd: "All right, smart guys. You're sitting around doing all this analysis, and you have all these smart people doing all this modeling and all this research and so forth. Why can't you just plug this into Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini and have it tell you what to invest in?" The reason, Andreessen explains, is that it takes a VC like him to know how to pick a winner. He throws out a bunch of examples, going all the way back to the whaling industry 500 years ago: book publishers, movie studio executives, talent scouts at music labels. (I'll spare you the details here, but I spoke with an economist who has analyzed the whaling industry, and he says MarcGPT is pretty much wrong on every count.) Andreessen insists that these are key jobs that spring up "any time you have a part of the economy in which you have an entrepreneur going on a high-risk, high-return endeavor where it is far from clear what is going to work, and there are many more aspirants than there is money to fund them." Here, Andreessen argues, is where the human element is irreplaceable. "You're not just funding them," he says. "You have to actually work with them to execute the entire project. That's art. That's not science. That's art. We would like it to be science, but, like, it's art." Now correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like a lot of AI folks have been trying to tell us that AI can make art. Last year, even Andreessen said that AI had enough of a sense of humor to " save comedy." But apparently it can't do his art. Which brings us to the wildest bit. Andreessen says he knows that venture investing is an ineffable, intuitive, intrinsically human skill precisely because venture capitalists are very bad at it. "The great VCs have a success rate of getting, I don't know, two out of 10 of the great companies of the decade, right?" he says. "If it was science, you could eventually have somebody who just dials in and gets eight out of 10. But in the real world, it's not like that. You're in the fluke business, and there's an intangibility to it. There's a taste aspect." Even accepting Andreessen's premise — that VCs contribute better advice than AI on how to run a business — it looks like he's wrong about whether he's replaceable. In a recent survey by the enterprise software company SAP, 75% of C-level executives at billion-dollar companies said AI already gives better business advice than their friends and colleagues. And 38% said they trust AI to make business decisions. The kind of people Andreessen counts on for his livelihood are already starting to think he's obsolete. But Andreessen's portrait of how venture capital works doesn't actually accord with reality. VC investors say they're looking for disruptive innovation. In practice, they have operated pretty much like any good-old-boy network, consistently funding way more white men than women or people of color — often the same white men they knew from previous startups, whether they succeeded or not. And economists say it's an open question whether VCs actually add value or are just the most basic kind of "pickers," identifying companies that would have been successful without them. That's the kind of operation that large language models are pretty good at. Identifying patterns in big sets of data is, like, their whole thing. I actually kind of agree with Andreessen. I'm skeptical that any form of AI — much less the generative, chatbot-type products of OpenAI or Google — will ever be able to do high-level critical and creative thinking as well as a human. But the reality is, the quality of the AI's work might not matter. History is essentially one big graveyard of artisanal jobs that wound up being automated, even though the automation produced an objectively inferior product. Andreessen, like so many of us, wants to think he's special — that no machine can ever do what he does. But he can't have it both ways. If he's right that artificial intelligence can't perform the kinds of skills his job requires, then he's wrong to be investing in companies that promise it can. In any case, when Andreessen says "AI can't do my job," the job he's describing isn't a venture capitalist. It's not even a run-of-the-mill investor, who buys stock in a company. The core function that Andreessen is lionizing is being a gatekeeper — the power over who gets to join the club of influence. An AI that trained on every decision every venture capitalist ever made and tried to make them line up with various definitions of success might go on to choose very different kinds of companies. In a world of vcAI, startups might finally get backed on their merit, instead of on how much their founders look and talk like Andreessen. Who knows? An AI VC's loony, black-box heuristics might favor things like whether an idea is "good for humanity" or "promotes class mobility." What if it started to hallucinate something about "redistributing wealth"? him.
