Marc Andreessen: belief

Transcript context

…That’s actually a tricky one in terms of learning as a non-coder to build stuff, I feel like you still need to learn how to code. It becomes a superpower, it helps you be much more productive. You could legitimately be a one person company and get quite far. I agree with that, up to a point. So, I think, for sure, for quite a long time, the people who are good at coding are going to be the best at actually having AIs code things, because they’re going to understand what, very basic, they’re going to understand what’s happening. And they’re going to be able to evaluate the work, and they’re going to be able to literally manage AIs better, even if they’re not literally handwriting the code, they’re just going to have a much better sense of what’s going on. So, I definitely think, 100% my nine-year-old is doing all kinds of coding classes, and he’ll keep doing that for, certainly through 18, we’ll see after that. And so, for sure that’s the case. But look, having said that, one of the things you can do with an AI is say, teach me how to code. And there’s a whole bunch of, I’ll name names, Khan Academy… There’s a whole bunch of work that they’re doing at Khan Academy for free, and then we have this company, Replit, which was originally specifically built for kids for coding, that has AI built in, that’s just absolutely extraordinary now. And then, there’s a variety of other systems like this. Yeah, the AI is going to be able to teach to code… AI, by the way, is, as you know, is spectacularly good at explaining code. And so, the tools have these features now where you can talk to the code base, and so you can literally ask the code base questions about itself. And you can also just do the simple form, which is you can copy and paste code into a ChatGPT and just ask it to explain it, what’s going on, rewrite it, improve it, make recommendations. And so, there’s dozens of ways to do this. By the way, you can also, even more broadly than code, like, okay, you want to make a video game, okay, now you can do AI, art generation, sound generation, dialogue generation, voice generation, all of a sudden you don’t need designers, you don’t need voice actors. Yeah, there’s just unlimited…And then a big part of coding is so-called glue, it’s interfacing into other systems. So, it’s interfacing into Stripe, to take payments, or something like that, and AI is fantastic at writing glue code. So, really, really good at making sure that you can plug everything together, really good at helping you figure out how to deploy. It’ll even write a business plan for you. So, it’s just this, it’s like everything happening with AI right now, it’s like this latent superpower, and there’s this incredible spectrum of people who have really figured out massive performance increases, productivity increases with it already, there’s other people who aren’t even aware it’s happening. there’s this incredible spectrum of people who have really figured out massive performance increases, productivity increases with it already, there’s other people who aren’t even aware it’s happening. And there’s some gearing to whether you’re a coder or not, but I think there are lots of non-coders that are off to the races, and I think there are lots of professional coders who are still like, eh… The blacksmiths were not necessarily in favor of the car business. So, there’s the old William Gibson quote, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet,” and this is maybe the most potent version of that that I’ve ever seen.…

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