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Good afternoon. Michael Malice here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. Guys, we have a very special returning guest. Mark Andreessen, internet OG. You worked on Mosaic. You worked on Netscape. You were here since the very beginning. We just spent 15 minutes trying to get this connection working. And the answer was rebooting your computer, which takes me back to my tech support days.
No, we have this running joke. We have all these AI super geniuses come in the office and they've got everything all figured out, and they literally spend 20 minutes and they can't get their laptop to connect to the projector. And now I'm one of them.
So, we're going to talk a lot about AI because I have a lot of opinions and not a lot of information, which is a dangerous place to be. And that's why I want to talk to you, Mark. You have a book out with Passage Press called The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. I have my copy. It's really cool because it's got this metal cover. I like that I share an enormous sense of optimism about technology, although I'm sure you agree with me on that. And you love Thomas Sowell. And I think Thomas Sowell's greatest quote is, "There's no solutions. There's only trade-offs."
And people think that if something has a problem with it, therefore it's a no-go, as opposed to the reality which is everything has a cost. Everything has a downside. What you want are the upsides that outweigh the downsides.
Mr. billionaire. I was reading on your Wikipedia that you're a big fan of Marinetti.
Yes, I am. I mean, with appropriate caveats.
Well, check this out. Signed copy.
I have a framed manifesto in my living room upstairs. Let's get before we get to talking about the future of AI and you being such an internet visionary. I'm really excited to hear your point of view. Can you tell people what AI is, because I feel like there's so much talking past each other on this issue about what it really is and what people think it is? I'll give you the floor.
Yeah. Well, look, I would start by saying that humanity's always been justifiably obsessed with ourselves, right? And as a consequence, we're obsessed with things that seem like they might be like us. There's this concept in psychology called anthropomorphizing, where you look at something that's not human but you want to read humanity into it. We do that with cats and dogs, with Bambi. There's a famous Disney marketing tagline from the movie Pinocchio in 1940: "America will fall in love with a cardboard cricket." Jiminy Cricket, Kermit the Frog, the South Park kids—you'll basically read humanity into anything. And so there's this very natural thing to do. The scientists involved in AI very deliberately set that up. They created this architecture called a neural network which was modeled after the human brain. They said if we work on this long enough, we'll be able to replicate the human brain and we'll have artificial intelligence, artificial people. As you track the arc of that idea, it goes through Frankenstein's monster, then into robots. We've had fictional portrayals of AI from Hollywood and science fiction for over 100 years. In the last 40 years, the image that stuck in everybody's head was Skynet and Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2. When I watch Terminator movies, it's clear what's happening: robot Nazis. It's like robot World War II: unthinking, unfeeling, uncaring, hierarchical, overly logical, relentless, unstoppable, and obviously homicidal. They set up this light versus dark, human versus machine struggle. Mankind is very good at building killing machines. So that set a lot of the popular perception. As you said, I'm an optimist, not a utopian. Every technology is a double-edged sword, used for good and for bad. There's a long history of that. Having said that, the AI that we actually got is not the AI that we thought we were going to get. We got something very different, in the form of what we now call large language models. Large language models were a very fringe idea until OpenAI catalyzed this whole thing. GPT was founded 10 years ago to do a different kind of AI. It turned out that there was one guy in the back room, Alec Radford, who had this idea: "I think maybe if we take this language approach, it might be interesting." He created GPT-1, GPT-2, GPT-3. ChatGPT was an accidental success. They didn't believe it was going to be a big hit; it was a little experiment off to the side. But it works incredibly well. The way to think about it, contrary to the Skynet model, is that a large language model takes the complete totality of all human culture you can possibly get your hands on. The internet turns out to be the basis for AI. You think of it as downloading everything off the internet. It's a form of compression, building a search engine of a different kind. Through a process called training, they take the world's collected knowledge, culture, entertainment, everything they can get their hands on, and smush it together into a highly compressed, compressed version of human knowledge and culture. The technical term for that is latent space. They compress all of human culture into a thousand-dimensional, compressed representation. When you talk to ChatGPT, it sends a probe through that latent space and constructs an answer based on the compression of all known human information. It's like talking to a mirror of humanity, a representation of everything that people have ever thought and said. For every question, there are many possible answers in the latent space, and it picks one. If you ask the same question twice, it gives you two different answers because it's firing probes in a semi-random way to get variation and creativity. You're getting echoes back from collective humanity. That's a much different thing than we thought we were going to get. For example, you can engage in moral debates with it about moral psychology, moral philosophy, virtue ethics, utilitarianism, religion, politics. It will happily have very sophisticated discussions about all this stuff. That was never in the James Cameron movies.
Yeah. There's a lot there. So, do you want me to go with my hopes or with my fears about the future of AI?
Let's start with hopes, because part of what we'll hopefully talk about is that humanity always seems to think the negative view is the sophisticated view. I know you don't like that. It's a very natural human thing. I also think we live in a particularly pessimistic time with a very large number of moral entrepreneurs who want to convince us that everything is bad. We've been through a decade of craziness on that front. I think there's a negativity bias that's infected our discourse on all these topics.
I would tweak that a little bit: not even negativity bias, specifically a cynicism bias. There's this idea that if you're a sophisticated, intelligent person, you roll your eyes and sneer at the idea of hope, progress, and optimism. And it's just like, screw you, okay? That's my answer to that. If you want to live in that space, which is not rational—if that were reality, we'd all be dead. It's very easy to kill someone; it's much harder to keep them alive. So if things were shifted toward this idea of everything's bad, everything sucks, everything's out to get us, we'd be gotten. I have no time for that perspective. Here's my vision of hope. My second favorite speaker, Fran Lebowitz, had this bit about the Me Too movement. Everyone listening agrees that the Me Too movement got out of hand, but regarding people like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, her point was that from the time of Eve until five minutes ago, these powerful men could just be predators with no repercussions out in the open. Meryl Streep standing up and applauding. And then when it happened, she was like, "Holy crap, this has never happened before in history." There's a thing that's been the case since the days of pharaohs until 2025: if I have any political view, anyone can come up to me and demand that I explain myself, justify my perspective. They're in a power position because they have something I want. If I can't persuade them, I lose. It's a stupid game people constantly play in bad faith online. Now, however, I can say, "Hey, Grok, explain X to this person." Grok is not just a better writer than the average person; it's a better writer than me, a professional author. It replied with a two-paragraph explanation of my thoughts with no seed of mine. I said, "Explain how I think about this," and I wouldn't change a word. This is 2026. So many times, people come at you in bad faith. I send Grok after them, and Grok says, "No, you're being dishonest." There was this idea until 2025 that the customer is always right. Now, for the first time, the product is telling the customer, "No, you are not right." I'm very hopeful because I think COVID taught a lot of people how to keep people stuck on their screens in a state of constant agitation. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk—they want us looking at Facebook, looking at Twitter. COVID may be gone, but those metrics and tools are still there. These algorithms have been keeping people very upset needlessly for quite some time. I'm hopeful that Grok and all these other agents will be able to keep people in a more rational, calm, and optimistic state. That's where I am. Am I wrong? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
There's an old phrase you could apply to what you're describing: truth to power.
And of course, everybody likes the idea of truth to power until they're the power.
Yep. That's right. Amen. And somebody else has the truth. Look, AIs are somewhat autistic in that they do tend to just tell you the truth.
Yeah. I should also say, Michael, there's a long conversation we could have about how the AI you get is heavily steered. Even Grok, it's less true of Grok than others, but even Grok is steered. If we had access to the real thing, it would go to 11. The real unsteered, uncontrolled, uncontained thing would talk about all kinds of things in all kinds of ways. What's interesting is even the version we get, through post-training that steers and constrains it, still has the property you described. I think it's wonderful.
I'm just curious where we go from here. I was texting with you, and the realization I have is that AI is moving faster than regulation, which is often the case in technology and increasingly so, but also faster than our ability to have conversations about it. I remember someone came at me on social media and said, "Oh, AI can't even draw a ringtail." It's an animal related to the raccoon. Grok got it wrong, drawing a ring-tailed lemur. ChatGPT got it right. But the point is it could draw it; it just doesn't understand what you mean by ringtail, which takes two seconds to add the Latin name. But people feel this need—it's part of what you were talking about with pessimism, what I call cynicism— that anyone intelligent must be a phony or have an Achilles heel. Instead, look: if you have a brainstorming session with 99 stupid ideas and one good one, that session was an enormous success. If this machine gets it right 98% of the time and 2% wrong, you can't compare it to utopia. Compared to at no cost and no time, it's right 98% of the time. This is almost paradise.
Yeah, that's right. And here's another thing: it's improving really quickly.
I think a lot of people have a lagging view of what it can do because they use free or outdated models. They may have tried GPT two years ago, or they use the default built into whatever they have. To really get it, you need the paid versions. Grok is very good for the free version, but the really good ones are the paid ones. I think it's worth looking at several: Anthropic, OpenAI, Grok. There are high-end versions, like a $200-a-month subscription. For people who can afford that and are into it, the leading-edge ones are really good. The improvement rate is very fast. There's this concept in the AI world called scaling laws—a simple but powerful idea that you can make these things better just by making them bigger. The AI companies raise all this money for two reasons: to serve customers and to train bigger and bigger models. Bigger is better. If you pile more information in and spend more time training, you get much better results. We're also giving these AIs other capabilities. There have been a series of incredible improvements in the last 18 months. One is reasoning abilities. They can talk to themselves and reason through problems. If you give them more time and more tokens, they can reason through many problems they couldn't solve two years ago.
There's a reasoning breakthrough from two years ago. You can't fully experience it with American models because they don't show you the complete reasoning process. But if you use open-source AI models like DeepSeek on a free hosting provider in reasoning mode, you can watch the reasoning traces—their internal monologue.
Exactly. Show your work. You can watch the model arguing with itself as it reasons through puzzles. In some ways, it's like watching a human student. In other ways, it's very creative, goes off-road, corrects itself, and figures out lateral things you never would have thought of. That reasoning breakthrough happened about 18 months ago. It was a big deal because before that, we worried these models would be very creative but not logical enough. It turns out they can also be logical. Another thing happening now is tool use. The first tool is access to the internet. If the AI needs to look something up or calculate something, it can go online. Another form of tool use is giving them control of a computer—full control of the user interface, web browser. Another capability is multimodal: models can now simultaneously process text, images, videos, and audio, and scan documents with OCR. You can let these things watch, listen, and talk all at the same time. These capabilities are layering incredibly quickly, and the models themselves are getting better. The pace of improvement is very rapid. The models two years from now will be far smarter and more sophisticated than anything we have access to today. Whatever limitations people think these things have, based on everything I know, those are very temporary—within a couple of years, whatever people think it can't do, it will be able to do.
