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There’s plenty of hype to go around about AI. It’s going to revolutionize this and automate that. But how, exactly? It’s a question that’s become increasingly pressing as governments and investors bet increasingly massive gobs of cash on its power to change the world.
Unfortunately, even AI’s move devoted acolytes are struggling to articulate how AI is actually going to help humanity.
Case in point, on a recent podcast appearance with Joe Rogan flagged by the Verge, the billionaire AI evangelist Marc Andreessen — who’s invested billions into AI development through his venture capital firm — struggled when asked to articulate AI’s benefits.
The conversation began, ironically enough, with Andreessen asserting that tech executives have done a terrible job explaining what makes AI so important.
“So, you’re saying that the people running AI have done a terrible job of selling AI,” Rogan said. “So sell it.”
“Yes — oh, sell it, I mean, look, so it, it is, alright — I mean, alright I’m gonna give you the deepest of all pitches, I’m gonna give you the, the — okay,” Andreessen stammered right out of the gate. “So, uh, Isaac Newton spent 20 years looking for this key to what he called ‘alchemy.’ Uhm, and the idea of alchemy was to transmute something that was very common into something that was very rare.”
Andreessen goes on like this for the next minute, trying explain that Newton wanted to turn lead into gold, seemingly trying to draw a parallel to the tech industry’s drive to turn sand — silicon — into thought.
“In any event, you may know that he never — we have never figured out how to do that,” Andreessen continued. “And gold is still rare and valuable, so, imagine a form of alchemy that turns sand into thought. Pause on that for a moment.”
It’s barely comprehensible, to put it charitably. At any rate, Andreessen immediately abandons the alchemy analogy to explain that AI is actually good because stuff like lawsuits, medical problems, and work is just too hard for humans to think about on their own.
“We’re always all bumping up on these limitations on thought, like just how smart can we be, how many things can we know about, and so AI quite literally is that: it’s thought at scale, for everybody, in perpetuity,” he insists. Nevermind that AI compute is incredibly expensive — it certainly won’t be free “for everybody” for much longer — it also isn’t even close to performing human-level thought. Keep in mind, these are basically massive predictive algorithms: a more accurate phrase would be “data at scale.”
Having made his grand point, Andreessen continues with an appeal to humanity: “I guess I see this with my 11-year old right now, like everybody who grows up now is going to have AI.” Of course, that’s a self-reinforcing argument, a cop-out which doesn’t explain why it’s important to have “thought at scale,” or why thought is currently insufficient at its current, human-sized scale.
The fact that one of AI’s loudest and richest devotees can barely articulate why he thinks the technology is important should be a telling sign, especially as productive returns on the tech remain far out of reach.
Commenters posting under clips of the interview were unimpressed. “Before AI, if I didn’t know something I would just google it,” one TikTok user wrote. “AI gets to the answer faster but it’s only correct half the time. How is that revolutionary?”
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