Marc Andreesen on AI
Venture Capitalist and technology industry veteran Marc Andreesen wrote (Jun 2023) Why AI Will Save the World, a “manifesto” for why AI Doomers are wrong and why
2023-07-10 11:08 AM
Econtalk Podcast interview: Why AI Will Save the World
Using AI LLMs prompt: “adopt the persona of an expert in X”
Write in the style of the twitter account
Religion
Nearly all of the people advancing the eschatological view of AI are atheists. Without realizing it, they are essentially developing their own new religion, much of it based on the Christian culture from which they come.
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Marc Andreesen and Lex Fridman:
2023-06-22 7:45 AM
- There is a fine line between creativity and hallucination. A law firm uses GPT to brainstorm potential legal approaches, of course double-checking all the references before turning it into a brief.
- AI-generated content might improve the quality of the web, by exploring the space of ideas that haven’t been fully uncovered. This is similar to how AI-generated content helps improve auto-driving datasets, by filling in missing features.
Re: falling trust in institutions, imagine past events unfolding differently if they’d had our modern media. He doesn’t mention Martin Gurri’s ideas, but this fits well.
Millenarianism is a core part of western culture. Much of the AI Doomerism comes straight out of that C.S. Lewis’ observation that the “God-shaped hole in every human heart” drives us to demand that there be a reason to our existence.
“models are not scientific” because there are no hypotheses, no falsifiability, no experiments, etc.
The COVID response is a case in point: policymakers panicked when so-called scientists presented them with big scary models, all of which turned out to be completely wrong.
A16Z podcast Bio Meets World with Marc Andreesen
2023-01-09
No real insights….I think Andreesen is naive about a typical doctor-patient interaction. It’s probably pretty rare for a diagnosis to depend on brainstorming alternatives that the doctor didn’t consider. Much more common is something like IBS, where there are like 5 different protocols and the doctor has to decide which is best in this particular case, based on whatever is true of this patient (e.g. more or less likely to be compliant, other pre-existing conditions that might affect outcome, degree of genetic difference, etc.)
Would you rather be treated by a newly-minted doctor (who has most recent medical knowledge) or an experienced doctor.
Doctors today: diagnose-prescribe Future: doctors have a closer relationship, a “life coach”
Education: enabling 1:1 tutoring, which is the only intervention proven to work.
Augmented intelligence
e.g. screenwriting now lets a single person do what used to require a “writers room”. You tell the computer to give you five alternatives and then you riff on those.
Marc disputes the “prometheus myth”