Marc Andreessen Predicts AI’s Critical Turning Point

00:00We're at this very specific and important and fundamental and I think profound turning point in technology, which is the rise of AI. Um and I would say the the good news, let's make the panel optimistic. The good news is the US is like by far the leader on AI. Now, by the way, we need to decide whether we want to be the leader in AI cuz there's like a lot of forces in the US and in the US government that are trying to prevent that from happening. But there's over a thousand laws at state level we've been trying to fight and stop that would screw this up, right? So there's a lot of people who are against this. >> California state state government almost passed a law to outlaw AI in California 6 months ago, which which is an

00:29indication how crazy California is. But yes, that we we can have it's like everything else. We can have it if we want it. Uh these are all choices. But like AI is happening and AI is only happening in two places. Like it's only US versus China and there's a whole competition thing there. But like the US is like very powerful on this. And then by the way, US is benefiting a lot cuz Europe has basically made AI illegal. Like they're regulating themselves to death. And so the smart AI people in Europe are moving to the US. Um and so like the the US really is ground zero for AI. Um today AI is software, right? And so when you use AI, you use ChatGPT. It's an app on your phone, right? It it does there's

01:02no manufacturing kind of component, you know, really to you know, people are building giant data centers, but you know, it's not a huge generator of like middle-class jobs. Um but there's another turn on AI that's coming, which is the turn to the turn to embodied physical AI, which is robotics. Right? Um and this is a transition that has already happened. It's already actually happened in drones, uh where drones went from being human piloted to actually be auto you know, autonomously piloted. They they now fly themselves. Um it's a transition that's happening in cars right now, right? Where cars went from, you know, basically purely physical products to now basically being rolling computers that drive themselves.

01:32And if you if you haven't tried this yet, like go to go to if you ever have the misfortune of finding yourself in San Francisco, uh take a Waymo. >> [snorts] >> Um it's amazing to live in a cyberpunk future reality where you're in literally a state-of-the-art self-driving car that's literally out of the Jetsons driving past people who are dying of fentanyl overdoses on the sidewalk. I recommend having the experience at least once. Um but but the self-driving car really does work. Like it's really happening. And then what's going to happen, you you've all probably seen, you know, Elon has this Optimus robot that he's building. Um these humanoid robots. Like the the the general purpose robotics thing is

02:05going to happen and it's going to happen in the next decade and it's going to happen at giant scale. And I I I think there's a plausible argument, which Elon also believes, that robotics is going to be the biggest industry in the history of the planet. It's it's going to be gigantic. There's going to be billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of robots of all shapes, sizes, descriptions running around doing all kinds of things. Um those robots need to get designed and built, right? And so my view is, you know, we don't try to get the old manufacturing jobs back. What we try what we should do is lean hard into the manufacturing jobs of the future, which is designing and building all of

02:32these new things, right? By the way, which includes drones and cars, right? And robots. Um and you know, we shouldn't be building manufacturing lines that have people sitting on a rubber mat for 10 hours screwing screws in by hand, but we should be building, you know, what Elon calls he calls them alien dreadnought factories, right? Which is like these super sophisticated factories with like tons of robotics. But you can imagine thousands and thousands of different categories of industrial production that have to happen all across the US in order to make this happen. Um and and and would cause just like enormous economic growth throughout the country. We get a huge payoff from all the tech investment that

03:03that that that the coasts are making, but we generate many tens or hundreds of millions of jobs um in the countryside. And then the US would would lead. It would be you know, be the third industrial or fourth industrial revolution. We would we would lead in the development of all these new things. And then you get to the national security side of this, which is if you don't do this, you're living in a world of Chinese robots everywhere. Um and that has, you know, very profound consequences uh for let's just say yeah, profound consequences. >> important policy point. And I I want to I want to dig into this a little bit more. A lot of I was just in an interview up there like, "Aren't we going to destroy tens of millions of

03:34jobs? Isn't AI scary?" A lot of people are very scared right now with the disruption. I'm very excited about the higher productivity cuz I see it being disinflationary. I see it creating more jobs. How how do we how do we if assuming we're aligned, how do we explain this to people? How do we explain this is actually a really good thing for the country? Cuz a lot of Luddites are going to attack this. They are going to try to stop it. Yeah, so the the Luddites the the Luddites are wrong. The neo neo-Luddites are wrong. They're wrong in the sense of like that for the reason they've always been wrong, which is the reality is we have not in the last 50 years been in an era of fast productivity growth, technological

04:02change. We've been in an area of slow productivity change, slow economic growth. Um AI, if it works the way that actually people either hope or fear that it's going to work, it's going to cause productivity growth to shoot up. That will naturally accelerate economic growth. Um but look, if if it just stays as software, then the result of that is it's going to make the cities much better off, right? It's going to it's going to make San Francisco and LA and and New York much better off and Austin much better off. But it's still not going to answer this question of what happens in the countryside. Uh to answer the question of what happens in the countryside, you need you need to get to the next thing. And you you need to make

04:32AI hardware as well as software. And and you're right back to that same prescription of basically reindustrializing the country. And again, not reindus not reindustrializing the country on the stuff that has already left. Reindustrializing the country based on all the things that have to be invented and built. Um and it's just like we know, I would just like I'm just like incredibly highly confident that there's going to be these giant industries of, you know, computerized everything, AI-powered all kinds of hardware of all kinds of shapes, sizes, descriptions. You know, you're finding a lot of that kind of thing. I'm finding a lot of that kind of thing. I mean, look, the entire defense base has to get rebuilt around this

05:02stuff. >> Yeah, we're going to redo the manufacturing. We're going to build roads and tunnels and everything cheaper. It's going to be exciting. Yeah. And so so so this this is this is the thing that that that this is the thing to do. Like the to me the path like on this is very clear cuz we have to we have to do it. We have to do this because it's necessary for national security standpoint. We have to do it because we need it. We need the economic growth. We have to do it because we need an answer for the entire population of the country, not just the cities. Um and yeah, and we have to do it because if we don't do it, China's going to do it and we don't want to live in that world.