Marc Andreessen: Who Runs the World’s AI?

There's a race underway, and the stakes are basically what is the world going to run on? Don Valentine had this old rule of thumb. He said more startups die of indigestion than starvation in terms of the amount of money you put in. And and and his point was, like, scarcity does spark ingenuity. All of the science fiction novels basically have AI either being, like, super utopian or super dystopian, but they never have this incredible sense of humor aspect, which is what we're actually getting, where people are just using everything as a fodder for memes. The world will either be running on American AI or be running on Chinese AI, and I I think it's very important which one wins for a bunch of reasons. For fifty years, economists have tracked a strange pattern. Rapid technological change paired with historically low productivity growth. Since 1971, productivity has flatlined even as computing reshaped daily life. In 1880, productivity growth ran at three times today's rate. By 1930, it had slowed to twice as fast. Then came the regulations and the restrictions. We said no to nuclear power, faster cars, and a space program. What we got was hyper acceleration in chips and software, and stagnation in nearly everything else. American labs lead for now, but Chinese open source models follow months behind at a fraction of the cost. The world will run on one system or the other, and the values baked into that system will matter. This conversation looks at what's actually happening in AI investment where value might accrue and why the regulatory response could determine which country wins. Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco, speaks with Marc Andreessen, cofounder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Marc Andreessen needs no introduction. He invented the browser. He, built the Internet, so I'm I'm really excited to have you here. I apologize for nothing. Alright. So before we get started, you had a really interesting conversation that I wanted to actually start with, just just a couple days ago with Lenny. And, you were talking about this notion of, in the history of time, when has productivity really spiked, and what's happening right now? So can you just talk a little bit about your perspective on productivity increases that have happened at different phases in time, and where are we today compared to those times? Yeah. So as everybody probably knows, pro productivity growth is like the key driver of economic growth. Like, it's it's the thing that actually causes the economy to expand. Economists measure it with something called total factor productivity. They measure measure measure it every year. The the the prevailing kind of myth of the last fifty years, basically, my entire life, our all of our entire entire lives has been that we've been in this era of very rapid technological change, which would necessarily mean very rapid productivity growth. Yet, if you actually look at the statistics, basically, since …