Marc Andreessen's 2026 Outlook: AI Timelines, US vs. China, and The Price of AI

This new wave of AI companies is is growing revenue. Like, just, like, actual customer revenue, actual demand translated through to dollars showing up in bank accounts. I've liked an absolutely unprecedented takeoff rate. We're seeing companies grow much faster. I'm very skeptical that the form and shape of the products that people are using today is what they're gonna be using in five or ten years. I think things are gonna get much more sophisticated from here, and so I think we probably have a long way to go. These are trillion dollar questions, not answers. But once somebody proves that it's capable, it seems to not be that hard for other people to be able to catch up, even people with far less resources. When a company is confronted with fundamentally open strategic or economic questions, it's often a big problem. Companies, like, need to answer these questions, and if they get the answers wrong, they're really in trouble. Venture, we can bet on multiple strategies at the same time. We are aggressively investing behind every strategy that we've identified that we think has a plausible chance of working. If you wanna understand people, there's basically two ways to understand what people are doing and thinking. One is to ask them, and then the other is to watch them. And what you often see in many areas of human activity, including politics and many different aspects of society, the answers that you get when you ask people are very different than the answers that you get when you watch them. If you run a survey or a poll of what, for example, American voters think about AI, it's just like they're all in a total panic. It's like, oh my god. This is terrible. This is awful. It's gonna kill all the jobs. It's gonna ruin everything. If you watch the reveal preferences, they're all using AI. AI is moving faster than any technology way before it, and the rules are being written in real time. For decades, new platforms followed a familiar arc. Build infrastructure, attract developers, capture the value. AI is breaking that pattern. Models are improving weekly, costs are collapsing, and entire markets are being rebuilt before incumbents can react. What looks stable today may not exist a year from now. No one has seen more technology cycles up close than Marc Andreessen. From the early Internet to mobile, cloud, and now AI, he's watched multiple eras reset the economy, and he believes this one is larger than all the rest. In this broad AMA, Mark joins the conversation to unpack why AI still feels early despite the hype, how model economics are reshaping software, and why usage based pricing and open competition are accelerating adoption at unprecedented speed. He also dives into the hard questions. Big versus small models, open versus closed ecosystems, and the role of startups versus incumbents, and how China and geopolitics factor into the future of AI. Mark explains why …