I think we don't yet know the shape and form of the ultimate products.

It's one just obvious historical analogy is, you know, the personal computer from sort of invention in 1975 through to, you know, basically 1992 was a text prompt system. 17 years in, you know, the whole industry took a left turn into GUIs and never looked back. And then by the way, you know, five years after that, the industry took a left term in the web browsers and never looked back, right? And, you know, look, I'm sure there will be chatbots 20 years from now, but I'm pretty confident that both the current chatbot companies and many new companies are going to figure out many kinds of user experiences that are radically different that we don't even know yet. Every major technology shift brings new capabilities, new pressures, and new questions about how progress

unfolds. At A16Z's runtime conference, I sat down with Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz to discuss

the current state of AI, how reasoning and creativity are evolving, how markets adjust to new technology,

and what this moment means for founders and institutions shaping what comes next.

Now to Mark and Ben.

Please join me in welcoming Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz with general partner Eric Tornberg.

Follow me into a solo.

Get in the flow.

And you can picture like a photo.

Music makes mellow maintains to make melodies for emcees motivates the point

some everlasting I know

thank you for the rock Kim

who did that Ben picked the music

Mark there's been a lot of talk lately

about the limitations of LLMs

that they can't do true invention

of say new science

that they can't do true creative of, say, new science, that they can't do true creative genius, that is just combining or packaging. You have thoughts here, I would say you. Yeah, so for me, yeah, so you get all these questions. And yeah, they usually come and either sort of, our language model is intelligent in the sense of can they actually process information and have sort of conceptual breakthroughs the way the people can.

And then there's our language models or video models creative. Can they create new art? Actually have genuine creative breakthroughs. And of course, my answer to both of those is, well, can people do those things? And I think there's two questions there, which is, okay, even if some people are quote unquote intelligent as in having original conceptual breakthroughs and not just, let's to say regurgitating the training set or following scripts what percentage of people can actually do that i've only met a few some of them are here in the room but not that many most people never do and then creativity i mean how many people are actually genuinely creative right and so you kind of point to a beethoven or a vangau or something like that you're like okay that's creativity and yeah that's creativity then how many Beethoven's and Van Gogh's are there? Obviously not very many. So one is just like, okay, like if these things clear the bar of 99.99% of humanity, then that's pretty interesting just in and of itself. But then you dig into it further and you're like, okay, like how many actual real conceptual breakthroughs have there ever been actually ever in human history as compared to sort of remixing ideas. If you look at the history of technology, it's almost always the case that the big breakthroughs are the result of usually at least 40 years of sort of work ahead of time, four decades. In fact, language models themselves at the culmination of eight decades, right, of previous work. And so there's remixing. And then in the

arts, it's the exact same thing, you know, novels and music and everything. There are clearly creative leaps, but there's just tremendous amounts of influence from people who came before. And even if you think about, like, somebody with the creativity of Beethoven, like there was a lot of Beethoven in Mozart and Haydn and in the composers that came before. And so there's just tremendous amounts of remixing a combination. And so it's a little bit of an angels dancing on the head of a pin question, which is like if you can get within, you know, 0.01% of kind of world beating generational creativity and intelligence, like you're probably all the way there. So emotionally, I want to like hold out hope that there is still something special about human creativity. And I certainly

believe that. And I very much want to believe that. But I don't know. When I use these things, I'm like, wow, they seem to be awfully smart and awfully creative. So I'm pretty convinced that they're going to clear the bar. Yeah. I think that seems to be a common theme in your analysis. When people talk about the limitations of LMs, can they do transfer learning, just learning in general, you seem to ask, can people do this? Yes, can people do these things? Well, it's like lateral

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