Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen says public anxiety about artificial intelligence is colliding with a very different reality in how people actually behave.
In a new interview with Jen Kha, Andreessen says surveys and polls show widespread fear about AI’s impact, even as adoption accelerates beneath the surface.
“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, gonna ruin everything,’ the whole thing.”
But when he looks at real-world behavior, he sees the opposite. Andreessen says people are downloading AI apps and integrating them directly into daily life and work.
“If you watch the revealed preferences, they’re all using AI. They’re downloading the apps. They’re using ChatGPT in their job. You see this online all the time now. I’m having an argument with my boyfriend or girlfriend. I don’t understand what’s happening. I take the text exchange. I cut and paste it into ChatGPT. And I have ChatGPT explain to me what my partner is thinking and tell me how I should answer so that he or she is not mad at me anymore.”
According to Andreessen, users are not just experimenting with AI. They are embracing it.
“And they love it. And they’re adopting as fast as they possibly can.”
He says this gap between stated fear and actual usage will likely persist in public debate. But in the end, Andreessen says behavior matters more than rhetoric.
“I tend to think we’re going to pick up with a public discussion, this is going to ping-pong back and forth for a while, because there is this divergence between what people are saying and what people are doing. But I do think that the what people are doing part is obviously the part ultimately that wins.”
He argues AI is following the same arc as previous transformative technologies with a predictable pattern.
“I think this technology is going to be exactly the same as every other one. This is just going to proliferate really broadly. It’s gonna freak everybody out. And then, you know, 20 years from now, everybody’s gonna be like, ‘Oh, thank God we’ve got it. Wouldn’t life be miserable if we didn’t have this?'”
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