From Business Insider May 6, 2025:
AI for thee, but not for VC
Marc Andreessen thinks artificial intelligence can do every job in the world — except his
Marc Andreessen is, arguably, the most famous venture capitalist on earth. Cofounder of the legendary VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, inventor of the first popular web browser, and by reputation such a widely read intellectual egghead that his colleagues call him "MarcGPT." And as befits his nickname, Andreessen is a big believer in a future powered by artificial intelligence. His firm — "a16z" to Silicon Valley sophisticates — has invested in Elon Musk's xAI and Sam Altman's OpenAI. Andreessen has called AI "our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone," and "a universal problem solver" that "ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves."
But for Andreessen, there is one job that AI will never do as well as a living, breathing human being: his.
Think I'm kidding? On an a16z podcast last week, Andreessen opined that being a venture capitalist may be a profession that is "quite literally timeless." "When the AIs are doing everything else," he continued, "that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing."
Here's the logic. Andreessen starts by talking about all the things that people thought might disrupt the way VCs operate — like the Craigslist-style approach of AngelList, or crowdfunding. "The other form of structural change, of course, is AI," Andreessen says. Then he issues a challenge to the AI crowd: "All right, smart guys. You're sitting around doing all this analysis, and you have all these smart people doing all this modeling and all this research and so forth. Why can't you just plug this into Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini and have it tell you what to invest in?"
The reason, Andreessen explains, is that it takes a VC like him to know how to pick a winner. He throws out a bunch of examples, going all the way back to the whaling industry 500 years ago: book publishers, movie studio executives, talent scouts at music labels. (I'll spare you the details here, but I spoke with an economist who has analyzed the whaling industry, and he says MarcGPT is pretty much wrong on every count.) Andreessen insists that these are key jobs that spring up "any time you have a part of the economy in which you have an entrepreneur going on a high-risk, high-return endeavor where it is far from clear what is going to work, and there are many more aspirants than there is money to fund them."
Here, Andreessen argues, is where the human element is irreplaceable. "You're not just funding them," he says. "You have to actually work with them to execute the entire project. That's art. That's not science. That's art. We would like it to be science, but, like, it's art."
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like a lot of AI folks have been trying to tell us that AI can make art. Last year, even Andreessen said that AI had enough of a sense of humor to "save comedy." But apparently it can't do his art....
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