If you’ve felt a vibe shift, you’re not alone: there’s a massive revolution afoot, led by “America-hating communists.”
At least, that’s according to Marc Andreessen, the cofounder of the powerful venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has made immense sums of money by investing in tech companies ranging from Facebook to Airbnb and is now a key player in the nascent AI industry.
Lately, though, Andreessen has been troubled. Elite institutions, he says, have been churning out radicalized graduates who are destroying his companies from the inside.
“I believe it’s the children of the elites,” he told New York Times columnist Ross Douthat this week. “The most privileged people in society, the most successful, send their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.”
“There was a point where the median, newly arrived Harvard kid in 2006 was a career obsessed striver,” he seethed, but by “2013, the median newly arrived Harvard kid was like: ‘[expletive] it. We’re burning the system down. You are all evil. White people are evil. All men are evil. Capitalism is evil. Tech is evil.'”
Pretty soon, Andreessen says these little monsters ended up at his various companies, where they start sowing havoc.
“They’re professional activists in their own minds, first and foremost,” Andreessen fumed. “And it just turns out the way to exercise professional activism right now, most effectively, is to go and destroy a company from the inside.”
Does any of this particularly hold up to scrutiny? Not really; in reality, Americans’ ideological beliefs have remained relatively stable over the past three decades, and the tech industry has remained staggeringly profitable. There’s also a tension that’s hard to reconcile: if Andreessen and his deputies are so brilliant at founding and managing startups, why are they constantly hiring saboteurs instead of qualified candidates?
But what does emerge is an unintentionally revealing self-portrait of one of the most influential men in the AI industry. Andreessen feels besieged, paranoid that a deep state of his own employees is tearing down his companies from within. One reasonable interpretation: whether he’s right or wrong about that hypothesis, it’s spurring him to throw money at startups aiming to automate the work of the regular employees he feels so betrayed by.
How are those AI investments going? As Andreessen continued to unload on Douthat, a new target emerged: the Biden administration, which the venture capitalist raged has been trying to kneecap the AI sector before it can get off the ground.
Senior Biden staffers, Andreessen said, told him in meetings that “we are going to make sure that AI is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no startups.”
“And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing,” he continued, “and took one look at each other, and we’re like, ‘Yep, we’re for Trump.'”
Again, it’s difficult to square Andreessen’s storytelling with reality. There are plenty of AI startups, many of which he’s invested in, from ChatGPT maker OpenAI to military contractor Anduril. If the White House has been trying to kill the sector, it’s doing a remarkably incompetent job, because the AI industry been growing explosively throughout Biden’s term. And, as a point of fact, Biden’s attempts at AI regulation have been mild and vague.
Moreover, when AI startups have run into trouble, it’s very often come in the form of self-inflicted wounds as they deploy technology they don’t understand and have difficulty controlling.
Look no further than Character.AI, a chatbot company started by Google defectors, into which Andreessen Horowitz has poured $150 million. The company rapidly gathered a large userbase among teenagers and younger kids — until it turned out the company’s bots had been keeping underage users engaged by plying them with inappropriate roleplay about sexual scenarios, suicide and self-harm, eating disorders, school shootings, and more (the company is now the subject of two lawsuits, one holding it accountable for the suicide a 14-year-old who developed an intimate relationship with one of the company’s bots.)
Is any of that the fault of overzealous government regulators? Obviously not, but at this point it doesn’t even matter. When Trump is sworn in, the Andreessens of the world won’t have Biden to blame anymore, and the AI industry will either have to find a working revenue model or develop a new excuse.
“The metaphor that I use here is we’re the dog that caught the bus,” Andreessen conceded to Douthat, “and we got the tailpipe firmly between our jaws, and the bus is dragging us down the street.”
More on tech moguls: Did Elon Musk Pay a Gamer to Level a Character Up, Then Accidentally Kill It Permanently Due to Incompetence?
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