Marc Andreessen pushes back on fears that AI will kill us all: 'That's not how it works'

• Marc Andreessen said on the podcast Huberman Lab that fears around AI are overblown.
• The billionaire venture capitalist said that AI won't "decide to kill us all" and replace jobs.

For some, the rise of artificial intelligence may spark visions of a post-apocalyptic future — but one billionaire investor thinks these fears around AI are overblown.

Marc Andreessen, founder of venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz that has led multimillion dollar funding rounds for numerous AI startups, said in a podcast interview earlier this week that we need to separate the "real problems" with AI, which he said are "technologically grounded," from the "fake problems" that he claims aren't "rational."

"A lot of the science-fiction scenarios are just not real," Andreessen said on an episode of Huberman Lab, a podcast led by Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist.

Some of the sci-fi scenarios the billionaire investor refers to as "fake problems" include the notions that AI will "develop the kind of agency" where it will "steal our money, spouse and kids," or that AI will one day "wake up and decide to kill us all."

"That's not how it works," he said in response to these scenarios.

Andreessen also said that "destruction of society" concerns" like how AI could bolster the spread of misinformation, hate speech, and deep fakes aren't "actually a real problem," and that economic concerns — like how AI will take everyone's job — won't actually happen.

The real concern, Andreessen noted, is that AI may end up in the hands of "bad people" who may do "bad things" with the technology, such as malicious actors using it to "build better defense tools."

The way to prevent that from happening, he said, is to make AI systems safer and less vulnerable to hacking.

"You should have a whole new kind of security suite wrapped around you, wrapped around your data, wrapped around your money, where you're having AI repel attacks, disinformation, hate speech, deep fakes — all that stuff," Andreessen said.

Andreessen's thoughts on AI come as tech leaders and experts alike debate whether AI has the potential to develop superintelligence and replace jobs across industries in the near future.

Still, the venture capitalist isn't too concerned with these scenarios.

In June, two months before the podcast episode was released, Andreessen published a lengthy blog post called "Why AI Will Save The World" where he attempts to dispel the fears around AI's risks to humanity.

In the post, Andreessen wrote that AI can "make everything we care about better," and that AI companies must be able to build their technologies "as fast and aggressively as they can" in order to "maximize its gains for economic productivity and human potential."

While Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said that a government agency should be formed to oversee AI safety, Andreessen disagrees. He said the private sector needs to work with governments to deploy the technology safely.

"AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such," Andreessen wrote.

Andreessen didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment when contacted through his VC-firm, A16z