Marc Andreessen, General partner of Andreessen Horowitz
As an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he worked at the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he became familiar with Tim Berners-Lee’s open standards for the World Wide Web. He and a co-worker, Eric Bina, created a user-friendly browser with integrated graphics that would work on a wide range of computers. The resulting code was the Mosaic Web browser, and Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape.
At the venture capital company Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen serves as both a general partner and cofounder. Being one of the few to launch a software category used by over a billion people and one of the few to create many billion-dollar businesses, he is an inventor and creator.
Marc co-founded Netscape, which AOL eventually acquired for $4.2 billion, and co-authored the incredibly significant Mosaic web browser. Along with Opsware, he co-founded Loudcloud, which Hewlett-Packard acquired for $1.6 billion. Later, from 2008 until 2018, he was a member of the Hewlett-Packard board. Marc graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. Marc serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Coinbase, Dialpad, Flow, Golden, Honor, OpenGov, and Samsara. He is also on the board of Meta.
2023
Andreessen Horowitz is cautioning that if firms creating AI are made to pay for the copyrighted data necessary for it to function, billions of dollars’ worth of investments might be significantly diminished. According to comments filed with the US Copyright Office, the business claimed that because AI investments are so large, any additional regulations pertaining to the material used to train models “will significantly disrupt” the plans and expectations of the investing community around the technology.
The unfettered use of owned and copyrighted information by the IT sector to train massive language models is a specific issue that the USCO is addressing in its upcoming AI regulations.
Big claims are nothing new for Marc Andreessen. A long-form “techno-optimist” manifesto released a month ago described any halt to AI development as “murder,” given the technology’s potential for medicinal applications.
“You live in a deranged age — more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.” — Walker Percy
