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Marc Andreessen on AI: “This is clearly bigger than the Internet”

January 14, 2026

“This is the biggest technological revolution of my life,” a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen begins. “This is clearly bigger than the Internet. The comps on this are things like the microprocessor, the steam engine, and electricity.”

Marc explains:

“The reason this is so big is if you trace back to the 1930s (there’s a great book called Rise of the Machines that goes through this), there was actually a debate among the people who invented the computer. They understood the theory of computation before they built the things, and they had this big debate over whether the computer should be built in the image of what at the time were called ‘Calculating Machines’ — think cash registers (IBM was actually the successor to the National Cash Register Company of America) — and that was the path that the industry took, building these hyper-literal, mathematical machines that could execute mathematical operations billions of times per second . . . that’s the computer industry that got built over the last 80 years.”

However, there was another path considered:

“They understood the structure of the human brain and had a theory of human cognition and neural networks. The first neural network academic paper was published in 1943. You can watch an interview on YouTube with the author [Warren] McCulloch — it’s an amazing interview because it’s him in his beach house and for some reason he’s not wearing a shirt, and he’s talking about this future in which computers will be built on the model of the human brain through neural networks. And that was the path not taken. But the neural network as an idea continued to be explored in academia and advanced research by a sort of rump movement that was originally called Cybernetics and then became known as Artificial Intelligence basically for the last 80 years. And essentially it didn’t work. It was decade after decade of excessive optimism, followed by disappointment.”

Marc continues:

“But the scientists kept working on it to their credit, and they built up this enormous reservoir of concepts and ideas. Then basically we all saw what happened with the ChatGPT moment. All of a sudden it crystalized, and it was like, ‘Oh my God, it turns out it works.’ That’s the moment we’re in now, and really significantly, that was less than three years ago . . . We’re sort of three years into effectively an 80-year revolution.”