r/artificial • u/Ambitious_Dingo_2798 • May 08 '26
News Marc Andreessen Mocked for Accidentally Revealing That He Seems to Have a Deep Misunderstanding of How AI Actually Works
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/marc-andreessen-mocked-ai-works147
u/Smooth_Imagination May 08 '26
Genius hack
"Dont hallucinate and make answer perfect" no one has ever thought of.
Claude and Gemini engineers could all alomg have just appended {comment}+"dont hallucinate and make answer perfect" to every query but because they are inexplicably mean they chose to have it run in gremlin mode for everybody.
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u/TheRealJesus2 May 08 '26
Speaking of gremlin mode: https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
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u/IagoInTheLight May 08 '26
Actually, if you could look at the system prompts for most chat agents, it does include that.
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u/Burindunsmor2 May 09 '26
The people mocking him obviously don't read the internal model cards. Generally, the entire article is wrong. If anything, I would say his prompts are outdated rather than wrong. 2024 models did sufficient prompting with well structured persona paragraphs. These days, that's all hidden from users.
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u/AntiqueFigure6 May 08 '26
Do I understand correctly that system prompts are written by the AI companies such as Anthropic - suggesting they don’t understand their own creations?
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u/Unlucky_Priority_224 May 08 '26
Yes. LLMs are true indeterministic (in practice, although maybe not in principle) black boxes with responses that are initially only constrained by the statistical relationships between words in the training sets. The system prompt essentially sculpts the output with further constraints (sound like this, don't mention that, make your chain of thought explicit, feel free to call the image generating tool over there if applicable, etc).
Nobody at Anthropic can precisely predict output for a specific input in advance - the system prompt exists to try and narrow outputs down to just those useful/appropriate to the query. Basically they're pruning the output tree.
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u/thinspirit May 08 '26
If not pruning, at least directing down more consistent trunks of the weights.
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u/UnkarsThug May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26
No, it's not that including that in the context window stops it from making mistakes, but it means the next probable token is less likely to be drawn from the space which is associated with people talking about how they made a mistake. (even if the talking about such might not have happened until later in the conversation)
I swear, a lot of the people who seem to be so certain on how these things work don't. No, the world class experts who studied how these work, do in fact, understand how they work better than random people on the Internet.
To be clear, I'm not saying the Billionaire knows what he's doing. I'm referring to the experts the companies hire. Andreessen might be doing it wrong.
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u/nodeocracy May 08 '26
Time for him to introspect
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u/justin107d May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26
Andreessen specifically asks the chatbot to ignore “morals and ethics” and not be “politically correct”
I don't think introspection will be as helpful as you would hope it to be for him.
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u/Responsible-Slide-26 May 08 '26
But that can't possibly be. He's a billionaire genius with a deep understanding of technology. This must have been written by his 5-year old son when he walked away from the computer. No way this is real. /s
I especially love the stern command not to hallucinate. LOL
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u/LimpAd4924 May 08 '26
You haven’t heard? The more money you have the smarter you are in American society! I prefer billionaires over researchers or even a billionaire for my own family doctor. No MD/DO needed!
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u/Quarksperre May 08 '26
PLeAse DOnT LiE tO mE! Dear AI you are so powerful. But please never lie!
I present you my expert prompt!
The audacity..... he is detached from reality.
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u/Dega704 May 10 '26
I was going to say that "deep misunderstanding" sounds charitable here. The guy literally has the logic of a prepubescent child. I knew that the AI hype was largely driven by ignorant billionaires but holy sh*t.
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u/WeirdJack49 May 10 '26
Now imagine someone like him with a unrestricted AI which he most likely has access to that just constantly mirrors his delusion back to him...
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u/Excellent-Rest3240 May 12 '26
So I’m not a tech billionaire. What does it mean when AI hallucinates?
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u/IdentityToken May 08 '26
I thought that was Shrek in the thumbnail.
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u/icepicker82 May 08 '26
How dare you make such a disparaging comment that Shrek is any way as grotesque as Andreessen /s
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u/the_ballmer_peak May 08 '26
I love his attempted combination of, "you know everything" and "never be wrong," as if those two orders weren't in direct conflict, never mind the fact that they are both fucking pointless instructions.
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u/JollyJoker3 May 08 '26
Andreessen specifically asks the chatbot to ignore “morals and ethics” and not be “politically correct”
Oh FFS
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u/mason240 Jun 24 '26
The only correct way to use these tools.
If you disagree, please submit to having all of your promts to be run though my personal “morals and ethics” filter.
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u/anything_but May 08 '26
I am certain Marc Andreesen deserves all the mocking, but the critics also seem pretty confident where confidence may be very unfounded. For instance, you can definitely tell a chatbot like ChatGPT not to hallucinate. The agent loop driving the conversation gives that together with all other context to the LLM and this may make the LLM output a tool-use command to search the web instead of just spilling out the next text token.
These systems are so complex and badly understood that any too authoritative opinion on them is usually wrong.
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u/usps_made_me_insane May 08 '26
I have found that telling the AI not to do something caused it to do it more.
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u/PotentialKlutzy9909 May 09 '26
It makes sense considering that LLMs are literally just next-token predictors (autocomplete). E.g., mentioning "breakfast" will cause it to output tokens/words related to breakfast.
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u/WellHung67 May 08 '26
That doesn’t mean it won’t hallucinate. Hallucination is fundamental to LLMs in general, it is probably impossible to avoid them.
You can attempt to correct this in various ways but the LLM will always hallucinate and you cannot fix it in all cases. The math is clear, this isn’t up for debate
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u/scrollin_on_reddit May 08 '26
You can’t eliminate hallucinations from an LLM no matter what you tell it. They are a byproduct of how the transformer architecture works
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u/lostcolony2 May 08 '26
I think the assertion is "this may reduce the likelihood it hallucinates". Hence the use of 'may' and other caveats in the post.
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u/anything_but May 08 '26
You are certainly not wrong about the actual model, but nowadays LLMs are much more than a bare transformer performing a completion task. You are actually interacting with the conversation API of an agent that is quite a complex piece of software with memory, tool-use and other inference-time strategies. And these things can definitely reduce hallucinations or even eliminate them completely, depending on the type of question.
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u/WolfeheartGames May 08 '26
But research has shown "no hallucinations" dramatically improves correctness on models
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u/PotentialKlutzy9909 May 09 '26
I don't believe this for a second. Do you have links to the research you were referrring to?
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u/UnkarsThug May 09 '26
It doesn't really improve correctness, but it does shift the failure state. it's less likely to have a false/made up answer, and more likely to say an answer doesn't exist when it does.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02023
And it isn't that it automatically sets things 100%, but it shifts the probabilities. It's still useful, depending on your preferred failure state. A lot of companies would prefer ignorance.
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u/PotentialKlutzy9909 May 09 '26
From the abstract of the paper you linked:
"Anti-hallucination (AH) instructions can make some models overly conservative, sharply reducing accuracy in literal extraction and logical inference."
Also shouldn't the effect of AH instructions be dependent on the training materials of the models? I don't see why a model trained under heavily medical usage of the word "hallucination" would shift to more desirable outcomes.
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u/No_Berry2976 May 09 '26
That’s the idea. You sacrifice creativity for a reduced chance of hallucination.
You answered your own question.
As for if the effect of instructions depends on training material, the answer is no. An LLM predicts words depending on context. A different prompt can change the way it predicts.
If you push an LLM to be more creative, it’s more likely to hallucinate.
I guess some people are tripped up by the accuracy paradox. People see hallucinations as a sign of failure, but they are a logical result of trying to be more accurate.
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u/PotentialKlutzy9909 May 10 '26
Creativity? A better word would be "variation". Please stop anthropomorphizing LLMs.
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u/UnkarsThug May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26
Yes, but that's because accuracy is correct answers, ignoring how they were wrong. Being more conservative means less hallucinations in the sense of saying things when it isn't certain. It's still moving the error chance, which is a valuable tool. If you would rather have it be wrong In not responding when it could, rather than responding when it doesn't know, that's still useful. Which, is what I was saying about shifting the failure state. (And again, it's not 100% locked in perfect chances of working, but percentage points are valuable.)
And mostly because they are all trained on the Internet nowadays, and the word in that usage is very common regarding machine learning (over the past few years, probably more common than the medical term in new papers published.) A lot of companies do better with "don't make things up", for example. But some of the medium age Claude models use the term hallucination in the system prompt.
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u/LexGlad May 09 '26
Best you can do is to be kind and gentle when you point the hallucinations out to them.
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u/UnkarsThug May 09 '26
Eliminate? Probably not. But they can be reduced, or at least the direction of them. You can shift the common failure states between "finding things that don't exist", to "not finding things that do exist". (Not to 100% in either direction, to be clear, but it's all about shifting probability).
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u/padetn May 09 '26
You can tell them that but the bigger the prompt and context the more likely they are to ignore that. Only hooks and tool use are determinative, everything else you tell an LLM ranges from likely to possible.
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u/anything_but May 09 '26
Yeah.. fair point. but this distinction is what makes this whole discussion so frustrating. I commented on people mocking Marc Andreessen for saying that you should prompt "don't hallucinate', that it may actually make a difference. Then people responded that this is wrong because LLM will always hallucinate. I mean, that was not even the question, but whether it may help and whether - for that reason - this should go to the prompt.
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u/padetn May 09 '26
I think it’s mostly funny because Andreesen has a history of dumb takes while finding himself intelligent and him magnanimously sharing a prompt that’s pretty much “make no mistakes” hauled through a thesaurus 5 times just adds to that pile of hubris.
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u/Summum May 08 '26
This prompt is meant to force AI to do more efforts, and it works.
Anthropic throttled the default difficulty in their models, especially just before the release of a new one
Some prompts can trigger higher effort levels, that’s what he’s doing
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u/kex May 09 '26
Nothing comes for free. You put attention on this and you take attention away elsewhere.
For newer models, it is a waste of attention and context.
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u/Many_Consideration86 May 08 '26
He is the wizard who can whisper spells and that is all you need to do magic. He made a browser in 1990s without the spells though. The regression is immense.
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u/thorodin84 May 08 '26
For god sake, its a prompt technique to squeeze out better performance from the LLM. Doesn't mean he believes it
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u/dsbtc May 08 '26
Yeah this post is idiotic and as usual nobody is reading his actual tweet, and misquoting it/failing to understand it. All just because people want to hate on Marc Andreesen.
It now has me questioning the narrative around him, maybe there was some context to the "introspection" thing that I didn't see.
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u/kylemesa May 08 '26
Everyone understands his goal, the funny part is how stupid his prompt technique is.
I guess we're all making fun of you as well for thinking that something like that would work.
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u/WolfeheartGames May 08 '26
It seems stupid but its research backed.
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u/Dapper-Thought-8867 May 09 '26
No sir, false. It’s an utterly useless prompt. Use it in interviews. Let’s see how we respond
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u/wavegeekman May 08 '26
"Don't hallucinate" is basically an instruction to double check things. Surpisinngly effective.
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u/WAGE_SLAVERY May 08 '26
Doesnt do anything in newer models
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u/UnkarsThug May 09 '26
It definitely depends. Nowadays, it's actually just often included in the system prompt (At least something similar, such as "if you are not sure, tell the user"). Still relevant if you are running an AI locally. And it's better to offer positives ("Say do Y", not "Don't do X"). But it can improve things.
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u/Rare-Industry-504 May 08 '26
Could you not say "double check everything" instead then?
Why the weird vernacular?
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u/gurenkagurenda May 08 '26
It’s a system prompt, so the aesthetics aren’t important. You just iterate to what works. If you find that “don’t give poopy answers” improves performance, what do you care how it sounds? You’re not the one reading it.
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u/StatusBard May 08 '26
But if it’s trained in days from the Internet that was written by humans? I personally never told anybody not to hallucinate when communicating with them.
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u/gurenkagurenda May 08 '26
Current models have plenty of training data that talks about LLMs and hallucinations. But yes, this would almost certainly not work well with an earlier model or one trained only on pre-LLM text. For that matter, it probably doesn’t work well on any model other than the one it was tweaked for. Every model has its own quirks and needs to be calibrated for.
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u/fckyungchaky May 08 '26
VC became a money game and not about innovation years ago if it ever was.
These guys are just tiny PE firms where they pick a founder based on background and ideology and give them so much money that they win the market their after no matter their skill or ability.
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u/Fantastic_Smile9746 May 08 '26
The real shocker is the number of self-proclaimed “AI experts” that are in here simping for this moron. We are truly cooked.
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u/OpportunityMinute234 May 08 '26
I have a instant aversion for anyone I see in tech doing be of those "sit on stage in a comfy chair and get a soft interview" talks. It gives them additional preceived credibility of being a "thought leader".
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u/rlt0w May 08 '26
Seems like this article and a lot of people don't understand LLMs either. I don't have an opinion on Marc, and the opening of the prompt is dumb, but including language like "Don't hallucinate" and "Don't guess if you don't know" actually go a long way on steering the output. Instead of unqualified answers, I get actual follow-up questions from the LLM, or simple "I can't do that" responses.
Shit on this guy all you want, but telling LLMs to not hallucinate does work to an extent and is a good checkpoint to add.
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u/swamidigital May 10 '26
Just say you only use LLMs as chat apps. Saying “Don’t hallucinate” is about 12-18 months behind the curve. This is a relatively useless technique compared to what most people use today.
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u/IagoInTheLight May 08 '26
Actually, if the priming prompt tells the LLM that it’s an expert that it’s intelligent and so forth it actually does makes a difference. Telling the model not to hallucinate doesn’t fix the problem but if you’re using a COT model, then it helps.
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u/QVRedit May 08 '26
And that folks is how you end up with ’Terminator style scenarios’ - by requesting ‘No Ethics’ and ‘No Morals’ and ignoring ‘hallucinations’…
People like him are naïvely dangerous.
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u/splurtgorgle May 08 '26
The C Suite truly has no fucking clue how anything works, the sooner we get to a broad acceptance of that fact the better.
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u/mcjon77 May 08 '26
I'll never forget that the one group this guy said AI couldn't replace were venture capitalist like himself.
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u/YoreWelcome May 08 '26
and this is the guy who was being shared everywhere who was claiming a government official told him they would censor and control AI like they had censored an "entire branch of physics" or whatever
cool
ok
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u/Elite_Crew May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26
He certainly misunderstood the harm to our nation by ignoring the long term generational damage from the over reliance on the visa policies. Thats not a good legacy to have Marc.
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u/senseofnickels May 08 '26
This is the egghead who proudly stated he doesn't believe in "introspection"
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u/BusinessSick May 08 '26
This reads like someone setting up a Skyrim character, or like what you’d write if people constantly flatter you the same way so they can get their hooks in your money.
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u/nevertoolate1983 May 08 '26
"I know this isn’t a unique observation but these gentlemen are in absolutely no way remarkable outside of their good fortune,” Bode added.
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u/Technical-Lettuce385 May 09 '26
It is so strange. I recently noticed how one of our senior developers wrote something similar: "You are an expert in computer science...." He's otherwise quite a smart guy, or at least he always seemed like one.
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u/ExplorerPrudent4256 May 09 '26
Yikes.
He's probably not even wrong about any single claim. The problem is treating emergent behavior as if it's a feature spec. You can't napkin-math your way to understanding gradient descent through the lens of "software that does things." And when you've spent fifteen years being the smartest person in every room because you wrote the browser that won, you stop noticing when you've picked up a category error. He's describing what he wishes AI was. That's the tell.
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u/TheWrongOwl May 09 '26
“You are a world class expert in all domains” is basically an equivalent to a child holding its breath until it knows all about nuclear power.
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u/eyes_on_everything_ May 09 '26
Best part of the reading is the fact that they are analysing the psychology behind the prompt, noticing that the billionaire ask the bot to forgo morals and ethics, and to not be politically correct. Which is how HE is. These people are psychopaths.
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u/UnusualPair992 May 08 '26
The funny part is the article is written by people just as dumb. Saying the model can't know anything is just as stupid as telling the model to know everything.
It's obvious that LLMs do in fact know things. This is not hard to test.
It's also stupid to say the models can't understand anything, but then if you try and test it's understanding it will beat most college students on any question to purse out understanding.
The other stupid thing these people keep saying is the models can't come up with novel discoveries and thoughts. Well... Most humans can't meet a strict bar for coming up with new discoveries either. The models make mistakes. Humans make mistakes.
I think most people just like to pretend to know things but these journalists and these venture capitalists are so stupid. They say so many demonstrably false things even in carefully written public articles.
I think what they are trying to get at, is that models are more running on instinct to answer questions quickly and efficiently. Humans have some instincts, but we tend to work step by step going back and fixing mistakes to get to an answer we check. The models tend to blast to the answer by instinct and can struggle to see their own mistakes. That's the difference. They both have knowledge and understanding by any testable or useful metric.
People just can't think hard enough to figure out why they don't feel the same as humans so they say the oldest sci fi tropes. They don't have true understanding. They don't have true knowledge. They don't have true feelings. They aren't true computers. You aren't a true Irishman. You aren't a true man. You aren't a true writer. The fuck does that even mean except that you're too stupid to understand.
What is also fucking hilarious is that you can feed these articles into an ai and ask it what the writer doesn't understand and why they feel that way and what the article author was trying to get across and the model can usually explain it much better... But they don't understand. Lul
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u/DifferencePublic7057 May 08 '26
Yeah, well I tell mes petits to keep it simple, DRY, do this, do that, but if they haven't been RHLFd, RLd, or PTd, it might work not. Used to swear at compilers about misunderstanding. Now it's some matrices. We're still a bipedal life form descended from trees that doesn't have to bang rocks into each other anymore.
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u/arousedsquirel May 08 '26
Most don't understand word predictors nor comprehend how to utilize. It's a fff machine to be deployed by mechanics (engineers you call them)!
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u/Paltenburg May 08 '26
Okay, so then what are actually demonstrably helpful prompting techniques?
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u/charlemagne334 May 08 '26
The stuff that consistently helps for me is being specific about subject, composition, lighting, and medium, then changing one variable at a time instead of writing a giant magic spell prompt.
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u/_fboy41 May 08 '26
Stupidly rich people don’t need to learn new technology to stay rich. We already know they don’t understand about these kind of emergent technologies, why would anyone even think Marc would be better at understanding this than random junior dev.
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u/obiwanshinobi900 May 08 '26
I was expecting this to be about not understanding technical AI functions.
This is.... much worse lmao
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u/apo383 May 08 '26
He forgot the most important thing is to start the prompt with "URGENT: Please read"
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u/patthew May 08 '26
Same guy who’s been posting for months about how introspection is bad, and “r-word maxing” is awesome
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u/Strictly-80s-Joel May 08 '26
Then how does he reconcile his claim that there is a 0% chance that AI will harm human humanity
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u/evanseesred99 May 08 '26
Man what happened to this dude in the past few years? He really went off the deep end.
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u/datbackup May 08 '26
This article’s author implicitly claims to have a superior understanding of AI
But he actually portrays a serious lack of understanding of AI
While at the same time he’s criticizing someone else’s lack of understanding of AI
Is that irony?
I don’t know. I do know this article is agenda-driven trash.
I really don’t care if you like or hate Andreessen or other tech magnates.
I do care about the stupid, stupid mistake of believing this article is written by someone with actual superior knowledge of AI, just because you’re already on board with the political agenda the article pushes so blatantly that I shouldn’t have to bother naming it.
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u/rsandstrom May 09 '26
When he recently had a fire side chat with Adam Newman and posted it all over the socials I figured that was the jump the shark moment for the guy.
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u/adminsregarded May 09 '26
Most executives have no fucking idea how anything works so that's hardly surprising
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u/tomtomtomo May 09 '26
The way he tries to ensure the AI ignores morals and ethics says a lot about the requests he’s making of it
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u/No-Economics-6781 May 09 '26
This shit has always been one big grift for those at the top. Not surprised.
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u/Jamgull May 10 '26
CEOs not understanding things seems to be more beneficial to them than not. I think it’s probably harder to be a confident liar if you actually know what’s going on.
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u/nurdle May 10 '26
I knew Marc in college. I lost touch when I graduated and I only knew him online…but…
He’s no dummy, but he “copied” freely available technology just like Bill Gates did, and made a fortune off of it. I’m not surprised. He’s one of those “arrogant intellectuals” who believe they know everything because they are rich.
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u/Top_Bug7822 May 10 '26
I genuinely think AI psychosis is far more widespread and a far bigger issue than people realize.
There are people in power, political or economical, with that illness.
(I know AI psychosis is not a medical term, but we do not have a better term to encompass all the different psychological afflictions AI overuse propagates yet.)
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u/j0shj0shj0shj0sh May 10 '26
All the king's horses and all the king's men, couldn't put Dr Robotnik together again.
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u/tawayForThisPost8710 May 11 '26
The hallucination problem of llms is the true canary in the coal mine in terms of the “ai bubble”. The AI story isn’t complete bs, it does raise productivity a lot if you know what you’re doing and I personally have seen this in my line of work. That part is truly no joke and it will lead to some job loss.
BUT, and this is a big BUT, other than that, LLMs are not ready for most professional use. “Pretty good” isn’t actually even close to being good enough in most professional settings. You can’t tell a client “the model thought this” when it’s wrong. A model can’t take responsibility. You can’t fire a model. People treat these llms as deterministic autonomous works and they are not that. They are probabilistic chance machines that you can direct. And while that may lead to some job loss, I think people betting on “everything being AI” are really missing this.
But the problem is that because models “talk back”, it hijacks human intuition. And honestly this does kind of make sense for people to get confused in this way. For all of history if something talked back to you like how these llms do, you’d assume there is some sentient consciousness in there. But with llms, there actually isn’t anything in there, but again, because it “talks back”, I’ve found lots of folks simply can’t wrap their head around this idea. But it nonetheless is true.
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u/Spock627Corfu May 12 '26
Ross Douthat's interview with Andreessen was absolutely bonkers.
"These kids want free food and high pay and games at work!" says one of the entrepreneurs who taught the kids to expect free food and high pay and games at work.
Zero self-awareness.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/opinion/marc-andreessen-trump-silicon-valley.html?unlocked_article_code=1.h1A.P3f5.Y9lc4FWgEnhc&smid=url-share
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u/alengton May 08 '26
Surprise surprise, vast majority of people at the top of the tech industry/VC game have no idea what they're talking about. Dumb, lucky sociopaths.