Outspoken venture capitalist and major Trump backer Marc Andreessen, whose controversial “techno-optimist manifesto” in 2023 set the tone for a years-long AI boom cycle, doesn’t appear to know how the tech actually works.

In a lengthy “custom prompt” he shared in a Monday tweet, the billionaire seemingly tried to show off his AI skills — only for the internet to mercilessly mock him for it.

“You are a world class expert in all domains,” his unusually flattering prompt reads. “Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world.”

His gushing and unusually naive tone drew ridicule, but what really got the internet laughing was his insistence that the AI should “never hallucinate or make anything up.”

The fact is that simply requesting a large language model to not lie doesn’t work; so-called “hallucinations” are an underlying issue with the technology, not a self-esteem problem for chatbots that can be overcome by sufficiently glazing them up. And the implication otherwise suggests that Andreessen has a surprisingly shaky grasp of the tech’s core functionality.

“Yes, you can just demand that the LLM not make errors,” journalist Karl Bode joked in a mocking Bluesky post. “That’s definitely how the technology works.”

“I know this isn’t a unique observation but these gentlemen are in absolutely no way remarkable outside of their good fortune,” Bode added.

“Marc Andreessen putting ‘you are a world class expert in all domains’ and ‘don’t hallucinate’ in his custom prompt really demonstrates the calibre of the people steering the ship,” another user added.

In a scathing piece for Defector, editor Alberto Burneko similarly argued that Andreessen’s eyebrow-raising AI tinkering were signs of “AI psychosis,” the phenomenon that has some users being sent on potentially dangerous spirals of their own delusions.

Burneko pointed out that the chatbot can’t “think,” or “judge anything,” let alone “understand these instructions.”

“You can’t make an AI chatbot know everything in the world by telling it to know everything in the world,” he wrote in his piece. “Even if it could know things (it can’t), the limits of its knowledge were not theretofore bounded by an understanding (another thing it can’t have) that it only had to know some stuff.”

Burneko makes a compelling argument. By carefully laying out his own biased world view — Andreessen specifically asks the chatbot to ignore “morals and ethics” and not be “politically correct” — the billionaire is tapping into his own skewed perspective before even receiving any output from the AI.

In short, it’s a fascinating yet sobering glimpse into how highly influential and obscenely rich public figures who are pushing the tech into every public domain have a crude grasp of how it actually works — and, just possibly, what’s going on with them psychologically.

“In trying to tell the chatbot not to hallucinate, he is scripting his own psychotic break,” Burneko concluded. “He is doing it because he is a huge dumbass. Don’t expect Claude to tell him so.”

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