Marc Andreessen

I think the federal government is down

Estimates are as much as 400,000 workers in the federal government since Trump took office the second time.

So private sector employment is actually way down and then private sector employment is way up.

And then the net result, I think, for the last quarter was actually very positive.

And so, like, in other words, like the reporting jobs numbers are even more impressive than they look because the private sector growth actually has to make up for the public sector decline, which means the private sector job growth is actually much better than people were expecting.

And again, like this is in the face of like actual AI, you know, staring us in the face and, you know, being rapidly adopted.

And so, okay, like the data is, you know, there's more data.

And then the other thing, you know, that's sort of macro data.

And then there's the micro data, which is the world we live in.

And the micro data is, you know, that sort of obvious question is, you know, if you live in Silicon Valley or work in San Francisco, you undoubtedly have friends who are, you know, computer programmers.

Those friends, you know, some percentage of those friends are early adopters of AI coding.

You know, you can just observe their behavior.

And, of course, if you believe in the, you know, kind of the Luddite, you know, kind of zero-sum argument, you would expect that they would be working less and less and then rapidly becoming, you know, getting paid less and less, by the way.

and rapidly becoming unemployed.

And in fact, the observed behavior of what's happening is very clear, which is the opposite, which is those people are becoming what we now refer to as AI vampires, by which I mean the individual programmer's productivity.

An individual programmer uses Codex or Cloud Code or one of these AI coding systems

Just the thing that you just now see over and over again on the ground level is they're working harder than ever.

They're working just like more hours than ever.

And then the AI vampire thing is literally this thing where they stop sleeping.

And then when you like talk to them, it's actually really funny because they're like – and I have a whole bunch of friends like this.