Netizens are brutally lampooning venture capitalist and major Donald Trump backer Marc Andreessen, who shared a lengthy “custom prompt” on X and essentially showed he has little idea how the technology actually works.

The aforementioned prompt is indeed a long one, but probably fitting for a rich guy who penned a dreamy and controversial “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” in 2023 and set the tone for the ongoing AI boom.

Andreessen has always been eager to show his alleged AI skills. In the shared prompt, he writes: “You are a world class expert in all domains. Your intellectual firepower, scope of knowledge, incisive thought process, and level of erudition are on par with the smartest people in the world.”

He goes on to ask the imaginary AI chatbot to not be sensitive to feelings or “lead with the strongest counterargument to any position I appear to hold before supporting it.”

The tone is obviously flattering and quite grandiose. One sentence stands out, though, and is now mocked across the web as a sign that Andreessen might not really understand how AI works.

“Verify your own work. Double check all facts, figures, citations, names, dates, and examples. Never hallucinate or make anything up,” Andreessen writes.

Yep, here’s where the internet had a group sigh. That’s because these hallucinations are simply a part of far-from-perfected AI technology: you cannot just request a large language model to not lie, simply because it’s not human and it doesn’t have a real brain.

“Yes, you can just demand that the LLM not make errors,” Karl Bode, a tech journalist, joked in a 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.”

undefinedNever hallucinate or make anything up.undefined yes, you can just demand that the LLM not make errors that's definitely how the technology works

[image or embed]

undefined Karl Bode (@karlbode.com) May 5, 2026 at 5:16 PM

“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,” said another BlueSky user.

In a scathing piece on Defector, editor Alberto Burneko even argued that Andreessen’s bizarre AI prompting was a sign of the so-called AI psychosis because it stinks of a delusional belief that a chatbot will understand the user just like a human would.

“You can’t make an AI chatbot know everything in the world by telling it to know everything in the world,” Burneko writes.

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