Billionaires Battle for AI’s Future

Forbes Jun 4, 2024 on Khosla vs Andreessen “Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreessen And The Billionaire Battle For AI’s Future” Andreessen and other optimists vs. Reid Hoffman and others who a pro-regulatory.

Within Andreessen’s partnership and their band of open-source absolutists—another amorphous group that counts among its number the CEOs of open-source AI startups Hugging Face and Mistral, Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun and Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk (sometimes)—such talk of disasters and state-level risk is often considered a shameless play by AI’s early power holders to keep it.

“classic regulatory capture”

But this analogy:

(Reid) Hoffman says. “But it’s like saying, ‘I don’t want the Wright Brothers to go into the air until we know how to have no airplane crashes.’ It just doesn’t work that way.”

applies back at Hoffman, right? Do you want the Wright Brothers to go through whatever hoops before they can test and fly their machines?

Certainly there’s a heavy dose of self-interest in the positions of Hoffman, Khosla, Andreessen and others on AI’s ideological frontline. Khosla’s early $50 million check to OpenAI could eventually be worth 100 times that.

And the opposite is true too, sort of. Andreessen’s side controls many companies that would benefit from low regulation.

Some of the proponents argue for “if you can’t beat them, join them” : better to work with regulators now to ensure that the worst regulations don’t happen. It can also help with consumer trust.