Vinod Khosla, the legendary investor who helped start Sun Microsystems, thinks AI "doomers" are focusing on the wrong risks and should instead worry about China. Khosla appeared Tuesday at Fortune Brainstorm AI 2023 in San Francisco.
Khosla told a crowd filled with technology and venture executives that every powerful tech comes with a risk. He pointed to nuclear and biotechnology; either could be used for good or bad purposes, the VC said. Artificial intelligence has disadvantages but promises huge upside, he said. “But by far—orders of magnitude—the higher risk to worry about is China, not sentient AI killing us,” Khosla said.
The VC said the China risk is "humongous,” and he wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t 100 million or more bots with persuasive AI engaging with U.S. voters next year and trying to influence the elections. “That's very likely to happen. I'd say probably a 95% probability [China bots] will be influential in the election. And we should be worrying about it,” he said.
When asked if he agreed with the Biden administration, which has cut off exports of advanced chips and AI software to China, Khosla said: “Absolutely.”
Khosla cofounded Sun Microsystems in 1982 and formed Khosla Ventures in 2004. The billionaire investor was clear Tuesday on which side he stands in the AI debate. On one side are doomers who worry about the risk of an apocalypse due to AI gaining sentience (think The Terminator movies). In the other camp are proponents of effective accelerationism, or e/acc, who believe that AI and other emerging technologies should be allowed to progress as fast as possible without any guardrails, according to the New York Times.
“So let me be clear. The risk of sentient AI killing us exists, but it's about the same as the risk of an asteroid hitting our planet and destroying us all also,” Khosla said. The press has amped up AI’s risks because “it’s so sci-fi,” he said.
Khosla was one of the early investors of OpenAI, the groundbreaking startup behind ChatGPT. Last month, OpenAI’s board ousted CEO Sam Altman, without much explanation, and then rehired him days later. The startup ended up reshuffling its board, expelling members who approached AI cautiously in favor of those who appear more eager to commercialize its power, Fortune reported.
Khosla said there weren’t many lessons to be drawn from the OpenAI chaos. The VC said there were a “bunch of misinformed board members applying the wrong religion instead of making rational decisions.”
OpenAI is “much better off today than it was a month ago. So that’s great,” he said.
Talk to you tomorrow,
Luisa Beltran
Twitter: @LuisaRBeltran
Email: luisa.beltran@fortune.com
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