Alex Konrad
Dressed austerely in a black turtleneck and blazer despite the warm early May day, Vinod Khosla surveys the packed auditorium in the bowels of the U.S. Capitol complex before setting the stakes of the debate at hand. “Winning the race for AI means economic power, which then lets you influence social policy or ideology.”
Khosla’s next point—that China’s developing AI prowess could prove a threat to upcoming U.S. elections—resonates with the hawkish mix of congressional staffers and policy wonks in the room for the Hill & Valley Forum’s daylong AI and defense confab. AI’s national security implications, particularly in the hands of America’s adversaries, loom large here. But Khosla’s words come with a call to action to lock down our leading AI models from broader use that places him in the midst of a wider, bitter debate back in Silicon Valley.
Where the former Sun Microsystems CEO and Khosla Ventures founder and his fellow investors and entrepreneurs generally agree: Artificial intelligence has heralded a technological revolution on par with that of the mainframe or PC—or even, to hear fellow billionaire and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman tell it, the automobile or the steam engine. A cheap virtual doctor on every smartphone, a free tutor for every child. AI can serve as a great equalizer, a deflationary cheat code, that can help save lives and reduce poverty. “We can free people from the drudgery, the servitude of jobs like working on an assembly line for eight hours a day for 40 years,” the 69-year-old Khosla says.
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