Name: Brainstorm AI 2023: Vinod Khosla’s Views on Investing and More
Uploaded: 2023-12-15
Duration: 16 min 8 s
Description: Vinod Khosla, Founder and Partner, Khosla Ventures Moderator: Jeremy Kahn, FORTUNE

Vinod Khosla, Founder and Partner, Khosla Ventures Moderator: Jeremy Kahn, FORTUNE

Brainstorm AI 2023: Vinod Khosla’s Views on Investing and More

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For the last two days, we have heard from organizations leading the charge in A I innovation and implementation. We're, we've demoed new technologies, explored some of the most pressing concerns around responsible A I and what it all means for the future of work. Our next speaker has predicted that A I will replace 80% of jobs in the next 25 years. He was the first start up investor in open A I and he's invested in organizations like doordash headspace and block. Currently, he's on the final investing stages of a $3 billion funding round. We are thrilled to be joined today by Vinod Kola, founder of KLA ventures to discuss what's next for the future of A I investing. He's going to be joined by fortune, senior writer Jeremy Kong. Please welcome to the stage. Great. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, happy to be here. Great, fantastic. So you were the uh the first four for profit investor in open A I invested even before they had the partnership with Microsoft. Um obviously, they've just had this huge blow up with the board. What, what's your take on? What happened? And what lessons do you think there are, maybe are to draw from it? Well, not a lot of lessons to be drawn. You should get the right board members. Uh, they were, uh, there were a bunch of misinformed board members applying the wrong religion instead of making rational decisions. The company is much better off today than it was a month ago. So that's great. Right. Uh, and one of the, the splits that became apparent, uh you talk about sort of the, the religious view of, of the book or it is the split between uh you know, the so called doomers and the, the, the people who are saying that they're effective acceleration is um what I mean, some people are thinking that split itself is, is, is not helpful. What's your view on, on that split that seems to be developing in the community? Look, every new technology has its pros and cons there huge upside with A I, I've been talking about it for probably a dozen years now and then there are some disadvantages, but the tumors are focusing on the wrong, less uh risks. Uh nuclear had a risk. It could be used for good or bad biotechnology had a risk could be used for good or bad. The same is true of any technology that's going to be powerful by far. What does the magnitude higher risk to worry about? Is China not sentient A I killing us all? I mean, it's so silly and frankly, it's people in the press who amplified that narrative because it's so sci fi, you know, it resonates with the movies we've been seeing. So it, it gets this artificial amplification from the press, but it's sort of not worthy of a conversation to be honest. Alright. Well, I'm sorry, I asked, I hope we at Fortune have not been part of that application process, but I want to pivot a little bit. You mentioned China. I know you're very keen to talk. You really think that there is a split between the US and China and that there should be that there. You know, we should not be collaborating on this technology. What's your view of the kind of uh technological arms race between the US and China? And do you think the Biden administration has played this right? Uh in their strategy? Let me be clear, the the risk of 10 and A I killing us exists, but it's about the same as the risk of asteroid hitting our planet and destroying us all. Also, you, you have to characterize risks properly. The risk of China is humongous first next year. I'd be surprised if there aren't 100 million or more bots with persuasive A I one on one engaging with every voter trying to influence our election for their purposes. That's very likely to happen. I'd say probably a 95% probability it will be influential in the election and we should be worrying about it. Um The longer term over the next 25 years, whoever wins the A I race will win the economic race. So economic wins and power will derive from uh technology events. And I think it's up for grabs who wins in the next 20 years and whoever wins, the economic race will have social influence. And I think whether the world believes in western values in Southeast Asia and Africa in Latin America everywhere or believes in chief philosophy, which is some combination of Tiananmen Square type tactics, dictatorship and a reasonable philosophy that I don't care about the bottom 5% we abuse. But the, the society as a whole is better off to give him credit. That's sort of his political philosophy. I don't like that one, but which one wins is what's at stake over the next couple of decades? That's the really important. Do you think? And do you think the Biden administration has done the right thing by cutting off exports of advanced chips and A I software in some cases to, to China? Absolutely. Yeah. Interesting. When, when maha introduced you, I think, I think she got this wrong again. She said you had predicted that A I would eliminate 80% of jobs, but I think you actually said it's 80% of 80% of that. Exactly right. Maybe you can explain a bit more about what you meant there and which jobs do you think will, will be eliminated. So, uh probably a dozen years ago, I wrote a blog called uh the A I Doctor. 80% something like 20% human included. Right. Right. And there will be a human role and we can't fully define it in all these and A I will need humans to learn from. So there's always a learning model. Um but it will be able to do most jobs or most parts of most jobs. So 80% of 80% of jobs is like 64% of all the labor, economically valuable labor that's done. I think that's a very good model. But let me give you the example of what happens if we replace 80% of what a doctor does, he can have five times more interaction with the patient and the number of interactions in the USA doctor has with their patients, say primary care is 1/5 of or 1/6 of what happens in Australia. For example, should your pa your doctor check in with you every month and have A I check in with you every day on how you're doing. Especially given how important the disease burden chronic disease, diabetes, heart disease hypertension. You should be checking in with a patient every day. My son runs a company called uh CC I that is building an A I primary care doctor. The idea is for chronic disease. You will do 100 touch points in the 1st 90 days, like very simple idea can't be afforded without a human, still a role for the doctor. He's really overseeing the A I and maybe changing things, but much more interaction is needed to avoid things like diabetes. And we've all read the book nudge that nudging is so important to healthcare. In fact, it may be the most important drug we can invent and, and would, does the human do the nudging or you have the A I do the nudging A I will do the nudging but under human guidance, got it. Uh And you were telling me just backstage, you're, you're sort of taking this thesis to other professions as well. You've invested in a company that's trying to do this for it professionals. Is that right? Well, we just invest in a company called Cognito. You know, business users shouldn't have to make a request for a new report or a new query of their data warehouse. They should just say in English what they need. And the goal of this thing is to directly write the code to access, say your snowflake system or your database system and get your answers. Why do you need to then go to it and somebody then deal with that and there's a lot of overhead. So one of the predictions I made uh probably 11 predictions uh in the last couple of weeks, one of those is there will be a billion people on the world programming of the 7 billion people on the planet. What do I mean by programming, writing in English language? What you need? If you have an incomplete specification, the A I will ask you clarifying questions like what do you want to do? If, if the number of customers is zero, do you divide by zero? Uh you know, humans can't think of all that. So will there be a ball programmers? No question that will happen in the next 10 years. And I think you said that you think going forward expertise will be less important and actually knowing to ask the right questions will be more important. Maybe you can talk a little bit about that. Well, you know, so A I is very good at expertise if, if I have breast cancer, for example, hopefully I don't get that. But uh I, I hope my oncologist has read the last 5000 papers on breast cancer, which is probably 2023 publications on breast cancer. Like the amount of research is so large that no human can keep up with it. Uh And most of the time they can't and they don't remember it if they've read it and you want that sign in your care. And that's what I'm talking about. Expertise will be much better and broader. Maybe there's the human elements of care that the A I that the human provides. Maybe there's other parts. Great. I want to take some questions from the audience if you have a question, please raise your hand and we'll get a, a mic to you. Um, and can I see any questions? Yeah. Right here. A woman right here. Yeah. Hi, Suzanne. From Invisible Technologies. Thank you for that. Do you think that people know what they want people to do and what they want machines to do? I think people make assumptions, but I actually don't, I'm not seeing it. I think the thing to remember about the future. Uh It's, it's very hard to forecast. You all know the Yogi Berra sign. Um It's hard to predict the future. What you ha what happens is as technology develops and how it develops, changes, how it's used. So uh use cases will evolve and people will adjust to the use cases and, and I think this this process is very messy. So any long term forecast, the only thing you can be sure of is it's wrong. So when people ask me for forecasts, I say, especially in technology, anybody who makes a forecast is not smart enough to know they can't make a forecast. And it's been universally true. Uh For those of you interested uh in fun books. Uh There's a book by a researcher called Phil Tetlock Expert Political Judgment. He basically said, experts have the accuracy of dot throwing monkeys. And this is based on following 20,000 experts over 20 years on like 84,000 predictions. He said, what's the accuracy and it start throwing monkeys was the exact phrase after 20 years of research, uh very scientific conclusion. But we had to realize you can't predict everything that happens. You can't predict when chat GP D gets to charge GP D capability. We invested in open A I five years ago. I couldn't have told you when that capability would emerge. I could tell you in the long run A I is going to be really, really pivotal and placing bets and it's going to be very important. Great. I want to get you another question just here. Thanks. You know, I'm Anita Vata with Iona Ventures, uh synthetic biology and pathway of G I. How do you see that any relevance to humans at all that are living almost to the point that when a child is born in this decade, it's an entirely different wire framing. How do you see that pathway over the next couple of decades? Uh You know, every child could be, should be fully sequenced, single point genetic defects. You can design uh a protein sequence to go address a specific uh defect very specifically A I can design proteins that fold in a particular way that address a particular single point mutation. The same thing will happen for uh multi uh gene sort of polygenic kinds of diseases. Uh So I don't think we are very far from when you will have one drug for one patient, for example, enabled by A I Wow. Another question is in this table here. You know, it's sort of silly. Let me take a very trivial example, 7 billion people on the planet, they get one dose of aspirin. Even though 30% of the planet humans can't even metabolize aspirin. Is that silly or what, you know, critical drug like blood thinners like Warfarin or Plavix, depends on genetics. You should get a different dose based on the, your genetics, not the same dose for everybody. But that's what we do. We do crude medicine. Let's get to this question before we be not. Uh John just up. I'm the CEO of 1440 based in Park City, Utah. Um my favorite place I know, you know, it's been great so far this year we met at Sundance last year. Um So my question for you, uh you said the English language. And so, but if you think about the world population, a lot of people don't speak English. So what do you think of like language translation? Because you know, somebody could ask in Spanish or French, you, you, you have a view that there will be sovereign LL MS. So there will be sovereign L la Las. We just announced last week, I think A LA LL LA just for India because all the different languages there are so different, they don't even use the same uh script. And so a fundamental thing you hear in A I is tokenization tokenization in TGU should be different. A tokenization in Kanji should be different. So you will see this localization of these models. But beyond that, it is such an important technology, I think from national security, national defense, national control uh point of view, countries, important countries will develop their own A I. And will this be done by government or will it be done by private industry? My bet is it will be governments encouraging private A I, this is not something governments can do. It's moving too fast to plan. You sort of have to be on your, on your reactive feet most of the time. Right? I think it's like skiing. You just have to keep your balance and you can't sort of like, fantastic, we're out of time. But thank you very much for being with us, Beno. I really appreciate it and thank you all for listening. Thank you, everybody.