Vinod Khosla on how AI will ‘free humanity from the need to work’

A: By 2014, it was clear to me most media would be generated by an AI. In our 2017 fundraising deck, we used the term “synthetic media” — which is now DALL-E.

Five years ago we invested in this company called Splash in Australia. This sounds ridiculous, especially five years ago, but the founder said to me, ‘I want a top 10 music hit, produced by me, composed by AI, the instruments by AI, sung by an AI. No humans touching the music.’

It sounds inconceivable, but I could see why AI would generate media. There was a term called style transfer. You take a photograph. Can I turn it into Picasso’s style? Could you do my portrait in the Mona Lisa style? This idea of transferring the style from an artist or a painter, it was highly probable it would evolve to more and more capability.

Q: Transformer models (the models used to create DALL-E and ChatGPT) hadn’t even been invented yet.

A: But new models were being invented all the time. Which ones would be a quantum jump? I didn't know, but I did know the following: The best talent out of every university was going into AI. And AI was making quantum leaps.

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A: Sam was looking for other ways. He cared about the mission and what AI could do for humanity.

It was clear it was going to become expensive and you needed a lot more money. Google could afford to do it. And the Chinese could afford to do it.

Q: In other words, you saw this as a geopolitical issue, too? A: I’ve always thought it’s a huge geopolitical issue. In 25 years, 80% of all jobs will be capable of being done by an AI.

This large transformation is the opportunity to free humanity from the need to work. People will work when they want to work on what they want to work on. That's a utopian vision. But getting from here to that utopia is really disruptive and it is terrible to be the disrupted one. So you have to have empathy for whoever's being disrupted. And the transition is very messy. It hurts people, hurts lives, destroys lives.

Q: If China develops AI first, what is the world that we end up living in?

A: Whoever wins the technology race in 20 years is up for grabs. The Chinese Communist Party’s most recent five-year plan commits to dominance in AI.

These are asymmetric technologies. A country like Rwanda can't afford to have their own AI. Even Brazil can't afford to have their own AI. Whether Western values win the technology race and hence the economic race will determine what political philosophy is dominant on the planet.

It's higher stakes than a war or a cyber war, and that bothers me. I do want us to be sensitive to the fact that a couple of these technologies — AI being a dominant one and I think fusion is like that — will determine whether in 2050 we are looking at Western values increasing in the world or Chinese values increasing.

They have a very different political philosophy. I'm not critiquing their philosophy. I just don't want it to win.

Q: That’s a critique in itself I guess. You've also talked about the need for fundamental research. Typically that's a government role. What role do the VCs play versus the government in this race?

A: Fundamental research is important. Germany has some of the best research. Cambridge in the UK is great at research. In Japan, there's really good research. They've not been able to commercialize it and turn it into societal impact [at the same rate that you see in the U.S.].

Pat Brown [Founder of Impossible Foods] took a bicycle from Stanford, came to our office, and said: “I want to change animal husbandry on the planet.” We worked with him on starting the whole thing that is now called plant proteins. That is the venture community’s traditional role.