- Marc Andreessen writes that AI can “make everything we care about better” in a new blog post.
- He believes AI companies should be able to build fast and aggressively without regulation.
- This will help society benefit from companies that are the “jewels of capitalism,” he writes.
The current AI wave wouldn’t be complete without a pithy missive from famed venture-capitalist and entrepreneur Marc Andressen.
The cofounder of namesake VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z as it’s commonly known, dispelled fears about AI’s risks to humanity – both tangible and imagined – in a lengthy blog post, insisting AI can “make everything we care about better.”
Tucked within his philosophical examination on the perceived perils and potential of AI, Andreessen reveals why he’s a staunch supporter of the technology and what needs to be done in order to “drive AI into our economy and society as fast and hard as we possibly can, in order to maximize its gains for economic productivity and human potential.”
To that end, he believes AI companies of all stripes should be able to build “as fast and aggressively as they can,” but without the involvement of the US government either through regulation or through an agency that insulates them from market competition.
“This will maximize the technological and societal payoff from the amazing capabilities of these companies, which are jewels of modern capitalism,” Andreessen wrote.
AI regulation, particularly after the explosion in generative AI and the startups building out the technology, has been on the minds of many these days including lawmakers in Congress, about how to address the fast-growing technology in light of potential misinformation, copyright violations, and threats to jobs.
Sam Altman, cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, urged US Senators last month to regulate AI, saying that it was “critical to mitigate the risks of increasingly powerful models.”
Altman has become the posterboy for AI after his company’s wide scale release of ChatGPT last fall. Despite knowing AI’s vast potential and wanting it to thrive, he’s also keenly aware of the risks it poses. To help avert those risks, Altman recommended to lawmakers that a new agency should be created to police AI projects, particularly ones that operate at higher levels of capabilities. And that agency should be able to hand out licenses for advanced AI work, and also have the power to take them away should they break any established safety rules.
But Andreessen thoroughly disagrees with Altman. He believes that the future of AI should be decided by the free market. He argues that open source AI – projects like MindsDB, which recently raised $25 million – should be allowed to spread freely and, because they tend to offer free versions of their wares, they can compete with commercial AI companies and startups. And even if open source projects don’t end up beating companies, the mere availability of such software will allow a generation of willing students to learn how to build and use AI, he argues.
To offset the risks of AI being used for nefarious purposes and to block China from becoming an AI superpower, the private sector needs to work with governments to come up with solutions. “AI can be an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems, and we should embrace it as such,” Andreeseen wrote.
He also says his firm is eager to fund AI startup founders.
Andreessen Horowitz has already made a splash there, recently leading a $50 million seed round alongside General Catalyst for Hippocratic AI, a healthcare focused, large language model startup, coleading a $10.4 million Series A in Coactive, and also coleading a seed round into London-based AI startup ElevenLabs with ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, Insider previously reported.
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