Vinod Khosla: How AI Impacts Healthcare, Energy, Geo-Politics, Media and Climate Change | E1045

Technology is very fun to talk about disruption. It's not a lot of fun to be disrupted. I do think we'll have to pay special attention to the people being disrupted, and their needs and desires and wants. (instrumental music plays)

Vinod, I am so excited for this. I've been absolutely loving your Twitter content recently. And so first off, thank you so much for joining me again today.

Happy to do it. Always like talking to entrepreneurs.

That is so kind of you. But I want to start today on the, kind of, topic of the day, which is obviously AI, artificial intelligence. And Khosla and you have been one of the biggest proponents and, uh, conversationalists of the space in the last 10 years, really, a- as one of the first investors in OpenAI. And I just wanted to start with the question of, do you believe the recent hype in AI is due to technological breakthroughs and innovation, or is it the result of hype cycles keeping up with innovation from years ago?

A little bit of both. Uh, let me give you a perspective, um, going back a long time. In 1982 at Sun, we adapted TCPIP and the internet as our native network. We were the only ones. Uh, by 1996, it was clear that exponential growth was going to continue, and we invested in Juniper, which, by the way, was a 2,500X return, a $7 billion return for us on a $3 or $4 million investment. Uh, when the internet really took off, and, uh, I remember investing, uh, meeting Marc Andreessen to invest in Netscape, the browser company, on a Saturday morning, uh, in Mountain View, um, when it was three people. It really took off, but the exponential was clear much earlier. The reason I bring this up is I wrote my first blog on, uh, AI, do we need doctors and do we need teachers? Uh, a little tongue-in-cheek, but, uh, encapsulating the idea that expertise could be free in 2011, 2012. It was pretty controversial then, but it was a similar moment to when we had, uh, adopted the internet and TCPIP in the '80s at Sun. And then when ChatGPT came out, it became like the browser moment for the internet, and, uh, it's now obvious to people the extreme capability that we've developed here and will continue to develop and is progressing at a rate where even I can't keep up. But anytime there's a rich area for development, bubbles form, and I worry a little bit that that will happen here. There's obviously real technological progress, real expansion of the opportunity set for real building businesses, but also a lot of hype that follows, you know, a l- or sort of a rich area to mine. Sort of the gold rush phenomena. What I'm fundamentally optimistic about is when you look at bubbles... In the 1800s, 1830s, there was a bubble in England when you got the right to build a railroad between two towns, you could issue scripts almost immediately. But... And it did, the bubble did burst. But more railroad was built after the bubble burst than before. My point is, I think the progress of AI applications in utility for society will go on a steady pace based on technical capability and entrepreneurial interest in it, not what Wall Street or, uh, investors think about it. So, I think investors are important, because they fund these developments, but investors cause bubbles, uh, the reality is the underlying technology and its applications.