No Priors Ep. 125 | With Senior White House Policy Advisor on AI Sriram Krishnan

(digital music) Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. Today, Elad and I are here with Sriram Krishnan, a top White House official currently serving as the senior White House policy advisor on artificial intelligence. A former tech executive and venture capitalist, he's one of the lead authors on the American AI Action Plan released this past week. We talk about the national implications of the AI race, what position we hold today, the workforce and energy needs of the future, and how to win.

Sriram, thank you so much for joining us today for No Priors.

Thank you for having me. I'm long-term fan. Never been invited before. I was always a bit sad. But no, thank you for having me for the very first time. And before, I just have to point out for folks who are listening on audio that Elad has never looked as good, as dashing, as handsome as he does now. Elad, you've dressed up for me. I'm honored.

This is how you can tell that Sriram is in politics now. He has the liquid tongue of gold with which he coaxes everybody into doing his bidding, so it's very good. So, you know, for our audience, Sriram has been a well-known Silicon Valley individual. He worked at Andreessen Horowitz. He worked at a number of the sort of marquee companies and names in Silicon Valley over the last decade plus, and now, he's in government, and he's really working on a variety of exciting initiatives around AI and other areas. Could you tell us a little bit more about your role? And should we be calling you Your Excellency or is there some special title we should be using now that you're in government?

Uh, you don't have to, but I will take it. But no, thank you. It's fascinating for me to be here talking to you in this capacity because I've known both of you for forever and ever. You know, we've had hundreds or, uh, of interactions and also been such a fan of the pod. Congratulations. Just to give a little bit of backstory, I've been in Silicon Valley for a long time. I feel very old. Uh, I did a tour of all the large consumer social media companies, and then, um, I was at, uh, Andreessen Horowitz for the last four years, uh, competing actively for series A term seats with both of you folks, I'm sure. And all this while, I had no real intention of joining government, I wasn't very particularly interested in policy, but what, what wound up happening, uh, is a couple of years ago, I moved to England to head up all of Andreessen's international efforts. And at the time, the UK was kind of a hotbed of all the AI policy debates. They had this AI safety summit, uh, at Bletchley Park, and th- this was kind of the peak of, I would say, the effective altruist versus the AI kind of drama which was going on. And, uh, and I got pulled into a lot of those discussions, and I remember thinking to myself, like, "Wow, a lot of people who are ma- in s- very senior roles in governments in the United States back then, uh, and in other parts of the world, didn't know what they were talking about when it came to AI." Uh, I was convinced that they were doing the absolute wrong thing on many topics. For example, open source or helping startups, and it was just really, really bad in a way which I think the industry didn't really appreciate until much later. And that got me interested into just policy, which by the way was a word which I didn't even understand what it means. We can even get into what that means, but, uh, but it got, it got me interested in policy. When President Trump got inaugurated, in the first week he did two things. One, he rescinded the Biden executive order on AI, which was bad and awful in many, many ways which we can get into, and then he signed a new executive order which basically said that America should dominate and win on AI. And he then he called upon a few of us to say, "You guys need to come up with a plan within six months to figure out how America is going to dominate and win." And so that put us off of the races, and I think everything that has happened since then accumulated in the event that we had yesterday where we put together, you know, we put out this long docu- 28-page document on America's AI action plan with a bunch of executive orders. So, so that's kind of the, uh, little bit of history.