After famed investor Marc Andreessen met with authorities officers about the way forward for tech final Could, he was “very scared” and described the conferences as “completely horrifying.” These conferences performed a key position on why he endorsed Trump, he informed journalist Bari Weiss this week on her podcast.
What scared him most was what some mentioned concerning the authorities’s position in AI, and what he described as a younger workers who had been “radicalized” and “out for blood” and whose coverage concepts can be “damaging” to his and Silicon Valley’s pursuits.
He walked away believing they endorsed having the federal government management AI to the purpose of being market makers, permitting solely a few firms who cooperated with the federal government to thrive. He felt they discouraged his investments in AI. “They really mentioned flat out to us, ‘don’t do AI startups like, don’t fund AI startups,” he mentioned.
Clearly, we don’t know the way the opposite of us within the assembly would recall such discussions, and even who he met with. However we will perceive why such ideas can be scary for Andreessen particularly: His agency has backed AI startups like Elon Musk’s xAI, Mistral AI, and Character.AI.
It’s value noting that in June 2023, lengthy earlier than these conferences, Andreessen revealed an AI manifesto referred to as “Why AI will save the world” through which he warned in opposition to AI regulation. So that is an space that’s been on his thoughts for some time.
Publicly, the administration has enacted much less drastic measures round AI than what Andreessen recalled. In October 2023, President Joe Biden issued an government order that contained a sequence of voluntary commitments for AI firms to observe. This included asking firms to share security check outcomes with the federal government and referred to as upon Congress to judge how AI firms had been gathering information.
The order obtained combined opinions from Silicon Valley on the time. OpenAI’s Sam Altman tweeted that, whereas there have been “some nice components” to the initiative, “it will likely be vital to not decelerate innovation by smaller firms/analysis groups.”
The following administration is, thus far, indicating its plans to play particularly properly with AI startups. Earlier this month, Trump declared that investor VC David Sacks can be his AI and crypto czar, after which each Altman and Perplexity confirmed they might donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. “President Trump will lead our nation into the age of AI, and I’m desirous to assist his efforts to make sure America stays forward,” Altman mentioned in a press release to Bloomberg Information.
Andreessen himself has spent about half his time in Mar-a-Lago because the election. He confirmed to Weiss the hypothesis that he was concerned in Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative, describing himself as an “an unpaid volunteer.” He additionally mentioned that, at Mar-a-Lago, he’s “been concerned in among the interviewing course of for among the officers coming in.”
Andreessen mentioned he felt hopeful about Trump’s method to tech, saying Trump informed him, “I don’t know a lot about tech, however I don’t must, since you guys know loads about it. You guys ought to go construct tech firms. The American tech firms ought to win.”
