Since the election of Donald Trump, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has told one podcast after another of a May 2024 lunch in the Biden White House where he claims we and our colleagues shared a secret plan to effectively ban AI startups, which he and his partner Ben Horowitz found so alarming they left the West Wing telling each other, “Yep, we’re for Trump.” For two years, we’ve held our tongue. We don’t know whether Andreessen has simply misremembered our discussion or purposely misrepresented it. But as the AI policy debate once again centers on questions of corporate power and government oversight, it’s time to set the record straight. Far from a revelation about AI policy, most of that 2024 meeting was about other issues and largely amounted to two businessmen airing financial and regulatory grievances. Behind closed doors, their loudest rants focused not on AI, but on the more likely reasons they supported Trump: Biden’s proposed billionaire minimum tax and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s oversight of cryptocurrency. Andreessen was adamant that Washington was choking the crypto industry, in which his firm is a leading investor. He demanded the administration change course on both fronts. Andreessen has since told Ross Douthat on his podcast that we said government regulation of AI would mean “there will be no startups,” only two or three large AI companies. But we said no such thing. The experience he describes as essential to his political conversion simply never happened. For the record, here’s what did when we talked about AI. First, Andreessen warned us to watch out for “the sex cult that wants to run America’s AI policy.” This appears to be a reference to instances of polyamory in the effective altruism movement, many of whose adherents believe AI poses existential risks to humanity. Effective altruism is a philosophy we and the Biden administration did not share. Second, we discussed the most significant action in the Biden AI executive order: requiring leading AI companies to share safety test results with the government — an action Trump would later revoke, then revive. We emphasized that to avoid harming startups, we crafted our policy to apply only to the largest firms. Third, Andreessen was under the mistaken impression that the Biden administration had banned, or would soon ban, open-weight AI models — models for which developers publish the model weights that enable others to refine them… [TheTopNews] Read More.
3 weeks ago
