Prominent tech investor Bill Gurley has seen enough innovation cycles in his career to know when something looks like BS.
And that is just what Gurley thinks of Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) CEO Dario Amodei's call to have independent evaluators with employee-like access to patrol AI advances: pure BS.
"I'm not a fan of regulation for two reasons - 1) it's hard to get right, and 2) it's highly susceptible to regulatory capture. That said, if we insist on doing it, we should try to get it correct," the P3 Institute and former Benchmark VC said in a new X post.
Gurley's return fire on Amodei isn't without a very impressive resume.
His claim to fame was an $11 million bet on the Travis Kalanick-led Uber (UBER) in 2011. But other key investments have included Twitter (now X and owned by Elon Musk) and Nextdoor (NXDR). He presently sits on the board of online retailer Stitch Fix (SFIX).
He continued, "As "safety" seems to be the primary goal of this AI regulation exercise, I wanted to share that I recently went deep on both the 737 Max (2 crashes) and Fukushima accidents. In both cases, the investigations led to a conclusion that "regulatory capture" was the EXACT failure that led to both safety incidents. Boeing/FAA and Tepco/NISA. As a result, with safety as the #1 goal, the regulator MUST BE someone with authority and accountability "over" the regulated company. The idea that it could be a friendly third party with lots of cross-relationships is a structurally broken idea. Ask Mr Kiyoshi Kurokawa."
Within the course of three days, Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) CEO Sam Altman have managed to scare the hell out of the human race with the powerful technology they created and pushed their teams of pioneering supercoders to supercharge.
"Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up," Amodei stated in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of A.I. models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain."
Amodei doubled down on his comments at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce event on Tuesday afternoon.
Altman has been quiet on X since responding to Amodei on Monday.
The new public uproar on AI safety has sparked intense debates on if the tech will need to be reigned, at the expense of profits for the tech supply ecosystem. It has also fueled concern on if the human race is at risk of extinction.