Nov 3, 2023 · 57m · more-or-less
#21: AI Regulation, War and the Future of the American Tech Stack · More or Less Podcast
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In this episode of the More or Less podcast, hosts Dave Morin, Brit Morin, Jessica Lessin, and Sam Lessin analyze President Biden's AI Executive Order, examining its implications for national security, regulatory capture, and the fracture of the global internet. The panel explores the necessity of digital identity verification within an American tech stack while offering strategic predictions on the economic and cultural future of artificial intelligence.
Statements from this episode (11)
Brit Morin: There are more dogs than children in the Bay Area
“There are more dogs than children. In the Bay Area.”
Sam Lessin: Slow Ventures was the premier dog startup investor
“Slow Ventures is the, was, I'm not sure we still are, but was the premier dog investor for many years. We were like the dog VC.”
Sam Lessin is very skeptical of artificial intelligence investing
“As you all know, I'm very skeptical on AI investing. I don't really believe in it.”
Jessica Lessin: Eric Schmidt drove Biden's AI executive order
“I mean, this is driven by Eric Schmidt, let's just say it, which I don't think is like good or bad necessarily, but like, you know, I think he went in there and said, here's what you should do, and they did it. That's my read of it.”
Sam Lessin: Open global internet is over, requiring national tech stacks
“The internet is done, right? The open global internet is over and needs actually is like a problem at this point in certain ways. And like, We do need to go to, like, national tech stacks in various forms with stronger borders”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI's push for regulation is an incumbent lock-in trick
“I think it's, like, been a cute trick that a bunch of the incumbents to date, and then we'll call out OpenAI, for instance, has been saying, oh, we're the good guys, regulate AI, and you're like, yeah, like, of course, like, that trick is a little old, guys, r…”
Jessica Lessin: Frontier AI models will cost tens of billions to train
“I mean, it's gonna be tens of billions of dollars to train these models going forward, and that's not, you know, a research lab at Stanford kind of stuff.”
Sam Lessin: Industry has displaced government and academia in frontier research
“We basically have ended up in this weird place where, you know, industry has the dollars and the will To do a lot of, like, really big picture research, which has historically not been true, right? Business has been like this application layer thing”
Dave Morin tried and failed to centralize digital identity at Facebook
“Five years before that, I literally tried to do this with Facebook. Right? Like, we tried to centralize it, and that didn't work, right?”
Sam Lessin: Phone numbers are America's closest thing to a national ID
“You know, the closest thing you have to a national ID right now is comes from the phone company. It's your phone number. That is literally the closest thing we have and it's poorly implemented and fraught with issues and dah, dah, dah, dah.”