Prediction Not checkable as stated
Khosla: Open-source AI models will die due to massive training costs
“It is costing an order of magnitude more to train, and that's why I don't think open source models will be viable because of the training costs.”
Opinion
Khosla: Open source AI models will not be viable due to training costs
“It is costing an order of magnitude more to train, and that's why I don't think open source models will be viable because the training costs.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Khosla: AI will eventually make almost all professional human expertise essentially free
“One of my big forecasts is almost all expertise will be free.”
Prediction Held up
Khosla: Frontier AI compute costs will drop 80-90% within a year
“My bet is, a year from now, it'll cost one-fifth to one-tenth of what it does today, and my advice to all our startups is ignore the cost of compute, because any assumption you make, any dollar you spend on optimizing your software will be worthless within the…”
Disclosure
Khosla tells his portfolio startups to completely ignore AI compute costs
“My advice to all our startups is ignore the cost of compute, because any assumption you make, any dollar you spend on optimizing your software will be worthless within the year, and so forget about it.”
Insight
Khosla: Startups should ignore compute costs; AI software optimizations become worthless
“And my advice to all our startups is ignore the cost of compute. Because any assumption you make, any dollar you spend on optimizing your software will be worthless within the year.”
Opinion
Khosla: Investing in startups building independent GPU cloud infrastructure is silly
“Beyond the model itself, and I think it's silly to invest in the cloud, people who are buying GPUs to build clouds.”
Opinion
Khosla: Regulation ensures Europe will never participate in the tech industry again
“I think the Europeans, for example, have ensured they'll never participate in tech again. You know, they keep shooting themselves in the foot.”
Opinion
Khosla: Marginalizing Muslims is the one thing that could slow India's economy
“Leaving a community of Muslims behind is such a bad idea. It's the one thing that can slow up a rapidly growing economy.”
Opinion
Khosla: Apple Partnership Establishes OpenAI Leads LLM Competition
“Obviously from an open AI perspective, it clearly establishes where open AI is in the competition for the best LLMs.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Khosla: Small models will not replace large frontier models for intelligence
“If you want human level intelligence from a model, it'll be a big model, and there'll be a couple of them around, some better than others, some a year or two ahead of others, but I don't think small models substitute
For big models”
Disclosure
Vinod Khosla: Khosla Ventures has never taken a dollar in management fees
“By the way, I, since I started the firm 20 years ago, I've never taken a dollar in fees.”
Opinion
Khosla: Apple Partnership Validates OpenAI as the Best LLM
“Obviously from an open AI perspective, it clearly establishes where open AI is in the competition for the best LLMs. Obviously many people wanted that business. And many things were evaluated, and so it's really rewarding to see where Apple thinks the best AI …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Khosla: Small models will never substitute for large, human-level AI models
“If you want human level intelligence from model, it'll be a big model, and there'll be a couple of them around. Some better than others, some a year or two ahead of others, but I don't think small models substitute for big models, but they do some things reall…”
Prediction Held up
Khosla: AI inference costs will drop up to 10x by June 2025
“I think what will happen is the expensive PhD will become dirt cheap. My bet is a year from now, it'll cost one-fifth to one-tenth of what it does today.”
Insight
Khosla: AI labs must prioritize usage and training data over near-term revenue
“So I'm pretty convinced The next few years, the revenue isn't the important metric. You don't want to, of course, lose so much money you can't afford it, but you're not trying to make tons of money. You're trying to get tons of usage and you're trying to get t…”
Opinion
Khosla: OpenAI executes crisply, while Google has great technology but poor execution
“I think OpenAI has been very good in execution, but Google has great technology and technologies. They just haven't been as crisp about their execution.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Khosla: Massive incumbent tech giants will dominate the large language model market
“Large LLMs will belong to the large players, players who can run on train on very large clusters, people who can pay for proprietary content, whether it's with Reddit or somebody else.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Khosla: AI primary care and therapy will become larger than specialized AI
“I think the specialties will become embedded in the generic. And the general, like primary care and mental health therapy are two examples that I think will be larger businesses because there's other aspects than just the knowledge aspect.”
Insight
Khosla: Blindly funding Google DeepMind spinouts with $2M seed checks is bad
“Anytime somebody leaves deep, deep mind, give them two million dollars, that's a bad strategy.”
Opinion
Khosla: OpenAI executes better than Google despite Google's great tech
“I think OpenAI has been very good in execution, but Google has great technology and technologies. They just haven't been as crisp about their execution.”
Insight
Khosla: Automatically funding anyone leaving Google DeepMind is a bad strategy
“Anytime somebody leaves deep, deep mind, give them two million dollars, that's a bad strategy.”
Disclosure
Khosla: Cognition's Devin is building an autonomous AI programmer, not a Copilot
“Of course, we invest in something like Devon. That's very popular. Everybody knows about it. They're building an AI programmer. They're not building tools for programmers like Copilot. They're building a programmer.”
Disclosure
Khosla: Has never taken management fees in 20 years of venture investing
“Since I started the firm 20 years ago, I've never been I've taken a dollar in fees.”
Vinod Khosla