A Conversation with Ben Horowitz

Yeah. So I can tell you what was said. I said look, you know, I was trying to be pragmatic. I said at the core AI is math. That is what it's doing. It's math. So if you start restricting the models and you start regulating the models, you're just regulating math. You're outlawing math in some way. Either you're outlawing parts of math or you're saying you can't do enough math. And the White House official goes, 'Yes, we can do that.' That was his answer. He goes, 'Yes, we can do that. We did that in the '40s around nuclear physics, and some of that stuff is still classified today.' And one, I was shocked. My jaw hit the floor. I was like, 'Wow, that's crazy.' And then this classification of AI would be even crazier. I don't know what it was in physics that remains classified today, but I'll just make this comment. If you look at the progress in the US and in the world in fundamental physics up until the Einstein and John von Neumann era, and then compare it with progress since then, it's pretty startling how little progress we've made. I would just say that many of the fundamental physics ideas that have come since then don't seem to work. And hopefully, we'll get to the other side of that lack of progress in fundamental physics with AI figuring things out. But I do wonder, did we put something away through overclassification that we knew that would have unlocked some of the fundamental physics problems we're trying to solve?

I really don't know what they did, but look, I just think that stopping physics. It didn't work, right? The Russians did get the bomb, including the exact trigger mechanism, which was the most proprietary thing. They got exact part for part, the whole thing. They were able to get it from us despite all this classification and whatnot. So, it didn't do anything positive. And restricting knowledge, I just think that's a very dangerous idea in general on escaping an AI induced permanent underclass.

I think that's very incorrect because of the thing that we talked about earlier where everybody can be an entrepreneur. I think if you look at it through the lens of this is an industrial revolution economic model and there's workers and there's capital, then yes, that would be true. But I think that in an AI age society for the people with initiative, I just think there's going to continue to be unlimited opportunity to even set up an army of AI agents to go work for you and do useful things and will have lots of consumers. I think that the idea that we're going to run out of ideas and only the big AI is going to do everything, I disagree with that.