American companies are currently ahead in the A.I. race, with wildly popular offerings like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But as competition intensifies, China could very well overtake the U.S., according to a top venture capital veteran. Vinod Khosla, founder of Menlo Park, Calif.–based Khosla Ventures, which was one of OpenAI’s early investors, thinks that America would lose out if it slows down the pace of A.I. developments now.
“We shouldn’t take for granted [that] we will lead in A.I. technology 20 years from now,” Khosla told Bloomberg. He added that China has an edge over the U.S. in the quest for more advanced A.I. because the country can “take many more risks, make many more errors.”
“We need to win this race,” Khosla said, adding that “democracy and freedom of speech and a whole bunch of things all of us believe in” are also at stake.
As A.I. tools have become widely available to the public, experts have expressed concerns about how they can be misused, and what could happen as A.I. becomes more powerful. A group of tech executives and academics signed an open letter in March calling for a six-month hiatus in developing advanced A.I. systems because of their “profound risks to society and humanity.” The letter now has over 27,000 signatories.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk was among the first to join the letter, but Khosla thinks his real reason for advocating for an A.I. pause was so that his companies could get up to speed with new developments. Musk helped cofound OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015, but walked away a few years later. He has said he’s now working on a rival chatbot to ChatGPT through a new business called X.AI Corp.
“Elon is behind,” Khosla said. “I 80% suspect his call to slow down AI development was so he could catch up.”
Representatives at Khosla Ventures and Tesla didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
China's A.I. run
Khosla isn’t the only Silicon Valley leader who has concerns about China overtaking the U.S. in A.I.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been vocal about his fears surrounding the misuse of A.I., and has said that an A.I. pause would only be advantageous for China.
“I’m not in favor of a six-month pause, because it will simply benefit China,” Schmidt told the Australian Financial Review last month. “What I am in favor of is getting everybody together ASAP to discuss what are the appropriate guardrails.”
Leaders at companies currently developing A.I. have also pushed back against a pause, including Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. He has said the tech giant, which has developed the chatbot Bard, won’t commit to an A.I. pause because it won’t be “effective” without looping the government in.
But there are other fears about A.I. larger than the U.S.-China rivalry. Geoffrey Hinton, an A.I. pioneer and former engineering fellow at Google, recently quit the company after over a decade to be able to speak more freely about what risks A.I. currently poses.
Having developed some of the key technologies powering today’s viral A.I. platforms, Hinton said he regrets his life’s work because it can be tough to prevent bad actors from using the technology.
