OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla believes artificial intelligence (AI) will result in free lawyers, doctors and tutors in 10 years.
According to the 68-year-old Indian-American businessman, people will have access to free professional services and robots that act like humans within the next two-and-a-half decades.
Khosla predicted the future of AI in a recent episode of Eric Newcomer's "Cerebral Valley Podcast". The venture capitalist said: "I do think in 10 years we'll have free doctors, free tutors for everybody, and free lawyers so they can access the legal system."
Moreover, he thinks the world will be teeming with robots that stand upright like the way humans do by 2048. "I also forecast in 25 years we will have a billion bipedal robots," Khosla said.
The billionaire suggests the arrival of these robots will pave the way for a massive industry that will be larger than the existing auto industry. He went on to predict that there will be over a million bipedal robots in less than 10 years.
Shedding some light on GPT-5, the next iteration of OpenAI's large-language model GPT-4, Khosla said he expects that AI's capabilities will grow in unparalleled ways.
"We haven't seen anywhere near the limits of AI capability. That's a reasonable assumption," Khosla said. However, that doesn't imply AI will destroy humanity. In contrast, some AI pioneers claim AI could lead to the extinction of humanity.
Is AI a boon or a bane?
In the podcast episode, Khosla called sentient AI, which alludes to an AI capable of thinking, feeling and perceiving like a human, "nonsensical". While AI doomsday scenarios are gaining traction, Khosla claims people should focus more on taking full advantage of this newfangled technology, which has the potential to make a positive impact on the world.
Similarly, some people believe AI will replace human jobs in the future. However, Google Bard product lead Jack Krawczyk suggests AI is not a replacement for people. Instead, Krawczyk said this technology can help people accelerate their creativity.
"Too many people are looking at the dystopian angle of this one per cent probability of something bad happening and ignoring the benefits to humanity of AI," Khosla noted.
How Vinod Khosla sees AI developing over the next few years
A spokesperson for Khosla's venture capital firm Khosla Ventures told Business Insider in an email that the investor believes AI's "multiplicative power on labor and expertise" can play a vital role in reinventing societal infrastructure and providing a resource-rich lifestyle to all 7 billion+ on the planet.
"It is the only way to realise his dream of near free doctors and tutors 24/7 for every child on the planet," the spokesperson added.
It is worth noting that Khosla hasn't shied away from highlighting the potential impacts of AI. In 2016, he wrote in a paper that he thinks AI automation could learn to do up to 80 per cent of the work physicians and healthcare workers do.
In March of this year, he noted that AI could do 80 per cent of jobs in 25 years. "This large transformation is the opportunity to free humanity from the need to work," Khosla told Semafor in an interview. He believes people will have to freedom to work when they want to work on what they want to work on.
It is no secret that Khosla has been believing in the revolutionary potential of AI for a while now. Notably, his VC firm, Khosla Ventures, invested a lot of money into OpenAI in 2019. Aside from this, the investor has poured funds into Replit and other AI startups.
However, he previously told Business Insider that he isn't betting big on AI at the moment. Apparently, he thinks AI startups are currently overvalued and that only a few will survive. "Investing in momentum is a bad idea," Khosla said regarding AI.
Nevertheless, he still believes AI would force us to "redefine what it is to be human". In the meantime, he is planning for another 25 years of VC investing and maybe more if all goes well.
