Keith Rabois on Why the AI Bubble Fears Are Overblown

Connie Loizos (0:01)

Hi, I'm Connie Loizos.

Alex Gove (0:02)

And this is Alex Gove.

Connie Loizos (0:03)

And this is StrictlyVC Download.

Hello, and welcome back to StrictlyVC Download. Today's conversation was recorded live at our StrictlyVC event in New York on Thursday night, September 10th, where I sat down with Keith Rabois, Managing Director at Khosla Ventures. I don't get to talk with Rabois very often, and I always enjoy it. I'm always stunned by how fast he speaks and how quickly he covers as much ground as he does. In this conversation, we get into his bullish outlook on AI. More specifically, as you'll hear, we discussed what he thinks of former Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxson's recent comments about the dangers of AI, and he doesn't think much of them. We also talked about why he's spending more time in New York, whether he approves of companies that use annualized revenue numbers to land press, even as these numbers are highly unreliable. And we spent some time on what Rabois looks for when deciding which founders to back.

That sounds easy enough, but in a world that's rife with fancy degrees and people who are at ease telling a good story about their vision, I do think it's a lot harder than it looks. And it was interesting to hear about one of his hacks on this front. In any case, we hope you enjoyed this conversation with Keith Rabois as much as we did. If you missed this StrictlyVC Evening, we hope you can make it to the next one. And either way, we will see you back here next week.

Thank you so much for coming.

Keith Rabois (1:40)

Pleasure to be with you. It's been a long time.

Connie Loizos (1:42)

It has been a long time. We didn't have an agenda and you're always so great at your game for anything.

I thought we could talk about maybe the news of the week, which has me freaked out candidly.

Keith Rabois (1:53)

Which day of the week?

Connie Loizos (1:54)

I know, I guess I'll see, Monday, what is it, was it Thursday? The former Anthropic researcher who was also at OpenAI previously said, on his way out to the door of Anthropic in a tweet storm, these companies are gambling with our lives. After which, I'm sure you saw another Anthropic researcher wade in and said, yeah, he's not kidding and we think there's like a 10% chance that it's going to kill all of us. And what, like, I don't know, and soon.

I've been really unsettled by that. What are you thinking, what are your friends thinking or talking about in reaction?

Keith Rabois (2:26)

I mean, personally, I'm a tech optimist and I don't think you should be in this profession unless you believe that tech is this magic wand that improves society. And so that's what we do. I give people capital and sometimes useful advice and ask them to take the magic wand of tech and fix things. And anybody who doesn't believe that tech is generally good and that tech can improve all of our lives, our kids' lives, my kids' lives, shouldn't be in tech. They shouldn't be investing and they shouldn't be an entrepreneur and they shouldn't be working at a company that's building things through tech. Fortunately, there's enough talented people that believe in the optimistic view of the world that almost all human progress for the last four centuries has been driven by technology. Now, it's more recent, the last 50 years, it's been driven through what we think of as startups or in venture capital fueled startups.

But all human lives have been improved through tech, whether it's the industrial revolution or the railroad, everything we take for granted, and that we're not toiling on the fields from like 4 a.m. to whatever time, and that we have choices in our life about moving around the globe or moving around the country, and marrying people we like versus people we're forced to by our parents, is all a function of tech revolutions. And this is going to continue. You know, and then also the zero defect philosophy just doesn't make any sense to me. If you go out the street right now, there's a non-zero chance that some Uber driver runs you over.

Several people in this room sometime in the next 20 years, unfortunately, will have something like a heart attack.

You can slip in your shower. Like living your life, thinking about everything that can go wrong is just a nonsensical way to live in my view.

And so I also don't believe that some chance something goes wrong is a reason to hit breaks on everything. I think you can be thoughtful, careful, intelligent, but we need to improve the world. And if we don't improve the world through technology, other people that we don't like, we don't like their values, and we don't believe that they celebrate or recognize human dignity, are going to take advantage of technology and we're gonna wind up in a world we don't like. This is the lesson of every history. And some people superficially allude to World War II, and they watch some dumb movie called Oppenheimer, and they're like, oh my God. The lesson from Oppenheimer is, first of all, what would the world look like if Germans had invented a nuclear bomb before we did? That would not be very pretty. And it could have happened. Fortunately, most of the German scientists who were any good were Jewish, and they were either forced or consciously chose to, you know, leave the country, or you would have confronted a very serious problem. Or what would the world have looked like if the Soviet Union had nuclear capabilities way before the United States?