What Vinod Khosla Says He's 'Worried About the Most'
AI stocks are continuing to rally but what should you buy? Vinod Khosla is more popular than ever right now. The Sun Microsystems co-founder turned prominent investor — first at Kleiner Perkins and, for the last 20 years, at his venture firm Khosla Ventures — has always been sought after by founders thanks to his no-nonsense advice and his firm's track record, including bets on Stripe, Square, Affirm, and DoorDash. But a $50 million gamble on OpenAI back in 2019 — when it was far from clear that the outfit would succeed on the scale that it has — put Khosla Ventures, and Khosla himself, squarely in the spotlight.
Passion for Startup Opportunities
He’s thoroughly enjoying himself. I sat down with Khosla this past week in Toronto at the Collision conference, and ahead of our stage appearance, he told me that he’s been appearing in public — either onstage or on podcasts or television interviews — several times a week lately. Asked if he was exhausted by the schedule — for example, he flew into Toronto just hours before our sit-down — he shrugged off the suggestion.
Certainly, there are things he prefers to talk about, and the art of deal-making is not among these things. “Frankly, the investor side is much less interesting to me,” he said when I asked him about something I heard recently, which is that he hasn’t taken a dollar in management fees since starting Khosla Ventures, despite that it now has $18 billion in assets under management. (He confirmed this, but he said that’s only true of himself and not a corporate-wide policy.)
AI and Its Impact
He’s much more passionate about the startup opportunities he spies in a landscape being changed daily by advances in AI, so we talked about some of this white space. We also talked about what concerns him the most about AI’s ripple effects; FTC Chair Lina Khan; and why, in his view, the “Europeans have regulated themselves out of leading in any technology area.”
We talked first about Apple’s splashy new deal with OpenAI, which allows Apple to integrate ChatGPT into Siri and its generative AI tools.
Regulation and Future Concerns
We also talked about regulation. I observed that Khosla has said before that closed large language models like that of OpenAI should be safeguarded, even while there should be a regulatory framework around them. I wondered if that means that Khosla will forever forswear other, “open source” AI.
Concerns About Income Disparity
Here, Khosla said the issue bothers him greatly. “I think 25 years from now, when I hope I'm still working … the need to work will mostly disappear.” Still, while AI should create “great abundance, great GDP growth, great productivity — all the things economists measure,” he said, he worries “more than anything else” about “increasing income disparity. How do we [ensure the] equitable distribution of the benefits of AI?”
Whether and how that happens, of course, are even bigger questions, and for all his brilliance, Khosla, a self-described techno optimist, didn't have the answers.
