Ben Horowitz: Why Open Source AI Will Determine America's Future
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Why does Ben Horowitz say the U.S. lost the AI culture war to China?
The biggest mistake people make on culture is they think of it as this very abstract thing. And my favorite quote on this is from the samurai, from Bushido, where they say, look, culture is not a set of beliefs, it's a set of actions. So the way for the U.S. to compete is the way the U.S. always competes. We're an open society, which means everybody can contribute. Everybody can work on things. We're not top down. And the way to get everybody to work on things is to have the technology be open and give everybody a shot at it. And then that's how we're competitive. I think when you have new technology, it's easy for policymakers to make really obvious, ridiculous mistakes that end up being super harmful.
Today on the podcast, we're sharing a conversation from Columbia Business School with A16D co-founder Ben Horowitz. Ben is a Columbia College alum from the class of 88 and joined Dean Costas Maglaris for a discussion on AI, culture, and leadership in times of disruption. They cover how open source AI and blockchain could shape the global race for technological leadership and why culture, not just strategy, determines which companies thrive through disruption. Let's get into it.
What a wonderful, wonderful way to start the semester by inviting an incredible leader and an alum of the college, Ben Horowitz, to join us to talk about sort of a variety of things. So I'm not going to spend time introducing Ben, but I'm going to make a small anecdote because Ben ran a company in the Bay Area in the late 90s to until the mid 2000s. that i without knowing ben back then visited with a bunch of mba students i think in 99 or 2000 as part of our silicon valley trip back in january name of the company was loudcloud which was the second company you were working after netscape yeah so he has seen through the entire trajectory of both the internet era of silicon valley and i guess around the late 2000s you started andreessen horwich with your partner and has been sort of one of the leading venture capital firms so i want to start by talking about ai we're going to talk about venture capital we'll talk about leadership and the types of
teams and people that you look for but i was reading this morning about anthropic closing the latest round and 183 billion dollar valuation which speaks a little bit about ai speaks also a little bit about how venture capital has changed because that's a private company that is approaching 200 billion dollar valuation incredible growth incredible change in capabilities Where do you think we are now in that AI cycle? And you're a war veteran from the 2000s. So in some sense, maybe you can give us your insight about that and then launch from there.
Well, I think we're early in the cycle in the sense that we just got the technology working like four years ago. So if you think about technology cycles, they tend to run in 25-year sort of arcs. So we're really, really early on. I think there is a question now of how big is the next set of breakthroughs compared to the last set. So if you look at, you could call like gradient descent, like a 10 out of 10, and then the the transformer and reinforcement learning, maybe eight out of 10 breakthroughs. Is there another 10 out of 10 breakthrough or even an eight out of 10 breakthrough on the horizon? And we haven't seen it yet. So we'll see. There's certainly companies kind of working at that. And so the big thing is, is there another kind of big discontinuous change in, I'll just call it probabilistic computing since AI tends to freak people out.
Or are we just going to keep kind of building on the breakthroughs that we've had to date? And that's, I would say, an open question right now.
When you think about adoption and disruption in the economy, how far out do you think that is going to be? And what sectors do you think may start getting affected? Large sectors, big corporates.
I think it's kind of like both overrated and underrated in terms of the dislocation. So if you look at the long arc of automation, going back to the 1750s when everybody worked in agriculture,
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Why does Ben Horowitz say the U.S. lost the AI culture war to China?
0:01–21:27
2
How will AI‑driven automation reshape jobs and industries?
21:27–42:27
3
How does open‑source AI give China a strategic advantage?
42:27–44:53
4
Why does Ben argue that open‑source models shape global culture and values?
44:53–46:43
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The a16z Show
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