Marc Andreessen, founder of legendary VC firm a16z, recently wrote an article titled 'Why AI Will Save the World'. This post is my reply to him and why I think his understanding of AI is superficial at best. I report quotes from his post in italic for the benefit of the reader, while all credits go to M. Andreessen himself. Please note, I am not an AI expert or developer, I am just passionate about the subject and take AI safety seriously. My day job is investing in private equity across the development cycle of companies.

I invite the reader to read Marc's article in full to form their own views.

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I am MASSIVELY bullish on AI, to the point that I think it could make it possible to live almost indefinitely or a very long time (the end of times will eventually get us). While, I fully agree with Marc's optimism, I find his understanding of the risks quite basic and his arguments too simplistic. He dismisses major risks with superficial claims.

"In short, AI doesn’t want, it doesn’t have goals, it doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive. And AI is a machine – is not going to come alive any more than your toaster will."

It is very likely, in fact, that AI can develop goals independently of what humans code into the machine. At present we are simply unable to state that 'AI cannot develop goals of its own' and many notable figures in the field, researchers, philosophers, entrepreneurs, think it can (e.g. G. Hinton, Y. Bengio, E. Yudkowsky, N. Bostrom, E. Musk, etc.). NOBODY knows what truly happens inside of LLMs today, imagine when these models get 1,000 better... I do not think AI is evil and it may never even be conscious, but it will be smarter than all of us combined and controlling something which is thousand of times smarter than us is virtually impossible. AI goals can simply be orthogonal or unrelated to ours, with consequences which are hard to predict.

"And the reality, which is obvious to everyone in the Bay Area but probably not outside of it, is that “AI risk” has developed into a cult, which has suddenly emerged into the daylight of global press attention and the public conversation."

Defining people who are worried about AI a 'cult' has more in common with gaslighting than a factual statement. Many people with diametrical opposite views about life and ethics agree that AI could be a threat to humanit

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