Why America Must Lead in AI Investment with Senator Young (R-IN)

0:00This isn't a particularly partisan issue. I think there's a tendency to catastrophize different technology areas as opposed to different potential outcomes. My colleagues typically don't think of an investment in the National Science Foundation as a national security investment, but it is. I think what you may have characterized in the past is fantastical. It's some fantastical, doomsday scenarios, and there are a lot of those. And there may even be a couple that are real, and we need to hedge against it. Depending on who you ask, conversations around AI range from solving the world's toughest problems to triggering and irreversible apocalypse.

0:42We're going to rapidly compress the treatment and drug development time one. We will come up with drought -resistant, climate change -resistant crops to help feed the world. Do you think that P -DOOM or P -DOOM is a probability that that we as humanity has a catastrophic event, do you think it's greater with or without AI? But these very fears and fantasies go back as far as 1863 when English writer Samuel Butler, inspired by Darwin, wrote a newspaper article suggesting that humans would create their own successors. A quote, self -regulating self -acting power that would make us the inferior race.

1:18And who could forget the murderous Hal 9000 in Stanley Cooper's 2001 Space Odyssey or the dystopian crime prediction tech in minority report, or even Pixar's Stary -eyed robot Mollie, all of which have shaped our relationship with the kind of science fiction that now in some way is becoming science reality. And as this is happening, everyone is weighing in. From the researchers building the technologies to the funders ushering in the next wave infrastructure to even the consumers, reimagining the ways that these tools can be used. And of course, governments too are increasingly paying attention.

1:56This is going to be another 10X expansion in value for sure. And historically the US captured that, right? That's like why the internet age was so great for us, right? And so is that part of the calculus or is the focus really on like how do we keep this stuff from hurting us? We also need to embed the standards that we have as it relates to privacy, consumer protection, and other things into those technologies rather than leaving it to all pick on the Chinese Communist Party again. And that's why Senator Todd Young and three of his colleagues hosted the AI Insight Forum, a series of roundtable events that brought together lawmakers, business leaders, government agencies, and the greatest minds in technology to grapple with AI at this absolutely pivotal moment in its evolution.

2:38And in today's podcast, A16C General Partner Martin Casado sits down with Senator Young to discuss what they learned from the forum. Or public policy meets AI and how the United States can remain a global leader in this emerging technology, striking right balance between innovation and regulation. Senator Young has represented Indiana in the Senate since 2016, while Martin currently sits on the board of several AI companies, like Ambient AI and Pendrap Security, but also has long been involved in the intersection of technology and the government. In fact, he started his career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, working on large -scale simulations for the department of defense.

3:18So as we collectively seek to distill science fiction from science reality, here are Senator Todd Young and Martin Casado. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the company's disgust in this podcast. For more details including a link to our investments, please see a16c .com slash

3:57Disclosures. We're going to cover in general like how policy intersects with AI and how we're thinking about it and how do we keep the United States ahead. As part of that, you had this Senate AI insight forum. I thought maybe you could first just kind of describe what that was and then we can talk about what the follow -up has been. Sure. Well, Martin, thank you so much for for having me this great event, I understand your speakers, shared some great information today. For those who may not be familiar with how Congress typically does its business, when we're really following the normal processes, we work through the committee process.

4:29So if we had gone the traditional route and trying to address artificial intelligence issues, that would have meant that a number of committees of jurisdiction would have started to hold hearings on artificial intelligence in a very public way. Members of their staff would have prepared members hours before each given briefing and we would have learned what we could from those experts who briefed us over the course of two or three hours but oftentimes members aren't able to dive deeply into the essence of various policy issues when we take that approach. So instead, Senator Schumer working with three other senators decided to deviate from the process.

5:06Instead we held first three briefings and then nine, as you'd mentioned, AI Insight forums. These These were round table events, long tables full of talented innovators, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and others. No cameras were present, as is typically the case in our hearing. So there's a lot of candid conversation on dedicated topics. We hold inside forums and national security, alignment, innovation, and other topics. And members were invited to witness these guided conversations, take extensive notes, and And then after that, we have a lot of work product that we can deal with, recommendations, policy concerns and other things that will lead to actual committee hearings and legislation being proposed as is traditionally done.

5:52So those were really constructive. Members gave a lot of positive feedback about it. We learned a lot in the process. What are your key takeaways having set to them? Well, too really, I would say the first is just a general sense that this isn't a particularly partisan issue. I would say one could probably detect slight differences in approaches when it comes to regulation versus innovation as you consult with members on either side of the aisle. But as related to this topic, I think in this gets into the second issue, there was a general embrace by my colleagues after they heard from some of the world's best minds that we needed to regulate, but it would have to be a light touch approach.

6:29which would be very careful not to go overboard and constrain what is right now, sort of leading edge industry and the United States is in the lead, we wanna keep it that way. Do you think we can expect some legislation framework come out of this, is there a time frame or is this still kind of too early? Well, I think we can't. My hope is that we can expect all kinds of legislative efforts, not just this year, but in coming years. I don't think we have to rush to do everything at once. We need to get clarity on a lot more of people's concerns, but more importantly, what they perceive to be their opportunities is the technology evolves.

7:05As we learn more about the technology, as new versions are released, so sort of a weight and sea approach. I do, however, think that there will be some things we agree on now. We agree that there needs to be some resident expertise within the White House, an ongoing basis that other departments of government look to when it comes to issues surrounding artificial intelligence. I think we need to revamp our human resources approach so that we embed more expertise in every agency of government. We can dialogue with businesses, consumers, and others about things within a department's field that touch on artificial intelligence.

7:45And then there'll be some things as you heard about earlier today that deal with national security where we're already behind. We need to make some key investments in people and platforms. And so all of those things are among the things that I think in coming months will be addressed through the committees of jurisdiction in a bipartisan way if politics doesn't get in the way. And as it relates to most of this, I don't think it will. This is a bit of a personal story. So I did my undergrad in Flagstaff Arizona, like Small Arizona Town. And at the university, which is not a notable university, there was a lot of investment from DOD and supercomputing.

8:18And they've bought supercomputers and I worked on them as a researcher. And that led me to a job in Lawrence Livermore National Labs. And then at Lawrence Livermore National Labs, I worked in the Weapons Program. I worked on these huge supercomputers with a bunch of other people that came from similar paths. And I remember thinking at the time, isn't it amazing that we live in this country where people understand those new technologies that are like very powerful and they invest all the way down to Flagstaff, Arizona to stay ahead and find the people that are very interested in doing that. And it feels to me having gone through that and then having gone through also the intelligence community, which also embraced like the internet and like a lot of the network technologies that like it feels like we're in a bit of a doctrine shifts now that when new technologies come like we kind of are more afraid of them than wanting to get ahead of them.

9:02And so like I just wanted to ask you is my perception correct that there is then a bit of a doctrine shift in the United States where we kind of worry about the implication of technologies before we're able to actually harness them and become leaders in them, or is that maybe just like a perspective from the outside? I think it may be fair. I think this is one of the reasons these AI insight forums were helpful to sort of keep certain colleagues honest that might have been ready to move forward aggressively and with various regulatory actions. I can't promise that won't happen in certain discrete areas, but I think there's a tendency to catastrophize different technology areas as opposed to different potential outcomes.

9:42Yeah. Historically, one of the many reasons that we've been a dynamic country and created a favorable regulatory atmosphere for our technology developing businesses is we have laws that reflect our values. We apply those laws to technologies only if they run a foul of certain prohibited behaviors that normally don't even mention the technology. Right? And if we can take, at least for the most part, a tech agnostic approach as it relates to AI development and adoption, I think that that will be more helpful. So, no special carveouts, no special benefits, except when explicitly there's rare instances where there's a compelling argument that we need to.

10:21I went to one of these AI meetings, and there's a lot of concern around AI, and I'll listen to it with the concern, and I'm like, wait, that's not AI, that's like all computers, or it's like, that's not AI, that's the internet. That one gets right. Ben and these things for a very long time, and so I've gotten this sense that maybe there's a response to the prior battle, Like people felt like we didn't get it right with the internet and therefore they're trying to like Use that consternation now, but for a different techno. Well, I think that's absolutely happening And it's happening with respect to data right now Well, let me tell you what the dangerous so having been through the rise of the internet very closely There were things that were very unique to the internet right things like asymmetric attack Right the more that you invested in the internet the more vulnerable you were And if you're dealing with a terrorist threat, that's a big deal because they didn't have infrastructure to take down we did.

11:07So that's a very particular thing that impacted defense. There's other things like exponential growth. Things can get out of control and it's everywhere. There's these huge implications. I will say they actually don't exist with AI, but somehow people are imbuing AI with it. So I'm just wondering if there's maybe like a lack of like literacy or maybe people feel like they've kind of didn't really do it on the previous one. This is being applied. Now, and if that's the case, what can we do to educate or kind of get ahead of it? Well, this is helpful. You're in the right town, right? But to the extent some of you have not been visiting with members of the Senate, members of the House who will soon be playing with live rounds as we said in the Marine Corps, right?

11:44We'll be considering actual bills, and we developing bills and we'll be voting on them. And there will still be some members who haven't done extensive homework and carry superficial views of what constitutes artificial intelligence technology. And we need all of you to disabuse them of this being an extension of social media, this is very different, and data, we're gonna have to think about data, perhaps in a different way. So I do think that some are either confused. There are others who are just probably using the opportunity of this legislative effort, which is ahead of us, to try and pass bills that they had prepared two decades ago.

12:23Yeah, right. So it's like, now's my time. I've done it in other contexts, but if we do it in this context, it could be quite damaging. And how much is the economic reality hit the calculus when it comes to these discussions? Because none of us really know the future. I will tell you, an economics change this much, right? When the marginal cost of creation goes to zero, this is going to be another 10x expansion in value for sure. And historically, the US captured that, right? That's like why the internet age was so great for us, right? And so is that part of the calculus or is the focus really on how do we keep this stuff from hurting us?

12:55We tried to make this part of the calculus. In fact, we spent at least half of the time, perhaps we should have spent even more on the AI insight forums discussing the upsides. So not as though we had to address the upsides. The upsides are gonna be resolved of innovators and entrepreneurs and investors. We understand that, but I thought it was very important for us to focus on that, to provide some balance to the staff members and my colleagues who are present. So constantly reminding people of that, I think is gonna be very important. There are, I think what you may have characterized in the past is fantastical, some fantastical doomsday scenarios, and there are a lot of those.

13:33And there may even be a couple that are real, and we need to hedge against, right? And we need to take those seriously. But we cannot become so fixated on those that we lose the force from the trees, and we can do this. It'll be complicated, it'll be challenging. We won't get it all right in the beginning, and we shouldn't try and tackle everything in the beginning, which is a bit of a concern. But I think we'll get it. It would be great for you to talk about on the positive side your takeaways from the discussions on how AI can benefit America that's not just strictly economic, from innovation or attack or daily life.

14:07It's very difficult for us to quantify some of these things. I can sound very specific and learned by just throwing out figures. Within X years we'll solve cancer, but no, we're going to rapidly compress the treatment and drug development time one, something I've heard from our pharmaceutical makers. We will come up with drought -resistant climate change, resistant crops to help feed the world, become more productive, drive down the cost of food. We'll develop the ability to have tailored, personalized tutor services and mental health services, vastly expanding the workforce in those areas, leveraging technology so that we'll have mental health providers and areas that we don't.

14:48We can clean up the environment in all sorts of creative ways, ways that our artificial intelligence technologies will illuminate some of the solutions to hard challenges. We'll have ways of reading health records so that we can discern probabilities of getting certain types of infections, certain prophylactic measures we can take to extend and improve and save people's lives. We don't have the benefit of those AI sort of insights. We can decrease the rate at which mistakes are made within a medical healthcare context. So, I mean, it goes on and on. And this is what we should be talking about.

15:26I'm sitting on a commission right now pertaining to synthetic biology. And so much of advanced biology these days really involves the use of artificial intelligence, technologies. And so, I have charged the commission with educating me and members on specific things, innovations from material science to medicine to environmental health that I can start touting because that's going to be very powerful for my constituents and also for colleagues. As an outsider, it feels to me like the general discourse is getting more sane. And so I've actually gotten a lot of faith in the process. Well, I tend to make people feel that way.

16:04But I mean in general, I just meant the national discourse. But the natural discourse does feel like - I say you meant in this conversation. Also this one too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think people are becoming much more reasonable about it and so forth. I just feel like you're one of the people that's really been advocating for AI research. I think it's the right thing to do. Thank you very much for doing that. Is your job getting easier in my right? Or has it shifted noticeably since it started to say two years ago? I would say we were able to foresee the need for more research dollars as it relates to artificial intelligence.

16:35Myself, Senator Schumer, who helped get signed into law the Chips and Science Act. We made a massive allocation for additional federal research through places like the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy. It wasn't easy to get that included with the chips piece, but arguably that will even be more consequential towards our economic security and our national security in the longer run than will the chips piece. So that authorization will allow us to now appropriate money if members of Congress can be persuaded for AI. And so I feel like half of that hard work is done. And we've got a lot more work to do, but I think the job's getting easier because we pass the chipset.

17:16And it's not just the authorization of research, but we've already made the argument very recently that something that falls outside of the direct DOD context as most the chips and science act does is indeed a national security investment. So, you got the institutional muscle memory used to that notion that is a historical and modern history. My colleagues typically don't think of an investment in the National Science Foundation as a national security investment, but it is. And then we also were able to make the case to my colleagues that by making these sorts of critical investments in research and in next generation technologies as we did through the Chipson Science Act, it's going to lead to a lot of economic growth.

17:58and we were able to personalize that argument state by state. So that's the very same argument that we have for this situation, artificial intelligence. So this is going to be repeating a little bit, and I apologize, I just think this is so important. So many of the DCNs I just hear understand the CHIPSAC and why it's important. A lot of people here that come from the investment committee or founders or whatever, probably don't understand the implication. Five of you, it is literally one of the most significant pieces of legislation in 50 years on on -innovation. It's a huge, huge, huge benefit.

18:25It was the right thing to do. And so if you could just take just a couple minutes of describe at the highest level for those that are not inside of what it is I think it's so important to get this message out. Yeah So the Chipson Science Act was at once. It was a 53 billion dollar investment in both research and incentives for the semiconductor industry the incentives would be to reshore some of our manufacturing capacity so that our supply chains Would not be as vulnerable to interruption as they of course were during the global pandemic and they It could be God forbid there was a geopolitical effort to interrupt those supply chains, say, by the Chinese Communist Party making aggressive actions towards Taiwan.

19:08It was also a national security effort because of course we need micro -processors and we need our own radiation hardened, domestically manufactured micro -processors to go into nuclear weapons, to go into our radar systems, and all manner of other things. So that was the micro processor piece and we have been in the process now, where some of that money starting to flow over $200 billion of private capital has been invested and we're not even at a billion dollars, even close to it, of federal monies that has been released. So it's paying handsome dividends, the market is responding, and we're becoming less risky in our supply chain.

19:47The idea was not to become independent of other countries. And then there's this whole other end science piece, which for the purposes of this conversation, big investments in research, which I mentioned earlier, not just in artificial intelligence, but that research can also flow to hypersonics, quantum computing, synthetic biology, autonomous systems, and other areas, far upstream, of course. But a bit more applied research than the curiosity -driven research that most people tend to associate with the NSF. Yeah, that's great. So, a number of investors are kind of like these kind of free markets solve everything and like kind of almost libertarian vent.

20:25I am not that. I worked at Livermore, I worked for DOE over two more efforts. I'm a huge believer in the government of the New Blueprint in actually national institutions and involvement. That said, there's been an ongoing dialogue with what is the right roles between kind of private and public partnerships for things like AI? What is the right balance? So, I would love your view on how we can work together on this. where the government stops, you know, where the free markets pick up. Like how do you think about that as we go forward? Well, I look to history. I look at what we did in the space race.

20:57I look at the innovations that have occurred through our DOE labs, like the one you worked at, like the one that developed fracking technology before the frackers claimed it their own, right? So many innovations have been earned off of the toil of our researchers in our DOE labs through our land grant colleges and the other constellation of research agencies So we need to keep making those investments. Over the years, the federal government started to pull back from research that wasn't curiosity -driven. Wasn't basic research, theoretical sort of research as opposed to more applied. We need some more applied research.

21:35I think that's one of the lessons we've learned in recent history. Beyond that, we need clear rules of the road, clear regulations. Those regulations ought to typically be, And I use my words very carefully here because they're exceptions to everything. But they typically should be technology agnostic so that we don't favor or constrain different types of technologies within the market. That's investors, that's business people, that's consumers. And then we're going to have to work with our partners and allies on development of standards for some of these, what I'll call platform technologies.

22:08There aren't many artificial intelligence and synthetic biology are the ones that really come to mind. So there's a diplomatic component that if we want our values embedded in this and follow on generation AI technologies, we better develop and design those technologies here, but we also need to embed the standards that we have as it relates to privacy, consumer protection, and other things into those technologies rather than leaving it to I'll pick on the Chinese Communist Party again. Yeah, perfect. Okay, so we have the last minute. So I only thought it was fair because when I was at the insight form, you asked me this question.

22:45So I'm gonna ask you two questions that you asked me. The first one, it may be a hard question. It's not. What would you give the chances of P -Dume? The probability of P -Dume. The probability of P -Dume. This is colored by my optimism, right? But low, you didn't ask me to make it on a tape, you'd be qualitative. Yeah, low but not nonexistent. which is how most of the doomsday scenarios are. Their low probability high cost, and we need to hedge against them, but let me say this, the first step in hedging against them is to really seek to understand them, to study them a lot better. So that before you take more costly action, constraining the opportunity cost for humanity ahead, we really know what we're talking about.

23:32I love that. Well, that's a very quick question with my flair. Do you think that P -DOOM or P -DOOM is a probability that we as humanity has a catastrophic event? Do you think it's greater with or without AI? I think in the short run, and you'll see I'm not pandering. Yeah, I love it. This is great. Here's what we're probably gonna have. We're gonna have in the short run some unsteadiness, right? Because we're trying to learn countermeasures. We're trying to figure out how systems work. We're trying to figure all sorts of things. And then in the long run, I think we can actually push the risk down.

24:03Awesome. Thank you so much. You're wonderful. Thank you. Thanks. Now, if you have made it this far, don't forget that you can get an inside look into A6CZ's American Dynamism Summit at A6CZ .com slash 80 Summit. There, you can catch several of the exclusive stage talks featuring policymakers like Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, or Governor Westmore of Maryland. Plus, both founders from companies like Andral and Coinbase and funders like Mark Cuban. All building toward American dynamism. Again, you can find all of the above at a6cz .com slash 80 -Semitismet. And we'll include a link in the show notes.