Two of the most successful investors on Wall Street are praising the possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the hope they bring to the future.
Key Details
- American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Marc Andreessen recently shared his glowing perspective on AI in a 7,000-word essay that claims the technology could save the world.
- ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood praised the billionaire investor in a tweet, thanking him for his bold perspective on a technology she is heavily invested in.
- “Like you, I was early in my career when you nailed the platform shift that ushered in the internet age. Thank you for your perspective and inspiration as AI catapults us into an even-more profound platform shift that could transform the lives of everyone on Earth,” she says.
Why It’s News
The rapid expansion and embrace of AI have drawn repeated praise from investors and entrepreneurs, who see the technology as a new tool for increasing productivity, profitability, and innovation. This does not mean it lacks critics, as many prominent thought leaders have warned that AI in the wrong hands could have a devastating effect on humanity. Tesla CEO Elon Musk echoed these concerns, sarcastically replying to Andreessen’s essay and asking, “How many years do we have before AI kills us all?”
Andreesen and Wood both faced scrutiny from commenters on Twitter, who argued that current AI technology on the market is not having the effect of saving humanity. Others bleakly prophesied that AI would have the opposite effect and bring about the end of mankind, The Street notes.
Andreessen directly challenges this idea in his essay, pointing out that AI has no wants or goals and cannot become alive or gain sentience. He also addressed claims that AI will destroy society, destroy jobs, create inequality, and empower dangerous people with immense technological abilities.
Wood’s tweet comes in the weeks after she sold hundreds of thousands of Nvidia shares, just before the company received an AI-boosted rally that pushed its market cap above $1 trillion, costing ARK Invest more than $200 million.
Notable Quotes
“What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here. AI augmentation of human intelligence has already started—AI is already around us in the form of computer control systems of many kinds, is now rapidly escalating with AI Large Language Models like ChatGPT, and will accelerate very quickly from here—if we let it,” writes Andreessen.
“The stakes here are high. The opportunities are profound. AI is quite possibly the most important—and best—thing our civilization has ever created, certainly on par with electricity and microchips and probably beyond those. The development and proliferation of AI—far from a risk that we should fear—is a moral obligation that we have to ourselves, to our children, and to our future. We should be living in a much better world with AI, and now we can,” he continues.
