Y Combinator president and CEO Garry Tan told a crowd at the Economic Club of Washington, DC this week that “regulation is essential” for artificial intelligence.
Tan spoke with General Catalyst board member Teresa Carlson in a personal interview to discuss everything. How to Join Y Combinator for AI, noting that “there’s no better time to work in technology than right now.”
Tan said he is “overall supportive” of the effort by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to create the GenAI Risk Mitigation Framework, adding that “a big part of it is the research and development of the GenAI Risk Mitigation Framework.” EO by the Biden Administration Maybe we are on the right track.”
The NIST framework proposes the following: Such as defining that GenAI must comply with existing laws governing things like data privacy and copyright; disclosing the use of GenAI to end users; establishing rules that prevent GenAI from creating child sexual abuse material, etc. Biden’s executive order includes a wide range of directives, from requiring AI companies to share security data with the government to ensuring that smaller developers have fair access.
But Tan, like many other Valley VCs, was wary of other regulatory efforts. He called the AI-related bills moving through the California and San Francisco legislatures “very worrisome.”
For instance, one bill that’s making waves in California, introduced by state senator Scott Wiener, would allow the attorney general to sue AI companies if their stuff is harmful, Politico reports.
“The big discussion at the moment in terms of policy more broadly is what does a good version of this actually look like?” Tan said. “We can look to people like Ian HogarthIn the UK, to be thoughtful. They are also conscious of this idea of concentration of power. At the same time, they are trying to figure out how do we support innovation while also minimising the worst possible harm.”
Hogarth is a former YC entrepreneur and AI expert who has been included in the U.K. AI Model Taskforce.
“What scares me is that if we try to address a concern through science fiction, it won’t even exist,” Tan said.
Regarding YC’s handling of responsibility, Tan said that if the organization doesn’t agree with a startup’s mission or what the product wants to do for society, “YC doesn’t fund it.” He said that sometimes he reads in the media about a company that has applied to YC.
“When we went back and looked at the interview notes, it turned out we didn’t think it was good for society. And thankfully, we didn’t fund it,” he said.
Artificial intelligence leaders keep messing up
Tan’s vision still leaves room for Y Combinator Start lots of AI startups As the cohort graduates. As my colleague Kyle Wiggers pointed out, according to YC’s official startup directory, there were 86 AI startups in the Winter 2024 cohort, nearly double the number from the Winter 2023 batch and nearly triple the number from Winter 2021.
And recent news stories have left people wondering whether they can trust those selling AI products to define responsible AI. Last week, TechCrunch reported that OpenAI is getting rid of its AI responsibility team,
Then there was the controversy surrounding the company’s use of a voice that resembled actress Scarlett Johansson during a demo Its new GPT-4o model. Found out, He was asked about the use of his voiceAnd he turned them down. OpenAI has since removed Sky Voice, though it denied it was based on Johansson. That, and issues around OpenAI’s ability to withdraw vested employee equity, were among several items Encouraged people to openly question Sam Altman’s Doubts.
Meanwhile, Meta made news for its own take on AI when it announced Creation of an AI advisory council consisting of only white menThat effectively left out women and people of color, many of whom had played key roles in building and innovating that industry.
Tan didn’t mention any of these examples. Like most Silicon Valley VCs, he sees opportunities for new, huge, lucrative businesses.
“We like to think of startups as a labyrinth of ideas,” Tan said. “When a new technology comes out, like big language models, the whole labyrinth of ideas shakes up. ChatGPT was probably one of the fastest-successful consumer products released recently. And that’s good news for founders.”
artificial intelligence of the future
Tan also said that San Francisco is at the center of the AI movement. For example, it’s where Anthropic, which was started by YC alumni, and OpenAI, which was a YC spinout, started.
Tan also joked that he would not follow in Altman’s footsteps, saying Altman “took my job many years ago, so there are no plans to start an AI lab.”
One of YC’s other success stories is legal tech startup Casetext, which Sold to Thomson Reuters Tan believed that Casetext was one of the first companies in the world to have access to generative AI and then it was one of the first exit companies in generative AI.
Looking into the future of AI, Tan said that “clearly, we need to be smart about this technology” as it relates to the risks of bioterrorism and cyber attacks. At the same time, he said there should be a “much more measured approach.”
He also acknowledged that it is unlikely to be a “winner takes all” model, but rather “there is freedom of choice for the consumer and the incredible potential for founders to build something that impacts a billion people.”
At least, that’s what he’d like to see. It would be in his and YC’s best interest — lots of successful startups returning lots of cash to investors. So what Tan fears most is not rogue AI, but a lack of AI to choose from.
“We could actually find ourselves in this other monopolistic situation where there’s too much concentration in just a few models. Then you’re talking about rent extraction, and you have a world I don’t want to live in.”
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