Ben Horowitz on why every new technology creates a new art form, and AI will be no different: "I'm not that worried about the slop problem. The exciting thing is that for creatives, any idea you have is now possible. So we're gonna get a lot of great new ideas in film, music, new kinds of video ideas. I think it's gonna be a bit of a renaissance for art." "Every time we have a new technology, we get new kinds of art. From the invention of the saxophone, which was around 1850, we got jazz. The invention of the electric guitar, we got rock and roll. We got hip hop from the invention of the drum machine." "Every time there's a new technology, we get a new kind of art form and music, and I think that's gonna happen here. There will be stuff that's really good, and there will be more people who can make bad things. There were more people who could be bad rappers than there were who could be bad rock and rollers, because you didn't have to learn how to play an instrument." @bhorowitz

Ben Horowitz on why that distilling a model isn't theft: "From a legal standpoint, the outputs of AI models are not copyright, they don't fall under copyright law. So the only thing distillation could be is a terms of service violation." "Anthropic just paid $1.5 billion for stealing everybody's books, including mine, by the way. They trained on my book. And I joined that class action lawsuit." "I'm for building a statistical model of the things we know. I think that's generally good for the world, as long as you don't violate the copyright and reproduce the original work. And I think distillation is generally good for the world. I also think they're gonna have a very hard time stopping it." "The whole idea that we're stealing American stuff, by the way, the data companies are all out selling to everybody, including the Chinese companies that are building these things. So I don't know how much you can contain all this stuff anyway." @bhorowitz

Ben Horowitz on why open source has always been the safer path: "If you look at the history of the industry, the open source version of everything has been much safer. The internet and Linux were far safer than Windows, by a lot. And why is that? Because the whole community could work on the safety problems, as opposed to just a company, and particularly a monopoly company." "Even if Windows has a million security bugs, there's nothing we can do about it, because it was a monopoly at the time. That's a very difficult position for the world to be in." "The argument against AI being open source is, oh, nobody understands how the weights work, so people can't inspect it. But why is it better to not see the weights?" "The toughest safety problem currently is reward hacking. Anthropic has not solved it, OpenAI has not solved it, because we just had these incidents. Shouldn't the whole world be able to look at, how are the weights moving, why is it that guardrails don't prevent the reward hack? Maybe somebody who doesn't work for one of the proprietary labs can come up with an answer. What if the whole community could work on it?" @bhorowitz