After a winning crusade to defeat a California AI safety bill earlier this year, Andreessen Horowitz partner Martin Casado claims he’s tired of venture capitalists taking the lead on the regulation conversation.
Casado was a particularly vocal voice among a chorus of VCs who opposed SB 1047, a proposal that would have required the makers of large-scale models to meet safety testing and risk mitigation requirements in order to curb potential catastrophic consequences of AI, like the escalation of nuclear war. Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill after it had passed both legislative chambers.
“I’m a venture capitalist, so clearly I’ve got a bias, right? So I should be a voice, but I should not drive the conversation. But in that case I was actually driving the conversation,” he said. Going forward, he’s hopeful that academics and technologists will be the ones to inform policymakers.
Casado was joined by Dawn Song, a computer science professor at U.C. Berkeley and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence.