Erin Beach
Within the next two-and-a-half decades, Vinod Khosla, an investor in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, thinks we will have access to free professional services and humanlike robots thanks to AI.
In a recent episode of Eric Newcomer's "Cerebral Valley Podcast," venture capitalist Khosla made some predictions on what AI could look like in the near future.
The 68-year-old billionaire said given AI's impressive capabilities, "I do think in 10 years we'll have free doctors, free tutors for everybody, and free lawyers so they can access the legal system."
By 2048, Khosla expects there to be entire populations of robots that stand upright the way humans do.
"I also forecast in 25 years we will have a billion bipedal robots," Khosla said. "That will create a massive industry larger than today's auto industry."
"My bet is we'll have more than a million in less than 10 years," Khosla continued regarding the bipedal robots.
On the question of GPT-5, what would be the next iteration of OpenAI's large-language model GPT-4, Khosla expects that AI's capabilities will grow in ways we haven't seen yet.
"We haven't seen anywhere near the limits of AI capability," Khosla said. "That's a reasonable assumption."
That doesn't mean we should be afraid of AI. Earlier in the podcast episode, he called "sentient AI" — the ability for robots to develop consciousness — "nonsensical." Instead of thinking about AI doomsday scenarios, like how it could lead to the destruction of humanity, he believes that people should be thinking about how AI can make a positive impact on the world.
"Too many people are looking at the dystopian angle of this one percent probability of something bad happening and ignoring the benefits to humanity of AI," Khosla said.
"He believes the path to reinventing societal infrastructure and providing a resource rich lifestyle to all 7 billion + on the planet runs through AI given its multiplicative power on labor and expertise," a spokesperson for Khosla Ventures, the investor's venture capital firm, told Business Insider in an email.
"It is the only way to realize his dream of near free doctors and tutors 24/7 for every child on the planet."
Khosla has been vocal about the potential impacts of AI for years. In 2016, Khosla wrote in a paper that he believes AI automation may displace up to 80% of the work physicians and healthcare workers do. He expanded on this point in March of this year, saying that AI could do 80% of jobs in 25 years, giving people more time for other pursuits.
"This large transformation is the opportunity to free humanity from the need to work," Khosla told Semafor in an interview. "People will work when they want to work on what they want to work on."
It's clear that the investor has long believed in the revolutionary potential of AI. After all, his VC firm, Khosla Ventures, invested $50 million into OpenAI in 2019 and poured funds into other AI startups like Replit as well.
Still, Khosla told Business Insider in October he doesn't want to place too big of a bet on AI at the moment. Given the hype around the technology, Khosla thinks that AI startups are overvalued, and that only a few will survive.
"Investing in momentum is a bad idea," Khosla said regarding AI.
