Open AI's Fraud and Marc Andreessen's #FakeTech Poses A Real Threat To Democracy
A different way to think about the fight between Google versus Microsoft
I like to chin stroke on things in the small hours where few people are awake and much is stirring.
Among my late night musings:
What was meaningfully the difference between Sam Bankman-Fried—and Sam Altman? Is it as simple as crypto and AI? Or is that in and of itself a cover for some larger intelligence operation? Are both Sams really just about selling Chinese chips?
Does either Sam really understand that they are close to Chinese intelligence?
Are treating a lot of these ideologies — effective altruism, effective accelerations, etc. — as if they have anything to offer just hiding the more mob or foreign intelligence operations?
These questions took on renewed urgency now that Ben Horowitz announced that his firm is going to be getting involved in politics to push something they’re calling techno-optimism.
“Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz plans to begin making donations to political candidates who support what it sees as ‘advancing technology,’” writes Dan Primack of Axios. “In short, the firm supports politicians who support swift innovation and startups, particularly in areas of AI, biomedical research and decentralized tech.”
This missive was an extremely interesting and revealing, especially as it indicated Horowitz’s involvement in the overall op. “We are non-partisan, one issue voters: If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them,” writes Horowitz, with echos of the old Bush 43 world of “you’re either with us or against us.”
Neoconservatism, we have seen, is particularly linked to the rise of Facebook where Marc Andreessen remains on the board. Like neoconservatism Facebook, too, has led to a global order that’s deeply exploitative as we’ve seen with the Facebook leaks.
Despite all the evidence of Sheryl Sandberg knowingly allowing teenage girls to self harm thanks to Instagram neither she nor Mark Zuckerberg did anything about it. As I said, Marc Andreessen remains on the board.
There’s a lot to be asked here.
Is Andreessen Horowitz even contributing to technological progress? How will Horowitz know if the technology is actually going to produce an optimistic technology-enabled future?
We’ve seen already that Andreessen Horowitz don’t invest in technology companies which make us safer — they passed on Othram and Clearview, for example — but they do invest in companies closely-linked to foreign governments like Israel and China. For all of the talk of American Dynamism it’s doubtful that either its founders — Katherine Boyle or David Ulevitch — could pass a security review. And while it’s cool and all to have Sequoia or some other Chinese venture firm be under strict review we also need to look very closely at all the Israeli or Chinese-Israeli friendly firms—firms like Andreessen Horowitz.
There’s a simple solution for a lot of these things: take your tech products to the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)—and have an assessment done. Indeed NIST is seemingly very interested in vetting a lot of the claims made by AI companies. Several of my portfolio companies have gone through just such a vetting.
To sweeten any assessment NIST could even go so far as to make it so that any company which passes a counterintelligence background check and NIST’s standards could be eligible to win government contracts. Such a process would have the added benefit of encouraging high standards in AI companies. You could envision a world in which NIST, working with other government agencies, gave AI licenses to companies to build products using government data. And yet the unwillingness of Andreessen Horowitz’s portfolio companies to have such a NIST assessment done is a tell. They’re interested in jamming their tech into our stack, not in working within our system.
Of course there’s a long checkered history of oligarchs trying to purchase our democracy. (The robber barons who founded and funded Stanford would like a word.)
Sam Bankman-Fried got in trouble for trying to subvert the democratic process by donating heavily to pro-crypto candidates. Time will tell if Andreessen Horowitz gets in trouble for a similar dastardly effort to elect purportedly pro-technology candidates. I suspect that they’ll really just be a pro-Andreessen Horowitz’s money.
More likely Andreessen Horowitz will simply fund a bunch of Kalorama or Georgetown lobbyists, who needing to pay school fees or pay off ex-wives, will tell these nerds exactly what they want to hear. They’re travelers in these DC parts and we, the Deep State, are the innkeepers. Put another way Andreessen Horowitz seems resistant to learning. All that money, so little education.
There have been many overtures from the U.S. intelligence agencies toward the tech ecosystem. I know because I have been involved with them.
The smarter of the tech types have already cut a deal with the Deep State. There’s a direct line to Palantir, fake as it is, getting a contract with the National Health Service and Thiel’s turn away from the Russians. Thiel had to turn in the Weinstein brothers but once he did that, he was seemingly kosher enough for the U.S. deep state.
Excepting Thiel, though, what we have is a bunch of performances of child stars, trying to tell us how the world ought to be. It doesn’t quite work.
The most challenging of them is seemingly Andreessen Horowitz, which isn’t so much a venture firm as it is a studio.
Here’s how the New York Times discussed the firm in 2015.
In some ways, Andreessen Horowitz is a talent agency as much as a tech investor. Marc Andreessen, the web pioneer who was a founder of Netscape and other companies before trying his hand at venture capital, has made this point explicitly. At a private event in 2010, a video of which The Wall Street Journal made public, he interviewed Michael Ovitz, the onetime Hollywood superagent who started Creative Artists Agency.
“A lot of what we’re trying to do at Andreessen Horowitz is based directly on Michael’s experience building C.A.A.,” Andreessen told an audience in 2010.
This a construct factory, in other words.
The reason so many of the tech leaders seem fake is because they are. This isn’t an Edison tinkering on his parents farm but a casting call with perhaps a casting couch as anyone who learns about the Silicon Valley gays, especially Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, learns rather quickly.
Alas it did not go well for Ovitz, who claimed a “gay mafia” in LA was out to get him. Was Ovitz right? Hard to say. I’ve always thought Ovitz as Chisrael versus David Geffen’s Mossad and it’s easy to hope both sides lose.
Still part of the reason Andreessen seems to like this model is that he was a child star and so he seems very comfortable in that world. It’s arguably all he really knows.
From the moment he appeared on the scene Marc Andreessen is intrinsically linked to Microsoft. Andreessen was, I think it’s fair to say, supposed to be the new Bill Gates once the Clinton administration’s anti-trust policy took off.
After all, Andreessen’s company Netscape was seen as a kind of competitor to Bill Gates. For what it’s worth I’ve always seen Netscape as the Israelis running both sides of the trade.
It can’t be a coincidence that it was around the time that Gates appeared on the cover of Time Magazine that the Maxwells came into his life.
Here’s how the Guardian describes Isabel Maxwell’s relationship with Gates in 2000:
Commtouch, an Israeli company, was attracted to Maxwell's optimism when it head-hunted her in 1997. Maxwell says it is the embodiment of the Israeli business culture. 'It's cohesive, innovative, disciplined' - and she is having the best 'corporate work experience' of her life.
Admittedly, it has been hit by the slump in hi-tech stocks, but Maxwell is san guine about it. 'If you look on the bottom of the market floor now it's just debris. Everyone's been battered.' The fact that big names such as Microsoft have bought into the company suggests Commtouch is better positioned to take the pain than many.
Maxwell jokes about persuading Bill Gates to make a personal investment in the business. In a faux southern belle accent, she purrs: 'He's got to spend $375m a year to keep his tax free status, why not allow me to help him.' She explodes with laughter.
Is it too much to suspect that the Gates Foundation and the Giving Pledge itself is but a means of financing black ops around the world? Israeli interesting to consider…
Wouldn’t that at least provide something of a plausible explanation for its abject failure at solving many of the issues it seeks to tackle?
Why here’s Larry Summer immediately next to Jeffrey Epstein, center, and Bill Gates — almost as if they already know the answer.
Microsoft versus Google is Fake versus Real.
Google is real; Microsoft is fake. That’s the takeaway from recent events.
If we are honest about it Open AI is a bullshit engine and a failed gamble for Microsoft. Even Bill Gates seems to realize that Open AI has plateaued. As time goes on and the connections between the cultists at Open AI and the Likud party are laid bare it’s hard to see how Microsoft’s current leadership survives.
Rather than do the right thing — of cleaning out the criminal Israelis who had compromised Azure — Satya Nadella seemingly decided to get further in bed with them. There’s plenty of evidence that Nadella has a criminal past of his own which we may well explore in another space.
In any event he’s ill-equipped to run America’s largest tech company as the macroeconomics shift away from consumer technology.
Publius reminds us that governments are formed by reflection and choice and it’s hard to see how an engine which creates deep fakes is consistent with that mission of self government. So yes, Microsoft has lost a lot of the confidence of the U.S. intelligence community as it’s increasingly got a leaky cloud. Is there a world in which AI is used to create fake evidence for law enforcement and the courts? Absolutely. Even the threat of fake evidence is enough to derail an investigation by wasting an intelligence officer’s scarce time. Such efforts violate due process of American citizens.
And yet as America gets more involved in the world and its empire continues to grow, there’s a demand for the empire’s data to be well organized and even predictive. This is an Age of Empires and empires require data and bureaucrats to parce it. We don’t often like talking this way — “we’re a commercial Republic!” — but this is what’s up. You’ll increasingly see the private empires — think Gates, Musk, Thiel etc. — join up or get cut down to scale.
The Pax Americana is over. America is in two hot wars with a good three or four conflicts which could go kinetic. This geopolitical reality has created a need for real technology. We don’t have time for things not to work.
Real technology is going to produce a demand for computing and hosting that’s beyond anything else currently offered. This need will be especially true as the U.S. deploys resources around the globe in areas that have hitherto lacked social services.
As the United States becomes an empire again it’ll need archives and Google alone is poised to host that material. Amazon Web Service is showing its strain and its leaderlessness. If Bezos got the contracts for the CIA and NSA because his grandfather was Lawrence Gise — an early employee at DARPA and the Atomic Energy Committee — it doesn’t work if Bezos isn’t there to direct the operation.
Hosting material will logically require artificial intelligence for the simple reason that those who host databases will want to get more value from their databases.
This is why, incidentally, that Salesforce has to have one of theirs — former CEO Bret Taylor — as chairman of Open AI. If it’s possible to do all kinds of interesting work off of databases then database company Salesforce can’t afford to be blind to these efforts. Try as Salesforce and Marc Benioff might, they keep falling short of being accepted into the Deep State fold as the new Michael Bloomberg.
Adam D’Angelo, CEO of Quora, similarly can’t ignore something as powerful as Open AI — with its purported ease of answering any question by anyone — if he’s running a people-powered search engine like Quora. (For what it’s worth I had recommended to D’Angelo to sell genetic tests to his users but he demurred. Wouldn’t it have been cool to search answers based upon people’s genetic traits?)
What’s less obvious is why Larry Summer is on the board. And then you realize that he’s a sort of mob fixer. He can do for Open AI what he did for Facebook — and help it avoid scrutiny.
What’s next for Google: Government, government, and government.
There’s a lot of talk about reducing inflation but Google could well be a force for reducing prices. There are all manner of places where information asymmetries harm the public. Google could help the state do a much better job of looking for where to move. Rather than “Don’t Do Evil,” Google could start to do “Real Good.” Google needs to drive Google Cloud and the only way to do that is to go outside of Google to look for future oriented startups.
I’d start with pharmagenomics, which we will turn to in greater detail soon.
Imagine logging into Google and seeing an option to securely sequence yourself and your family without any of the foreign penetration of 23andMe or Ancestry.com.
Correlating that data from your search history and your email would yield for way better ads, provided, of course, that they weren’t exploitative. I’d move from consumer technology to stewardship tech.
Were I Google I’d want access to the companies that are the best in these spaces. I’d use the NIST ratings to either acquire or partner with them accordingly.
Naturally — if we’re talking our book — it’d look closely at Othram (forensics), Clearview (facial recognition), Terradepth (submarine), Umbra (SAR satellite), and Traitwell (genomics).
Google could offer these companies the same deal it offered Sam Altman — with a twist.
Offer free cloud hosting for a percentage of the business.
Just make sure that the technology is Real Good — and good for the world.