“The frontier AI companies invited the government into the room. Now the government is beginning to behave as if it owns the door, the guest list, the schedule, and the product roadmap.” — Keith Teare

Last week, I was away in Europe. So Keith Teare ran our That Was The Week show solo — with a chillingly authentic Andrew Keen bot. So realistic, in fact, that the fake version sounds (to me, at least) more interesting than the real one.

The bad news is that I’m back. The good news is it’s been an interesting week in tech. That was the week in which the US Commerce Department told both OpenAI and Anthropic that they now need government approval for whom they can sell their frontier AI models. This is supposedly “voluntary” — for now, at least.

Keith’s TWTW editorial argues that Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have spent over a year crying wolf about the dangers of their own technology, supposedly deliberately seeking government involvement as a regulatory moat against competitors. And now the government has walked through the door that Sam and Dario left ajar. Now, Keith argues, the US government is behaving as if it owns not just the door and the guest list, but the entire product roadmap. “Payback’s a bitch,” Keith bristles in his editorial.

The other major news this week is the rumour (via David Sacks) that OpenAI has offered the US government a 50% stake in a sovereign wealth fund. If true, this would change everything — not just in Silicon Valley, but in the political debate about public ownership of our AI economy. It’s not just tech insiders like Sacks and Altman who are on board the sovereign wealth fund express, but also Bernie Sanders and other leftist critics of Big Tech. So maybe payback, at least when it comes to public investment in AI, isn’t always such a bitch.

Five Takeaways

• The Fake Andrew Keen. An hour of work. A local Nvidia GPU. No third-party service. Andrew second-guessed whether he was actually there. The question for every future episode: which Andrew are you listening to?

• Payback’s a Bitch. AI leadership spent more than a year crying wolf about existential risk — to create a regulatory moat. The government believed them. Now it owns the door, the guest list, and the product roadmap. They asked for this. They got it.

• American and Chinese State Capitalism Converging. America has prided itself on free enterprise even as the internet, atomic technology, and now AI were all substantially government-shaped. China is just more explicit about it. The direction of travel is the same.

• OpenAI’s Rumoured 50% Stake Offer. Keith has heard from David Sacks that OpenAI has offered the government a 50% stake in a sovereign wealth fund distributing dividends to citizens. Sacks thinks 50% is too small. A company that aspired to ‘open’ AI is offering the state a controlling interest.

• Paul Kennedy and American Decline. It is historically impossible for America to retain its first-place status. China, India, and Asia are where most future growth will be. Does the AI boom change this? No. It may slow the decline. America: an older gentleman on a rocking chair. Europe won’t even be in the chair.

About the Guest

Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of That Was the Week. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch.

References

That Was the Week by Keith Teare: thatwa.st
Azeem Azhar, The Exponential View: the AI economy at $175 billion
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Chapters:

00:00:38 The fake Andrew Keen
00:02:11 Commerce Department tells OpenAI and Anthropic they need permission
00:02:58 Payback’s a bitch
00:05:50 American and Chinese state capitalism converging
00:08:32 OpenAI’s rumoured 50% stake offer
00:28:42 America’s inevitable decline: Paul Kennedy
00:31:32 Azeem Azhar: the AI economy at $175 billion
00:34:27 Is the real Andrew better than the fake one?