Washington, D.C. May 2024. There are new revelations of secret government control over Big Tech. Marc Andreessen, a tech billionaire and venture capitalist, described a “horrifying” meeting with the Biden Administration that cemented his decision to endorse Donald Trump for president.
“Andreessen is a towering figure in Silicon Valley, with many investments in start-up tech ventures.” He states that Biden administration officials explicitly discouraged entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from pursuing artificial intelligence (AI) startups.
Andreessen said the government was seeking to consolidate AI development into the hands of a few government-aligned corporations while shutting out startups and entrepreneurs. This is so the US government will have total control of the development of the technology.
Government officials said they were “reviving Cold War-era tactics to suppress knowledge and innovation by classifying AI’s foundational mathematics.”
Marc Andreessen:
We had meetings in DC in May where we talked to them about this, and the meetings were absolutely horrifying. We came out basically deciding we had to endorse Trump.
AI is a technology that the government is going to completely control. This is not going to be a startup thing. They actually said flat out to us, “Don’t start, don’t do AI startups. Don’t fund AI startups. It’s not something that we’re going to allow to happen.They’re not going to be allowed to exist. There’s no point.” They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government, and we’re going to basically wrap them in a… I’m paraphrasing, but we’re going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We’re going to protect them from competition, we’re going to control them, and we’re going to dictate what they do.
Then I said, “I don’t understand how you’re going to lock this down so much because the math for AI is out there, and it’s being taught everywhere.” They literally said, “During the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community, and entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn’t proceed.”
Marc Andreessen:
If we decide we need to, we’re going to do the same thing to the math underneath AI. I said, “I’ve just learned two very important things because I wasn’t aware of the former, and I wasn’t aware that you were even conceiving of doing it to the latter.”
