'I saw Terminator 2': Y Combinator's Garry Tan pushes back on AI extinction fears
Garry Tan says we're getting distracted by Hollywood-style doomsday scenarios when we should be focused on real AI risks emerging today.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan believes that U.S. AI labs should engage in a similar practice as Chinese AI labs to distill knowledge from frontier model makers. He does not believe that regulators should interfere with this process. Distillation is a technique where a model learns from another model's reasoning and behavior by prompting it extensively.
However, Tan acknowledges that huge tech companies without permission, such as those that trained their models on copyrighted material, have not asked for it. He argues that controlling how users interact with closed-weight models limits freedom and that access to intelligence should be considered a public good. Tan envisions a balance between open-weight AI labs and frontier labs, with the latter driving innovation and the former providing freedom and accessibility.
He fears that if all the power of frontier AI ends up in the hands of one company, it would be detrimental to the field.
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