AI could make all expertise free within 15 years, billionaire VC says

Billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla believes artificial intelligence will make pretty much all expertise free within the next two decades.

“I’m almost certain, within the next 10-15 years, we can have free doctors for everybody on the planet, or near-free, with the cost of computing,” he said at the Forbes Iconoclast Summit in New York on Thursday morning. “We’ll have nearly-free personal tutors for every child on the planet, because AI will be the AI tutor.”

“Whether you’re talking about structural engineers or oncologists, almost all the expertise will be free,” he said, noting that the technology will make this possible within the next decade, but that it could take 20-25 years to reach full adoption. The investor didn’t elaborate substantially on how this will happen.

The billionaire’s venture firm, Khosla Ventures, has skin in the game as an early backer of OpenAI. Khosla, who describes himself as a “techno-optimist with real empathy and care,” has long been entrenched in Silicon Valley, co-founding Sun Microsystems out of Stanford in 1982. The investor regularly makes headlines for his 15-year effort to keep people off a public beach adjacent to his land.

Khosla likened the technology to the development of the internet, but noted that AI is “the first time we get amplification of the human brain,” he said.

“Almost every function human beings can do will be done more scalably, probably better than humans can do,” he said.

These developments will bring massive productivity gains, but they will also cause increasing income disparity, the VC added. At some point, he said, this could become very deflationary and could ultimately result in needing new ways to measure output via GDP.

Khosla also pointed to the geopolitical consequences surrounding AI, as the race for chips and AI technology continues to heat up between the world’s two largest economies.

“We’re clearly in a technoeconomic war with China, and whoever wins that will have huge economic influence,” he said. “And because of economic influence, influence on politics, policy, and ideology.”

“And I, for one, don’t want the Chinese ideology to win,” he said.

The VC said he supports the use of any and all measures to curb China’s development in the space, including trade restrictions. The U.S. strength in this battle, according to Khosla, is in its entrepreneurial ecosystem and openness to creativity and imagination.