Marc Andreessen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why is open-source AI in particular important for national security? For a whole bunch of reasons. One is, it is really hard to do security without open source. There are actually two schools of thought on information security, computer security broadly, that have played out over the last 50 years. There was one school of security that says you want to basically hide the source code, and you want to hide the source code precisely. This seems intuitive because, presumably, you want to hide the source code so that bad guys can’t find the flaws in it, right? Presumably, that would be the safe way to do things. Then over the course of the last 30 or 40 years, basically, what’s evolved is the realization in the field (and I think very broadly) that actually, that’s a mistake. In the software field, we call that “security through obscurity,” right? We hide the code. People can’t exploit it. The problem, of course, is: okay, but that means the flaws are still in there, right? If anybody actually gets to the code, they just basically have a complete index of all the problems. There’s a whole bunch of ways for people to get the code. They hack in. It’s actually very easy to steal software code from a company. You hire the janitorial staff to stick a USB stick into a machine at 3:00 in the morning. Software companies are very easily penetrated. It turned out, security through obscurity was a very bad way to do it. The much more secure way to do it is actually open source. Basically, put the code in public and then basically build the code in such a way that when it runs, it doesn’t matter whether somebody has access to the code. It’s still fully secure, and then you just have a lot more eyes on the code to discover the problems. In general, open source has turned out to be much more secure. I would start there. If we want secure systems, I think this is what we have to do. What’s the biggest adjustment problem governments will face as AI progresses? For instance, if drug discovery goes up by 3X, all of a sudden, the FDA is overloaded. If regulatory comments are open, AI can write great regulatory comments. What does government have to do to get by in this new world?…

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