Bill Gurley rails against regulatory capture in AI

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Venture capitalist Bill Gurley paced onstage at an event this week and asked the audience to yell a sentence that would not normally generate excitement.

Gurley—who as a general partner at VC firm Benchmark has invested in the likes of Uber, Grubhub, and Zillow—warned about the dangers of “regulatory capture.” He described his own experiences butting up against it as he championed innovative startups, and then described the role it may play in artificial intelligence.

He described how “hundreds of mayors” were excited by the company’s wireless mesh networking technology, hoping to “provide free wi-fi service across their downtown area.”

In the case of Philadelphia, he said, Verizon and Comcast used lobbyists to push bills through the Pennsylvania legislature that would protect their positions from upstart challengers like Tropos.

If large language models (LLMs)—which power AI chatbots like ChatGPT—are open source, the reasoning goes, more startups will be able to innovate and challenge incumbents.

Altman and Microsoft have denied this characterization, and Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and cofounder, shared his thoughts on the the switch away from open source in an interview with The Verge in March:

The original article contains 951 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

4 comments

- Except "railing" is actually a perfectly cromulent word to be using in this context. To rail against something means "to revile or scold in harsh, insolent, or abusive language." There's nothing wrong with using it here.
The talk in question: https://youtu.be/F9cO3-MLHOM?si=BVP9h6OgHqo3DBsC
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/F9cO3-MLHOM?si=BVP9h6OgHqo3DBsC
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Venture capitalist Bill Gurley paced onstage at an event this week and asked the audience to yell a sentence that would not normally generate excitement.
Gurley—who as a general partner at VC firm Benchmark has invested in the likes of Uber, Grubhub, and Zillow—warned about the dangers of “regulatory capture.” He described his own experiences butting up against it as he championed innovative startups, and then described the role it may play in artificial intelligence.
He described how “hundreds of mayors” were excited by the company’s wireless mesh networking technology, hoping to “provide free wi-fi service across their downtown area.”
In the case of Philadelphia, he said, Verizon and Comcast used lobbyists to push bills through the Pennsylvania legislature that would protect their positions from upstart challengers like Tropos.
If large language models (LLMs)—which power AI chatbots like ChatGPT—are open source, the reasoning goes, more startups will be able to innovate and challenge incumbents.
Altman and Microsoft have denied this characterization, and Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and cofounder, shared his thoughts on the the switch away from open source in an interview with The Verge in March:
The original article contains 951 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!