I'm one of the recipients of the AI grants, to support my work at fast.ai. I'm extremely grateful to a16z for their support. Here's some additional details based on questions I see in the comments: My grant covered the purchase of a Scalar server from Lambda Labs, which allowed me to configure a system with 8 previous-gen A6000 GPUs, partly also thanks to NVIDIA who has recently given me 3 of those cards, and Lambda…
"There is one final, and real, AI risk that is probably the scariest at all:
AI isn’t just being developed in the relatively free societies of the West, it is also being developed by the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China.
China has a vastly different vision for AI than we do – they view it as a mechanism for authoritarian population control, full stop. They are not even being secretive about this, they are very clear about it, and they are already pursuing their agenda. And they do not intend to limit their AI strategy to China – they intend to proliferate it all across the world, everywhere they are powering 5G networks, everywhere they are loaning Belt And Road money, everywhere they are providing friendly consumer apps like Tiktok that serve as front ends to their centralized command and control AI.
The single greatest risk of AI is that China wins global AI dominance and we – the United States and the West – do not.
I propose a simple strategy for what to do about this – in fact, the same strategy President Ronald Reagan used to win the first Cold War with the Soviet Union.
'We win, they lose.'
Rather than allowing ungrounded panics around killer AI, “harmful” AI, job-destroying AI, and inequality-generating AI to put us on our back feet, we in the United States and the West should lean into AI as hard as we possibly can.
We should seek to win the race to global AI technological superiority and ensure that China does not."
I don't think one needs to think too hard about the grave consequences a mission of "We win, they lose" may have for human survival.