Scaling solutions for the climate crisis

JEFF BERMAN: Hi folks, Jeff Berman here. This week, we wanted to share a conversation I had in the fall with Vinod Khosla.

Vinod joined me on stage at the 2024 Masters of Scale Summit to discuss a range of issues, including one of his passions: how to scale solutions to climate change.

The entrepreneur and billionaire investor is a true titan of tech. He’s the founder of Sun Microsystems and Khosla Ventures. Over the past several decades, he has been integral to the success of dozens of tech companies.

Vinod believes we only need a handful of dedicated change-makers to turn the tide on the global climate crisis.

[THEME MUSIC]

BERMAN: I’m Jeff Berman, your host.

Copy LinkVinod Khosla on his ‘instigator thesis’

I spoke to Vinod on stage at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco back in October. We dove straight into a thesis he champions: that we need a small but mighty number of what he calls “instigators” to turn the tide on climate change.

Will you start by telling us about your instigator thesis?

VINOD KHOSLA: I’ve dealt with instigators, which are really entrepreneurs, all my life. But when I was looking at the climate problem and people kept telling me it was a very hard problem, not a solvable problem, I looked at it carefully, and I said, it’s a much simpler problem than people make it out to be.

You only need a dozen instigators in a dozen areas. Everybody can help, everybody can contribute, but we need a dozen instigators to solve the climate crisis.

BERMAN: I mean, okay, so it matters, but it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme, if I drive an electric car or what have you. Why a dozen in a dozen areas?

KHOSLA: Because there’s only a dozen large areas that have large carbon emissions. I’m talking about carbon emissions, and I’m separating climate change from sustainability. To me, they’re quite different things, though they’re often confused. Sustainability is about recycling and things like that. Green approaches get mixed in with some of the wellness approaches to food and other things.

But if you’re strictly looking at the climate change problem, it’s about carbon emissions. And there’s a dozen important areas. Electric vehicles are one. Aviation fuel is another. Plant protein or proteins is another. There’s only a dozen large emission areas that really matter. If we solve them, we will mostly have solved the climate crisis or the carbon emissions crisis. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter what else we do.

BERMAN: Your view is literally one instigator, one entrepreneur in each of these categories can make a difference? Or, make the difference?

KHOSLA: I hate giving Elon Musk any credit, but I do give him credit for instigating the change to electric vehicles. Without him, we would be on a very different path, dependent on General Motors and Volkswagen and Ford to ship electric cars. So, without ever being in the car business, he changed the paradigm of what’s accepted and then got everybody to follow.

BERMAN: We contain multitudes, even Elon Musk.

KHOSLA: Yeah, Pat Brown did that with plant proteins, and I think they are well on their way. They’ll have ups and downs, but I think we are well on our way to solving the protein problem through fundamental scientific innovation. Bob Mumgaard has done that in fusion. I don’t think fusion’s an “if” question. I think five years from now, nobody will be debating whether fusion’s possible. We’ll be asking how fast we can implement it.

BERMAN: Why do you believe we’ll be there within five years?

KHOSLA: Just because if I looked at 2018, when we invested in Commonwealth Fusion, by the way, also invested in OpenAI the same year, and we can come back to that, and a public transit system — three fundamental things in one year—I was very proud of that year. But it isn’t that Bob started that company; we started it in a way where in the following five years, maybe a dozen, maybe 20 start-ups started doing the same thing.

And then when there’s that many shots on goal, and talent and money are flowing in, which is what Bob caused to happen, that’s an instigator. So at this point, whether Bob succeeds or fails, I think the world will have fusion because there are so many good scientific attempts.

BERMAN: And do you believe we have enough time?

KHOSLA: So, I didn’t speak to that issue. We are well on our way in steel. We are well on our way to sustainable aviation fuel. These are things most of you probably haven’t heard of. But I’ve seen the state of development to say at this point, it’s mostly engineering risk. Very often, the risk is cost.

Dispatchable power generation is a big one where there’s more than one approach that will work. And we’ve instigated that change. If I take these dozen areas, I’d say eight of the dozen have very good scientifically sound efforts to develop the technology. That’s the optimist in me. My bet is by 2030, most of these areas will have a solution. And then the 2030s will be about deploying them, building five plants, 10 plants. But at that point, we get to a point where we can do thousands of plants a year in each of these areas, whether it’s steel or power generation or others.

Copy LinkCan AI solve the climate crisis?

BERMAN: I think we’re now legally required to talk about AI in every conversation.

KHOSLA: Yes.

BERMAN: How will AI help us achieve the 12 on 12?

KHOSLA: Yeah. So the first thing I would say is we should be cautious about ascribing too much to AI. How many people know the NeurIPS conference here? Raise of hands. It’s sort of the go-to conference for AI. Very few hands up. I looked at last year’s papers and the years before on AI and climate change, and I said none of these approaches, these efforts of AI in climate change are going to be consequential — just because they address minor problems. Building efficiency isn’t a climate change problem. You can improve it two, three percent, but unless you’re making substantial progress and get to 80, 90 percent reduction in carbon in every one of the major areas, we’re not going to get there. And so, I’m only looking for the 90 percent reductions, not the 10 or 20 percent improvements in efficiency or other things.

BERMAN: Which categories do you think AI may help us the most?

KHOSLA: Well, I think in the next couple of years, we’ll get to an area where we have what I call AI scientists. Then you can apply a much faster rate of scientific progress in materials design. For example, we are using AI in Commonwealth Fusion to control plasma.

Plasma control is a hard problem. We are using AI, and Commonwealth Fusion is partnering with DeepMind to do that. But I do think fundamentally, AI scientists getting creative about new approaches in some of these areas will make a huge difference.

BERMAN: Take us beyond climate if I may, unless there’s something you want to add there.

KHOSLA: Sure. Nope.

Copy LinkHow AI will advance healthcare

BERMAN: Taking the instigator thesis into healthcare, for example, we have at least a couple of companies here including Transcripta, that are using AI to discover new applications for existing drugs, discover new drugs. How do you think about the instigator thesis as it applies to healthcare, particularly with AI healthcare?

KHOSLA: I think I would broadly say entrepreneurs cause most of the radical change. When it comes to incremental innovation, big companies are relatively good at it. Intel can do a good job of moving from a seven-nanometer semiconductor process to a five-nanometer process. But in the 40 years I’ve been involved in innovation, I can’t think of a single example of large-scale innovation done by a large company, institution, or government program.

Whether I like to put it the following way: Did Amazon reinvent retailing or was it Walmart or Target? We talked about Elon Musk. It wasn’t General Motors or Volkswagen. With Airbnb, you might have thought that Hilton or Hyatt would know how to do that, or in Uber’s case, you’d think somebody like Hertz would reinvent that area. There isn’t a single example I can think of for large-scale innovation that a large institution was part of doing or was predictable.

Now, big companies help; they pile on. Today, we are dependent on big auto companies to build EVs, but they’ve all switched because somebody has shown the way, and that’s what instigators do. And that is happening in healthcare. Vaccines were done that way. Almost all the large innovations are happening at many levels. You talked about drug discovery and the idea of drugs being designed by AI — very powerful.

I think I first talked about it 10 years ago in a long piece I wrote. But every company is now getting on that bandwagon, and they’ll help.

BERMAN: And how quickly do you think we’ll see the revolutionary change, not the evolutionary change, in healthcare?

KHOSLA: Healthcare depends on regulatory control, so that limits what we can do. At the drugs level, no matter whether you have AI-designed drugs or other traditional drugs, you’ve got a 10-year process of getting a drug approved through the FDA. Now, there’s a workaround to that that I’d love to see happen, and we are working on it. If you design a drug that’s for one person today, we design a drug that works for all 7 billion people on the planet, whether it’s a fancy drug or a simple aspirin.

Different people have different genetics. We don’t optimize for that. You could design a drug for only one person. I don’t know how the FDA would handle that. We are attempting to see how that might go; design the drugs with the help of AI for one person, one patient at a time. It’s much easier to do this for certain classes like genetic diseases.

And I’m very excited about this idea. It’s hugely disruptive.

Copy LinkAI expertise vs human irrationality

How many people have heard of a thesis I put up on AI about two weeks ago called “AI Dystopia or Utopia”?

BERMAN: Everyone raises their hand.

KHOSLA: No need to. I postulated that all expertise will be free.

In 2012, I wrote a blog on TechCrunch called, “Do We Need Doctors?” Under a simple thesis, later expanded to a 100-page thesis by 2016, that we won’t need doctors for their expertise because AI will be the best primary care doctor. We’re working on that. AI will be the best and easily scalable medical therapist for mental health. AI will be the best oncologist in most of these areas. It’s not restricted to medicine. AI will be the best structural engineer. AI will be the best salesperson or marketing person. So all expertise will be nearly free.

BERMAN: Best marketing person and the best salesperson?

KHOSLA: Yes.

BERMAN: I mean, that’s not necessarily intuitive, at least not for me. Because there’s a lot of complexity involved, and creativity. There are relational components, right? If you and I are working on a deal, there’s trust that we’ve built over time. We’re able to ask each other questions, work together to create a deal. Are you imagining two AI agents putting that deal together? How do you imagine that being a more efficient and effective process?

KHOSLA: What I would say is, just because you can’t precisely predict how the change will happen, doesn’t mean the change won’t happen. I’m almost certain the change will happen — radical change. It’s hard to predict exactly how. If you were to bet that in 15 years things will be the same, I’d take 10-to-1 odds on that with anybody.

BERMAN: More from my conversation with Vinod Khosla, in just a minute.

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BERMAN: Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this conversation and more on our Masters of Scale YouTube channel.

Next up, I asked Vinod if there are any areas where he thinks human effort will still be more important than AI.

KHOSLA: Look, there are certain things that are not rational that make us human, and I think those categories will remain. Even today, you could get a well-produced glass like this off a factory line, but I’ll pay more for a handmade glass. We all do, and so that’s the humanness factor. We prefer certain things, and we don’t have to be rational about everything in our lives. We like to think of ourselves as rationalists. I do. But there are things I prefer.

BERMAN: And perhaps the irrational decisions are some of the most important.

KHOSLA: Yeah, in fact, some of the most important decisions—there was a scientist, and I won’t name the name only because I haven’t been able to verify it—who said we make most decisions rationally, except the most important ones.

Who do we marry? That’s not a rational decision. That is an emotional decision and it should be. That’s where humanity comes in and humanness comes in. And I postulate in my thesis that we will have more room for humanness because we won’t be occupied by the things AIs can do for us.

Copy LinkVinod’s version of techno-optimism

I’m a techno optimist, but I modify techno optimism with a simple phrase, which I use in my long essay — it’s 25 pages, not easy reading — I say techno optimism with care and caring. The care part is AI safety, and the caring part is inclusiveness about everybody else.

And I do think techno optimism by itself is not necessarily good for society as a whole. It’s good for technologists, but with care and caring, I think it becomes the single most powerful tool we’ve ever had to move society to an era of abundance and being more human. Now, people ask me a simple question: won’t it displace jobs?

Honest answer? Yes. In fact, I think 65 percent of all jobs can be done by AI. And those countries that choose to do so will be a country-by-country political choice. So a lot of job displacement and probably a pretty disruptive period, which I define in my essay. Today, being a farm worker, having to work in Salinas in 100-degree heat eight hours a day for 20, 30 years, or working on the General Motors assembly line, mounting a tire on a car for 30 years, eight hours a day, those aren’t jobs. That’s servitude because you need to make a living. I’m pretty certain we will have enough abundance, and I postulate GDP growth will go from 2 percent to 5 percent, and that kind of growth rate — maybe not for our kids, but our kids’ kids — will live in an era of abundance.

We will have enough resources to support everybody at the minimum standard of living, so people work on the things they want to work on, not the things they have to work on to support their family.

BERMAN: A place to end. Thank you.

KHOSLA: Thank you.

BERMAN: Vinod Khosla’s version of techno-optimism is an inspiring one, and I’m so grateful he joined us at the Masters of Scale Summit.

You can read his essay titled “AI: Dystopia or Utopia” here.

I’m Jeff Berman, thank you for listening.