Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale painted a terrifying picture of government regulation of AI during a Tuesday morning appearance on CNBC.

After providing a bit of background on the subject and introducing Lonsdale, host Andrew Ross Sorkin prompted Lonsdale with the following questions: “Is there ultimately gonna be an FDA for AI models? And as a-, you know, is that a good thing or a bad thing for somebody who’s thinking the way you do?”

“I mean, listen, the FDA has killed millions of people, let’s be totally clear, right?” replied Lonsdale.

“Killed!? Killed m-,” interjected Sorkin before Lonsdale regained the floor to affirm, “It has literally led to the deaths of millions of people, Andrew, because basically there’s all these new therapies — especially now, by the way, with AI — that we could be developing-”

“It’s also hopefully saved some lives. I mean, I like to believe,” submitted Sorkin.

“Yes, but the trade-off is like probably 100 to 1, right?” shot back Lonsdale, who continued:

There’s a very famous story from 60 years ago where they caught some stuff that was killing people in Europe and saved them here. And then they’ve used that as an excuse to make this massive bureaucracy that makes it cost ten or a hundred times more to do drugs than it should, which means there’s tons of these new drugs you could be developing to save lives that we’re just not able to do. Like I would be investing billions more to save lives, but I can’t, so the equivalent is terrifying to me. The government is bad at these things, the bureaucrats are bad at things.

Now, there’s another argument here, which is that you have things like Mythos and OpenAI’s new technology that’s really, really good at hacking into everything, and you probably don’t want like that new technology going to the bad guys right away. So there has to be some sort of trade-off, some sort of framework. We have to be really careful not to make the mistakes the FDA has made.

“So what would you do? What do you think that should look like?” followed up Sorkin.

“You know, there probably should be some national agreement on regulation on new powerful models. It should be as small and as narrow as possible. It should not have the same bureaucracy. You should make sure the government, from the start, has metrics on a speed at which it has to go. And the transparency, because you’re going to have cronyism. You’re going have the big guys capture it. You’re gonna slow it down. Pharma loves the FDA against biotech. It makes it too expensive for us to build our own pharma companies, we have to sell to them. This is what the big guys want,” answered Lonsdale, who bolstered his point a few moments later:

If you are the leader in the space, and you have tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars, you want there to be really complicated regulation, with people you can hire who go in and out of your company who work there, because you know you’re gonna be able to control it and influence it. America needs to be really careful not to give the big companies this kind of power. Like, listen, if you’re on the right, maybe you’re afraid of government. If you on the left, you’re afraid of companies. I’m afraid of them working together to screw all of us because that’s what happens in health care, that’s what happens in every other area.

Watch above via CNBC.

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