A prominent venture capitalist says the United States is increasingly leaning on artificial intelligence as the centerpiece of its economic hopes, warning that the surge in expectations around AI could create a too-big-to-fail dynamic with major social risks.
In a CNBC interview, Slow Ventures general partner Sam Lessin says the US government’s urgent need to accelerate economic output is helping shape the AI boom narrative as a national growth project, blending speculation, industrial policy and investor optimism into a shared storyline.
“I think what’s going on in AI is quite interesting, and there is a lot that can be real about it. There’s no question that there has been a fast and furious game across the AI sector of this kind of setting expectations at infinity.”
He says the country’s record-level national debt to the tune of $38.12 trillion has amplified the demand for a powerful economic narrative, and AI has been positioned to fill that role.
“We have an enormous debt crisis at the federal level. The only way we’re going to get out of that is two things. One is we’re going to inflate the currency, right? And two is we need to somehow get GDP growth way higher than it’s been historically.”
The investor warns that overlapping incentives across Wall Street, sovereign wealth pools, and US policymakers risk creating the same political and financial alignment seen during the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.
“When you see these types of things, where all of a sudden, you know, Wall Street’s in the game, the Middle East’s in the game, everyone’s pulled into the game of how do we spur a lot of growth all on this one story, which is LLMs and AI, you understand how quickly you yada, yada, yada your way into and the government should backstop it.”
Lessin referenced the public backlash toward comments from OpenAI leadership suggesting government support for the ChatGPT creator, calling it a signal of collective anxiety about concentrated power and asymmetric benefits.
“I think it’s socially very dangerous. People remember 2008. They remember the financial crisis… What the average American, I think, is quite worried about is, ‘Oh, my God, once again, we’re going to pay for all this so that a small number of technologists get extremely wealthy…’
The fact that these comments got so magnified and projected, it became such a hot button, I think, is really a sign of the times.”
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