The salient point to me was the Biden administration wanted the state to monopolize AI through regulation. They wanted to prohibit AI startups.
Well, since corporations were using AI to evade all kind of laws and regulations (privacy, copyright, slander, liability, power demand and sustainability...) it isn't surprising.
AI is less powerful than it is advertised, but it's still powerful and disturbing, and any power will try to keep control and don't let others become more powerful. Government power too.
Government regulates nukes, weapons, finance, transport, customs, and lots of things. Why shouldn't it regulate AI? Just try to set up a startup to smuggle things into the country,
or refine uranium, or sell securities, or deploy a railway, and you'll see the government prohibiting you a lot of things.
The thing here is that IT in general grew a lot in a lowly regulated world, and it made sense while it affected mostly unmaterial things, but then came online commerce for physical objects,
exorbitant electricity use, accumulation of capital and therefore gentrification, and economic power, etc.
If Andreesen would have got rich in aeronauticcs, building or law, he would be more used to a playing field fenced by regulations. But he wasn't. So at a certain point
he went "how comes I can't do what I please with my money and my business! Help! Freedom for me!".
I'm more worried about prohibiting free software collaboration across countries because of sanctions than about regulating AI.
Also Andreesen started relatively poor then made it rich. How can you criticise that?
I don't criticise it. He was born in a born witth capitalistic rules, and whether he liked them or not at the beginning (I think he never thought too much about that) he played by the rules and sort of won, so
it's unsurprising that he ended up loving capitalism. Other tried and failed, so they maybe don't like capitalism now. But as long as we focus in one of the ones that "succeeded", then we may observe
a change of politics after a change of social class.
I don't say that's wrong in itself, just that it's unsurprising. Wrong would be to generalise his views and think they are better than anyone else's.