What I don't understand is why the Democrats don't just come out hard against AI at this point. It is unpopular and the tech titans are openly Republicans.
As is typical of Democrats, they're trying to balance multiple interest groups (authors, artists, programmers, users, tech vendors, international markets, etc), arriving at a complex, multifaceted, reasonable position that everybody hates.
This was despite the tech community being predominantly democrats. They turned to Trump, because the democrats shut them out completely and in some cases were highly antagonistic (crypto and elon companies).
Look, a16z basically are talking their book. They went heavily into crypto, and when the Biden administration started taking actions against crypto, they started supporting Republicans.
Not everything needs to be complicated.
While I didn't agree with a lot of the governmental responses to ChatGPT (the bowlderising of the EU AI act is my personal lowlight), I think that a lot of what the Biden admin was against was monopolies, which I entirely agree with.
It's super dangerous (as an example) that basically 3 companies now control all online advertising, and another 3 have a monopoly on renting servers. This is bad for markets and society so I was mostly onboard with a lot of what they did (and am very disappointed in the results of the trials, particularly the Google ones).
I don't think this is anti-tech, it's anti-monopoly which I think is really good for basically everyone here over the longer term.
That being said, a16z were totally just trying to make sure they had time to unload all their crypto "investments" to another sucker.