India AI Impact Summit: Vinod Khosla on Why 2047 Could Free Every Indian from Survival Work

I think AI is much more dispersed than people think. AI can make it possible to give every Indian a personal doctor that's available to them 24/7. Right. And provide a level of healthcare that's not been possible. Many, many Indian farmers, hundreds of millions of them, they can have a PhD-level agronomist available to them for free. All 230 million children and every adult learner can use AI tutors for their education. The world isn't as well equipped to adapt AI as India is. 2047 is a great date. I think that's a good time to shoot for nobody in India needs a job. I am allergic to a big title in a big company because They are uninteresting people. They're not creative people creating new things. They are following last year's paradigm. I think the problem isn't with entrepreneurs. The problem is with the investors. The biggest worry I have is people like President Xi in China using AI for the wrong purposes. I think MAGA is a really, really bad idea. I'm a huge critic of Trump. He's truly idiotic.

Vinod Khosla does not do incremental. He doesn't do cautious. And he has very little patience for AI optimism that stops short of actually changing who gets to live well. In a conversation with Surbhi Agarwal and Swati Murthy at the ongoing India AI Impact Summit, he spoke about AI as public infrastructure and how it will transform or nullify the concept of wealth as we know it now. He shared his optimism about India's adaptability to AI, and he spoke about his one biggest worry: political might as hindrance to human, technological, and entrepreneurial progress. Listen on. It's Friday, the 20th of February. I'm Anirban Chowdhury. This is The Morning Brief.

Vinod Khosla, thank you so much for talking to The Economic Times. It's a real pleasure. You had a meeting with the Prime Minister yesterday. What were some of the key takeaways? What can you tell us about the discussions?

Well, the main thing I'd say is what I talked about today in my presentation, the idea that AI can make it possible to give every Indian a personal doctor that's available to them 24/7. And provide a level of healthcare that's not been possible. Yeah. And it's very, very affordable, much less than what healthcare costs in India today. To reduce the burden of health and to make people better, faster, and manage chronic disease, manage mental illness, manage physical therapy. All these things can be done by an AI. And done today and probably implemented to every Indian through a system like Aadhaar, right? Very, very quickly in a couple of years. So Aadhaar has been a huge success with UPI and financial services. I think it can be as successful for AI doctors, right, available to every Indian citizen. And the other thing is all 230 million children and every adult learner can use AI tutors for their education. Those are two big ideas. Of course, there's many, many Indian farmers, hundreds of millions of them, working small plots. They can have a PhD-level agronomist available to them for free. So these are not things we have to wait for in the future. I think they're available as soon as we adapt them from what is being done in the West. Or our country.

Sure.

Mr. Khosla, you've been here for a couple of days. Did you get a chance to look at some of the work that is happening by Indian startups in some of the areas that you just spoke of?

I haven't had a chance to meet many startups yet. We have a lot, a number of portfolio companies here and they're doing fabulous job. Sarvam, of course, in the AI space is the dominant model for the sovereign model for India.

Yeah.

Emergent, which is 8 months old since they launched their product, just announced they are doing $100 million in revenue.

Yes.

ARR in only 8 months. This is unheard of. Maybe the fastest growing company ever. My wife runs CK12, which is a nonprofit AI tutor. They already have probably 4 or 5 million students in India who on their own without any help, have found and used the AI tutor from CK-12, about 12 or 13 million users. Those are mostly children, so it's really, really useful. Now, can that be scaled to 250 million children? Pretty trivially, with a little bit of work.

Mr. Khosla, you've been talking about AI for a really long time, and now that it has come into the play now and the scale. And the last few days you've been talking about the job losses. India is a money, money poor, or maybe even like people rich, time rich economy. So what does it mean for a country like India? And if you're talking about Asia, you have spoken about AGI on multiple forums. So what is the post-AGI, if as predicted by Altman today in a couple of years or other person like 5 years, what does the post-AGI economy looks like for a country like India?

I think the next 5 years will look very great to economists. They measure things like productivity growth, right? They measure GDP growth. They measure, you know, things like that. That looks great. I think at some point the disruption AI causes, and my bet is from 2030 to 2040, we will see strong political forces and politics influencing whether AI gets adapted in each country. And it'll be different in each country. You'll see chaotic policies, politicians pushing certain benefits, politicians saying there can't be job losses, which would slow down AI adoption. It'll be a complex mix. The fact is, and that's why I'm talking about free AI doctors to everybody, free AI tutors to everybody, free education, free agronomy. Those are things that massive scale and should come before the job losses and the disruption. But I have no question GDP growth will accelerate because of it. Because productivity is growing, you might see job losses or disruption in jobs. People will have to move what they do pretty dramatically. I think there will be such a large production of goods and services. Things like food will be cheap. Entertainment will be cheap. Almost every service will be near-free. And I know it's fine. It sort of seems odd to believe, but by 2050, it's going to be very, very exciting. It'll truly be an era of abundance. If the politics allows it to happen. And so you get geopolitical influence not through brute force or Trump-like characters. You get it through doing good for everybody that people appreciate.

What do we do in the short term? Building on what Swati asked you about, you know, and you made a very strong statement yesterday where you said that perhaps by 2030 there would be nothing like IT services or BPO industry anymore.

Well, let me put that in context. If you're providing IT, the thing with technology is either you change with it and leverage it, or it leaves you behind. The notion that there will be IT services, I think over some period of time, whether it happens by 2030 or 2035, hard to predict.

Right.

Those, the idea of providing software services to Western enterprises will go away. Already there's AI bots, agents who are doing that work, and they'll only get better and get better very, very rapidly. More importantly, the world isn't as well equipped to adapt AI as India is, especially the developing world. You know, they have either very high costs in the West or very little knowledge, like in Africa or Southeast Asia. So Indian services companies can do AI services all over the world, and that's a real opportunity. But only those who move rapidly and quickly will take advantage of it and probably be a bigger opportunity than what they're leaving behind. We are starting to see people come up with very creative solutions that are not based on spending a billion dollars to develop one model. So I just want to give you an example of Deepseek. Yeah. Completely changed the paradigm of how much money it takes to develop a state-of-the-art model.

Right.

Sarum's models today are ahead of where Deepseek was a year ago. Today. So if you talk to them, right, that's pretty exciting. So I do think creativity is as important a tool, not the only tool, as money. Money is an important tool. Creativity is an even more important tool. And talent and knowledge are important tools. And India clearly has the talent and knowledge and expertise to do these things. In fact, most labs mostly have a huge percentage of Indians in their labs.

True. I want to understand from you, if you zoom out a little bit and look at, you know, how the world order on AI right now, what does it mean for a country like India, which has ambitions to be a developed nation by 2047?

2047 is a great day. I think that's a good time to shoot for. Nobody in India needs a job. They can work jobs because they want to work them. If you're a farm worker laboring in 110-degree heat, it's not really a job. It's servitude to survival. Can the bottom quartile, the bottom half of the Indian population have 10x better standard of living than we have today? By 2047, without having a job? Yes. By 2047, which would be an awesome goal for India, we can declare minimum standards of living in the country that are so high that nobody needs to worry about survival. That will be possible by 2047.

Right.

What does this mean for wealth creation as a whole? Because if Everything is free, like what you're saying. You know, I'm also seeing sort of wealth concentration with just few companies holding a lot of power. So wealth and power, what is that dynamic?

I think the focus on wealth is the wrong focus. I think what is the right focus is what happens to the bottom half of the population. How well off are they? And do they have freedom? Wealth concentration is only a problem if it imposes lack of freedom on the other 90% of the population. And I think we can have both. Now, it's very hard to predict what happens to the notion of wealth. I think very likely starting 2035 to 2050, 50, we'll have a hugely deflationary economy. So if onions cost 10 paisa a kilo, do you care about wealth?

No.

You care about relationships. You care about what you have time to do. Time when you can follow your passion, whether it's competing in the Olympics or doing your own photography. So I do think people will have a lot more freedom. That's why I say 2030 to 2040 will be very, very chaotic and very, very dependent on policy from the government. And policy depends on politics. So this complex— this is not going to be easy. Transitions are always hard. I like to tell people in the US, in the year 1900, the majority of jobs in the country were in agriculture.

Right.

By 1970, it was 4% of jobs. So most people got dislocated out of their jobs and nobody could define what those jobs would be.

Right.

I think people are happier in the year 2000 than in 1900.

Right.

I have just one thing there. So if we are talking about, you know, the prices are deflationary, but what it had— AI also done is it has the disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest heavily increased. So do you—

why do you think that's the case? I think I challenge that in terms of the facilities. Okay, if a farmer who has a 1-acre plot can get a PhD agronomist, why does wealth matter? Okay, so, you know, I don't think disparity has increased based on wealth. I think there's other factors that are more important. In fact, it has enabled people who are curious, which tend to be the young people, right? That's why so many of them are swarming to this summit. It's curiosity becomes very, very important because AI can help you learn, but only if you want to. So no amount of wealth will make up for what you can learn on the internet with good AI. Same thing with agency. Why you're seeing all these entrepreneurs, they're not wealthier people. The wealthy people don't have more of an opportunity to do a startup than the people with agency. And agency means you see something, you say, I won't wait for somebody else to do it. I will go do it. And this idea that you can drive your own world. Because you have the powerful tools of AI working available to you, agency becomes much more important. Curiosity and agency and persistence, of course. It takes a lot of persistence.

If wealth doesn't really matter, what kind of economic model? It's going to be deflationary, yes. But the capitalism and you suggested scraping off capital gains tax, we both were the AI-driven economy.

Well, you know, The labor share of the global economy, especially the US economy, will decline. How can you make up for it? By making capital gains tax the same as ordinary income and take the bottom 40, 50% of the people out of the tax roll. So you don't have to pay taxes. We'll double tax on capital, not on labor. Suddenly you have the same revenue. I'm not saying make increased taxes, but they come from different places. 40% of capital gains in the US are paid by people making $10 million a year. Nobody has sympathy for them. And I think they should pay more. So, you know, there's things, there'll be exceptions. So if you're a farmholder and you have a family farm, you don't want it to be sold because The next generation has to pay taxes. So there are things, you know, inheritance tax is another thing. There's no reason to have inheritance tax be low. Inheritance tax, I believe, should be high. Those are all examples of favoring the people who are at the bottom of the pyramid over people at the top of the pyramid.

Coming to your bets as a venture capitalist, you've made some really amazing and futuristic bets by investing early into OpenAI. You know, we are seeing some of your investments into Emergent and Servum reaping, you know, they are very, very promising companies. Talk to us a little bit about what kind of ecosystem are you seeing in the US, primarily in San Francisco, which is emerging as the epicenter of all AI innovation, and in India?

Well, I think AI is much more dispersed than people think. Told. What happens is the best people move to California because there's others like him. They get a lot of support. So these support ecosystems are very, very important. Here in California, you work for a big company for 10 years and nobody wants to ever hire you. You're unemployable if you work for a large company for 10 or 15 years. You have to have startup experience. I know it sounds silly, People like big titles in big companies.

True.

I am allergic to a big title in a big company because they are uninteresting people. They're not creative people creating new things. They're following last year's paradigm.

Do you also study the ecosystem in India? Because we are often criticized for saying that, okay, we might have produced a Sundar Pichai or a Satya Nadella, but we've been incapable of producing a Google or a, you know, a Microsoft or OpenAI out of India. How can we change that?

Well, I think problem isn't with entrepreneurs. The problem is with the investors. They have very short-term views. They don't like the long-term. They don't like ambitious projects, which tend to be more risk. So I like to say my willingness to fail is what allows me to succeed. If I wasn't taking the risks, I would have zero chance of success. In fact, you can very easily move. So most business, especially larger businesses, reduce risk to the point where the consequences of success are inconsequential. My world and the culture in San Francisco— and San Francisco is a state of mind, it's not really a place— the culture there is, I don't mind failing. But if I succeed, it better be consequential. So you're increasing the probability of failure and increasing the consequences of success. Those are rational trade-offs, and you have to decide what you want to do.

So if we have a lot of assumptions about AI, what's going to happen, what's not going to happen, if you were to be happy about maybe one or two of your assumptions which doesn't come to pass, which one that would that be?

—For you, it doesn't come to pass?

Yes, doesn't come to pass.

Well, the biggest worry I have is people like President Xi in China using AI for the wrong purposes. My assumption is he will use it to increase their geopolitical footprint and influence and just create nastiness. I think they benefit from this sort of what I call a techno-economic war. The West is fundamentally in a techno-economic war with China. Europe has mostly given up, so America has to win that war. Countries like India have to align on the right side and benefit from it. So I'm not a big fan of President Xi, and my assumption is they will succeed. I hope I'm wrong.

Let me ask you this one final question before you go. Uh, do you think we've gone a little too far with this entire MAGA thing where we are closing the borders? We are—

I think MAGA is a really, really bad idea. I'm a huge critic of Trump. He's truly idiotic. I don't know how to describe— and his level of intelligence is so low. He's very clever, but that's not intelligent about the future of America. I think he's made America much less attractive for the best immigrants who created almost all the growth in the country through entrepreneurship. Yeah, you know, you talked about Sundar, you talked about Satya, you talk about Adobe, any of these companies. Yes, yes, the Indian community is a huge contribution to American society, and he's made it less likely the next, which may be good for India, but it is bad for America.

Thank you so much, Mr. Khosla. Lovely talking to you, really enjoyed the conversation. I don't think I've ever, ever had that kind of a conversation with anybody, which has left me so much to think about. Well, thank you.

I'm always very direct. Thanks for joining us.

It was so great having you.

Vinod Khosla's conviction is unsettling and clarifying in equal measure. If even half of it lands, India's next 25 years will look nothing like its last. That's it for today. You were listening to this episode on The Morning Brief. It was produced by me, sound designed by Indranil Bhattacharjee. This is our latest episode from the India AI Impact Summit. It. We hope you like the conversations that we are covering from there. The Morning Brief drops every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday wherever you get your podcasts, but during super fast news cycles such as this, we come to you more often. Stay tuned.