Asana’s Dustin Moskovitz is bullish on AI but concerned about risks

A typical playbook for a successful tech founder looks something like this.

Start a wholly owned company. Venture investors sell large quantities as the business progresses. He eventually became a minority owner. Take the company publicly. Sell ​​more shares over time.

Dustin Moskovitz from Asana took that rulebook and completely rewrote the ending.

Moskovitz, still best known to many as the co-founder of Facebook, started Asana in 2008 to make work more collaborative through software. By the time he took the company public via direct listing in 2020, his ownership was about 36%.

Then he went on a buying spree. After buying 480,000 Asana shares in June, Moskovitz’s ownership has swelled to 111.4 million shares, representing more than 51% of outstanding shares. In March, asana a statement that Moskowitz has a trading plan to buy up to 30 million more Class A shares this year, sending the stock up nearly 19% the next day.

“It’s been a wild couple of years in the market and there have been some interesting buying opportunities,” Moskovitz said in an interview with CNBC.

Even after rising 66% this year, Asana shares are more than 80% below their highest since late 2021.

For Moskovitz, who has a net worth of more than $12 billion — much of it from his early stakes in Facebook, now Meta — becoming majority owner of Asana isn’t about control. Instead, he sees it as the best way to invest to support his charitable work.

In 2010, Moskowitz signed to give a pledge, a promise by some of the richest people in the world to donate most of their wealth to charity. Moskovitz and his wife, former journalist Carrie Tuna, distributed their money through Good Ventures, based on recommendations from Open Philanthropy.

When it comes to spending that money, there is no greater concern for Moskowitz than the future of artificial intelligence.

Good Ventures donated $30 million To launch OpenAI over a three year period in 2017, long before Artificial Intelligence or ChatGPT even entered the public lexicon. OpenAI, now worth about $30 billion, started as a nonprofit, and Open Philanthropy said at the time that it wanted to “help play a role in OpenAI’s approach to safety and governance issues.”

One of the ten open focus areas lists philanthropy on its site website is “Potential Risks from Advanced Artificial Intelligence”. The organization has recommended a $5 million grant to the National Science Foundation to support research on ways to ensure the safety of AI systems, and $5.56 million to the University of California, Berkeley, to “create an academic center focused on AI safety.” In total, Open Philanthropy says it has provided more than $300 million in focus through more than 170 grants.

“I definitely think there is a huge risk there, something I spend a lot of time thinking about,” Moskovitz said.

Moskovitz co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin at Harvard University in 2004. He became a billionaire after Facebook in 2012. Initial public offeringowns more stakes than anyone other than Zuckerberg.

Even after snapping up additional Asana shares in 2022 and 2023, his ownership amounts to about $2.6 billion, less than the $4.6 billion in shares he owns at Facebook, according to FactSet.

“I am in the unique position of coming to the negotiating table with an existing source of wealth,” said Moskowitz. “Even things that seem like huge purchases, they still represent a relatively normal type of net worth for me compared to other founders.”

Moskovitz agreed not to purchase all of Asana’s outstanding shares or even to take ownership of 90% of the common shares. It would also keep the majority of its directors independent, according to the rules of the New York Stock Exchange, according to the rules of the New York Stock Exchange deposit.

Moskovitz declined to say whether he was buying stocks to prevent activist investors from stepping in and trying to force change. Activists have been busy in the cloud software space, most notably in sales forcewhich responded to the pressure by expanding its buyback program and boosting earnings.

Recently, Moskowitz’s worlds have collided.

OpenAI catapulted from niche startup to tech hotspot after launching ChatGPT in November. Before that, Moskovitz had been tinkering with the company’s DALL-E technology to convert text into images. He said that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman set up a “labs account” for him in April last year.

After launching ChatGPT, Moskovitz Have some fun Ask the chatbot to set goals to help deal with California’s housing problem.

Meanwhile, Asana has joined the band of companies announcing improvements to their products with generative AI features that can take human input and deliver text, images, or audio in response. Earlier this month, Asana He said It has given some customers access to several generative AI features powered by OpenAI models.

“Chat is just one model of how you can use these technologies,” Moskovitz told CNBC. “When you incorporate it into workflows like managing work, doing things like improving automation workflows or helping make decisions — you can literally ask questions about the system and they’ll give you a summary and a recommendation.”

More complex tasks, such as adding structure to projects, are where “some kind of potential kicks in,” Moskovitz said. Rather than simply asking for specific answers, he said the strength is in technology to take “a bunch of information and kind of a vague goal” and then “give you something almost in the right direction.”

Moskovitz said Asana could spend $5 million or more on OpenAI technology next year, adding that he was “very impressed with GPT-3,” the company’s “previous big language model,” and was even more impressed with GPT-4, which was announced in March. .

Moskovitz took six minutes into Asana’s 51-minute earnings call in early June to promote the company’s approach to artificial intelligence. The acronym was used 41 times, compared to 32 AI references Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on his company’s April earnings call. Microsoft is the main investor in OpenAI.

Moskovitz said Asana is “deeply personally connected to the AI ​​labs leading the way.”

The connections are, in fact, very deep. Altman I invested in Asana in 2016. On Asana’s earnings call, Moskovitz reminded analysts that his company and OpenAI “share a board member in Adam D’Angelo,” the former Facebook CTO who later started Q-and-A startup online Quora.

One of the first OpenAI board members was Holden Karnofsky, who is co-executive director of Open Philanthropy. Kanofsky later co-founded AI startup Anthropic with his wife, Daniela Amoudi. Moskovitz invested in Anthropic in 2021, the same year he and Altman became involved in the nuclear fusion startup Helion.

Similar to Altman, Moskowitz is wildly optimistic about AI and fears the damage it could cause.

Moskovitz was one of the many entrepreneurs signed on statement In May, he said that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority along with other societal risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” The letter came from the nonprofit Center for AI Safety.

But Moskowitz was not among the signatories to the nonprofit Future of Life Institute open letter In March, AI Labs called for a pressing pause on training the most advanced AI models for six months or more. Near the top of the list of signers was Tesla CEO Elon Musk, an early supporter of OpenAI who warned that we should be very concerned about advanced artificial intelligence, calling it “a greater danger to society than cars, planes or medicines.”

Moskovitz said Musk’s concerns aren’t completely exaggerated and that they both want to “bring this technology into the world in a safe way.”

“Elon comes in kind of from multiple angles,” he said. “I think we kind of share opinion about issues of potential existential risk, and maybe we don’t share opinion as much about censorship and vigilance and artificial intelligence and things like that.”

In December, Musk chirp that “the danger of training an AI to get up — in other words, to lie — is mortal.”

Moskowitz helped draft the List 12 points of potential policy changes for US lawmakers to consider.

“My greatest concern is ensuring that subsequent generations of the latest model, such as the GPT-5 and GPT-6, undergo a safety assessment before they are released into the world,” he said. “I think that will require an organization to coordinate all the players.”

He even made up a word in a tweet last month to express his complex views.

“Be alarmed by the artificial intelligence!” he wrote.

He watches: Elon Musk created an artificial intelligence startup called X.AI to take over ChatGPT from OpenAI