OpenAI investor Vinod Khosla says people should worry more about China than a sentient AI killing us off

• Billionaire Vinod Khosla thinks sentient AI isn't the biggest threat to the world.
• The OpenAI investor says that "doomers are focusing on the wrong risks."

Vinod Khosla may have seen the significance of AI when he invested millions in OpenAI, but the billionaire says people shouldn't see the technology as the world's greatest threat.

"The doomers are focusing on the wrong risks. By far, orders of magnitude, higher risk to worry about, is China, not sentient AI killing us off," Khosla told attendees at Fortune's Brainstorm AI conference on Tuesday.

"It's sort of not worthy of a conversation to be honest," he continued.

The 68-year-old investor was an early backer of OpenAI. In 2019, his venture capital firm Khosla Ventures invested $50 million into the ChatGPT maker. That was the largest investment made by Khosla's firm in its 15-year history.

This isn't the first time Khosla has cautioned against overestimating the risks AI poses.

Khosla told Eric Newcomer on a December 1 episode of the "Cerebral Valley Podcast" that he thinks people are too pessimistic about the technology.

"Too many people are looking at the dystopian angle of this one percent probability of something bad happening and ignoring the benefits to humanity of AI," Khosla told Newcomer.

Khosla's views set him apart from OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk. Musk, who has since gone on to set up his own AI startup, is a strong critic of the potential dangers of AI.

"AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production," Musk told Fox News in April.

"In the sense that it has the potential, however, small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial, it has the potential of civilization destruction," he added.

Representatives for Khosla did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.