AI Superpowers (Kai Fu Lee Sinovation Ventures & Rebecca Blumenstein, NYT) | DLD 19

Khai food thank you so much for joining us today we are very lucky to have you you were on national television last week in the u.s. where 60 minutes called you the Oracle of AI you like that title I've not worked for the company Oracle I think they meant something else you have been saying that AI is going to be bigger than electricity could you please explain that that's quite a that's quite a statement yes well AI is going to be used in every industry reducing costs improving performance and disrupting business models we've already begun to see that in all kinds of areas from finance to internet today's most powerful companies are rebranding themselves as AI companies from IBM Microsoft Google to Facebook and also a I will because AI will have such a huge change over the whole industry all industries yet it will be much faster than electricity because the electricity took many decades and even a century to build out the electrical grid and all the applications say I is running on the cloud now so it's um one could say it's arguably about as important and significant but certainly a lot faster one of the questions I and many people have is we've been hearing about AI for a long time and if we could I'd love to play a clip of when you were on another TV show Good Morning America 26 years ago with John Sculley from Apple giving one of the first demonstrations of speech recognition technology that you had created this is quite a classic sci-fi well remember how the talking computer from the film 2001 well reality is a step closer to science fiction with Apple computers new developed program that allows us computers to understand and respond to spoken commands and for a first look at this new technology joining us are John Sculley the chief executive officer of Apple in Kailua the inventor of Apple speech recognition technology and also with us this morning cast for the computer it's nice to have all three of you here some people might say mr. Scott like come on there are other computers that do recognize voices and I think even synthesized voices but how Kaspar different this is the first time we've had a computer that can handle continuous speech the way we're having a conversation now it's also speaker independent which means it can recognize you or me or five through or anyone else you have a trainer for everyone and it works on a personal computer this happens in Macintosh or bunny I don't know that's kind of racers in here one is speaker independence which means we train it on thousands of speakers so it learns what English sounds like from a variety of speakers and secondly we had been able dit to recognize continuous speech from a trillion sentences a trillion different senses yes all right now we're going to give you good [Applause] so Kai Phu I guess a little-known story behind that segment is that you and mr. Scully were quite nervous about the computer working and you actually had someone behind the curtain yeah the demo did work by the way but I was very nervous he wasn't because at the time when God we got the invitation he said Kai fool what is the likelihood of a catastrophic failure and I said about 10% he says we're canceling the show unless you can get it to 1% so he was thinking it would be easy just to tweak some software but it was all custom hardware we could not possibly tweak it so I ended up bringing two computers each with 10% chance of failure and a human and a human who had a switch once one crashed he switches to the other so so I told Jon down to 1% not to worry and so you didn't end up needing the human we didn't we were in that 90 percent case however the end of the show John London came to the backstage and she saw the human with the switch she said I knew that was fake but what what took so long in a sense I mean you were onto this you had one of the first PhDs in AI in the late 80s I believe why why is it taken almost 30 years for for AI to really accelerate well the algorithms we had at the time were not nearly as good as deep learning which truly revolutionary revolution eyes the whole domain dramatically dropped the error rate to beating human so at the time we showed the demo were probably 10 times worse than human 5 to 10 times worse than human now it's better than human and that crossing that threshold was important but deep learning doesn't isn't just a magical software algorithm there's also required a ton of data to train the system when I did my PhD thesis I had the world's largest database for speech recognition and there was a hundred megabytes so it's like five songs on your iPhone now when I was at Apple maybe we had maybe a gigabytes but now people are regularly using 100 terabytes for training so we've gone up factor of 1 million in data and AI is just so hungry for data and with more data and more compute power and better algorithms it's really crushed that across the threshold and that's what is good it's made it blossom in this area in your book the AI superpowers China and Silicon Valley in the New World Order you write about how China is very very quickly catching up to the US why is that I would argue China has already caught up in the implementation execution and monetization of AI u.s. is clearly still ahead and actually Europe is quite strong in basic research but China has gone faster to translate that to value I think there are a couple of fundamental reasons first I think the most important is the amount of data as I mentioned data is the rocket fuel to make AI work great and China has so much data so many users each user using the phone the apps so much more ways so by breadth and depth arguably China has 10 times as much data as US or Europe and in the era of a I if data is the new oil then China is the new OPEC I think that's one analogy but in addition to that China has a very strong VC ecosystem so tenacious entrepreneurs funded by VCS who work a hundred hours a week I mean the entrepreneurs not not a species hundred hours a week incredibly hard in finding every which every which way that there's value to be created for the user money to be made and AI sort of gave the entrepreneurs a magical knob where you can say I want to tweak for more user minutes I want to tweak for more revenue I want to tweak for more profit of course that there's issue with that and that's what God you know Facebook into some trouble but that is such a magical knob that no business has ever had and Chinese entrepreneurs are they are tweaking the knob every day so those I think are the main reasons of course the government incentives and support is also important but mostly the day that the entrepreneurs the VCS the ecosystem so many people in the West have looked at China and technology and they said you know China either copies there's protectionism or you know in the case of AI while the government is funding it to the tune of billions of dollars but you write that it's some it's not any of those those factors could you talk about the trip to Silicon Valley that took sure first all three of those statements independently were true at some point in time it's just that China moves so quickly people forget things change Chinese entrepreneurs were copycats but they now innovate there are new apps coming out worth hundreds of billions of dollars that have never been heard of in the US or Europe and protectionism is not an issue because Chinese companies are actually stronger at least on Chinese soil than American companies product for product feature for feature and the Chinese government support is a little bit after the fact it's certainly helpful companies are happy to get it but it was the private capital and the independent private entrepreneurs who made the 18 billion dollar companies in AI this is just in AI that China has the I think the government funding is maybe coming to help them a little bit more building infrastructure but it's not what the government Mundi money that made them so I run the VC we've invested in forty five AI companies four of which have become unicorns currently valued at about 21 billion and still regularly we take our entrepreneurs to visit a Silicon Valley because we believe there are things to be learned a lot people with more experience and also great innovation but when they came back they their number one number two takeaway was WOW these people are in fact quite innovated out-of-the-box the number one impression was they don't work very hard no when they went to you name your favorite company any one of the companies Google Facebook Oracle Salesforce went to visit the mall and the parking lots were empty at 7 and in and then our weekends nobody could get any meetings and that the entrepreneurs are so frustrated it's like how can we not use the weekend time we are you know we're we're move away from our companies here to learn in Silicon Valley nobody would meet with us and then I eventually found a bunch of Chinese entrepreneurs in the Bay Area's who would meet with them in in China people call it's either 996 or 997 and I a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week or seven days a week you choose and the ones that are six days a week that's how it is they usually lose to the 997 so so you have been making some pretty bold predictions about where this is going to end up China you think will start dominating the app world will start dominating AI startups where does this go from here well I think China and us will be neck and neck for the next five years in various types of AI China will be ahead in some areas face recognition speech recognition machine translation drones US will be ahead in certain areas autonomous vehicles business AI US Europe and Japan may be ahead in robotics so it's case by case but if you think of it as one pie with a dollar sign on it China and US will each take a very large piece that's the the the likely outcome I also think the Chinese companies will naturally go beyond the Chinese borders because if what I said is right namely that there is innovation and that the entrepreneurs are really good then there's no reason that Chinese software can only win in Chinese markets so I anticipate there to be a likely bifurcation in fact the parallel universe where roughly half the world will be using mostly American software and half of the world will be mostly in Chinese software in about the five years time so we kind of have a bipolar world in a sense the US and China yeah I'm not an advocate of it I don't think it's necessarily good for the users but I think that's the path well given the state of tensions between the US and China the the word superpower and the title of your book do you feel like we've entered a bit of a cold war already I certainly hope not there are talks going on and we know the academic community is very much interlinked if you go to what used to be called nips or anyone at the AI conferences you really see incredibly collegiate and cordial and truly of friends among the Americans Chinese and Europeans sharing ideas and putting things in the open source and publishing things in real time not waiting into a journal so I hate to predict that kind of kindred spirit will go away but certainly that is a risk if current tensions continue now I want to talk about Europe which is obviously right in the middle and privacy concerns are obviously very big here they're growing in the US I have to ask you know a company like face plus plus the use of facial recognition in China there are many who have who have moral issues and worried that it could be used to track people in in ways that are quite troubling how do you how do you square the different standards for the use of such technology right well I think different cultures do have different views about privacy so I think first I think we have to understand that not the whole world has exactly the same view that said I do think every culture wants to protect every citizen wants as his or hers privacy to be protected at some level I would think it's kind of like a knob where each user should have the right to go for a lot of privacy or a lot of convenience / security it isn't I don't think it is merely an inalienable rights certainly you're entitled to feel that way I think it is a trade-off between convenience and security versus privacy and I think everybody has a line where he or she would draw to to basically give up the privacy in order to win the other benefits for example almost every country has cameras in the airports because we're concerned about hijacking so that's one line that is strong and I think there are all the users of Google and Facebook if you're still on it you are accepting that the company has your private data and we'll deal with it responsibly otherwise you would withdraw so there is a line so I think I am a huge admirer of the policy makers and believers in Europe who want to really go out to bat for the individual privacy but I would suggest that they also consider this not as a completely black and white issue that they're ever there is a line and to find that right line I would further suggest that if the privacy protection went to the extreme then the then the monetization the value creation will come to a halt now because AI is in fact a centralizing technology it benefits from all the data being gathered if you force them to be separated then the value will be lower now I understand many policymakers here believe it's wise to slow down AI and many of them are are willing to accept the consequences so all I'm saying is understand that there are consequences and to the extent that you accept them then then that's fine last point is that in making a policy is incredibly important to get the technologists in the room when you make the next version of gdpr or something else it's great to have ethicists and policy makers and consumer advocates in there but also make sure you have a technologist in the room so that you know each of the regulations what are the possible consequences and and and think about it that way you made some comments last week about Europe and said that it's not even in the running for the bronze position nai could you please explain what what is is it the lack of a you know that we were just hearing that the VC you know system here is growing but it's just not what it is in Silicon Valley in China yeah I think the main point I was making is that there is no bronze medal right when the when the gold and silver achieves so much who gets the bronze is kind of irrelevant and that's kind of the main point I think the but as far as what could Europe do to get a meaningful bronze out of this competition or maybe some hope for silver the game is certainly not over I think there are a number of things that are very strong Europe I think the academia is very strong but all the PhDs go work for American companies so you're not really monetizing that or using that the VC ecosystem is improving but still a huge gap from either China or Silicon Valley and I think that is a huge issue because VCS and entrepreneurs help each other grow and I think that's the second second aspect and I think Europe as a market how can they come together as more of one market is important because english-speaking countries are more one market China is one market and and that's another another element so there are good things and there are issues to be dealt with I certainly have huge respect for a lot of the academia academia here in fact if you look at the three inventors of deep learning I think all of them have Europe or Europeans when they were born in anyway I don't know they still are so great schools great universities but somehow when it reaches commercialization there isn't doesn't seem to be the ecosystem and the that the large market and the capital for them to realize their their dreams I want to open it up to a couple questions but first want to talk about the impact of AI and work you have commented that you think up to 40% of all work could be impacted by a walk white collar and blue collar jobs how soon will this happen and and what can we do so technically I think in the next 15 years that displacement will happen some some of it will be one for one displacement so AI for person like a customer service or a cashier or a truck driver some but some of it will be through industry disruptions where complete industries changed that you we borrow money from apps and not banks thereby the loan officers are out of work so those things will happen and there is a lengthy discussion in my book about the types of jobs but however there's a lot of reasons for hope still first I think all the jobs that you're in all the creative jobs strategic jobs jobs that require the planning and jobs that require dealing with uncertainty those things AI is not good at AI is just one tool that optimizes an objective function based on a large amount of data within one domain so if you're multi domain your strategic your planning you're creative you're building something new a I cannot touch that so that those jobs are safe secondly are the human to human connection jobs are also safe and in fact they will be growing for example elderly care nurses teachers the future doctors tour guides concierge those jobs will even be in greater demand because AI cannot fake the human to human trust empathy and compassion and even if AI did an 80% job taking it we're not we're not going to accept it so I think those jobs are not only safe but also very good jobs for people who are being displaced to consider retraining to move into and then there's going to be jobs that are to be created by AI there will be lots of them but I have no idea what they are why not because if you go back 20 years the internet started none of us could have predicted that 10 million uber jobs that came as a result of Internet so those thing things will happen so I think a massive an employment is not the big worry but rather there will be a lot of jobs but many of the jobs that open up require training and skills that may not be had by the people who are displaced so how to help the retraining probably is the most important thing do you think China in the US will need to consider the universal basic income I think the universal basic income as by itself is a terrible idea I think enhanced with conditions and qualifications it would it may be something worth doing essentially we're talking about taking care of the 40% of the people so they don't need to worry about food on the table and shelter and also training them so they can move on to the next step so as long as those are the policies being applied whether it's through encouraging corporations to do training whether it is changing the mix at vocational schools whether it is the tax credit given only when people have done work on improving themselves towards a job that's not displace able by AI then I think that's a good thing if you just give money away then I think the main issue is that people may fall into addiction or depression and and furthermore I think the biggest issue is not just the loss of income but the loss of identity that people [Applause] [Music] yeah because people associate their worth many people associate their worth with the jobs they have I do hope in 50 years we will find something better to identify ourselves with but such is today's society and we have to deal with that core issue we have time for one or two very quick questions if I see any hands out there I've got plenty myself right in the first row here here's it could you introduce yourself please yes if he must Trotsky here to Metropolis from Russia would you would you tell you ever you ever seen or anybody ever seen the natural intellect do you think the natural intellect exists you know once you are saying artificial intellect and artificial intelligence AI yes so did anybody sometime have seen the natural intelligence oh well human natural intelligence does it exist because the human intelligence is also the artificial one I think wondering is there a choral Isis yeah I think today are the visual intelligence is actually a bit of a misnomer because what it is is a tool of optimization based on data that can lead to smart decisions within one domain there eerily when we think about our intelligence that our ability to have common sense and reasoning and planning and creativity and learn from few examples those are things the today's AI that does not have and I think to cross that bridge will require a number of breakthroughs and if we look at the last 63 years of AI history there's only been one big breakthrough and that was about 10 years ago with deep learning so to project that we'll have a bunch of breakthroughs in the coming decade to reach human intelligence I think is not only too optimistic but naive and Chi foo we need to wrap up here but maybe this is a good thing to close on you close your book by saying actually that the love and compassion are two unsolved issues and they give you optimism so so so basically we are not going to be able to teach machines how to love well for those of us who watch a lot of sci-fi and don't think about it and don't understand technology sure it looks like there is love and compassion and many of the robots that we see in the various science fiction movies but AI is really just a tool that optimizes and that I think we humans are unique in in our ability to connect to each other to build that trust and the special feeling that you have when you see your newborn baby the fall in love the first time those are things that are not quantifiable in any way shape or form by AI so I think it's important that we believe that we are unique and special and so far I think no one has been proved able to prove otherwise and that I think if we all believe love and compassion is what holds the world together will certainly be a much happier world and and I think AI can continue to take away routine jobs and in some sense that is good because it liberates us from having to do them and really be able to focus on our love which i think is so unique and amazing for for us we may just need to find some different work [Applause] you [Music] you

Channel: DLDconference

Views: 13,323

Rating: 4.8552036 out of 5

Keywords: DLD, Conference, Burda, 2019, Munich, Optimism, Courage, Kongreßhalle, Kai Fu Lee, Sinovation Ventures, Blumenstein, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Electricity, Finance, Internet, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Innovation, Digital, Life, Design, Superpowers, China, USA, Europe

Id: nnZ7gr-xHSQ

Length: 26min 26sec (1586 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/AONomad]

Around 6 mins in is a discussion about China's progress in the field if anyone wants to skip to it

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re: collegiate relations between AI specialists in different countries, I think the US/European scientists probably don't realize the huge nationalism present in the Chinese AI industry. Could be a future speedbump to good relations