Ex-Google CEO on the Consequences of an A.I. (Eric Schmidt) | EP #7

15 years ago we embarked on an experiment in social media which I didn't you know pay that much attention to we were busy doing our own Facebook beat us so forth and so on that model which was a linear feed right made sense to me today's model which is an amped up AI feed to engage to increase engagement and make you outraged right is not what was on the program 10 years ago and a massive transformative purpose is what you're telling the world it's like this is who I am this is what I'm going to do this is the dent I'm going to make in the universe here's a conversation I had back in April of 2022 at my executive Summit called abundance 360 with the one the only the extraordinary Eric Schmidt uh you may know Eric Schmidt as the head of the Smith Futures Foundation most people know him as the past CEO and chairman of first Google and then alphabet he's an extraordinary technologist and philanthropist and entrepreneur and thinker and here we talk about a wide range of conversations from the world's biggest problems uh to cleaning up the oceans to the ex prises he's been involved with uh please join me for an extraordinary conversation with one of the most brilliant investors and entrepreneurs someone who's built one of the most impactful companies on the planet Eric Schmidt I was recounting our our trip to Russia for the uh soers launch it's actually true so it's one of the best memories ever hiding in the bus yes escaping to get through the gates in the bus on the way to the uh underground bunker we had to duck down so we wouldn't be seen Peter said that if it blew up we would be dead and we said it's not going to blow up this is the care that we take I always thought I could like uh I could make money by putting puts on uh on Google and telling people that you're half a kilometer from a soou lunch yeah or or the or the time that we took you know one of the things that's interesting is uh we had some fun on some zerog G flights too uh and I don't know if you know if you remember so the first time we did a zero GF flight I I followed all the rules and the second time the uh I observed the photographer who basically the moment it started which started flipping himself and so I thought well I'm a veteran now I've done it once and so this is an airplane full of Google customers okay and so you can see where this is going so and at the time we didn't have video phones on our phone but I had my camera uh in my hand strapped to my hand my uh digital camera video camera and so the moment we start floating I immediately flip myself flip one flip two flip three boom everything comes out and when you throw up in space okay now and by the way so we're clear I have this on video and our customers are flying through this so so Peter has so Peter's smart he he knows that there's idiots like me so there's a guy whose job is to retrieve you and strap you down and there's another fella whose job is to clean it up while it's floating we paid the other guy double in fact we've got uh Matt I strongly recommend you do this flight I strongly recommend you follow the instructions mat Matt Go's in the back of the room he's our new CEO for zero g hi Matt Matt before we get started you know I was I was prepping for our our time together and I I'm grateful for our friendship Eric and for all of your support over the years but um you are the hardest bio on the planet I mean is this stuff true so check this out um Dr Eric Schmidt served as Google's CEO and chairman from 2001 to 2011 remain chairman to Google through 2015 next served as executive chairman of alphabet from 2015 to 18 and Technical adviser through 2020 I know that stuff uh prior to Google uh you were a chairman CEO of Novel 14 years at Sun prior to that and then you were at Xerox Park which is legendary um Eric was elected the National Academy of engineering the American Academy of Arts and Sciences On The Board of Trustees of carigan melon University Princeton University the board of visitors of UC Berkeley and the board of the institute for advanced studies in Princeton which is the coolest one for me that's one but those are extraordinary boards board of directors of at Apple from 2006 to 2009 now I need to hear about the conflict of interest stories in apple and and Google I mean I mean guys were like dueling phones around that end of that time period today he's chairman of the broad Institute of uh board of directors uh at MIT and Harvard the broad is the most you know extraordinary biotech uh engine uh in the US uh the board the Mayo Clinic uh uh Cornell tech board of overseers became the chairman of the Department of defenses Innovation board in 2016 held a position for four years current ly chairman of the National Security Commission on AI has authored many books including you digital age how Google works the trillion dollar coach I was C trying to catch up to you yeah thanks no no you wrote the book on abundance which I followed thank you it worked I recommend it he has three more books that say the same thing buy them all okay he he was right he is right and he will be right right this is why we work with him thank you pal uh Eric co-founded Schmid Futures in 2017 uh and bets on early exceptional people who making the world better and it's an interesting thing Eric we should talk about this it's think of it is smartest Talent on the hardest problems yeah and we got lots of Hard problems and there's good news we have lots and lots of smart Talent globally right this is a straightforward formula you just have to solve that formula yeah uh in 2019 he and uh his wife Wendy announced a billion- dollar philanthropic commitment to identify and support Talent across disciplines and around the globe to serve others and help the world address its most pressing issues uh Eric you know I I get pissed that there are so many people on the planet not doing stuff that are hoarding wealth or or Talent OR treasures and you're not one of them you're someone uh like Elon and many others who's changing the world and I'm grateful for you so thank you well thank you um we're going to have a conversation for just a few minutes I'm going to open it up uh so one philosophical answer if you look at the history of science scientists when they're kind of spent end up working on public policy and trying to make the world better place and I decided I was spent you know that I had done the obvious technical stuff but that because of my experience in the tech industry I could work on these other problems and it's been very satisfying and for those of you that are sort of toward the end of whatever you think is the most consequential thing one of the most important things to understand is that that your life is a series of chapters and each chapter is interesting and people tend to fear the next chapter when in fact you should run to it because that's how you learn that's how you make new friends that's how you do new things um you understand synthetic biology better than I do uh I've recently started working on it and I've decided it's like the super coolest thing um I would not have had time had I been running Google or the equivalent to learn this stuff we can talk about that um when I became chairman I was CEO for a long long time uh and when I became chairman I thought well what will I do and so my friend Jared and I went to North Korea to try to get them to open up their internet we failed but that trip wouldn't have been possible right I wrote a series of books about those sorts of things so one of the sort of Life advice things when you get old enough is you're better off having a series of events not one thing because your life needs to be sort of you you need to fulfill your whatever your destiny is as an individual um this appears to be mine uh I look forward to the next few chapters and since you've worked hard on life extension sign me up I there's a l there's a lot of stuff ahead yeah this is the most exciting time ever exactly hey thanks for listening to Moon shots and mindsets I want to take a second and tell you about a company that I love it's called levels and it helps me be responsible for the food that I eat what I bring into my body see we were never designed as humans to eat as much sugar as we do and sugar is not good for your brain or your heart or your body in general levels helps me monitor the impact the foods that I eat by monitoring my blood sugar for example I learned that if I dip my bread in olive oil it blunts my glycemic response which is good for my health if you're interested learn more by going to levels. link back/ Peter levels will give you an extra 2 months of membership it's something that is critical for the future of your longevity all right let's get back to the conversation in the episode I'm I'm curious about your jumping I mean being chairman of the board of the broad is fascinating as a move for you uh jumping into biology I know where's Ben lamb Ben so Ben uh is partnered with George church and is the CEO of colossal uh bringing back the woly mammoth yes we read I actually read about this whole project it's incredible yeah I think you know uh Mr Tull his his his partner in that um but it's you know the amount of extraordinary uh I mean programming in atcs and G's is that so I don't think I'll ever understand biology the way our real biologists do but I can give you a formula which is you go in biology from the squishy stuff to the digital stuff and the quicker you can go from squishy the digital the more we can accelerate and so I got involved with the broad you know years ago because I thought I Now understand that it becomes a computational problem once they once they can measure these things and we're now in a situation where um I'll give you a model um AI is to biology the way math is to physics um an interesting statistic is one of the you know I'm dumb in this area so I said well okay well let's see if we let's just take a digital model of the cell and figure out what it can do and they said we don't have a digital model of the cell I said how can you you've been working on biology for like a thousand years or like a long time right how can you not have a digital model of the cell well we don't know this and that it's all these sort of lame excuses um I mean how can you do biology without understanding how it works well these poor biologists have been doing biology for for literally a hundred years without understanding the underlying mechanisms and the only way to understand the underlying mechanisms is to estimate them and sort of one of the B basic rules about AI is that AI is very useful at estimating a function that is a naturally non-computable function so you can essentially look at the pattern and give a a good enough approximation of what's going on that then the human scientists can look at that and say I see the correlate I can see A and B cause C and D to occur which says there's language or there's communication or there's a mechanism which then stimulates their research and I started funding stuff in this this area because it seems to me that until you understand the structure of a cell um how how far can you go now one of the things that's going to make that squishy stuff more understandable is what you just did with Jack hit uh sandbox AQ can you speak to that for a moment so I think everybody here knows that uh Quantum is coming and it's most estimates are that real quantum comput computers of the kind that that look like a computer or like half a computer because they can only do the algorithms is probably 8 to 10 years away the technical reason for that is that the um various approaches there are six or seven that are sort of favored um and I'm I've been briefed on two or three but just imagine that all of them are roughly similar at this point they all have measurement errors and in order to get something which has accurate computation you have to have replication so you typically for one cubit to be accurate you need 100 or 1,000 cubits and we can build computers that are super cool coed right down to basically 0.01 Kelvin uh which is quite something think about the number of refrigerators necessary to get down to absolute zero um but we can make like a hundred of them or 70 of them so we're waiting in in in quantum computers for the ability to make these things on MOS so that's rough for the time frame to lower the error rate of that to lower the error rate so Jack Jack hit uh I'd worked with at Google for years formed a company and spun it out of Google Google for whatever ever reason want to do it separately and then have them be a a Google Cloud customer which is fine and I'm the chairman and its objective is to get everybody ready for this so its first two products are um Quantum security Communications and the simple rule is that in 8 to 10 years all of your digital Communications will be breakable probably initially by foreign powers uh I don't know if the US is I'm not now my Bitcoin is safe though right um Bitcoin has its own and different set of problems uh including the fact that if 51% of the miners collude your Bitcoin is not safe but that's a separate discussion that's not a Quantum problem that's a human problem um so so the important thing about Quantum is that that the other thing you can do is you can anticipate these computers by doing Quantum simulation so using digital computers you can simulate what the quantum computer will do and it looks like Quantum simulation will allow you to take compounds that uh chemists have already made and make them more robust the way they express it is I have this beautiful thing I want to make it last longer without Refrigeration I want it to make it more effective I want to dampen this reaction and using Quantum simulation today you can do that to some degree and when quantum computers come out um the ability to because a quantum computer is fundamentally a natural thing it actually operates the way the analog world does you have a real simulator right an accurate simulator as opposed to a digital simulator 100% faithful according to the to the belief anyway to see how these systems work that will change everything because all of a sudden you can understand the energy states of how things merge together all sorts of quantum chromatics and things like this that I don't understand at all but are crucial to getting materials um resistance other things done very quickly you know Eric uh when we spoke last uh couple weeks ago we're talking about this session and a few of the things that you said that are philosophically on your mind is what we've been talking about the last two days which is the digitization of absolutely everything and how fast the acceleration is right now so again you you worked on this starting 10 years ago and were one of the first people to see it others have since seen it and I'll say it as bluntly as I can the whether you say it's Mark and Jason software is eating the world or you talk about technology the digitization of these businesses transforms each business and and it's only a matter of when and what happens in the competitive environment so we've already seen this in music and entertainment we've seen this obviously in my world we've seen it in biology we will eventually see it in regulated Industries including health and education and so forth and so the regulation slows it down but it's definitely coming and one of the things to understand is every there's so much capital and there's so many entrepreneurs that every idea many of whom in this room every idea no matter how implausible will be tried and you'll be able to raise the money and try it and so then it's up to you is whether you can assemble the team and the timing and so forth um and we have and the industry that I am a have been a member of for a long time now understands this you have hundreds of people on every question looking for what's that scalable path how do you design for scalability um and I I mean a separate but related Point look at the scale of the large language models and the um announcement last week from Google Google of something called Palm which is industrial strength um knowledge system and the most interesting thing about it is that for example it can translate from one software language to another even though it wasn't given pairs of to to learn right it clearly embeds by virtue of its immense training and immense cost you know they used four of the TPU clusters and they cost you know millions and millions of dollars to do this over six weeks that model uh represents real knowledge right there's something in there and by the way you know it's sort of like a teenager it can't explain itself but you know there's something going on inside that head right there's something going on of power now that is in incredibly disruptive because it leads to improvements in in total intelligence in the system now today this is not intelligence this is sort of special tricks with with pattern matching but you can see the path you can see the ramp right as these things get bigger and stronger and the algorithms get better there's all sorts of issues and opportunities but the the nature of this acceleration in terms of everyone having an opportunity to transform the businesses and so forth and so on that they're doing than you um is profound and um my general answer to things is if you want to choose what to work on work on biology if you want to work in my field work on these language models yeah I the number I I've heard is we're seeing a 10x every 10 months in the size of these language models and um and it's a extraordinary let's I want to hit on the compression of time because that's something I feel um and please what are your thoughts on that I've been an executive for for a very long time and I used to tell people as a leader that if you had infinite time you could do everything right you could get your strategy right you could manage your people right you could be charismatic you could be prepared for your speeches and so forth every product you did would be perfectly and it have no bugs the only problem is we have the compression of time and I'm now extremely worried that the sum of everything we're describing is causing further compression of time than we can can deal with um when you say that you mean the human mind can comprehend or that we can comprehend that we have time to process that our systems that our legal systems that our political systems can process in um Andy Grove years ago explained to me uh in a sort of sort of true but but unpleasant statement that we run three times faster than normal and the government run runs three times slower than normal so the government is nine times slower or 10 times slower and and it's just true unfortunately and I got in trouble for saying that so I'll say it again just true and so so in the you know your problem with the abundance religion which we we fundamentally agree with and you're exactly right runs into the reality of human systems yes so I want to give you some examples please the easiest examples to use are National Security ones and and I'm there are many other ones but so here we are and we're on a ship and the ship has a supercomputer which is running an AI system that can detect hypersonics and hypersonics are hard to detect because they're moving so quickly so the computer says to the captain of the ship him or her says you have 23 seconds to press this button to launch a Counterattack or you're dead Okay now how many of you would fail to press that button okay this is like an IQ test that's the compression of time now when we were all young the the dialogue about uh nuclear attack and I've now watched the simulation so I know what these timings are it takes about 30 minutes for a nuclear weapon from Russia for example not to use a bad example of today but in the doctrine uh from Russia to go over the pole get to a a sort of a us-based Target it's some number like that um and so in their Doctrine they have three minutes to wake up the president who then says like what's going on and say Mr President you know there's a bomb coming and the President says did you wake me up for that and they go yes he goes okay okay good and then you know another two minutes for a cognition and then another five minutes for conversation and then then then he or she in this Doctrine orders the response uh in just in time okay well in 30 seconds you don't have time to call the president wake up the president and so forth so okay now what happens when it's fully digital what happens when the systems attacks are so difficult that a human can't spot it and can't react in time so now you have to have automatic defensive weapon systems what happens when those systems make a mistake simple rule about AI systems is we don't know how they operate we don't know what they do they make lots of mistakes and they're very powerful that's a dangerous combination when it comes to personal security or health so here's an example um what should be the doctrine between two countries that are potential opponents the canical examples being China and the US um China has hypersonics for example so let's say this all happens and we build a system that can respond in a defensive way automatically for this reason well what's the appropriate level of response I suggest for example that the two countries enter into a treaty and the treaty goes like this if you have a a something you think is coming to you then you have to respond proportionately but not over proportionately okay that's an example um another example has to do with Biology where we know that the spread of these biological databases will allow people to begin to build things which are evil Bad viruses and things like that how are we going to detect them you're going to have to have automatic observatories which will watch for them you're going to have to have mechanisms where if you for example if a lab is about to build something biological it scans a database to say is this thing related to something evil and then it stops IT and sends sends this person to the police or what have you so all of these things require both an identification of the problem the compression of time and an agreement globally how to handle it and you sit there and you go well that's not possible well we did actually do this successfully in the nuclear age Kissinger and I wrote a book about this called the age of AI which everybody has we've said it thank you if you read chapter 5 you'll see the history which he largely LED and it has this very strange outcome which is in the 1950s um Iran's group that Iran group that was organized at MIT and Harvard came up with the idea of mutually assured destruction and this is an idea where we will deliberately not develop defensive systems to make sure we're exposed and they will as well now this makes no sense to any of us and yet it solved the problem of the time so we collectively have got to and I'm not suggesting mad is the correct solution for this because I don't think it is but nobody in our system is talking about the compression of time the human decision cycle and the structures that we and I I'm using National Security to make the point but the point is in general true hey everybody I hope you're enjoying this episode want to tell you about something I've been doing for years every quarter or so having a fonus come to my home to draw Bloods to understand what's going on inside my body and it was a challenge to get all the right blood draws and all the right tests done so I ended up co-founding a company that sends a fonus to my home to measure 40 different biomarkers every quarter put them up on a dashboard so I can see what's in range what's out of of range and then get the right supplements medicines peptides hormones to optimize my health it's something that I want for all my friends and family and I'd love it for you if you're interested go to myli force.com back/ Peter to learn more let's get back to the episode Eric let's move more directly into AI for a second I have a lot of discussions about this with folks like Peter nordvig and Ray CW and Elon and others and there's a there's a two camps of AI is really super dangerous what the hell are we doing and the camp just everybody knows I'm in which is it's the most important collaborative to most important tool we're going to have to solve the world's biggest problems um I'm curious about your conversation there and then the second half of that is the ability to even regulate any of this because we live in a country of porous borders and if you make something illegal here or just go someplace else and last part I'll move into that that is the uh uh in the late in the mid 1980s when we were having recombinant DNA uh it was the um uh series of sort of collaborative meetings of the scientists that set out the rules and and you're referring to the Asar conf conf which which was the culmination of this where the the scientists agree in general that they would police each other and that there were particular things that they would do for examp they would not modify the germ line but this was not government mandate this was voluntary yeah and it worked because the stuff is so specialized and it worked until the Chinese guy violated that rule and God knows what happened to him um he's been recently released um okay so he's probably back at his lab um the so so let's go through the the scenarios for AI um I think it's EXT extremely clear that in the next 10 years we're going to get industrial strength AI um computer scientists and funding and so forth around AI will help us understand how these algorithms work make them much more explainable so you'll be able to converse with it so for the next 5 years you should expect multimodal which means you're going to have text and speech and video today they don't do video very well but they're working on that and that'll come it's just computationally harder you're going to see huge improvements in speed and computation um the cost of algorithms will go down way the the models that I'm describing will get much larger the other thing that's happened that I should note is that five years ago when I started looking at this almost no science people were using AI in any interesting way it was all being done in places like Google and Facebook in the last five years this is the genius of America that The Graduate students who are sort of always looking for something new have all embraced um essentially various forms of AI machine learning deep learning to actually solve and estim estimate hard problems in their Sciences so you're going to see all of that so think of it as the next 5 years industrial strength usable Global conversational systems you can say to the system why did you do this it will give you its best understanding of why it made that decision and so forth it will will become part of our lives uh this I'm quite sure of the next steps get much more interesting and much more speculative so the first question is how do you define um arbitrary artificial general intelligence and I'll give you mine which is so can we just take a second back up and we have AGI versus narrow ai ai so most of what you deal with today is considered narrow AI has a specific objective function that was set by a set of humans it builds and these are very powerful system Google translate yeah but but also uh the development of new drugs things which are really remarkably powerful so not taking away from that so my Definition of artificial general intelligence is computer intellig ENT that looks human but is not human intelligence and I want to make this distinction because of some really fundamental issues that are going to come up and I'll give you some examples so in the industry there's sort of as you said two camps there are the people who think that AGI will happen relatively quickly which is sort of in the 20-year period sort of in our lifetimes and there's a set of people who think it's much harder um if you do the median of the predictions across the experts the exact answer is 20 years so I predict right now April 2042 is the arrival of AGI and I'm statistically going to be correct when when that occurs we're going to have these systems that can set their own objective functions and they can discover things that we can't necessarily understand or why they went after it there is speculation that these systems will also be able to write code themselves and therefore rewrite themselves today if you look at the Microsoft codec which is a significant technological achievement one of the uh numbers that I read was about a third of the code is being written by the computer two3 about by the human it's roughly correct so imagine that that number will get a much larger percentage written by computer over the next few years at the point at which these systems are capable of independent thought that is nonhuman what do we do with them now let's say that you and you and you and I are we don't know each other and we probably don't trust each other for whatever reason um but we can expect based on our shared Human Experience what the limits of your good and evil are right that there are real biological limits on you on your life on your thinking on your experience uh and furthermore we judge people you know male female uh Asian American Russian whatever European we have our all these stereotypes that we care none of that applies to this new kind of intelligence so how will we treat it on the one hand it will be extraordinary it might actually discover things that we have no path to discover they may actually discover princip they may be able to answer the gravity question in physics they may be able to answer all sorts of really really fundamental questions but they could also do their own thing right now we're going to be watching them right because somebody's going to write an article that says we have you know no idea what this thing's going to do there' be lots of people watching it in fact I believe that there will be people watching it with guns on the on the mistaken theory that they should shoot it um pull the plug uh yeah well you might have to shoot it in case it takes over the plug but the important point is the the paranoia about these things is going to be really profound because we don't know how to we don't know how to bottle it we don't know how to constrain it and that's why you get a bodal distribution that's why why you get this view that you have which is this things extraordinary because believe me these things if at that scale will accelerate your vision at a scale that is impossible for us to understand because it's a non-human acceleration on the other hand it also brings in these issues and I can give you lots of negative examples um but at the end of the day and I'll I'll be more precise because I it be 20 years people will have forgotten whatever I say I hope um I think there will be five to 10 of these things because these things are so computationally expensive even 20 years from now because of the amount of data and and the this what we understand about uh thinking and sparse thinking and so forth that there'll be a few of them they'll be controlled by nation states and unless that we have one universal World Government which I think is unlikely between now and then um we're going to have tensions I think every science fiction movie I I I or science fiction book I read has it as Quantum clusters kilometers underground below Beijing it's part of my military work I went to visit where we keep our plutonium so there's a military base with large amounts of people with guns and then inside this military base I won't go to details there's another little base with even more guns um and inside the fence after many things they put the radiation suit on you go in and then there's more people with guns W right so then you see behind the window you see the person with lots of guns around with basically handling the pl plutonium and moving it right is that our future or is there a different future can we think about this is a question and I James manika and I announced a $125 million program to fund research on these hard problems of which this is a good example James from uh from Mackenzie just just joined Google um oh I didn't know that and uh it's funny to see my friends go to Google as I left um sort of the natural progression of life you know your children do better than you and you go that's good what happened to me but it's all good uh and James is fantastic so J James will can give you a much more sophisticated argument as to why these problems are so hard but I think that the most important thing is we need to start now with the philosophers and the technologists the sociologists and the economists to start thinking about how does society look like when we have these things coexisting now and and just to be completely brutal 15 years ago we embarked on an experiment in social media which I didn't you know pay that much attention to we were busy doing our own Facebook beat us so forth and so on that model which was a linear feed right made sense to me today's model which is an amped up AI feed to Enga to increase engagement and make you outraged right is not what was on the program 10 years ago and that those decisions were made by technical people not by society as a whole I don't want to do that again I want us to collectively have this discussion to shape this I can think of lots of ways where we could put uh various forms of trip wires and slow things down to to address the most extremely uh dangerous aspects of this technology while preserving its benefit all technology at this level is dual use and the question is you know I I often ask the question if uh if Einstein knew the consequences of his research would he have stopped could he have stopped you know if you understood eal MC squ was going to lead to nuclear bomb and the question is is AI research regulatable at all well one of the questions I mean Einstein of course wrote the famous letter to FDR sure so he was more than just an inventor he was also complicit in in a very important aspect of human history and you know an extraordinary person in in our history if you look at software you have a core problem with proliferation so I'll give you let's use nuclear versus software in nuclear Kissinger tells a story a very funny story where he was in the Kremlin in the 1970s and he his negotiating style was that he would basically start by telling the opponent um how what he knew about the opponent so he' always start with a little presentation of the other side's nuclear weapons so he starts and then there's this big promotion they stop the meeting and they throw one of the Russians out because he wasn't clear to hear their own information okay right okay so now let's imagine Eric right trying to do a bad impersonation of this and I show up at the equivalent group let's say in China and I start up and I say we know you have done X well the first thing the Chinese are going to say is no and then if I reveal anything that we're doing that they don't know we're doing they will immediately begin it because if we're doing it that they know it's possible so you have this core problem of when you have hidden research I'm using defense analogies but you'll see the point you don't know how to regulate it because you don't know what it is furthermore how do you deter people from stealing software okay so what we do is we create an observatory and the observatory watches for the software right but what if the software is not turned on yet and furthermore we hear that our opponent let's pick China has built a a a a software weapon that is so dangerous that they refuse to even test it but if they use it it will result in you know an horrendous outcome for America so then the American strategist go we have to preemptively destroy the software right that is a dynamically unstable situation in in dant because one of the things you want to do is you want to have stability and if you become afraid that your opponent has something that will that you don't know and you want to destroy it how do you do it so I'm just giving you example after example where software is different it's easily spread open source is a problem because so okay so we're really smart here we work with UCLA and Caltech and the other great universities here in LA and we built an open source software that includes all the checks and balances and we release it and we're proud and we write lots of papers we get lots of awards the first thing the opponent does is take all the checks and balances out okay so you go what do we do now you need some kind of Hardware limit well any hardware limit that you write is reproducible by the opponent you see how you see where I'm taking you for each of the problems you hit a roadblock and what happens is people say I want a robot killer robot regulate Killer Robots we're not building Killer Robots guys we're building incredibly powerful intelligent systems that we don't fully understand their use I don't know how to regulate that I remember uh probably about four or five years ago at at the world economic Forum you said uh China was five years ahead of us in AI or 10 years well or or would would be yeah so let's talk about about China for a moment um so two and a half years ago China announced its AI 2050 sorry um China 2030 plan which included um a statement in Chinese that they would be dominant in by 2030 that they would catch up by 2025 Etc and China issues lots of these written statements so one of the good things about studying China is that they say what they intend which doesn't necessarily mean they're going to pull it off and it is an indication however of where the money is going and they have enormous money going into this I was the chairman of this AI commission that you mentioned for the Congress we looked at this really really carefully and we're still a little bit ahead and we're a little bit ahead my own estimate it's hard to estimate is a couple of years maybe one year simply because they're catching up but I think a fair reading of this is that in the next five years the two countries will be roughly equal on everything interesting but the systems will be built with different values so a consequence and a a prediction I will make is that we're going to have that the competition between the US and China is the most important competition that we're going to face during the rest of my life and I mean it as a competition not a war and in that competition it'll be a rivalry partnership there'll be a set of things that we collaborate on um things which are shall we say non-strategic um and a lot of things which we do which people claim are strategic are non-strategic so for example steel Imports farming you know Plastics things like that they're not going to change the level but anything which involves information is going to be very carefully fought over and blocked and the reason is the Chinese cannot allow the Western models into China we have chosen in America to allow those into the US TI Tok is the most successful uh website in America today right so it you may not know where your teenagers are but it does and you know we've made that decision but China is not going to allow it because they can't afford the instability in their system we're going to go to your questions a moment I have two questions uh Eric which I was like should I ask them shouldn't I ask it I'm going to um you've known a lot of extraordinary successful Tech billionaires Tech Founders uh over your last 30 years um I've known many as well and I've seen a predominance of um how do I put this bluntly in some cases it typically improves with age you have never been that you've always been a gentleman and a great I just a joy to work with but some of the most successful people uh I won't name names but do do you think to be to be successful on the world stage at that level you need to become desensitized and uh and you know I'll use the word again an in cases so one so I've now worked with founder I'm not a Founder I'm a person who works with Founders and what I've learned is that there are different management styles and mine is unique to me and theirs is unique to them and not one is the only one that works so um using Steve Jobs as an example Steve was my very close friend he put me on the board he was also incredibly rough on me on things that Google was doing and yet we remain friends and I admired him and I and he certainly cared about me um his brilliance which was undeniable uh meant that when he was in a room he would get people so excited about the future that he would foretold it was a genuine gift that people would follow him anyway it was one of the first times I saw that special leadership gift it's very very very rare and I think the people that you're describing um have the as part they may be very unpleasant but they have a counterveiling brilliance yes that is that it it's almost cult-like and U I'm proud to have worked with such people um I don't think you can generalize uh to any particular style the great Founders break out early they have extreme self-confidence and I would say they disagree they disagree with everything so you know one day I was sitting there and Larry and C had been rollerblading around the campus of Mountain View and they said said we're going to take over these buildings and I said no you're not I said yes we will and they said okay I mean you know they just see the world differently and I think without knowing all of you um a a number of you have this skill but most of you will ultimately work with such people so my approach to life in hindsight was um find the incredibly smartest person in the room uh and inevitably we're in systems where such a person is around man or woman and figure out a way to work with them and do you know why they you know you say well they don't need me they're so brilliant no they absolutely need need you because they can't get through the day right they literally just can't right they've got so much conflict and confusion and drive and so forth they need help so I set myself up as the helper and um and that means you have to be willing to listen to them and and so forth it's worth well my whole career amazing amazing

Channel: Peter H. Diamandis

Views: 17,253

Keywords: peter diamandis, longevity, xprize, abundance

Id: D6-5rxvTceQ

Length: 45min 6sec (2706 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 27 2022