LEAP22 | Dr. Kai-Fu Lee (CEO and President, Sinovation Ventures) on How AI is Transforming the World

[Music] good afternoon thank you very much it's great to be at this fantastic conference and my talk today is on deep tech the future of technology uh i saw it's great to see so many young people at this conference because you are the future and you're born in a very very special time perhaps the best time in the history of human race in terms of what technology can do to disrupt enhance and change and improve the future of humanity there probably was the closest moment to this moment was about 120 years ago around 1900 when three great technologies electricity radio wave and a combustible engine which created phenomenal industries and changed the future for the 20th century and these technologies are not just being used in one application but they are inter they interact with each other to create further and further industrial changes for example take a look at this slide right obviously uh electricity changed the future of energy and the combustible engine change the future of other motor mobiles but think about the future of radio wave plus electricity that's what created the telegraph the telephone the television and that's also what created the uh the world war ii enigma the first computer that created the computer industry so technology is the most valuable and most incredible way that our future can be changed and we're at an even bigger confluence today because we had three big technologies back 120 years ago today we're talking about five technologies we're talking about at the very center artificial intelligence this is computers that will be smarter than us for most things that you can think of within the next 10 years we're talking about automation for that what that will replace and do better than human half of our jobs will be done by computers and artificial intelligence we're talking about new energy cost of energy going down by factor of 90 in the next 15 to 20 years we're talking about life sciences and synthetic biology where we can create and edit life and we're talking about quantum computer which will render today's computer classical computer useless because the quantum computer is so so so much faster so with these five compute five technologies and i didn't even count crypto blockchain metaverse all of these things are happening so fast so the young people at this conference you have a you really have an opportunity not of a lifetime but of an entire lifetime of the human race to take advantage of these technological breakthroughs and do something amazing and many many uh and i think that if you think about the hit the history of united states the second industrial revolution with those three big breakthroughs was what allowed us to surpass the united kingdom and we now have these five technologies and it will give many countries an opportunity and saudi arabia as we've heard from the fast pace from his excellency today has a wonderful opportunity and i want to give you from a different perspective i work in china i'm a venture capitalist and china was nowhere 10 years ago if you go to silicon valley people will laugh and say china is all copycat but in three four years ago i wrote a book called ai superpowers in this book i predicted china is going to lead in artificial intelligence maybe not in the fundamental research but certainly in the application and the value realization and i plotted the prediction from 2013 to 2023 when you china will take the lead from the u.s and today you read any newspaper from new york times to mit technology review it is happening so what is it that made the miracle happen in china it's a little complicated uh but fundamentally it has to do with china's phenomenal ai engineering education talent is critical as we heard from the his excellency and also china's tenacious entrepreneurs who work incredibly hard and who uh do will not stop until they win and we heard now you're doing the garage so great for you and china has created a new ecosystem and we see you're doing that with nyam and china has benefited from a huge amount of data and we also heard from stc and uh and saudi aramco so it seems like saudi arabia is absolutely following the footsteps of china if china could challenge the united states in ai you too will have a chance and i just published a new book called ai 24 2041. in this book i make a bolder larger more ambitious prediction namely that when we saw the circle with the five technologies i predict that by 2041 china will co-lead all deep technologies with the united states and i think the kingdom with this vision 2030 neon plan can you can be the third co-leader if you put your mind to it and your resources to it so let me tell you go back now and tell you about these five technologies and why they're so incredible the first technology ai ai fundamentally takes a huge amount of data and trains a different brain than the human brain it's much much better than people on many tasks repetitive tasks data-driven tasks quantitative tasks it's not as good as people on on things like common sense emotion and creativity but the pace in which that ai has overtaken the people in many of these repetitive tasks is absolutely phenomenal this graph shows that since 1960 up till 2010 ai has made very small progress 1.5 times per year but since 2010 to now it's seven times a year and think about that as being exponential each dot on the graph shows an important technology so alphago alpha fold switch transformer openai gbt3 all on that chart and guess what what that means today is that we're out of compute power because all these new things need seven times more compute than the year before and i heard that the kingdom now has super computing project and i think you are thinking exactly in the right direction so if ai is improving seven times a year how long can it be that many of the things that we do will will not be taken over and done better by artificial intelligence perhaps the largest breakthrough that we saw in the last five years is called self-supervised learning see the way ai works is you present a huge amount of data with the grand truth and it learns it learns the picture of a dog picture of a cat the sound of an ah the sound of an e but what is powerful today is that a new set of technologies is allowing ai to teach itself no longer does it need human supervision so you just have it trained on the whole world's data then it learns to translate generate search it can write it can read they can write music it can create websites now this technology is not yet perfect but because ai does better with more data and this technology allows ai to work without human supervision now we just throw the whole world's data at it and they become smart this is a huge huge breakthrough and the technology that currently only mastered by us and china and i'm actually here in saudi arabia to look for partners and to look for support to transfer this technology to you so let me let's look back on on the two big technologies that has happened uh in the in the past uh back in um about eight years ago at sanovation my venture capital firm we saw that ai was about to overtake people in five years in computer vision and we made a big bet that when ai can see things better than people then ai will create value whether it's to replace people or to enhance people so we made a big big bet on over 10 vision companies computer vision companies and most of them are about to go public right now because our when you read understand the technology it's not too hard to put one and one together and see that when ai does better than people you bet on this technology you invest in this technology and it will grow and today we're seeing another phenomenon namely that ai is reading and understanding our human language better than people already and we saw that two three years ago we made a number of investments and they've done extremely well so today if you look at computer vision and natural language both technologies were invented by americans but chinese have monetized better and created more value this is a lesson for the kingdom to be learned right you don't have to be as good with the nobel prize in touring award as the americans the chinese people have become good at generating data creating data using huge amount of compute to create value so thank you american researchers you invent all this we're happy to use it and create even greater value because maybe we have more people more users more engineers more entrepreneurs more resources more computers so this is really an opportunity for all flowers to blossom and how well has my company side ovation done well we are the number one company in the world for investment in ai we've created 10 unicorns this is not just investing in the last minute before they become a unicorn we were the series a or b4 investors creating 10 to a thousand times return on 10 ai unicorns currently valued at 30 billion dollars this is not china's ai result this is just my company so this is the opportunity that you too can look and and in the future what about beyond ai automation automation robotics so once ai starts to run in software it can to run in hardware we can figure out that ai can create a lot of value in in visual inspection in moving things in putting things together in hand-eye coordination all of that can be done not quite today we can do simpler things and gradually increase the capabilities this is of paramount importance to china because china is the world's factory so if china and china wages are increasing vietnam wages is half of china so china must automate in order to retain its title as the world's factory so at sanovation we made the next big bet is that ai applied to automation robotics is something that the chinese government will support the chinese companies will need so here you see a bunch of pictures that on the upper left is chinese robots making cars on the right are chinese robots doing code tests on lower left are chinese mini buses that have no driver not only do they have no driver they have no steering wheel no brake is 100 automated on the bus routes and on the lower right you see a warehouse that's fully automated these cars drive like crazy they don't have to worry about hitting people because all the people have been relegated to become box movers so these you can see how these cards coordinate with each other and once these technologies work well in the industry they will go into commercial for example many chinese restaurants have robotic waiters and at my home i have a little r2d2 that delivers all my e-commerce and groceries to me so china is about to become the world's leader in use of robotics automation in manufacturing in in any warehouses and that this is of great importance also as i understand in your neon project so i'd love to bring these technologies to you either by you can buy the machines or you can license the ip you can create your own startups this is a huge opportunity given how important manufacturing seems to be for neon the third big area is in quantum this is a huge race in the world right um this because quantum computing will will be much much better than today's digital computing i won't go into details but i'll just say that quantum computing is built out of elements that can model an uncertainty inherently and they can model many qubits of uncertainty the more qubits the smarter it is so each qubit can be modeling a part of ourselves a part of nature so with digital computers creating digital twins is very difficult but with quantum computers very easy there can be a digital double of you that takes a medicine and it will simulate what the medicine will do to your body do you get cured do you have side effects if your digital twin is cured then you take the medicine imagine how great that is it can model the universe it can model what happens with fertilizers flowers planting agriculture it can model climate change it can model of course artificial intelligence every computer program has to be has to be rewritten and also this technology is a huge race we see here a quote from forbes that says the next battle between us and china will not be in the battleground but will be fought by scientists to see who can get further ahead by quantum in this technology the us is ahead today but u.s used to be way ahead as using c on the lower left curve china is catching up and the amount of investment china is putting two to three times more money applying for two to three times more patents doesn't mean china will win but it's got a place so i haven't heard quantum mentioned here at this leap yet i would urge you to look into it another very important area is life sciences imagine under life sciences this new area called synthetic biology it basically allows humans to now create living organisms you can create a worm that can become a fertilizer you can edit genes to help people become healthy and live longer this is something that has never been possible before and actually editing these genes creating these new organisms is a digital activity all of these things that we read about multi-omics or genetic sequencing mrna etc are all digital sequences so us computer scientists ai people can work hand in hand with biologists to make all these amazing things happen from gene editing to cure diseases from creating new fertilizers that are 100 green from creating cultured meat and manufacturing them without growing animals and from new materials that are fully biodegradable so this will have huge implications on sustainability and this is an incredibly important area within one part of the life science so us is ahead in life science china is catching up but there's one part of life science china is now leading and that is the use of artificial intelligence and robotics in sciences what this means is on the left hand side you see that on the upper left you see that how china has contained kovit how has it done that one big part is in testing very rapid testing you've all done tests it takes 12 24 hours expedited is 12 hours china has a company called mega robot which we invested in that creates this giant robot the robot will do 120 000 nucleic acid tests for covet per day so china pcr tests are lightning fast 100 times faster than people that's one of the reasons and after doing this covet test mega robo and us we realize that biological sciences can be automated that is the job that technicians and scientists and drug discovery people molecular biology people genetic sequencing people they're all running to the labs doing experiments but these labs can be fully automated because the atomic actions within the lab are very much routine and repetitive so we've now been expanding to cell biology stem cell research molecular biology immunology synthetic biology etc in an example of a monoclonal process the human takes over 116 hours with our machine is 15 hours so what this means is if you automate all of your labs labs in all of your of your universities laboratories drug companies pharmaceuticals all automated it means number one you'll save money because you don't have to hire the technicians number two your scientists don't have to waste time on doing these silly experiments they can think about breakthroughs number three the invention of your drug will be faster because the robots are eight times faster than people so we can anticipate amazing speed of increase in terms of drug discovery and now also with the lower cost of drug discovery rare diseases will become treatable so this is phenomenal the right hand side is a similar technology that uses all of the past to predict the future each drug drug invention scientist has only his or her experience to count on but ai can read all the papers all the clinical trials that succeeded and failed and use that to predict which drug is most likely to work similarly each doctor treating a patient is based in his or her knowledge on treating maybe 10 000 patients but ai can use all the treatment data from 10 billion patients and get them much more accurate predictable and repeatable and much safer treatment and personalized treatment for people so many many more things you can read my book for details huge opportunities the last technology area i want to talk about is important to this region and it's about new energy and we all know that energy is uh needs to go green but what has happened actually on the lower left is that solar wind battery combination have over the past 20 years reduced sorry past 10 years reduced the cost by about 85 percent making it very economical today what's more is that all these technologies will advance battery technologies will go from lithium to maybe sodium maybe hydrogen we don't exactly know which ones but the trend of 85 cost reduction will continue thereby undoubtedly making this combination of solar plus a little wind plus battery the future of new energy creation that's not only green but also cheap just telling people this is green won't necessarily move everybody but when it's cheap the whole world will embrace it and when that happens energy will become a process that is manufacturing driven it will not just be the case of who has the best natural resources oil natural gas but it will be the case who can make the best batteries and also the case who can make the best solar panels and to a certain extent which country is in the region with the most sun in which i think the kingdom is in good shape but you are you also need to get ahead in manufacturing in battery technologies and today who's the winner in the world in battery technologies some of you will say us otherwise we'll say japan another sweet korea and i will tell you the winner is already china china has this company called catl it is the world's number one lithium battery maker it provides to the largest supplier to tesla and its technologies production market share all increasing and its technologies are the best in the world it has multiple generations of technologies let me just give you one example so you get an idea one of their ambitious projects in the next three years is to build what's called cell to chassis what that means is when you buy an electrical car you no longer have batteries the batteries is the chassis of the car the frame the foundation the chassis of the car is your battery think about the savings you can have in the weight in the fewer parts in the pre in the reliability and also it will have a 1 000 kilometer driving range and when a company like catl builds a phenomenal cell to chassis solution and it becomes the architecture of the future car well all the other car companies gm and uh byd and mercedes they will have to license technology from catl so suddenly a battery company becomes the world's most powerful automotive architecture company so that is the importance of technology you would have never expected just like you wouldn't have expected a search engine company to challenge microsoft you here wouldn't expect that a battery company will challenge a car company so to conclude on my talk i want to tell you that i think today these are the five big technologies and china is leading in two of them co-leading in one of them quickly catching up on two of them and china has a very pragmatic mindset chinese companies don't view this as us versus you we don't view it as this is our ip you can't have it i'm physically here as an emissary from china to look for partners who want to license these technologies it's possible to license core technology ip patent source code making the kingdom realize its dream faster because it has partners in china that can help you so if you're interested i'll be in the conference next two days and look forward to talking to you thank you [Music] you

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Keywords: LEAPandInnovate, LEAP Tech Event, Global Tech Event, Tech Event in Saudi Arabia, Innovative Events, Tech Events, Digital Cities, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Internet of Things, IoT, Robotics, Drones, Clean Energy, Renewable Energy, Blockchain, 3D Printing, 5G, Unmanned Systems, Biotech, Quantum, Open Source, One Giant Leap, Tech Event in Riyadh, Events in Riyadh

Id: f4Of3GasNV0

Length: 23min 13sec (1393 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 01 2022