Sebastian Thrun, Founder of Udacity | The Brave Ones

I was so intrigued to live today look at the history of humanity almost everything in metaphor our cell phones to cameras around me at this very moment to our airplanes with all that stuff is going to end last 150 years humanity is like 2,000 years old give or take if you scale us then the last 100 years have been special now how about the next 50 years maybe more special I can't wait our next speaker is really one of the highlights of our entire day please welcome sebastian prime founder of capacity good morning my god the reason why adapt exists is you I think people honestly think of him as a rock star in many ways and I think in reality he's pretty humble he's brilliant he's created and he's fearless Sebastian is really someone who defines that what we go that 10x thinking kind of extreme out-of-the-box and ambitious outlook on almost any project to really think about things differently I have this dream that if we can make education globally universally available if it doesn't matter that he will live and live in the Middle East or in South America we get the same medication everywhere the vegan completely transformed the world he looked at your problem that other people in looked at how do we educate people better but he came up with a different framing of it and I think that's really his genius I want to thank all of you for the trust you're putting in us by giving us your time your attention on coming here you guys are my heroes and we do what we do because of you I thank you present for you I'd like you to oh my god TF 57 nice oh my god do it with a battery okay where'd you find this if you did your research that's awesome so this is my body between my age of maybe 12 and 14 I spent every afternoon programming it it has 50 steps so it memorizes keystrokes and I program video games I programmed geometric calculations and all kinds of stuff it's fascinating to work with him because his mind goes at a million miles a second absolute million and in all kinds of disparate ways I'm an odd bird maybe I'm socially challenged I would have you but at a time when computers weren't you anybody I came across this programmable calculator which was slightly more expensive than the non programmer one and they developed a passion for lying on bed others figuring out what key do with sixty programming steps like fifty words as a joke but today's computers but at that time was actually significant this thing by the way when you switch it off it erases itself so the next day try it you have to start over again so I spent a lot of time and then I really liked it because at the time was intriguing that there was something around me my world and I told to do something he did it everyone else around me my parents my siblings and so on i would they do this and they would never do it so I had a partner I had a friend I did this for fight about a little later I got a real computer and that allowed me to do real programming at a bigger scale so he's huge flop we destroy I thought he could flop in and hit like half a kilobyte of memory reserves and there I started programming and it was about 16 or so and then something bizarre happened I kind of lost interest a little bit and the Miss Maris's I began I became more interested in people and I was felt that by computers to exactly we tend to do that's what makes them boring I think the nuances of human interaction and is much more fascinating thing so when I went to college I did choose computer science as my major but I dabbled in philosophy and by only medicine and do with my major in medicine in a whole bunch of and psychology whole bunch of disciplines ended with people it was just fascinated by people like I think this is maybe a small version of a person and the bigger version person there must be some commonality like how can we decipher the machine over here in his complexity and get it to the level of it and their field that did this at the time of Scottish intelligence the first time I encountered sedation I guess was via email he had been enrolled at Bonn universities in Germany as PhD student and he was interested in spending some time at Carnegie Mellon artificial intelligence was an infancy a lot of a famous fear his language today but people artificial intelligence the grievant understand how the human brain works and how can we put a brain into a machine that's how I became the AI researcher this is a very powerful calculator because we are now moving into the era of household computers the idea is that eventually everyone will use a computer is a very important tool what will life really be like in the next country Reed Simmons and Sebastian run are with Carnegie Mellon University's robotics Institute and they're here with one of their creations slow the nurse bot gentlemen good morning and slow hello now obviously this is a prototype when do you expect robots like slow Sebastian to actually be in nursing homes or hospitals or private homes I think in the next five to ten years we're going to see something happening here and we're going to see these robots coming it's not a question of the if anymore it's just a question of the event he really does believe in an optimistic world his world of AI is not controlled by all these robots that are gonna take a lot of jobs it's just not I said if the in Silicon Valley only bring these creating all these and monetizing a very rich they'll be leaving people behind and that's not good [Music] I'm associate professor of computer science at Stanford University and I'm the leader of the Stanford Racing team my very first thing I did in Stanford was building itself selling cars and we competed in something called DARPA Grand Challenge that was when challenge took place in 2005 and it was basically an autonomous car robot race through the Mojave Desert in this race if you make a mistake in finding the hole you fall on a cliff you run into a rock so finding the road and just finding over it is was the hardest thing building almost 200 teams had stood in line to participate with the idea that the team that could build a car that could drive a hundred thirty miles honestly the fastest would be making too many of us ladies and gentlemen boys and girls it's been done how about my team Hannah would be the lucky winner for the reason Stanford team this is a beginning we have shown that we can build cars the contrivance of the importance all its custom at our climb until it happens I don't have my promise and we got the intention of the Google founders here so there I came to the race itself and came disguised like a hat on sunglasses so it wouldn't be bothered by everybody but he had a keen interest in this layers been I believe in the technology for much longer than he knew and so Sergey and they really went understand what's going on 42,000 people die every United States and travel existences the number one cause of death aged we decided to be huge with the next version of itself driving car for simple urban challenge internet process we did something really interesting we we had a camera on the roof that looked in all directions like a spherical camera like 360 360 and we were recording video most excit batting purposes that we could sit down an evening see by the car do this and for the video and say oh that's why and then we realized to research a meaning so born was the idea of sweet mule she went back to Google and said hey we'd love to build to help you build Street mule and we kind of ended up felt like an acquisition of a little startup company kind of Stanford's transitioning into Google where mean for my grad student them became Street View enthusiasts and we build up Street View and with the single a vision to photograph every street in the world for people like myself who are not as smart as he is you have to kind of keep up with it but it's this insatiable curiosity and creativity that I love working with and you just get to learn a lot so if I'm with Sebastian I'm on this wild ride of incredible learning Google also getting lots of attention today for the launch of its new Street View feature we're building a website that's helping people communicate and completely different right be confident in this marketplace continue to deteriorate Google is developing a robo car that drives itself we started Google X with self-driving car project and the idea was to really kind of get an Innovation Center that has authority and just crazy things we had a separate building that no one knew about at least for a year and a half no one had clearly existed it was I believe a Google fellow I had heard about that reputation and the hurt that was a fairly visionary position it gets exciting to be doing this project but specifically at Google because it shows that Google is taking big big bets for the future people know that Google's quirky and that odd things happen around that campus but I don't think at the time people fully embrace the idea that this was going to become something that affected broader society anytime soon it's just sort of those quirky Google people working on something when we started the septum--ah car project Larry in particular of course Sergey and Eric really kind of came to me and said Sebastian you should do it three of us worked hard to systematize the innovation that is we didn't want to just have an idea we wanted to let people have ideas and just do them and have hits over and over again I wasn't I even thought at the time it might not even be possible to drivers in the public safety and Larry in his infinite wisdom said okay Sebastian prove commutes not possible which I couldn't and then he and surrogates sat down for a half a day and captured a thousand miles in California that are really hard drives like downtown San Francisco lombard street highway 1 to Los Angeles and Street service we didn't see any how to drive and said look if you drive those well and completely autonomous then you make a bonus all right it's thing ok but it can't be done we talked to this and he makes they took it can be done people can do it just do it and tumor completes the price blows our minds about 15 months later a team of trans engineers did it today he's going to talk about something this is a new segment and douche for groundbreaking say a breakthrough of yeah something that you know could shake up the world of the universities the way education is looked at today and I'm very happy that you're going to talk about this amazing project come up and stage Sebastian Thrun I'm not going to talk about cars and I'm not going to talk about Google X I just want to tell you a story the story that changed my life in a really profound way and the story starts at Ted where I met Maria there was a speaker whose name was someone Khan yes I was at Ted I listened to a young fellow named Saul Khan who started talk about Khan Academy and he's a you are like an investment banker I had no teaching credentials but his videos teaching there's been viral it like tens of millions of students and I was sitting at Stanford with my favorite class of like 50 and thinking god dammit I can do that so I went to my co-instructor we were just about to teach a class on artificial intelligence and asked him hey what do you think of putting put in this class online he said let's do it so we wrote an email to all our colleagues and so if your students want to take this artificial intelligence class they can sign up over here and take it we expected maybe I know five hundred students at best to show up all Friday afternoon Saturday morning 9 o'clock 5,000 students Sunday morning 10,000 students Monday morning 14,000 students ISM they made Dean found out about it and he gave me a phone call and said come to my office please Sebastian because the blogosphere was praising Stanford or finally abandoning tuition lo and behold when everything was said that we had a hundred sixty thousand students of those 160,000 students 23,000 graduated and when they graduated we stacked ranked those students with a Stanford students we give them the same exams in August I was due to really compare them the top four hundred twelve students were not at Stanford the single best Stanford student was number 413 I was at Stanford the world's best university and it was a great teacher having done this I can teach at Stanford again I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students but I've taken the red pill in a scene Wonderland it was kind of like calling to me I hadn't anticipated that I've become an online instructor or CEO of a company a founder of a company that wants to democratize education but when I realized that with this one class I had more teaching impact in this specific folder then like the entire academic field combined and entire world I realized my god there's something has to be done I was head of Google X my name was no news at least three times a week for something and Here I am giving up 97% of salary our next guest gave up his tenure at Stanford University tried to democratize higher education with his company Udacity you did an experiment back in 2011 where you put one of your classes online you offered the introduction to artificial intelligence who showed up to see that class to my complete surprise you got 160,000 students to show up whenever somebody is going to be the founder of an organization like this they obviously have a vision for a need that's not yet been met or a vision of what the future is going to look like you know it's definitely pretty far ahead at that time of doing very short video segments interspersed with quizzes or challenges and that seemed like the thing that we should definitely be doing so we launched these massive online courses and the first one hadn't had a six-week evidence so we hope that the second one will get 500,000 students and to our surprise it only got 90,000 students the notion another one in only got 5,000 students so why we are being celebrated as the big disrupter the heroes of the world who finally brings education is the pinnacle century the numbers didn't work out the vision that we had earlier on I wasn't sure was going to work to be perfectly honest I think we went to a really hard time so we teamed up with the local university and made the decision to offer credit bearing courses credit currency the college system credit bearing courses publicly online for a small fee so we said some terrible 50 bucks that's enough money we're not that greedy Hewitt and that unfortunately fell flat in the face sir fled in the face because teacher unions didn't like that idea the teacher you news told me look Sebastian don't take this personal but if you ever do is Croatian by 90% our 44,000 employees that we represent won't be employers from employed for much longer so you know enemy or state Emeline we were seen as monstrous the New York Times called a flop on the front page above the four walls didn't have to flip it over to find out Emma flop the Financial Times picked it up and without talking to us said to be a temporarily going out of business well I hadn't realizes I was at the perfect storm we asked a number of university presidents to come and represent the old world of Education on on stage today and they all said no Sebastian why do you think that is oh my god I think it's an interesting time for a higher education to really understand passing shows amazing grace and dignity to these things and just an amazing belief in the power of humanity I was the most hated professor of America I please one accessory shop most hated of America I decided not good Silicon Valley speak that's not the community to learn if you want to learn something you're going to fall flat in your face otherwise you're not learning anything right if you could predict what's going to happen then don't do it so let's do it again the beauty of Sebastian and working with him is he can be flexible so we had a very hard pivot in venture words two years ago where we decided to say we're not focusing on replacing colleges were focusing on lifelong learning that was a hard thing admitting that you might have been wrong that's a really hard thing that's was all on him and that's what he did and he pushed us on this path toward nanodegrees which was a very hard change for the company Udacity today is basically a reinvention of a university of the way I believe the university should act first of all it's lifelong I don't think we can live with a single education anymore I think the technology is moving too fast and we live too long on a job so too short but it's also the idea of using modern technology in education like why not do it online why not caching things away whether the professor give the same lecture here in the out when we educate we believe that the outcome should be the student a graduate to be able to find a job how can we do this well we go to companies and sing very and say what's that keeper do you need machine learning engineers but they need Android developers well you need self-driving car engineers turns out no universe in the world teaches self-driving cars so we do it so we go then to compensate ok we need certain kinds news tell us Mercedes over your our Tesla when we are done what do you require for them to know the nanodegree conveys enough of a sense of formality it's a really brilliant concept put together a solid curriculum that can demonstrate skills in an area and make it achievable in a timely manner above the observing is we a movement which is very unique where the Udacity nano degree is now beginning to be on par with strong conventional college degrees in the Haring decision-making process we are all united today by the shared belief that learning has the power to uplift to empower and transform lives intersect is our any conference we bring our students in and clean them up with employers so they get hired Google's here in a couple of different functions we are we have partnered with Udacity for many years to develop great developer training content we have about 2.3 million students enrolled in those courses all combined it's so so amazing random students bump into me they all know me from class people from over 20 countries travels here for this specific event just to express in many ways their joy about the chance that they're given that they've never been afforded before unanimously helped me find a position I am a vendor with ASG I'm working at Google it's be an iOS icon Udacity courses thudding and their nano degree after nano degree give me five months to study through the name of your program is able to get a job same week I graduated I really believe there's going to be a future where we all learn all the time and we work really close with the companies that we'd love to work with envy Aurora and you are making possible you are partners and your students thank you everything that she does nanofied and knocks on door Audrey not if it is like a dating site or an e-commerce site or let me flick through photos you know none of it's bad it's like can we take AI n you know create a better way to figure out cancer can we take a cell type in car and have less accidental driving can we take some kind of learning and create new jobs they're always these goals overall I think two things that truly define Sebastian is sort of the crazy 10x thinking but the other thing is are like a really deep compassion and the democratizing education really deeply caring about education for everyone the greatest thing that I've seen special glue is you'd Anthony he was very well established in Google could define pretty much any project he wanted to work on and work on and he gave that up why did I leave Google I was head of Google X how you'll be running possibly the coolest lab on the planet my name was in the news at least three times a week for something and Here I am giving up 97% my salary who will pay quite well joining a little startup company for a small fraction of income in the money of the time and go after education I can tell you many of my colleagues web fellows I said been patted before when I gave up my tenure at Stanford but it occurred to me I could be at Google and build a self-driving car or I can teach 10,000 students how to group self-driving cars and then I serve humanity so much better it would be amazing if every single person in the world if they just wanted to could work in Silicon Valley or something similar at home I think it's so game-changing there's nothing bigger I can imagine that you can do than that [Music] my perfect day is one where I am afforded the ability to do something for somebody else where the other person is not England Revolution I don't watch science fiction I make them as a customer and that happens all in Tesla Volkswagen Beetle convertible I love bicycling a lot of running and a skiing apparently a lot of fast motion I know I sleep I used to go from like a hundred percent energy into sleep with the necklace in 30 seconds [Music] I'd say so there's too many stupid things in my life maybe those shoes here [Music] I'm scared when I do something that doesn't live up to my own values that and I'm really me absolutely yeah Kantar whatever today talking to some of our students here I realize they are smaller than me from the Larry Page you don't go to Larry Page to figured about himself because he is bigger smart but I love feeding them [Music] you

Channel: CNBC International TV

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Keywords: CNBC, The Brave Ones, Sebastian Thrun, Udacity, CNBC The Brave Ones, Sebastian Thrun The Brave Ones, CNBC Sebastian Thrun, Sebastian Thrun CNBC, sebastian thrun interview, sebastian thrun udacity, sebastian thrun youtube, udacity founder, the brave ones cnbc, cnbc's the brave ones, cnbc documentary

Id: DtO3pcNnEuA

Length: 25min 39sec (1539 seconds)

Published: Mon May 15 2017