Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQkeRxeh34I
Transcript
eric schmidt is a business leader and
software engineer that served as
google's chief executive officer from
2001 to 2011.
under his leadership google grew from an
early silicon valley startup to arguably
the most important technology company on
the planet
schmidt is currently co-founder of
schmidt futures and sits on the board of
many public and private institutions
he is still involved with technology
consults with the us department of
defense
also talks about ai in his latest book
the age of ai and our human future
written alongside former u.s secretary
of state henry kissinger and computer
scientist daniel huddenlocker
schmidt was a guest at the milken global
conference and here he anticipates some
of the ai innovations that we will
certainly see in five years
he also predicts what we might see in 20
years
here are the details
recently in the last couple of years
there have been
extraordinary gains so for example a
team at google and at the baker lab
separately
figured out a way to actually understand
if you take dna what proteins are
generated and what their structure is
that's an extraordinary achievement in
my opinion worth a nobel prize
there are drugs being designed now that
could not be possibly
designed by humans
in any way because of their complexity
there's evidence that ai can be used in
biology ai is mapped to biology the way
math is to physics in other words
biology is so complicated that ai will
be used to interpret biology and predict
its outcome
over and over again ai will arrive in
your life
another example is the hottest area in
my industry right now are large language
models uh recently a set of startups
have been funded between 100 and a
billion 100 million and a billion
dollars
they have no current product or revenue
plans um
the the belief of the power of this
technology these large language models
are interesting because you suck all the
information in
like you read all the web which
computers can do but we can't and then
they discover things they appear to
discover a structure of language and an
example of recent google product last
week can actually translate from one
computer language to another and we
didn't give it any examples of one to
translate to the other it discovered a
structure and it can predict it
these are the beginning of general
intelligence
the the current um excitement stems from
a technology called transformers that
was invented three or four years ago and
what transformers do is it can predict
the next word after a set of words so if
you give it a sentence it can predict
what the word will be and it's done
using a complicated mathematical
technique it turns out predicting the
next word is mathematically the same
thing as predicting the next sound the
next video the next image
all of that and so you have a
unification a multi multi-modal
unification of video text and speech so
these systems sound and look like
they're intelligent
a good example is gpt3 which came out
last year
which kicked the current revolution off
you asked it
do you think like a human and it says no
i do not
because i am a large language model and
you are a i think a human who has been
taught to think in this way
now is that
it thinking about you or is it pattern
matching we can't tell and the truth is
and i'm as part of philanthropic work
i'm funding projects to try to
understand this we don't actually
understand why this works we don't
mathematically understand why it works
and we also don't understand its failure
modes
so you wouldn't want to use this as a
replacement for something that's live
critical because we can't say when it
fails when does it just crash
the current large language models for
example have trouble with the notion of
gravity so if you say to them i moved it
i moved the object from here to here and
then i put it up here and i put it down
there and so forth now everyone just
followed what i did the large language
model gets confused because it doesn't
understand gravity so the computer
scientists say we're going to now add
concepts
right
so with concepts and then with planning
maybe you get to the point where it
looks like a human-like intelligence
which has all sorts of issues
if i were 24 today this is exactly what
i'd be working on this is where the
hardest and most challenging computer
science systems problems are with the
greatest payoff
now remember that the system can predict
patterns
and if you can predict a pattern you can
also generate an artifact there's a
duality in these systems where they can
generate things
so part of the issues that we face now
is that these systems can generate
speech i'll give you an example
within five years
the following will be true
you'll be able to take a system
um take one of these language models
which would be infinitely expensive to
make but you didn't pay for it
it shows up in your doorstep and it fine
tunes the technical term is literally
fine-tuning it you fine-tune it to you
who are you what do you care about it
sort of watches you and learns from you
it learns your voice
right all of a sudden it can generate
videos with you in it
now you could think of this as a second
ai right
now the interesting thing is imagine
five years from now i install this thing
and i use it for a few years and
eventually we all die unfortunately well
it lives on
right
as a pretty good impersonation of me
and what happens when i'm dead and it's
still learning is that me
is that an artifact of me or is it just
a stupid artifact of history that you'll
keep in a box and some future will say
oh eric was so stupid back then but it's
entertaining to watch him right because
he didn't keep learning we don't know we
have no way of discussing these things
this stuff is incredibly powerful it
will be the basis of enormous gains in
human health
language translation communication
summary and education
all the things that milken represents
will be affected in an almost always
positive way having said that there's
terrifying consequences as well so the
first question has to do with jobs
does this fundamentally mean there are
more jobs or less jobs i spent my whole
life people saying computers will
replace humans humans won't have
anything to do so far that narrative has
been false notice that there's a huge
surplus of jobs and not people to fill
it certainly in the united states the
second one has to do with national
security something i've worked on for
almost a decade now
and in our in the kissinger book we talk
a lot about this
what happens when the...