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“AGI Will Shape Humanity In 6 Months” – Eric Schmidt

because remember the computers are now doing self-improvement They’re learning how to plan and they don’t have to listen to us anymore People do not understand what happens when you have intelligence at this level which is largely free So that was the former Google CEO Dr Eric Schmidt at the Special Competitive Studies Project having a conversation with Gene Masserv about the future of AI and biotechnology And honestly it’s a really insightful conversation Let’s actively dive into exactly what he says because the implications are profound Because remember the computers are now doing self-improvement They’re learning how to plan and they don’t have to listen to us anymore We call that super intelligence or ASI artificial super intelligence And this is the theory that there will be computers that are smarter than the sum of humans The San Francisco convent consensus is this occurs within six years just based on scaling Now in order to pull this off you have to have an enormous amount of power I was here yesterday testifying about this you know and we need like I can talk at some length about how many gigawatts and how many nuclear power plants and all they got we can talk about separately This path is not understood in our society There’s no language for what happens with the arrival of this I wrote a book on this with Henry Kissinger called Genesis which you know I recommend obviously um because I wrote it available available available in your usual places Um but the important point is this is happening faster than our human that our society our democracy our laws will address and there’s lots of implications That’s why it’s underhyped People do not understand what happens when you have intelligence at this level which is largely free So we believe as an industry that in the next 1 year this speaker just dropped a bombshell AI isn’t just learning fast It’s evolving beyond human control They’re talking about artificial super intelligence Machines planning without us possibly outsmarting all of humanity in just 6 years And the scariest part society isn’t ready No laws no road map just blind acceleration That’s not hype That’s warning sirens The vast majority of programmers will be replaced by AI programmers We also believe that within one year you will have graduate level mathematicians that are at the tippy top of graduate math programs There’s lots of reasons to think this is going to happen This is the consensus You go “Okay well that’s pretty interesting Now I can’t do that kind of math Very few people can do that math How can the computer do that math better than anybody else?” To some degree it’s because math has a simpler language than human language So the way these algorithms actually work is they’re doing essentially word prediction So you take you take a a sentence you take a word out and then it learns how to put the correct word back in This is called the loss function and it’s optimized to do that at a scale that’s unimaginable to us as humans So you do the same thing for math but there you use a conjecture and then a proof format through a protocol called lean In programming it’s pretty simple You just keep writing code until you pass the programming test So strangely the first question I always ask programmers is what language do you program in And the correct answer is it doesn’t matter because you’re trying to design for an outcome You don’t care what code is generated by the computer This is a whole new world Yes a whole new world And it’s not just Eric Schmidt saying this Take a look at what Dario Amod said recently in a panel interview about this But now getting to kind of the job side of this Um I I I do have a fair amount of concern about this Um on one hand I think comparative advantage is a very powerful tool If I look at coding programming which is one area where AI is making the most progress um what we are finding is we are not far from a world I think we’ll be there in 3 to 6 months where AI is writing 90% of the code and then in 12 months we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code Here’s where we get into something even more interesting So basically Eric Schmidt talks about the fact that AI is now writing all of the code But what happens after that in year two Take a look So that’s one year Okay What happens in two years Well I’ve just told you about reasoning and I’ve told you about programming and I’ve told you about math Programming plus math are the basis of sort of our whole digital world So the evidence and the claims from the research groups in open AAI and and anthropic and so forth is that they’re now somewhere around 10 or 20% of the code that they’re developing in their research programs is being generated by the computer That’s called recursive self-improvement is the technical term So what happens when this thing starts to scale Well a lot One way to say this is that within three to five years we’ll have what is called general intelligence AGI which can be defined as a system that is as smart as the smartest mathematician physicist you know artist writer thinker politician maybe not in the same level um but you get the idea Uh just the creative industries and so forth But imagine that in one computer Okay Well that’s pretty interesting I call this by the way the San Francisco consensus because everyone who believes this is in San Francisco It may be the water What happens when every single one of us has the equivalent of the smartest human on every problem in our pocket So it means you have to best architect when you have an architecture problem Another thing that’s going on is the development of agentic solutions and agents are refer to systems that have input and output in memory and they learn An example here is that I want to uh buy another house Uh I happen to like Virginia I grew up in Virginia I say “Find me a house in the greater MLAN area Look at the that’s one agent Look at all the rules Figure out how big a house I can build.” That’s another agent Do the transaction to buy the land That’s another agent Design the house with a human architect right but sort of ignore them for most of the thing but they have to sign it off and then I approve it and then find the contractor right Hire the contractor pay the bills and at the end sue the contractor for lack of performance Okay Now I just gave you the stupidest possible explanation I just described every business process every government process and every and every sort of academic process in our nation So it isn’t just the programmers that are going to be out of work We’re all going to be out of work No that’s not a consequence I’ll come to that But but the reason I want to I want to make the point here is that in the next year or two this foundation is being locked in and it’s not we’re not going to stop it So what he’s basically saying is we’re already seeing AI write its own code and that’s just the start In a few years we could all have something like a genius level assistant in our pocket Not just programmers every industry could be transformed It’s wild to think we’re laying that groundwork right now And by the way on the jobs thing everyone assumes that automation will replace will eliminate jobs If you look at the history of automation ever since the the looms and uh in uh 300 years ago the jobs are changed but more jobs are created than destroyed In this case you’d have to convince me that this time is different If you look in Asia where they for whatever reason are choosing not to have children the Asian reproduction rate is in the order of 1.0 or lower So they’re rapidly disappearing So the Asian countries are very very quickly automating The tools that I’m describing will allow the few humans that will be working very hard in 30 or 40 years if these trends continue The rest of us will be dependent on those hardworking humans It’ll make their productivity more much greater Eric Schmidt challenges the fear that AI will destroy jobs pointing out that automation has historically created more work not less But with Asia’s declining birth rates and rapid automation he’s hinting at a future where fewer people carry the load for many The real question is will this time really be different or are we repeating history In China the deepse seek moment is equivalent to our chat pt moment I was there with Henry Um and this is what happens when you’re talking to to the Chinese about AI with Henry And this means we are alive and we’re listening to you Thank you very much Right That’s not what they’re doing anymore when the when deepseek showed up and our stock market lost a trillion dollars in one day all of a sudden they began to understand the scale of what it was So now there is a massive program in China to accelerate these things I had thought Illy and I and some of the other people in this room worked really hard on these um chip controls and the chip controls have been um in my view largely effective How did China get around them Well some of it was straightforward theft and evasion of the tariffs but they also they’re sufficiently smart They created new algorithms that use different kinds of computing to move forward because they because China operates in open source That is they they released the software to everyone There are two things that happen We we Americans immediately saw their idea and incorporated in our own So thank you very much China You invented something new We immediately incorporated it But second because it’s free the proliferation issues around Chinese models have now become a very big deal And our government is trying to figure out uh without success so far how to handle this question It’s a very tricky question But but think about it We’re having this whole debate in our nation about what to do about Iran’s nuclear program And I’m not an expert in that but these are the kind of conversations that happen here in in DC So when we get to the point where China is n months ahead are we willing to bomb their data centers My favorite example here is I was in I’ve been working on this I was talking to somebody said “The answer is obvious.” I said “What The good lady and the bad guy We agree to a treaty where each of us puts dynamite on each other’s uh electricity supply You get to blow up my electricity if you get mad and I get to blow up your electricity if I get You get the idea.” Eric Schmidt just laid it out bluntly China isn’t just catching up in AI they’re sprinting ahead From algorithm innovation to dodging chip sanctions they’re playing smart and fast The scary part the US might not be ready This clip isn’t just about tech It’s about global power shifting and Washington knows it I’m the primary funer of a particular group that has built a model It first learned how to do chemistry and uh it was trained as a foundational model for chemistry and it’s attached to a robotic lab and what this model does is it generates hypothesis for drugs of one kind or another and it just generates them God knows if they’re right and then overnight the robotic lab tests them and gives a report overnight and then it starts again and the reason I’m mentioning this is this is the future model of the fusion of AI and bio right the AI system generates all sorts of candidates to reduce the um essentially the um search space if you think about it algorithmically it’s an exponential with too many degrees of exponential So you have to come up with some way of reducing the space So this particular group is using AI to reduce the space run the things and so forth Their objective we’ll see if they pull it off This is research project is to identify all human druggable targets within the next two years If that occurs then that information goes straight into the drug industry Now it’s a different way of thinking and it’s profound in that it gives them the targets they need to go build drugs against That’s interesting to me It’s the combi combination of AI and a robotic lab that does something in a wet lab essentially So one model that you should think about is wet labs will be roboticized And the wet labs will have AR they’re essentially they’re not humanoid robots they’re arm robots and they go boom boom boom They and they do the pipeetting and so forth and so on and they do it 24 hours a day That’s a major change in the way bio bio the biotech industry works Do you think there’s implications for ASI via drug discovery for like curing cancer and or personalized medicine Just something um yes because under the under the assumptions of super intelligence these are systems that see things that we don’t see And so the assumption is that ASI for example could understand biological and cellular mechanisms that you are an expert in and I’m not at a level that humans will not So that’s why this is such a big deal We’ve always assumed that humans would know there would at least one human right We call these people polymaths that would understand these things We’re going to end up in a world maybe 10 years from now where we won’t actually understand why But you as our scientist will say I use it every day When I when I was at college I was studying quantum physics and my friend who was a graduate student who was much better than I and I said “Is this stuff actually true?” You know it’s like too weird to be true and he said “Yes we use it every day.” And I imagine in 10 years some young student will come up to you and say “Is this stuff true?” And you’ll say “Frankly I use it every day No human understands it What an interesting situation for you as now a senior researcher 10 years from now to have to deal with This is insane Eric Schmidt is describing a future where AI doesn’t just assist in drug discovery It leads it Imagine robotic labs working 24/7 AI narrowing down complex chemical possibilities And humans trusting cures we don’t fully understand We’re not just speeding up science We’re handing over the steering wheel Is that genius or dangerous I think we are very close I would say um you know we’re a couple of years away from having the first AI design truly AI designed drugs um for major for a major disease cardiovascular cancer We’re working on all of those things isomorphic and um and then obviously there’s still the clinical trials and that stuff has to happen and right now that would be the bottleneck but I think certainly getting it into the clinic the discovery phase I would like to you know shrink that from years to months maybe even weeks at some point so I think in a couple of years we you know I would be disappointed if we don’t have some uh great candidates for drugs for very important diseases u you know starting to go through clinical trials If AI pulls this off it won’t just speed up medicine it’ll redefine the future of human health The age of algorithm-driven cures is closer than we

FOR EDUCATIONAL AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING PURPOSES ONLY. NOT-FOR-PROFIT. SEE COPYRIGHT DISCLAIMER.