Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: The former Google CEO Eric Smith joins us on his
Speaker 2: latest book, Genesis, Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit.
Speaker 2: Eric joins us now for more, Eric, Welcome to the
Speaker 2: program Sir. I want to pick up on that one
Speaker 2: word hope, and ask you how much hope I should
Speaker 2: have that this goes right? And start with this quote
Speaker 2: from Foreign Affairs magazine. It reads as follows. In cases
Speaker 2: where some humans might face off militarily or diplomatically against
Speaker 2: the highly AI enabled state or against AI itself, humans
Speaker 2: could struggle to survive, much less compete. Such an intermediate
Speaker 2: order could witness an internal implosion of societies and an
Speaker 2: uncontrollable explosion of external conflicts. So you've got to calm
Speaker 2: meet down, Eric. Should I have hope that this plays out?
Speaker 3: Well? Well, let's start with and hope that either of
Speaker 3: your show is incredible. Previous guests talked about two percent productivity.
Speaker 3: Imagine that productivity goes to five percent a year because
Speaker 3: of this technology.
Speaker 1: So there's every reason to think that there's.
Speaker 3: Enormous land businesses, inventions, science, health, and so forth to
Speaker 3: get invented. But the same is also true for the
Speaker 3: invention of conflict and war. And if you think about it,
Speaker 3: it makes absolutely no sense to put somebody in a
Speaker 3: fighter jet up in the air and have it be
Speaker 3: shot at by another missile. It makes much more sense
Speaker 3: for that fighter pilot to be sitting on the ground
Speaker 3: and having a swarm.
Speaker 1: Of the equivalent of those jets.
Speaker 3: Let's just call them powerful robots, powerful drones that act
Speaker 3: in synchrony to achieve the objective of this attacker or
Speaker 3: to defend yourself. And the future of war is autonomous
Speaker 3: and networked and AI driven.
Speaker 4: This is something that a lot of people have focused on,
Speaker 4: in particular how the US is going to evolve in
Speaker 4: this manner, as well as how China is going to
Speaker 4: evolve in this manner, how they're going to use some
Speaker 4: of the space satellites to help coordinate that effort. Eric,
Speaker 4: do you feel like right now one superpower is winning
Speaker 4: versus the other? What is the best way to gain
Speaker 4: preeminence in a military AI sphere?
Speaker 3: But when doctor Kissinger and I went on his last
Speaker 3: trip to China, I was convinced from that meeting that
Speaker 3: China was two to two and a half years behind us.
Speaker 3: But I am now wrong turns out that in the
Speaker 3: last couple of weeks, China has brought out software models
Speaker 3: what are called language large language models that are rivals
Speaker 3: of the best American ones, which I never thought would
Speaker 3: be possible. One is called Quinn, another word's called hong Yong.
Speaker 3: And it looks like they've caught up or they're very
Speaker 3: close behind. And it looks like China has decided that
Speaker 3: it's another part of its industrial policy along with this
Speaker 3: focus on cellular dominating the battery industry, dominated in the
Speaker 3: car industry, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So they're willing to spend the money.
Speaker 3: What's interesting is that it does frame the narrative of
Speaker 3: China versus the US as the defining narrative.
Speaker 1: And one of the more interesting questions, which we.
Speaker 3: Discussed at some length in the book, is what happens
Speaker 3: to the deterrence and what happens to all the other
Speaker 3: one hundred and ninety five countries that are not China
Speaker 3: and not the US. These questions are really important because
Speaker 3: the power of this technology upends society in so many ways, economically,
Speaker 3: the way we govern, the way we reach language, and
Speaker 3: so forth, and so on.
Speaker 4: So there are a lot of questions within this, and
Speaker 4: this could be a half an hour discussion, but one
Speaker 4: of them is who should be financing and who should
Speaker 4: be leading the national efforts to gain pre eminence in
Speaker 4: this sphere. And you have to wonder, you talk about
Speaker 4: China as a state organized, state funded type of effort
Speaker 4: that is coordinated in that manner, how should it be
Speaker 4: directed in a place that does consider itself capitalist like
Speaker 4: the United States.
Speaker 3: Well, the Chinese model is what is called civil military fusion,
Speaker 3: where they subsidize their biggest companies. No one in America,
Speaker 3: not even in the companies, thinks that the thinks that
Speaker 3: the largest American companies need to be subsidized. But let
Speaker 3: me make an argument that if general intelligence, that is,
Speaker 3: human intelligence, is to be invented, it should be invented
Speaker 3: in the United States and under control of Americans and
Speaker 3: the American government. And I don't mean managed, but I
Speaker 3: mean under the legal control of our country and our
Speaker 3: citizens at our democracy and getting there first is a
Speaker 3: big deal. A number of us have talked for some
Speaker 3: time that there should be ANAI for America initiative where
Speaker 3: the government works closely with the private companies and figures
Speaker 3: out a way to make sure that we are ahead
Speaker 3: of ahead of time.
Speaker 1: In truth.
Speaker 3: However, the financial industry that you all invented, for which
Speaker 3: we are incredibly grateful, has been incredibly generous in terms
Speaker 3: of the ability to fundraise the billions of dollars that
Speaker 3: are required, and id state by the way that you
Speaker 3: guys have done such a good job in raising money,
Speaker 3: and we've done such a good job in actually getting
Speaker 3: the computer scientists around the world and the data and
Speaker 3: so on and so on. What we now need is energy.
Speaker 3: We are prolific consumers or energy, and we're going to
Speaker 3: run out. One estimate is that US will run out
Speaker 3: of all sources of energy by twenty twenty eight at
Speaker 3: our current growth rate.
Speaker 5: There's another topic you discussed in this book, which is
Speaker 5: to check AI.
Speaker 1: How can that work? What do you think about it.
Speaker 3: One of the things that happens is in AI systems
Speaker 3: is you have compositional generations. What happens is you take
Speaker 3: one piece and another piece and you interlick them and
Speaker 3: they've never been linked together before, and it looks like
Speaker 3: when you combine those two.
Speaker 1: You get emergent properties. Right, So that's in and of
Speaker 1: itself interesting.
Speaker 3: So the question is what is the limit of that
Speaker 3: how far can can that system go up? I think
Speaker 3: it will get there, and I think that it's probable
Speaker 3: that we can build systems that are the technical term
Speaker 3: is super intelligent, where you have a simple system, sorry,
Speaker 3: a single system that is at the nineteh percentile of physics, math.
Speaker 1: Chemistry, and arts and so forth. No human can do that.
Speaker 3: It looks like these systems will be not only available
Speaker 3: in the next five years because we already have examples
Speaker 3: of passing these tests already, but also that they'll be
Speaker 3: broadly available for all of society. That has huge implications.
Speaker 3: We've never had an experiment where each and every one
Speaker 3: of us has a polymath, you know, the Einstein type
Speaker 3: scientists at our back and call. And furthermore, that scientist
Speaker 3: whatever you want to call him or her or it,
Speaker 3: is capable of writing code, doing agents, and making things happen.
Speaker 5: How do you think the United States competes with China
Speaker 5: when we have an incoming administration that wants to put
Speaker 5: up tariff walls, and even this administration who's been putting
Speaker 5: export controls on some of our high tech semiconductors.
Speaker 1: I am not in favor of broad tariffs.
Speaker 3: I never have been I'm the son of an economist
Speaker 3: and a grandson of an economist, and tariffs are essentially taxes.
Speaker 3: What I am in favor of is restrictions or limitations
Speaker 3: for strategic reasons. It's really important that we win in
Speaker 3: this race against China. And so the things that the
Speaker 3: Trump administration Biden administration to limit, for example, hardware access,
Speaker 3: were really smart. And I know because I was part
Speaker 3: of a commission that recommended it way back when in
Speaker 3: fact was adopted.
Speaker 1: Great job.
Speaker 3: So the question here is ignoring the tariff question, which
Speaker 3: I just don't like, and I think this is just
Speaker 3: another tax. How do you control how do you control
Speaker 3: and limit what China does? And how do you amplify
Speaker 3: what America does? And you sit there and you go, well,
Speaker 3: you're doing pretty well, right. Everybody's making a lot of money.
Speaker 3: There's all this growth, and video is doing well. All
Speaker 3: the tech companies are doing well. But let me explain
Speaker 3: what happens. You have a slope that's like this, and
Speaker 3: it keeps going up and up and up with humans.
Speaker 3: At some point, the industry believes that there will be
Speaker 3: AI scientists, that is, non human scientists, and he or
Speaker 3: she who gets there first gets a slope like this
Speaker 3: and all of a sudden boom.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, we're really really growing fast.
Speaker 3: These network effect businesses are what we do in our
Speaker 3: in our competitive environment against each other under a US regulation.
Speaker 1: I want that to be true globally for.
Speaker 2: The US, Eric, I can tell you we're all in
Speaker 2: favor of having your back soon to continue the conversation.
Speaker 2: Congratulations on the new book, so we appreciate your time.
Speaker 2: The former Google CEO Eric Smith