Waymo, Udacity, and Kitty Hawk Founder, Sebastian Thrun: Building Moonshots & His Next Company

24:19Tommy:Let's talk a little bit about what you describe and others describe as the singularity. You've said we are living through the singularity now in terms of superintelligence. What does that mean for you in practice? this so what is the singularity a singularity is a moment where things accelerate so vastly that you won't be able to say what happens at the other end okay that's a singularity and we can we can scribble about the definition but you look at um look at society today um if you if you think about yourself back say 100 000 years you could have easily predicted the next 10 000 years because not much really changed to be honest maybe a few little innovations like you know steel what have you but that's pretty much it stone ages were boring okay if you lived 500 years ago same thing europe would be engulfed in war after war you lived 100 years ago things a little bit faster we have the steam engine you have the airplane innovation stuff like this and you have 50 years ago 20 years ago when i was a student i was able to predict the next seven years okay so in computer science my own field every seven years there was a major new programming language and no major, no programming framework, and things changed.

25:30And past that point, I couldn't predict. Today, I cannot even predict the next seven months because things are moving so insanely fast. And that to me, even the experts in the world can't predict what's happening. That to me is a singularity. We now see for the first time that for the vast majority of people, the machines are as good or better in big aspects of their daily work. And I'm not scared of it. I actually love it myself because I think we're wasting a ton of time ourselves doing stupid stuff. But it's amazing to see how big machines now are so smart that they beat the world's best chess player and the world's best goal players, but also are as good as the world's best or maybe close as good as the world's best lawyers and doctors and all these things that we inspire our kids to do to be safe in life and have a great job.

26:17Tommy:And why is the pace, the exponential pace of improvement and change? What's going on there? Why is it happening now? Well, so the big innovation in the last few years, which I'm sure all your listeners have been talking about every night for many, many years now, is data. Okay, so OpenAI was probably the first to see this. They got the world's text data together, which is hundreds of billions of documents and emails and pieces of software. And they're put in a big table, a big machine to predict more data. So how does this work? Like you can always predict the next word in a similar way. Let's say like the dog ate the dog food is a good word or maybe homework, but not the propeller, right?

27:03That's not a good word. So that idea of statistically figuring out what's a good next word based on three, four, five words has been around for several decades in statistics, machine translation, linguistics. but now with the largest language technology you can predict the next word based on hundreds of thousands of words in context and it turns out strangely enough predicting the next word if you take enough context and you're smart enough about it looks really intelligent so intelligent that large language models can write a rap song they can write a haiku they can translate languages. In fact, they can do 90 % of what a software engineer does today in terms of writing computer code, software engineering software, they can now do this automatically just by looking at past data and extrapolating from it.

27:57Tommy:Sebastian, I think I've read an interview where you've talked about in the next period of time, because of those advancements, the pace of those advancements, we're going to enter a world where the basic needs of humans are going to be met in a very significantly different way. We're going to have essentially close to free food, energy, even clothing, potentially housing. And it's something that almost every one of the senior leaders in AI that I've spoken to and that we've had on the show on Giant Ideas, people like Mustafa Solomon, who founded DeepMind, that seems to be a view that people right at the center of AI's progress share.

28:33Tommy:And it's never actually been particularly clear to me the leap between the pace of change we're talking about and all the amazing things that AI can do and it can be a great lawyer and so on. But why does that mean we're going to get almost free energy, almost free food, these very physical basic needs that human beings need? Yeah. I mean, if you look at even pre-AI and look at automation and what we're doing in society, food is now so massively available that obesity has become a bigger problem than malnutrition. There's still pockets in the world where food is very short right now, usually for political reasons.

29:10But if you were to distribute food better, we could feed every human being, to be honest. And that's new in history, right? If you go back 200, 300, 400 years ago, all Europeans effectively lived in extreme poverty. Take clothing. 300, 400 years ago, you would rip the clothing off dead people's body as you supply for clothing for many people. Now, I mean, often the t-shirt is cheaper than the laundry to wash it. It's amazing how disposable that has become. Or look at education. Education is effectively available worldwide for pretty much everybody. Maybe not the same quality, but online education, I built a company under the topic that we democratize the access to high-quality online education.

29:59k-12 education for kids is available vaccinations are available i think 95 percent of kids under the age of five are vaccinated some very large number so all these things have been improving even pre-ai and they're all amazing accomplishments because what they did to us people is they allowed us to escape the daily churn of farm working and learn for example how to read or write and how to become scientists and how to really advance the world knowledge. We've done amazing work in making agriculture more effective and all these things. It's all pre-AI. Now, AI will superpower all this even faster.

30:39So we still live in a world where all of us effectively work, most of us do. And we work mostly in offices now. In the Western world, it's like 70 % or so. And what we do in offices is communicate with other people one by another right so we write memos we write orders we listen we go to meetings what have you we write email um all that stuff now can be automated very soon which pre-apps enormous creativity in society which will put us into an incredible position historically never happened before that we have a lot of free time to be creative how amazing would that be

31:13Tommy:one last question on the topic of autonomy uh you have designed some of these systems from the ground up you've been really at ground zero what are some of the potential failure modes that can be designed into these autonomous systems that aren't maybe being talked about enough especially in self-driving cars what you find is that there is a long tail of situations that even the smartest engineers might never anticipate that might come to bite you so for example let's take Waymo. Waymo is just about now to go to autonomous highway driving. And highway driving in many ways is the simplest or the easiest way of driving because if it goes well on a good day, nothing really moves.

31:59In the United States, all the different lanes have the same speed limit. So we all basically run rolling around the same speed. And relative to you, all the other traffic is effectively standing still. But why did it take Waymo a long time to do autonomous driving driverless driving on highways is because there's this very rare incident where like you have an accident in front of you or like a pedestrian or a cow or what have you something that you haven't really thought about like a cow on a highway okay you think that is impossible unless you're in india but in reality yeah there'll be a cow on a highway occasionally or a sheep or whatever a dog a coyote a deer deers are pretty common on highways So how do you deal with these very rare instances that could be conceivably fatal?

32:42Like deer can actually kill people. They're very hard to avoid. Moose kill people regularly when cars and highways hit a moose. So how do you deal with this incredibly rare instance and still make your car safe? And that's challenging because, as I said before, your tolerance for error, your tolerance for hallucinations, and self-driving is effectively zero.

33:03Tommy:Maybe let's talk a little bit about education. You obviously founded Udacity, this massive online learning startup. Maybe before we go into some of the questions about the future of education, just tell us, if you can, the story of how Udacity came about. The company was started in 2011 when I was teaching as a professor at Stanford University. And I taught a graduate level class on AI. Today, a very hot topic, but trust me, in 2011, it was an esoteric topic. and I decided to put the class online and not just the lectures as videos but I created a classroom environment where people had to take homework exams and quizzes and pass the midterm exam and the final exam and I made it so that the online students would effectively have to pass the same exams as like the Stanford PhD doctoral students, okay?

33:54We put it online, we sent out one email to a couple of friends and I expected maybe 500 students would sign up. I mean, Stanford's campus was about 200 every year, so maybe 1 ,000. That would be optimistic. The next morning, this was a Friday evening, we had 5 ,000 signed up. Sunday morning, 10 ,000. And Monday morning, 14 ,000 people had already signed up, which is when my dean at Stanford found out because I was being plotted on the blogosphere for finally doing away with Stanford tuition, which a message he didn't quite appreciate. And then it went on to reach about 160 ,000. And I realized, my God, my impact teaching 160 ,000 students is more than I can do in 10 years of life, 10 consecutive lifetimes at Stanford University.

34:49So I really focused on how can I teach these 160 ,000 students effectively. So we really built this new modality, online, interactive, quiz-driven learning system overnight. They would teach 160 ,000 students. And these were not just your typical Stanford students. Some of them were like soldiers in Afghanistan. Some were like, it was a single mother trying to raise their infant. There was a person on the deathbed whose last wish really was to finish this class before he died. People you would, Stanford would normally not admit, let's put it this way, okay? But anywhere smart is the best Stanford student.

35:20in the end 23 000 of these students finished and i got a chance to stack ranked the stanford students relative to these online students and guess what the top 412 finishers were not at stanford and the best stanford doctoral student ranked number 413 and that opened my eyes to i mean stanford is an amazing institution i love stanford and it does a fantastic job but it's very confined. It only accepts a few thousand students every year, a few hundred students. And the world has 8 billion people. So if we just open the floodgates and let everybody study at Stanford, we would have so much more impact than having a small elite university here in California.

36:08Tommy:And is that the way that the world is going to go, particularly now with AI? And how do you think AI is going to supercharge the efforts that you began really with Udacity to democratize education yeah first let's i mean udacity became a global force we do a lot of middle eastern education in places like egypt and saudi arabia where people in nigeria and northern africa where people really have no chance to ever get a great technical education and even material moved the needle for probably 10 million or 20 million people at this point in terms of their life income and so on it's quite amazing um now ai is the next chapter and um there's a very famous 1982 paper by a gentleman named Bloom who proved that if you give a normal kid a tutor to the entire like youth and lifetime when they grow up they will perform at the level of a highly exceptional gifted kid so you can turn a normal kid into a world-class gifted child it's all relative of course just by tutoring it one-on-one and what does a tutor do the tutor is much better to adapt to kids' needs, right?

37:12So whereas a teacher might teach 30 kids at a time, a tutor teaches one kid at a time. And it turns out in terms of math, English, and so on, a tutor delivers better results. Now what AI can do is, AI can now understand the learner deeper than ever before. And rather than putting a single curriculum out for every kid identical, like today when we teach kids, we have an identical curriculum for all the kids effectively, it could adapt to the child and say, this child is more of a visual learner, or this type of needs more exercise, or this type of cares more about history and less about math. And then really evoke a conversation with the child and help the child to become better and better.

37:49It's unproven. It's a hypothesis. In child education, it hasn't been shown. In adult, in professional training where I work, it has been shown to work better. And I think they're going to go into a world where all of a sudden, even learning gets superpowered and all the kids learn so much more than in the past.

38:07Tommy:So to maybe summarize, moving from democratization of education to mass personalization, where everyone gets an individual tutor tailored to them. Amazing. You've had some huge successes like Waymo, but you've also had some challenges. You had to wind down Kitty Hawk. What heuristics do you use when you're committing years of your life to an idea? We know building a company is a challenge. It's an adventure, but always has ups and downs. What are the heuristics you use? The majority of Kitty Hawk was sold to Boeing. We did okay. It's still available. as a company right now called risk.aero. It wasn't exactly the path I anticipated in some cases.

38:44I always think that there are some of these amazing things where we can change the world. And my goal is to make the world better for other people. So for example, education, what if you can truly democratize education, right? That's the mountain you want to climb. So you pick a mountain in life that will motivate you 10 years later, right? So self-driving cars motivates me 10 years later. Transportation, health motivates me 10 years later. and that's the mountain you are to climb. But then you, if you actually, this is a mountain never been climbed before, right? So you pick something that hasn't been done before.

39:13There's no book you can buy on Amazon that says how to do it because it hasn't been done before. And then you go and start climbing, right? And as anyone knows, that's a complete different story. You're going to put your first foot forward a second and then you, I know, you run out of a false summit and you have to retract, which happens all the time in innovation, that you build something that doesn't work and you have to undo it, possibly even fire people in this process. that is painful for most people, but it has to keep motivating you because rather than, you didn't make any progress maybe in terms of getting your goal done, but you learned something interesting that other people don't know yet and you didn't know.

39:48So you're not going to make the same mistake again. So you're constantly making mistakes. You go into, as a climber, let's say, take the mountain climbing analogy, you go into bad weather, right? So all of a sudden there's a thunderstorm, right? You can't see the summit anymore. That doesn't mean the summit is gone. You still have to believe it exists, but maybe your colleagues can't see it and they get frustrated. it you have to keep climbing and you have to be very flexible my estimate is if you know what you're doing if someone can be a little bird in your ear and tell you exactly every every moment exactly what to do you're typically five times faster than if you're a true entrepreneur it takes five times longer to figure things out than if you could pick up a book at amazon it would tell you how to do it so if you do something new like building democracy education or building self-driving cars four out of five days are effectively spent learning something interesting without making real progress towards the goal and then pick something that really is meaningful and to me the most meaningful is stuff i always have this thing called grandmother test like can i go to my fictitious my grandmother's or passed away obviously my fictitious grandmother and tell her i'm working with something like this okay and if i tell her look i'm building you a car that can get you anywhere that's self-driving she probably gets it but i say i'm building a lock likely with discriminator that goes into blah blah blah and does blah blah blah i don't care about that stuff so if i think what are the basic things that people really deeply care about is communication it's health it's education it's safety these are the things we truly maybe travel experiences we care about can you relate your innovation to those things and i would say when you do things like transportation or education almost recently i've been working on shopping and e-commerce these are things people do care about and you can you can explain to somebody's non-technical tell us about the new startup yes i haven't really talked much about it but we have a startup that's called shop on gold which has launched just last week uh it's a personalization app that goes on the internet and in the space of fashion finds everyday stuff for you that has been recently discounted and you might actually like and uses AI to match those millions of things we find every night that are showing up new in the fashion industry and finds those 50 pieces it believes you will love the most and then it also has an agentic AI where once you like something with a single click it does all the shopping for you so you don't have to go and create a password on some obscure website and sign up for some newsletter you didn't want to sign up for and all that stuff so it really changes the interface to the World Wide Web, instead of having 30, 40, 50, 100 different shops you might actually attend to in your lifetime, there's just one that now does all the shopping for you.

42:35Tommy:Fantastic. Well, we should be watching the future of that very, very closely. Maybe if we can just wrap things up, Sebastian, by asking something we ask everyone who comes on Giant Ideas, and modesty is not allowed in this answer. So what is it about you, do you think, that has allowed you to have the kind of extraordinary success that we've just talked about for the past half an hour i'm both extremely arrogant and extremely humble okay i'm arrogant when i say let's democratize the world's education i go to a stanford dean and say screw this stanford should admit 10 million people not just 7 000 700 people and that's certainly unappreciated by the people who care about the status quo and i do this for everything it was for government it was for health these mountains that have to be climbed you have to pick them and when you when you proclaim you're going to climb the mountain of making cars drive themselves you're surrounded by people who basically think you're an idiot okay let's be plain in the beginning that's the way it feels but then you can just pretend you know everything the actual process of climbing this mountain is extremely humbling because you've constantly proven wrong and you have to be able to motivate yourself when you constantly do the wrong thing so give an example for my most recently startup which is now doing extremely well, Shop on Gold.

43:51We did five iterations of building something that just didn't work. We tested it with users and they basically hated it. And it's not because I'm not smart enough. Maybe it is. But it's very hard to understand what makes people really tick and what makes things work. The same is true for Gadasity. The same is true for self-driving cars. Did many, many, many iterations. Didn't work. And to me, those give me energy. I love uncertainty and I love learning. I love learning new things I love being proven wrong I have a rule in my life I'm allowed to make every mistake but only once if I make it the second time I haven't learned anything about it so I mean then I'm actually an idiot but I drive enormous energy out of this idea of like you do something it doesn't work and you make a mistake and you look in the mirror and say I screw this up and it's okay that's great I allow myself to make mistakes and that's I think where many people fail they they often move in and say i know everything and if you take the position you know everything you got to be extremely lucky to be cracked because you're dealing with something it's never done before and it's hard it's more likely you believe you know everything but you don't and then you're being stuck with your mistakes and you can't understand that you actually have to learn right so i feel like i'm like a first grader in what i do every single day.

45:09I feel like a complete novice and I have no clue what I'm doing. I'm learning from the firehouse every single time I build a new company.

45:16Tommy:One final question, Sebastian. What advice would you give to your 10-year-old self? Be curious. I think the world is changing so rapidly. Don't get married to anything that exists today. And let's say develop grit. Grit to me is the one thing that is really driving success. Grit means you stick with it, right? If you're the person who jumps off quickly when the first failures come along, then you're not made for Silicon Valley. You're not made for this world of innovation. Pick a job, like work for the German government or the UK government where things are more predictable. But if you want to be in a world where you invent something, you innovate, you push something forward, in fact, pretty much any job, if you have grit, you have a much higher chance for success.

45:59Tommy:Superb place to end. Couldn't agree more. Sebastian, thank you so much for sharing not just one giant idea, but about three or four in this episode. Really, really appreciate you taking the time to join us. Thanks so much. Coming Cameron, it was a real pleasure meeting you. Likewise.

46:16Tommy:Fascinating conversation. One insight I take away from that was just how advanced technology is today. It's essentially pretty close to perfect. And by Sebastian's estimation, we have close to million deaths a year from human drivers. Given that's the situation we still, as a society, as people aren't quite comfortable with the role of that technology, even though the cost of doing that is fairly high. That's pretty fascinating, both philosophically and socially. Yeah, I agree. I think it's so striking when the technology is so far rolled out in San Francisco. So we heard there that a quarter of ride shares, a quarter of the Uber equivalents are now Waymo, driverless cars.

46:55Tommy:It's working. It's just working. It's there. And go to San Francisco and it's a part of daily life. And it's so completely foreign to people in Rome or London where you just don't see that at all. I think it's unusual because mostly the technology that we get out of Silicon Valley is just widely adopted everywhere all at the same time. And it's an example of that not being true at all, basically because of regulatory differences. I think that will probably increase over time because of this kind of geopolitical differences that are now being accentuated. It's a very tangible example of the future is here, but it's not yet equally distributed.

47:24Tommy:Yes, totally. And I feel like we need in Europe to get on it pretty quickly. Absolutely. We're going to miss out. I think one thing I would have liked to push Sebastian on more was this question of why exactly AI is going to suddenly deliver free food, free energy, free clothes, which, as I said in the interview, every single one of these top AI thinkers are all saying. But no one, to me at least, is actually nailing down exactly what is the jump between AI and free energy, which obviously would solve climate change and all this, and to me just seems a bit of a fantasy. For you, do you see that?

47:55Tommy:Yeah, I think it's an assumption of this extrapolating from the progress that's happening that it will continue, which I think is an assumption, and that there will be these emergent, incredible benefits. And we have to use our imagination. But I also feel it depends on the day that you ask me whether I think that's going to happen or not. One thing I wish he would have gone a little bit deeper on was the failure modes of building these autonomous systems. He's built them from the ground up. you know it would have been great to go maybe a level deeper on how it could go wrong and how we should design these systems for those edge case scenarios to protect us and protect the planet and and protect uh yeah our lives agreed but overall i thought it was great i mean it's really nice you know i saw him 12 years ago in silicon valley in his office and he told me driving his cars are going to be a thing it's going to work and at that point no it was a kind of the the pit of despair for for autonomous vehicles yeah and it's now happening and it's kind of down to him lovely fellow and a clear visionary yeah

48:49Tommy:if you like the episode don't forget to like subscribe and follow the show and you can find many more giant ideas wherever you get your podcasts