How Governments Should Handle AI Policy & Deepfakes w/ Eric Schmidt | EP #99

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1:10People tend to think of AI as language to language and we're going to move from language to action. What are we going to do when super intelligence is broadly available to everyone? Well, in this case, I'm both optimistic and also fearful. And obviously there's evil people, and they'll use it in evil ways, but I'm in a bet that the good people will route out evil That's historically been true in human society. The systems will get so good That you and I everyone in this audience will have access to a polymath Let's be able to proud that we are inventing a future that will accelerate physics science chemistry and so forth Eric first of all, thank you for your friendship and for your partnership you've been an incredible friend, mentor, supporter for X Prize for singularity for all the things that we've been working on and I just want to say a heartfelt thank you for that.

2:06Thank you. Thank you. So the conversation we've had over the past 24 hours has been what we call the great AI debate, which is a, obviously, a challenge. It's not truly a debate. But it's been the conversation around, as we evolve digital superintelligence, that's a million times and a billion times faster. How do we think about it? Is it our greatest hope? Or our gravest existential threat? And how do we steer the course there? We had Rick Kurzweil and Jeffrey Hinton on stage with us yesterday, as well as many people that you know, Ema and Lusdak and Nat Friedman and Gioem Verdon. I'm curious I mean, you just, how you're steering this in your mind.

3:03I mean, you have been, you know, Google from its earliest roots has been an AI first company. I don't think people realize that. It's always been the fundamental of the organization. And Google actually developed all this technology way before anybody else, but it chose not to release it just to make sure it's safe, which was the responsible thing to do, but your hand was forced. How do you think about fear versus optimism in your own mind? Well, in this case, I'm both optimistic and also fearful. Larry Page's PhD research was on AI. So you're correct that Google was founded in the umbrella, if you will, of what AI was going to do.

3:51And for a while, it seemed like about two -thirds of the world's AI resources were well -hosted within Google, which is a phenomenal achievement on the part of the founders and the leadership. I think that people tend to think of AI from what they've seen in the movies, and which is typically the sort of female scientist kills the killer robot kind of scenarios. And first, we haven't figured out how get robotics to work yet, but we certainly understand how to get information to work. I wrote a book with Dr. Kissinger called the Age of AI and we have our second one, his last one, he died unfortunately last year called Genesis coming out later this year, which is precisely on this topic.

4:34I think the thing that to understand is that we're going to have a very different world and it's going to happen very quickly for the following reason. The systems will get so good that you and I, everyone in this audience and everyone of the world through their phone or what have you, will have access to a, essentially, a polymath as in the historic polymath of old. So imagine if you had Aristotle to consult with you on logic and you had Oppenheimer to consult with you on physics and not the person but rather the knowledge and that kind of scaling intelligence, these sort of truly brilliant people who were historically incredibly rare, their equivalents would become generally available.

5:20In the shorter chart, so that's the long -term answer is, what are we going to do when super intelligence is broadly available to everyone? And obviously, there's evil people, and they'll use it in evil ways, but I'm going to bet that the good people will route out evil. That's historically been true in human society. The thing I would emphasize for this audience is that something is about to change that I is people tend to think of AI as language to language, and we're going to move from language to action. Specifically and technically, it means that your text language, your text will be essentially computed into a program that can be then used.

6:00So in your case, you're doing a conference, start at all the potential confirm members, call them up, figure out if they're going to come, lock them in, figure out who the most important ones and do the seeding chart, right, and do it all by program, right? That's something that humans do all day, right? In what you do and many of you do many things, but that one that will become automatic just by a verbal command. Somebody else will say, you know, I really like to see a competitor to Google. So build a search engine, sort the ranking, but do it using my algorithm, not the one that Google is, which I don't like, and the system one thing.

6:35So you're going to see this explosion in digital power on a per person basis, and no one's quite set it this way. You're very good at marketing. Maybe you can come up with a name for this. It's an abundance of intelligence, but it's also in your format, it's a bunch of action. You do it on it. It's intentional AI, making things happen. And this is gonna, everything is gonna become, I think we're heading towards, the Trillion sensor economy where everything is knowable or AI can then take actions based upon the information out there and execute through robotics and such. You've been very active in guiding national leaders on security and that's been a really important work at this stage in your life.

7:30I want to hit on three of these, we have such a short period of time. So let me, let me mention the three and then weave them as you, as you would. The first is AI and US national security. The second is AI and competitiveness with China. And the third is the impact of AI on the upcoming US elections, which many people have said could be patient zero in a lot of concerns. So How do you think about these three things? How should we think about them? So I'm a part of a group that has looked very carefully at the real dangers of the current LLMs and they're scary. The conclusion of our group, which is roughly 20 people who are basically scientists is we think we're okay now and we're worried about the future.

8:19And the point at which you really want to get worried is called recursive self improvement. So, recursive self -improvement means go learn everything, start now, and don't stop until you know everything. And this could allow this recursive self -improvement, could eventually allow self -invocation of things. And imagine a recursive self -improvement system which gets access to weapons. So, you can do things in biology that we cannot currently understand. So, there is a threshold. Now, my standard joke about that is that when that thing starts learning on its own, you know what we're going to do?

8:54We're going to unplug it because you can't have these things running randomly around, if you will, in the information space and not understanding at all what they're doing. Another threshold point is when two different agentex systems, agents as a computer science point, are today defined as LLMs with state. In other words, not only do they know how to go from input to output, but they can also, So they know what they did in the past and they can make judgments based on that. So they accumulate knowledge. So there's a scenario where your agent and my agent learn how to speak to each other and they start and they stop talking in English and they start talking in a language that they have invented.

9:33What do we do in that case? Unplugged the things. You see my— You see that? And we've seen that. So, these scenario—these threshold points, they will know when they're happening. Another example will be when the system can start doing math on its own at a level that's incredibly advanced math. That's another threshold point. Now will these things occur? When will they occur? There's a debate in the industry. Some people think five years I think is going to be longer, but people, you know, that's the clear threshold. Now with respect to AI safety in general, I was heavily involved with the UK Act in November, the executive order from the White House, and we started a series of track two dialogues with China.

10:19So I kind of roughly understand, and Europe, of course, is its usual hopeless self. So I roughly know what everybody's doing, and the governments are trying to tread lightly at the moment by doing essentially various forms of notification and self -regulation. So if you look at the US Act, for example, you're not required to tell them what you're doing, but you're required above 10 to the 26 flops, which is an arbitrary measure that we frankly just invented, that you have to notify that the training event begins. That seems like a reasonable compromise. We don't know what the Chinese are going to do in this area, but you have to assume that they're going to fear the broad scale impacts of AI more than democracies will, because it will be used to disembarr of the state.

11:05And so we have to assume that the government will ultimately restrict it more than the West will. Eric, how do you benchmark China today in terms of their capabilities in large language models and neural nets against the US? So I think as the audience knows, the government did something good, which is a restricted did access to sml and h100 h now 8800 chips from Nvidia, although Nvidia is doing just fine without all that revenue. And so China is now stuck at the A100 level. They're roughly limited at five nanos. So I'll just say broadly speaking, seven nanometers lower is better. The chips that we're using now are three nanometers going down to two and then 1 .4 or so.

11:50So it looks like the gap, hardware gap is gonna increase. And it also looks like the Chinese will be forced to do scalable software with lesser hardware. Can they pull it off? Absolutely. How will they do it? They'll spend more money. So if it costs us a billion dollars to do training, they'll spend five billion. So it's a temporary gap. It's not a crippling gap, if you will, in the competition. You asked about the elections. One way to understand this is that people now, and it's sad, don't really get their information out of traditional news sources. They get it out of, let's think about it, YouTube, which is in my view well -managed.

12:36Instagram, and Twitter, and Facebook, and TikTok. Now, TikTok is not really social media. TikTok is really television. Remember, it's not really a function of what your friends are doing. It uses the different algorithm, which is super impressive, and it's growing like crazy. And of course, the US is busy trying to ban it, which is probably not a very good idea. But in any case, with TikTok's growth, you should expect regulation of content because we regulate every country regulates television in one form or another. We're precisely this issue of election interference. So I think you're going to see the decisions that are made by the social media companies with respect to how they present content will determine how badly regulated they're going to be in this election because most people will encounter misinformation, not because they built it, but because they sought through social media.

13:32So the secret that the social media companies understand, the peril that they're in with respect to the downside if they screw this up on either side. Everybody want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and Could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love companies called fountain life And it's company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians You know most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all Optimus until that day where you have a pain in your side You go to the physician and they burn see room and they say listen and I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on.

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15:39Really it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends, it's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy life spans. Go to fountainlife .com, BackslashPeter, it's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. Alright, let's go back to our episode. So I saw recently some limitations put on Gemini and talking about elections and politics. Is this our other companies doing this or is it just Google that stepping up? So while Google, again, my view and I'm obviously biased, has always been at the forefront of this.

16:19In 2016, when Google faced the question of elections and the Trump interference, we did not have trouble because we had done the advertising with a white list. In other words, you had to be approved, whereas the other is in particular Facebook that was ultimately the biggest casualty of this had not put a white list in. Since then, Facebook has put a white list in. So there's hope that the companies who have a vested interest in their own survival will manage this. I'll let you speculate on X and Elon. But the important thing here is that I didn't fully understand this until the last few years.

16:57When you run a large social network, there are well -funded information transparency opponents who, for whatever reason, misinformation, disinformation, national security, what have you, they want their information out there. I got in trouble one day because I announced, why would we ever source from RT, which is Russia today? and people yelled at me at the time, Russian to an RT after the Crimea invasions was in fact banned for precisely this reason. So you really do have to be careful about the power of misinformation at scale. The misinformer is guilty, but so are the platforms if they spread it without checking, right?

17:41And that's damaging to a democracy. It really does put democracies at threat. And this problem will only get worse. There are a gazillion videos now where, basically, I'll give an example. You can have Chatsy BT your equivalent, generate a text. You can generate the mouth movements. You can move the face and so forth to the average person they're indistinguishable from real. If you look at what happened with Taylor Swift and the deep fakes about her, there were plenty of systems that were trying to prevent the creation of the deep fakes. but people were so motivated to create these images that they managed to get around all of the checks and balances.

18:23So he is a war between the locks and the lock, lock pickers and lock makers and the lock makers need to win with disinformation for the nation, frankly, for democracy. You have been involved in the inner workings of U .S. national defense policy. how will AI change the business of war? Is it ultimately a positive right now, helping us be more accurate? I'll say this, it'll sound cynical, but I'll say it, I genuinely mean it. The best thing about the Western militaries is they're not at war, and so they're incredibly slow. Right? There is a real war in the West, and that's in Ukraine and Russia.

19:10And I've now been many times to Ukraine and I've provided some advice to and I obviously want want but I think that however imperfect we want to preserve democracies in our world they're just better and safer to have democracies than autocracies is certainly not ones that are busy invading the neighboring country. So what's really going on in Ukraine is a vision of what's happening in the future. You now have, and again, I'll avoid my own history with respect to this, but a year ago I could go to the front and I could hang out and joke and so forth. The weather was nice, the food was kind of a thing.

19:51Now you cannot walk during the day or the night because there's a traffic jams of your drones and enemy drones for both sides on top. And it's essentially a death zone. So the ubiquity of drones means, in my view, that tanks and artillery and mortars go away as weapons of war. I'm a sufficient optimist that I believe that once countries figure out a way to make this ubiquitous notion of drones for their own defense, it'll become impossible to invade an adjacent country. Because once the tanks roll, what you could do is just bomb them with drones and a drone costs $5 ,000 or less, and the tank costs $5 million or less.

20:32So the kill ratio is such that the tanks just don't make it. And you can make enough drones to pull it off. The current drones are not particularly AI sophisticated, but if the US government in its infinite stupidity were actually to do something right and approve the Ukraine aid pack, it would give us another year. So my current phrase publicly is, let's get another year here. And in that year, you're going to be asymmetric innovation that can allow a smaller government, which is a new democracy trying hard to counter the moves of a large and established of invading power. I suppose the cynic would say, well, that means it's going to get harder for the US to invade neighboring countries.

21:16And I say, well, that may be true too. But when having now seen real war as opposed to what you see in the movies, and I have lots of drone death videos that I will not show anybody. It's really horrific and we want everything we can to stop war. And I think that there's a scenario where AI makes it actually much less likely. They'll certainly with AI and empowered weapons be far fewer collateral damage because of the targeting. And again, this is lost in the various critics of what I and others are doing. The biggest casualties of war are not actually the soldiers, but the civilians. So war is horrific and it should be if you have to have a deal with the professionals and don't kill kids and women and old ladies and bomb the buildings like the Russians have been doing with their tanks, which sets me nowhere.

22:06Those are called war crime. At Palmer Lucky on the stage last year describing what he's doing with Andrew Olin, that was his key point that precision is everything I'm being able to. Yeah, and Palmer's company has done a fantastic job there, one of the great US leaders in this space. Yeah, for sure. Let's talk about AI safety. You know, the point's been made over and over again in the last 24 hours that these AI models are progeny. They're built on our digital exhaust. How should we be training models? How should we be trying to maximize? Is containment So the first element ever an issue is how do you think about safety in our super advanced AI models?

22:57I mean, the first rules were don't put it on the open internet and don't allow it to self -referentially improve itself. And we've put it out in the open internet and we've had software coding software. So where do we go from here? Well, let's understand the structure of the future internet. At the moment, the hyperscalers, the big ones, which essentially are Microsoft Open Now, it's kind of a pair, Google, Anthropic, Infliction, there's a couple in China that are coming. These are closed models. And when I say closed, that means that you don't know how they work internally. the source code is not available, the weights are not available, and the APIs are limited in some way.

23:49And there's been a debate in the industry for a long time as open versus closed models. If you look at the open models that have come out, if you look at the Mistral, most recent models, if you look at Lama 3, each of these models are incredibly powerful. They get roughly 80%. But so the debate that's going on in the industry is, will the open source and closed models will they track, and other will open source lag a year or two, or will the hyperscalers get much bigger? That is essentially a question of dollars, right, and train time, dollars and so forth. I think we're talking about $250 million for a training run, $500 million for a training run escalating quite quickly, and you see this in Nvidia stock price, et cetera.

24:32So the first question is do you think that there'll be a small number or a large number of such things? My own view is there'll be a small number of incredibly powerful AGI systems, which will be heavily regulated because they're so powerful. This is my personal view. And then a much larger number of what I'm going to call middle -sized models, which will be open source. Much people will just plug in and out. I looked very carefully at this question of could you selectively train? In other words, if you could delete the bad part of the information in the world and just only train on good information, would you get a better model?

25:06Unfortunately, it appears that it doesn't actually work that way. When you restrict training data, you actually get a more brittle model. So it looks like you're better off, at least today, with the current algorithms to build a large model and then restrict it with guardrails with the so -called red teams and so forth. And the red teaming is clever because what they do is they have humans who think that they test something, they say if it knows something, it must know something else. And that seems to be working. Eventually, the consensus of the groups that I have been working with is that the red team will become its own business.

25:41I would think about how to fund this feeling, probably, because if you think about it, how do you know what an AI is doing unless an AI is watching it? Well, how can the AI that's watching it know what the AI discovered it unless that the AI I tell it, but it doesn't know how to tell you what it knows. So this conundrum is to be worked on. There are plenty of people working on this problem. I think we'll get this solved. But I think it's important to say that these very large models are ultimately going to get regulated. And the reason is they're just too powerful. And they're going to be regulated because they need to be.

26:12They know too many ways of harm, as well as enormous, enormous power of gain, right? The ability to cure cancer and fix our energy problems and do new materials and and on and on and on. I mean, I can go on and on and on about what they'll be able to do because they're polymats. Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons, the ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood.

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28:29Is there enough attention? Is there enough awareness and a fear? Well, fear is a heavy motivator for political leaders, especially if they're worried about their own jobs. What I found in the Senate was that there's a group of four, two Republicans and two Democrats who really got it. And I worked very closely with them. We had a series of centered hearings on this subject, which were well attended. There's a similar initiative now in the House. And this is largely, it's happening so quickly, in fairness to our political leaders, most of us have trouble understanding what's going on. Can you imagine a normal, a new person who's got political problems to deal with?