Why humanity needs a 10x mindset, with Astro Teller

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1:07Hi there, Pioneers of AI listeners. Today we're bringing you something a little different, a live conversation from the Masters of Scale Summit, which happened last week in San Francisco. Summit is an annual convening of some of the brightest minds. There were over 800 of us, and some of you might have even been there. During Summit, I met politicians, artists, AI scientists, and so many others, And we talked about how we can use tech, business, and creativity to solve some of our biggest problems. One of those people was Astro Teller. He's at Alphabet, the parent company of Google, where he runs the Moonshot Factory.

1:52Also called X. But not to be confused with the social media platform. Moonshot Factory. It's a pretty unique concept. As captain of the Moonshot Factory, Astro and his team are working on solutions to some of the world's biggest challenges, like carbon capture and universal global internet connectivity. At Summit, I got to speak with Astro on stage. We had a wide-ranging conversation that touched on cutting-edge AI, the meaning of humanity, and even love. Yes, love. I'm excited to share it with you, so let's get into it. I'm Rana El-Khalyubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

2:49Hi, everyone. Hello. Hello. We are excited to be here. Thank you for being here with us today. Yeah, let's make some trouble. Well, let's make some trouble. Exactly. So you lead up Alphabets X, which is this moonshot factory for tackling some really innovative projects impacting most of humanity. And, you know, some of these projects are really radical, sci-fi-esque, but they're tackling like really important challenges in the world today. So can you give us some examples of what moonshot factory has been working on? Sure. So two examples that I bet most of the people here will be familiar with.

3:27First, Google Brain came from X. This was the source of a lot of the innovations, including the transformer, that underpin what you now think of as foundation models, large language models. Waymo, the self-driving cars that many of you may literally have taken to this audience today, Waymo came from X. And that's sort of how innovation is for many people. Even in this audience, you may only really have become particularly clear about Waymo gotten into Awaymo for the first time, sort of seen the vision over the last year or two, but that's been almost 15 years in the making. That's kind of how radical innovation works.

4:09Verily, the life science business for Alphabet that came from X, Wing, the drones for package delivery that came from X, and there are many more, but those are some examples. Yeah, so if you got here in Awaymo, you can thank Astro and his team for that. Yes, absolutely. So AI is at the core of many of these projects. And, you know, AI is often hailed as this force that's going to propel humanity into greatness, revolutionizing everything from transportation to medicine, education, etc. But I have a controversial take. Bring it. You know, I've dedicated my entire career to AI, but I don't think AI is going to take us there.

4:49I think it's going to be something deeper. I guess I think it's going to be our mindset. So my question for you is, is it going to really be AI or is it this kind of audacious mindset? You call it a 10x mindset that is going to really help us kind of tackle some of these biggest challenges facing humanity. I'm going to yes and you. Okay. Artificial intelligence will end up mattering the way electricity or the transistor has mattered. I think it would be really hard to argue now, you know, 50, 100 years on, that things like the transistor or electricity haven't massively supercharged our ability to be creative and to have a sort of longer lever for our minds and a longer lever for our bodies.

5:31None of that has changed. That is just the magnitude of the vector. The direction of the vector is the mindset. Radical innovation is 10x thinking is about shooting over the horizon. And as soon as you shoot over the horizon, having a bigger motor on your speedboat is not actually as useful as you might think because you're probably going in the wrong direction. So you have to have very high audacity and equally high humility so that you start out on misadventures over and over again. But you're very clear that most of them are misadventures so that you don't go too far in the wrong direction before you realize it.

6:11You kind of need to be ahead. But how much ahead? Yeah, but that's actually a joke, EdX. Our job is to be the right amount too early. And so sometimes Google Glass, which many of you maybe have heard of, we were too, too early in the case of Google Glass. But I think everyone has come around, society is coming around to exactly the vision that Google Glass had a long time ago. So we don't always get the timing right. But better to be a little too early than not enough too early. So you've clearly built this culture of 10x mindset at X, but I'd love to talk about how we can all get into that mindset.

6:49You have this exercise that you do with your team, and I would love for all of us to try it. So can you explain what the exercise is? Sure. So let me start by making sure that what at least we call a moonshot is clear for everyone. It has three basic components, huge problem with the world that you want to solve. If you can't name that, it's definitely not a moonshot. Second, there has to be some science fiction sounding product or service that you can imagine. However unlikely it is you can really make it, we could all agree ahead of time, if you could make it, it would make that huge problem go away.

7:22And then third, there has to be some breakthrough technology that gives us at least a hope of being able to make that science fiction sounding product or service. So there's a lot that we do at X, but what Rana is referring to is we have something called bad idea brainstorms. Bad idea brainstorms. And the reason that we do that is if you come to a meeting with me and I say, okay, show me your brilliance. You're on right now. Give me brilliant ideas. You seize up. That is the opposite of enabling creativity. If you say, give me the worst ideas you have. I mean, just hair-raisingly stupid and bad.

8:03All of a sudden, your shoulders go down. You're like, I can do that. Anyone can do that. and you get going. So let me give you three and then we're going to ask you to do it for about two minutes together. So a really bad idea. Give us the prompt that you have. Okay. Our prompt is how can we build bridges across lines of division? So how can we get people to have more civil discourse? Yep. Great. So here's a really bad idea. Let's sew everyone's mouth shut. Okay. doable doesn't break a law of physics clearly a bad idea for a whole bunch of reasons but good we're limbering up okay all right how about we're gonna de-platform anybody automatically if they ever say anything negative or unfriendly or disagreeable for at least a month okay like doable it's in the gray area but that's pretty obviously still bad what about hey my son is going on an exchange trip with a house state into Japan next semester?

9:08What if we did homestay kind of exchange trips for college students and high school students between blue and red states so that people could actually get to know what is actually much more foreign to them than a foreign country? Sounds crazy on the surface, but hey, hold on, maybe that's not totally crazy. So that's what we're going to ask you to do for two minutes is just talk to each other and see if you can drive a few bad brainstorms about how we can end up in a more civil discourse together. And be silly, be vulnerable, be bold. Our clock starts now. Bad ideas only. Bad ideas only. Okay.

9:54If you are in a space where you can do this bad brainstorm, great. Get going. We'll cue you when it's time to stop. If not, skip about 30 seconds ahead. And hey, you'll be back with us on stage.

10:46So hopefully you generated a ton of bad ideas. Yeah, love it. When your team does that, what do you do with all of these bad ideas? We have to filter them, but you would be surprised that, first of all, some of them kind of become legendary. You know, climate change. Hey, let's like invent smaller people. Probably not doable, but like memorable. But you'd be surprised. One in 30 of them were like, you know what? That might not be totally crazy. Let's hold on to that one. See if we can evolve it. That's so interesting. I think this is really cool because as adults, we often show up with kind of our curated.

11:28Like we want to look smart. We don't want to take risks and we lose our creativity. So this is a great way to get us to think outside of the box. And 10x thinking and risk, you cannot tease them apart. I love it. We'll be right back after a break.

11:55If you've spent any time building AI products or leading technical teams, you know this. Transformation doesn't fail because of ideas. It fails because teams can't move together. Enter Atlassian's Teamwork Collection. It has planning in Jira, documentation in Confluence, video updates in Loom, and now AI agents in Rovo, which connects the dots across your work so nothing gets lost. It's one AI-powered teamwork platform designed for how modern teams actually build. Learn more at Atlassian.com slash TeamChanger. That's A-T-L-A-S-S-I-A-N dot com slash TeamChanger. So I want to switch gears to talk about profit and purpose.

12:46As an outsider looking into Alphabet to X, one might think that you don't have to worry about all this, like, profits, making money, right? And you can pick projects and dream big and think big and don't really have to worry about the viability or the sustainability of some of these ideas. Because some other parts of Alphabet can deal with that. but that's not actually how you approach kind of these problems and these solutions so can you talk about how you balance purpose and profit sure i mean first it's just an axiom i guess other people can have other axioms but at least at x we are only going to fish at the intersection of purpose and profit if we do something which has purpose but it doesn't have profit i believe that things that make money get bigger over time and things that lose money get smaller over time so if i want we want something that's really going to have a huge positive impact on the world, it needs to make money or it won't ultimately have a huge positive impact on the world.

13:42And when I'm just, we're not going to work on something that we can't brag to our grandkids about if we don't feel really good about the long-term impact. Now that begs the question, how do you know what the long-term impacts are going to be? Spoiler alert, you can't. I mean, obviously, like sewing people's mouths shut, there's a certain amount of that that you can removed before you leave the conference room. So there are whiteboard kills for projects. But for a lot of them, you have to go out in the world and discover. And you have to find ways to safely sandbox what you're doing so that you can have microcosms of the change you envision without actually endangering society.

14:21And then when you get out there, you have to learn, oh, we were wrong. That isn't going to work. That isn't really what people want. It won't really solve the problem we aspire to solve. So a great example of this is now more than 10 years ago, Waymo had self-driving cars and they actually believed that they were going to sell the cars. That was their original business plan. And we put Googlers in these cars and we made them swear, like literally sign documents saying they were going to keep their hands right by the wheel the whole time. Yeah, you all know the joke now, but no one knew the answer to this at the time.

14:59And the cars were really safe. But even the Googlers who had promised to do the right thing got in the back seat, they were taking naps. And we stopped that experiment. We said, okay, we've learned you shouldn't sell cars that put people in a position of a moral hazard where it's safe enough that you stop paying attention, but it's not really safe enough. And that learning caused us to transition to kind of level five autonomy and making sure that the cars could go all the way by themselves with nobody in the front seat. Very cool. So you've created these lists of five beliefs, and you don't like to call them predictions.

15:42I gave you five. There's a lot more than five. Okay. All right. But they're like these positions on what the world will look like in the future and or assumptions maybe. So some of these are like by 2035 computation will be a thousand times more energy efficient, landfills will have value, and interpersonal communication will look very different. We don't have time to go into each one of them, but I am particularly intrigued by this idea that interpersonal communication will be meaningfully different. What do you mean by that? First of all, let's backtrack. Why do you come up with these beliefs?

16:18I don't believe that any of us, including me, can reliably predict the future. I think you can systematize the process for kind of groping your way into the future a little bit less randomly than you might otherwise be able to do it. But there are things I am willing to treat as risk-free at X while we're in discovery. We might be wrong, but they're ones that look enough likely and non-obvious that I'm willing to treat them as risk-free. Because if you treat everything as sort of wildly risky, it's hard for people to know where to start. So interpersonal communications. Might it be exactly the same in 10 years?

17:00Yeah, of course. But how many people think that little piece of glass in your pocket is the best possible way for us to interact with technology? Show of hands if you think it's the best possible way. like zero people raised your hands. When I look at great technology, it's like this, where you don't even realize it's happening. When you smash your foot onto anti-lock brakes, there is a robot behind the scenes going, I hear you, but I'm not really going to just like lock up the brakes, even though it's kind of what you just asked for. I'm going to take that unsophisticated ask and do a very complex dance to make sure that the wheels don't actually lock up so I can slow up the car as fast as possible.

17:42That's what technology wants to be like. There's so many ways in which we have wrapped our humanity around technology instead of getting technology to wrap itself around our humanity. And I think we all know that intuitively. I have no idea how it's going to be different in 10 years, but it's really hard for me to believe that it won't be enough different that I can let Xers treat that as risk-free when they do their reward-risk ratio calculations. And so now that that's like this risk-free belief that's out there, you can then start to like imagine what that would look like. And then you get a whole slew of ideas about what that future human machine interface looks like.

18:20Yeah. Yeah. Because a lot of innovation is skating to where the puck is going to be. And so having some sense of how the world's going to change gives you some ways to start skating to where the puck will be. Let's talk about the landfill belief, because I think that's like really curious. So So yeah, tell us about that belief. I mean, right now you have to pay, or sorry, you get paid to deal with a landfill because it's a pain. The statement is somewhere between 10 and 20 years from now, landfills will have positive value instead of negative value. At X, we think that that's true because we're seeing so many rising opportunities.

18:58Like, oh, here's a little bacteria that can go get gold out of e-waste. Oh, here's a way to sequester methane from compost. If you were just going through landfill to try to get the gold, it's probably not worth it. If you're just going through landfill to get some methane, it's probably not worth it. But we've seen so many of these things. At some point, it feels just from this bottoms-up vision we've got from all the little successes we've had, it's going to start being easier to get humanity's stuff out of these fairly refined piles of our leftover stuff rather than trying to dig it up out of the land or the ocean, which is kind of mostly what we still do.

19:42Yeah. What about sustainability? A lot of X's projects are related to sustainability. And what role does AI play in solving some of these problems? So AI plays very different roles in different ones, but let me give you an example or two. one that's going particularly well right now is it would be great if somehow we could just plug a lot more renewables onto the grid. If you go look, the interconnection cues, the wait times for solar farms or wind farms to be plugged onto the grid, average across the world is about seven years, including in this country. And in many places, that's the average.

20:22That is crazy, by the seven years. There is plenty of renewables already waiting in line. That's not the problem. But if you run a grid, it is your legal and moral obligation to do a ton of checking before you plug a solar field onto the grid. What is the absolute worst thing that this solar field might do under the weirdest possible scenarios I can come up with 13 years from now under a whole bunch of different like what ifs. Because if it's going to wreck the grid, I have an obligation to not plug it into the grid. That is a very bespoke process right now. If you could use artificial intelligence and data, you could radically speed up that process.

21:06We don't have the time now to go into exactly how we're doing it, but I'm really proud that the country of Chile just announced that our moonshot for helping the electric grid to solve this and other problems, which is called tapestry, is now what they're going to use going forward as a mechanism for doing their grid planning. That is awesome. Congratulations. Yeah, I think that's awesome.

21:34More to come after a quick break.

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23:02So I want to end our conversation by talking about this particular moment in time. Technology has always had a profound impact on the way we do things, the way we connect, the way we communicate. But there's something fundamentally different about AI. It's kind of calling into question our sense of self. So I often think about this question like, what does it mean to be human in the age of AI? So I'm asking, what does it mean to be human in the age of AI? I think it's the first time in our lifetimes, but it's not the first time in humanity's existence. So I need to take you back about 2 ,000 years, depending on who you're going to credit it with.

23:40But there have been a number of times in humanity's evolution where, I mean, every time change happens, it kerfuffles us. That's natural. That's just like part of the human condition. But occasionally, that kerfuffling is qualitatively more painful. when Ptolemy or Copernicus said that our planet is not in the center of the universe, man, that hurt in a really different way. Because our sense of self was tied, whether we realized it or not, to being in the middle. If we're not in the middle, we're not as special. That's not like a little bit of a bummer and some change management. That's like qualitatively not okay.

24:21we got over it then some jerk comes and says we're descended from primates wait a second we're better than the stars we're better than the bunny rabbits we can't come from the bunny rabbits how are we special so darwin really messed with our heads freud there are a few of the other ones who have given us kind of a knock to the side of our heads which isn't just about the world's going to be different, keep up. It attacks our sense of specialness. And I believe at an unconscious level, society is hanging on by its fingernails right now to our last remaining sense of specialness. I think. I'm funny.

25:05I tell stories. I can have a conversation. Who else can do that. Oh God, Gemini, whoever.

25:15And we can either get mad that the world is changing and that these things are coming onto the scene, or we could take a big step back and ask, should we really be tying our sense of what it means to be a human, to enjoy our time on planet earth, to our sense of specialness? Do we have to be better than the bunny rabbits? Do we have to be better than the stars? Do we have to be better than Gemini? What if we were just good to each other and we spent time having love, letting people love us, finding ways to make the world a better place? That's what makes me feel good about being human. And artificial intelligence is not actually undermining that.