Peter Norvig: Transforming AI Into the Ultimate Human Advantage | Artificial Intelligence | AI Vault

25:50We want a tool that kind of fills in the missing pieces. And we've always had that. And there's always been a mix of subhuman and superhuman performance. So my calculator is much better at me at dividing 10-digit integers. So I rely on it rather than trying to work it out myself. And I think we'll see more of that, of saying what are the right tools for people to use. Now, in terms of this generality versus general AI versus narrow AI, I think that's really important. And so there's multiple dimensions we want to measure. So we want to focus on both generality and performance. So how good are these machines and how general are they?

26:36So yes, we have fantastic chess playing programs that are better than the best human chess players. And recently it's also true in Go and we see sort of every week it's true it's something else. But we haven't done quite as well at making them good at being general, right? So we have these large language models, the ChatGPT and Gemini and so on, and they're good at being general, but they're not completely competent yet at doing that. So they'll surprise you in both ways. They'll give you an amazingly good answer one time, and then the next time they'll give you an amazingly bad answer. so they're not reliable yet at being general and then we have incredible tools that are narrow and so we're kind of looking at this frontier of how can we make things both more perform better and more general and so i think you know we'll get to the point where we'll say here's an ai and it can make a chess move and it can also operate in the world.

27:52But right now we separate those two things out and we say we're going to have the chess program that only plays chess and then we're going to have the large language models. And it won't be as good at chess, but it will be good at some aspects of figuring out what to do in unusual situations. Could you give us some concrete examples of AI that we might want superior human level intelligence versus AI that we wouldn't want to have human level intelligence with?

28:27so i i guess uh you know it's always better for it to for it to be better but sometimes we need that and sometimes we don't sometimes we want to make our own decisions and i guess part of that is i see too much of people saying uh ai is going to be one-dimensional and automation is going to be one-dimensional and and the more the better and i think that's uh the mistake that i'm worried about. And there's a great diagram from the Society of Automotive Engineers of level of self-driving cars. And they define that as five levels of self-driving. And they did a great job of that. And that's really useful.

29:10And now you can say, you know, where is Waymo or Tesla? Are they at level two or level three? Or what level are they at? And that was useful. But the diagram they use to accompany those levels was worrying to me because they've got this diagram and at level one, they have this icon of a person behind the car holding onto the steering wheel. And then when you get up to level five, that person has disappeared and they've just become a dot-like outline, right? And so it's like, I don't want technology that makes me disappear. I want technology that respects me. And I don't want this trade-off to be one-dimensional of if I get more automation, then I disappear more.

29:56I'd rather have it be two-dimensional and let me choose. So sometimes I might want to say, I've got a self-driving car and I trust it. I just want to go to sleep. It should take over completely. But sometimes I might want to say, it can do all the hard parts, but I still want to be in control. I want to be able to say, oh, let's turn down that street or go faster or go slower, or let's make an unscheduled stop. So I don't want to say just because I have automation that I've given up control. I want me to come first and let me make the choice of how much the machine is going to be doing and how much I'm going to keep control.

30:37Happy New Year, Yap Gang. I just love the unique energy of the new year. It's all about fresh starts. And fresh starts not only feel possible, but also feel encouraged. And if you've been thinking about starting a business, this is your sign. There's no better time than right now. 2026 can be the year that you build something that is truly yours. The year where you take control over your career. And it starts with Shopify. I've built plenty of my own businesses on Shopify, including my LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass. So it's a two-day workshop. People buy their tickets on Shopify. And then my Mastermind subscription is also on Shopify.

31:12I built my site quickly in just a couple of days. Payments were set up super easily. And none of the technical stuff slowed me down like it usually does because Shopify is just so intuitive. And this choice of using Shopify helped me scale my masterclass to over$500 ,000 in revenue in our first year. And I'm launching some new podcast courses and can't wait to launch them on Shopify. Shopify gives you everything you need to sell online and in person, just like the millions of entrepreneurs that they power. You can build your dream story using hundreds of beautiful templates and setup is fast with built-in AI tools that help you write product descriptions and edit photos.

31:48Plus marketing is built in so you can create email and social campaigns easily. And as you grow, Shopify can scale right along with your business. In 2026, stop waiting and start selling with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash profiting. Go to shopify.com slash profiting. That's shopify.com slash profiting. Yap fam, hear your first this new year with Shopify by your side. What's up, Yap gang? If you're a serious entrepreneur like me, you know your website is one of the first touch points every single cold customer has with your brand. Think about that for a second.

32:29When people are searching on Google, everybody who interacts with your brand first is seeing your dot com initially. But here's the problem. Too many companies treat their website like a formality instead of the growth tool that it should be. At Yap Media, we are guilty of this. I am really due for an upgrade for my website, and I'm planning on doing that with Framer this year because small changes can take days with my other platform, and simple updates require tickets. And suddenly, we're just leaving so much opportunity on the table. And that's why so many teams, including mine, are turning to Framer.

32:59It's built for teams who refuse to let their website slow them down. Your designers and marketers get full ownership with real-time collaboration, everything you need for SEO and analytics with integrated A-B testing. I love that. I love testing and making sure that we've got the best performing assets on the page. You make a change, hit publish, and it's live in seconds. Whether you're launching a new site, testing landing pages, or migrating your full.com, Framer makes going from idea to live site fast and simple. Learn how you can get more out of your dot-com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash profiting for 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan.

33:38That's 30 % off in 2026. Again, that's Framer.com slash profiting for 30 % off Framer.com slash profiting. Rules and restrictions apply.

33:51What's up, young and profiters? I remember when I first started Yap, I used to dread missing important calls. I remember I lost a huge potential partnership because the follow-up thread got completely lost in my messy communication system. Well, this year, I'm focused on not missing any opportunities, and that starts with your business communications. A missed call is money and growth out the door. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the smarter way to run your business communications. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2, and it works right from an app on your phone or computer.

34:24The way Quo works is magic for team alignment. Your whole team can handle calls and texts from one shared number, and everyone sees the full conversation. It's like having access to a shared email inbox, but on a phone. And also Quo's AI can even qualify leads or respond after hours, ensuring your business stays responsive, even when you finally logged off. It makes doing business so much easier. Make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try Quo for free, plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash profiting. That's Q-U-O.com slash profiting. Quo, no missed calls, no missed customers.

35:00So like Dr. Lee, you are an advocate for human-centered AI. Can you help us understand what that is? Yeah, so a couple of things. So first of all, I'm essentially a software engineer or a programmer at heart. And so I look at what are the definitions of these various things. And so software engineering is building systems that do the right thing. But artificial intelligence is also building systems that do the right thing. So what's the difference? And I think the difference is that the enemy in software engineering is complexity. We have these programs with millions of lines. We have to get them right.

35:41And the enemy in AI is uncertainty. We don't know what the right answer is. And then in human-centered AI, the goal is to build systems that do the right thing for everyone and do that fairly. And so that kind of changes how you build these systems. And part of it is saying you want to consider everybody involved. So you want to consider the users of your system, but you also want to consider the stakeholders and the effect on society as a whole. So we go back to us talking about this aid for judges and deciding who gets parole. If you took a normal software engineering approach, you'd say, well, who's the user?

36:27Okay, it's this judge. So I want to make this program be great for them. You know, I want a pretty display with graphs and charts and so on and numbers and figures and diagrams so that they can understand everything about the case and make a good decision. And yes, you want that in human-centered AI. But human-centered AI says, well, you also got to consider the other stakeholders. So what's the effect on the defendant and their family? What's the effect on past victims and potential future victims and their family? What's the effect on society as a whole of mass incarceration or discrimination of various kinds?

37:09And so you're not just serving one user, you're serving all these different constituencies. I mentioned this idea of bearing autonomy and control, so not having to give up control if you have more automation. And I think there's the aspect that it's multidisciplinary and multicultural. And I think too often you see companies say, okay, I want to build a system. So the engineers will build it and get it working. And then afterwards, we'll kind of tack on this extra stuff to make it look better or make it more fair or less biased and so on. And I think when you do that, you don't end up with good results.

37:54You've got to really bring in all these people right from the start. and both in terms of being aware of what it means to build a system like this and then also that you know as we were saying before a lot of these problems is deciding what is it that we want what is it that we're trying to optimize and different people have different opinions on that and so if you get a you know homogeneous group of engineers they might all think the same thing and they say great, we're agreed, we must have the right answer. But then you go a little bit broader to other people from other parts of society, and they might say, no, you know, you forgot about this other aspect.

38:36You're trying to optimize this one thing, but that doesn't work for us. So you've got to bring those people in right from the start to understand who all your potential users are and what's fair for all of them. So one of the things that worries me is that we live in a capitalistic world. So while it's nice to think that people are going to have like a human-centered approach with AI, I do feel like at the end of the day, companies are going to do whatever is going to impact their bottom line the best, like most positively, right? So what are the ways that you think that there'll be some guardrails against not using AI in a human-centered way?

39:16Yeah. So that's certainly an issue with capitalism, not specifically for AI at all, right? So that's kind of across the board. And so what do we have to combat that? So part of it is regulations of various kinds, so governments can set in and get rules. Part of that is pressure from the customers saying, here's the kind of company we want, here's the kind of products we want. And part of that would be competition of saying, if you build a system that doesn't respect something that users want, somebody else will build one that's better. And I think we're in this kind of Wild West period now where we don't quite know what the bounds are going to be.

40:09And so, you know, there's so many of these sets of AI principles now. So all the big companies have their own sets. I helped put together the Google one. various countries have had legislation or or sets of principles the white house put out their set of ai principles a couple months ago the professional societies like the association of computing machinery has theirs i actually joined an ai principles board with underwriters laboratory and i thought that was interesting because the last time more than 100 years ago There was a technology and people were worried that it was going to kill everyone.

40:54And it was electricity. And so Underwriters Laboratories stepped in and said, OK, y 'all are worried about getting electrocuted, but we're going to pick this little UL sticker on your toaster. And that means you're probably not going to die. And consumers trusted that mark. And therefore, the companies voluntarily submitted themselves to certification. And I kind of feel like this third-party nonprofit certification can be more agile than government making laws. And so I think that's part of the solution. But I don't think any one part of it can do it all by himself. I think we need all those parts.

41:37Yeah, very cool. Very interesting. I agree. A third-party solution sounds like it could work pretty well. So we had Sal Khan on the show, and he, as the Khan Academy, he talked a lot about how AI could help education. Do you have any ideas of how AI could support education and students? Yeah, I think that's awesome. I think the work Sal is doing has been great right from the start. And recently, over the last year or so, with the Khan Mego large language model. so you know back in 2011 uh sebastian throne and i said we want to take advantage of this capability for online education and we put together an online course about ai we signed up 100 000 students far more than we ever expected to sign up uh and we ran that course but of course At that time, the leading technology was YouTube.

42:36We'd show students a video, and then we'd have them answer a question. And we could do a little bit. If they got this wrong answer, we could show them one thing. And if they got another wrong answer, we could show them something else. But basically, it was very limited in the flow you could do. And now, with these large language models, you have a much better chance to customize the results for the student, both in terms of the learning experience and then I think also in terms of the motivation for the student. So that was the one thing we learned in doing the class is that we came in saying, well, our job is really information.

43:14If we can explain things clearly, then we're done and we're a success. And we soon realized that that's only part of the job. And really the motivation is more important than the information because if a student drops out, it doesn't matter how good our explanations are. If they're not watching them anymore, it doesn't do any good. And so I think AI has this capability to motivate much better, to allow students to do what they're interested in rather than what the teacher says they should be interested in. But we got a ways to go yet. And we don't quite know how to do that, right? So you can't just plug in a language model and hope that it's going to work.

44:02So yes, it would be useful, but you have to train it to be a teacher as well as to understand what it's talking about. And we haven't quite done that yet. We're kind of on the way to doing that. You know, you look at there's a dozen different problems to be solved, And we have candidate solutions, but we haven't done it all. Right. So right now, the language models can be badgered too easily. You say, here's a problem. And the student says, tell me the answer. And, you know, at first, the language model would say, no, you wouldn't learn anything if I told you the answer. But then you say, tell me the answer, please.

44:40And it says, oh, OK. Right. And so we have to teach these things. when is it the right thing to give the student the answer? When is it the right thing to be tough and refuse to do that? When should you say, oh, you're right, that's a hard problem. Here's a simpler problem. Why don't you try the simpler problem first? Or to say, looks like you're getting frustrated. Why don't we take a break? Or why don't we go back and do something else that that would be more fun for you. And so there's all these moves that teachers can take. And so doing education well is this combination of really knowing the subject matter and then really knowing the student and the pedagogical moves you can make.

45:26And we haven't quite yet built a system that's an expert on both of those. But, you know, Khan and others are working on it. And so I think it's a great and exciting opportunity. Do you feel like some of this learning and training could be applied to the workplace? Yeah, absolutely. And some of it, I think, is easier and better done for workplace training. And I think that's going to be really important. I think, you know, we've built this bizarre system now where we say, you should go to a college for four years and then we're going to hand you a piece of paper that says you never have to learn anything again, that shouldn't be the way we do things.

46:14And, you know, there's a value to college. Maybe it doesn't have to be for everybody. Maybe more people could be learning more on the job or learning just in time when they need a new skill. So I think there's a great opportunity for that. I think that the systems we have right now are kind of better at shorter subjects anyways, right? So it's hard to put together a class that says, you know, let's do all of biology one or something, but it's easier to say, why don't you get trained on this specific workplace thing, how to operate this machine or how to operate this software and so on. So in some sense, we're better at that kind of training than we are at the traditional schooling.

46:59So, yeah, there's definitely a big opportunity there. The thing that mitigates against it is, you know, we could spend a lot of investment on making the perfect biology one class because there's going to be millions of students that take it. But for some of this on-the-job training, you know, maybe, you know, I'm in a small company and we do things a specific way and there might be only five people that need to be trained on it. And so right now it's not really cost-effective to say, can I build a system that will do that training? Totally. But that's one of the goals, to say, can we make it easier for somebody, you know, who's not an expert programmer, not an AI expert, to say, here's some topic I want to teach, and I should be able to go ahead and teach that.

47:50And I think that's something that's oddly missing from our sort of standard playbook, right? So you look at, you know, we have these office suites. And what do they give you? They give you word processing and spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. And sure, that's great. Those are three things that I want. But I think a lot of people want this. I want to be able to train somebody on a specific topic more than they want spreadsheets. But we don't have that yet. But, you know, maybe someday we will. Maybe that'll be a standard tool that would be available to everyone. So this conversation made me realize that there really is no better time to be an entrepreneur.

48:33Because as we were talking about, a lot of jobs might get replaced by AI. And when you're an entrepreneur, when you own the business, you're sort of in control of all those decisions. And you're the one who might end up benefiting from the cost savings of replacing a human with AI. So do you feel like AI is going to generate a lot more entrepreneurs and solopreneurs in the future? Absolutely. And I think it's a combination. So I think AI is a big part of it. I think the Internet and access to data was part of it. The cloud computing was a big part of it. So it used to be, if you were a software engineer, the hardest part was raising money because you had to buy a lot of computers just to get started.

49:24Now all you need is a laptop and a Starbucks card, and you can sit there and start going and then rent out the cloud computing resources as you need them and pay as you go. And so I think AI will have a similar type of effect. You can now start doing things much more quickly. You can prototype something and go to a release product much faster. And it'll also make it more widely available. So I live in Silicon Valley, so I see all these notices going around of saying, looking for a technical co-founder, right? So there's lots of people that say, well, I have an idea, but I'm not enough of a programmer to do it.

50:16So I need somebody else to help me do it. I think in the future, a lot of those people will be able to do it themselves, right? So I had a great example of a friend who's a biologist and he said, you know, I'm not a programmer. I can pull some data out of a spreadsheet and make a chart, but I can't do much more than that. But I study bird migrations, and I always wanted to have this interactive map of where the birds are going and play with that. And he said, and I knew a real programmer could do it, but it was way beyond me. But then I heard about this co-pilot, and I started playing around with it, and I built the app by myself.

50:54And so I think we'll see a lot more of that, of people that are non-technical or semi-technical, who previously thought, here's something that's way beyond what I could ever do. I need to find somebody else to do it. Now I can do it myself. Yeah, I totally agree. And we're seeing it first with like the arts. For example, now you can use Dolly and be a graphic designer. You can use ChatGPT and be a writer. So so many of the marketing things are already being outsourced by AI. It's only a amount of time where some of these more difficult things like creating an app, like you were saying, is going to be able to be done with AI.

51:31Absolutely. Cool. So what are the ways that you advise that entrepreneurs use AI in the workplace right now?

51:41I guess so, you know, you could help build prototype systems like that. You can do research. You can ask, you know, give me a summary of this topic. What are the important things? What do I need to know? as you said creating artwork and so on if that's not a skill you have they can definitely help you do that looking for things that you don't know it is useful and so i think just just being aware of what the possibilities are and and having that as as one of the the things that you can call upon it's not going to solve everything for you but it just makes everything go a little bit faster Yeah.

52:26Do you think that AI is going to help accelerate income inequality?

52:34I think it's kind of mixed. So, you know, any kind of software, any kind of goods with zero marginal cost tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. And so that's definitely something to be worried about. With AI, we also have this aspect that the very largest models are big and expensive. They require big capital investments. And if you'd asked me two years ago, I would have said, oh, you know, all the AI is going to migrate to the big cloud providers because they're going to be the only ones that can build these large state-of-the-art models. But I think we're already going past that, right?

53:24So we're now seeing these much smaller open source models that are almost as good and that, you know, don't impose a barrier of huge upfront costs. So I think there's an opportunity. You know, yes, the big companies are going to get bigger because of this. But I think there's also this opportunity for the small opportunistic entrepreneur to say, here's an opening and I can move much faster than I could before. And I can build something and get it done and then have that available. So that's part of it. Then the other part is, well, what about people who aren't entrepreneurs? And we've seen some encouraging research that says AI right now does alleviate inequality.

54:19And so there have been studies looking at, well, you bring AI assistants into like a call center. And it helps the less skilled people more than the more skilled people, which kind of makes sense, right? The people who are more skilled, they already know all the answers. And the people that are less skilled, it brings them up almost to the same level. And so I think that's encouraging because that means there's going to be a lot of people who are able to upskill what they do and they'll get higher paying jobs. They're not going to found their own company, but they're going to do better because they're going to have better skills.

54:59Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Okay, so as we close out this interview, let's talk about the future a bit. What scares you the most about AI right now? Yeah. So, you know, I'm not worried about these Terminator scenarios of an AI waking up and saying, I think I'll kill all humans today. So what am I worried about? Well, I guess I'm more worried about a human waking up and saying, I want to do something bad today. and so what could that be well misinformation we've seen a lot of that and i think it's mixed of how big an effect ai will have on that i mean it's already pretty easy to go out and and hire somebody to create big news and and promulgate it and and the hard part really is getting it to be popular not to create it in the first place so in some sense Maybe AI doesn't make that much difference.

56:00It's still just as hard to get it out. And maybe AI can fight against that misinformation. So I think the jury is still out on that. But, you know, if you did get to the point where an AI could create new enough about an individual user to say, I'm going to create the fake news that's going to be effective specifically for you, that would be really worrying. And we're not there yet, but that's something to worry about. I worry about the future of warfare. So you're seeing these things today. We just saw a tiny little personal size drone shot down a Russian helicopter. So we've had half a century or so of mostly a stalemate of saying the big countries have the power to impose themselves on the others, but none of them are really going to unilaterally do it on a large way, and we have smaller regional conflicts.

57:05Now we may be transitioning into a world where we say the power is not just in the big countries, it's in lots of smaller groups. And that becomes a more volatile situation. And so there could be more of these smaller regional conflicts and more worries for civilians that get caught up in it. So I'm worried about that as well. And then, you know, like you said, the income inequality, I think, is a big issue. Well, let's end on a positive note. I guess what excites you the most about AI? So a big part of it is this opportunity for education. That's where I spent some of my time, and I'm really interested in that now.

57:52So I think that can make things better for everyone. Just making everyone more powerful, more able to do their job, able to get a better job. So that's exciting. I think applications in healthcare are a great opportunity. And, you know, I got involved a little bit in trying to have better digital health records. And that really didn't go so far, mostly because of bureaucracy and so on. But I think we have the opportunity now to do a much better job, to invent new treatments and new drugs. You've seen things like AlphaFold figures out, here's how every protein works. And, you know, it used to be you could get a PhD for figuring out how one protein worked.

58:42And AlphaFo said, I did them all. So I think this will lead to drug discovery, lead to healthier lives, longevity, and so on. So that's a really exciting application. Yeah. It's so interesting to me that AI can do so much good, and then there's also such a risk of it doing so much bad. But I feel like any good technology kind of brings that risk along with it. Yeah, I think that's always true, right? If it's a powerful technology, it can do good or bad, especially if there are good and bad people trying to harness that way. And some of it is intentional bad uses and some of it is unintentional, right?

59:24So internal combustion engines did amazing things in terms of distributing food worldwide and making that be available, making transportation be available. But there are also these unintended side effects of pollution and global warming and maybe some bad effects on the structure of cities and so on. And, you know, we would be a lot better off if, you know, when cars were first starting to roll out in 1900, if somebody said, let's think about these long-term effects. So I guess I'm optimistic that there are people now thinking about these effects for AI as we're just starting to roll it out. So maybe we'll have a better outcome.

1:00:09Yeah, I hope so. Well, Peter, thank you so much for joining the show. I end my show with two questions that I ask all of my guests. What is one actionable thing our young and profiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

1:00:25I guess keep your eye on what it is that people want. You know, so I said the problem in AI is figuring out what we want. I'd work some with people at Y Combinator, and I still have this T-shirt that says on the back, Make something people want. And very simple advice to entrepreneurs, but sometimes missed. And so I think that's true generally. And I think AI can help us do that. Yeah, it's so true. The number one reason why entrepreneurs and startups fail is because there's no market demand. So make something that people want. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond today's episode topic.

1:01:13uh i guess uh you know keep keep around the the people you like and uh be kind to everybody love that where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do You can look for me at norvig.com or on LinkedIn or thanks to Google. I'm easy to find. Awesome. I'll stick all your links in the show notes, Peter. Thank you so much for joining us. Great to join you, Hala. It was so great to connect with Peter and dig into a perspective on AI that feels grounded and deeply human. Peter spent decades at the center of technology. and what stands out to me is how committed he is to creating tools that elevate people rather than overwhelm them.

1:02:05His lens on human-centered AI is a powerful framework for anybody building, leading, or innovating in this new era. Here's a couple takeaways from this conversation. First, clarity matters more than complexity. Peter reminded us that great technology doesn't start with bigger models or fancier algorithms. It starts with defining the right goal. Entrepreneurs who know exactly what outcome they're aiming for will use AI more effectively than those who are just chasing the trends. Next, human judgment remains irreplaceable. Even as AI becomes more capable, its value depends on the choices we make.

1:02:40Peter emphasized that people will set the objective, interpret the results, and decide what good looks like from AI. For founders, that means leaning into your taste, your creativity, and your intuition. AI can accelerate your work, but it can't choose your mission, and it can't replace your human intelligence. Finally, learning must become a lifelong habit. Peter offered us a refreshing view of education as something that is continuous, adaptive, and personalized. Entrepreneurs that have that mindset in this new era, those who stay curious, update their beliefs quickly, and experiment often will thrive.

1:03:14When you stay adaptable, you stay ahead. All right, Yap Fam, if this conversation got your wheels turning, I wanna hear from you. So take a second and share your thoughts on Peter's human-centered approach to AI. Let's keep this dialogue going and build a community that uses AI with intention. And if you want to follow me on social media, you can find me at Yap with Hala on Instagram or LinkedIn. Just search my name. It's Hala Taha. All right, Yap fam, this is your host, Hala Taha, aka the Podcast Princess, signing off.