How Do Billionaires See AI?

Key Takeaways

I think artificial intelligence is going to change everything everything 180 degrees Yeah my view is that computer may be clever but human being I'm much smarter yeah definitely not the idea that there's going to be a general AI Overlord that subjugates us or kills us all you don't fully understand how it works and yet you've turned it loose on society my name is David Andre and here is what the world's richest people think about AI starting with none other than Elon Musk who's known to be a big AI skeptic I try to convince people to slow down slow down AI to regulate AI this was futile I tried for years think about AI for a long time since I was in college really it was one of the things that the sort of four or five things I thought would really affect the future dramatically the biggest issue I see with so-called AI experts is that they they think they know more than they do um and I think they're smarter than they actually are but Zack is much more optimistic about AI well he has to be after losing so much money on the metaverse with AI especially I'm really optimistic and I think that people who are naysayers and kind of try to drum up these doomsday scenarios are um I I just I don't understand it I think it's it's it's really um negative and in some ways I actually think it's it's pretty irresponsible because you know in the next five to ten years AI is going to deliver so many improvements in the quality of Our Lives perhaps the most important foundational technology of our time artificial intelligence now Bill Gates is someone who really surprised me maybe I got sidetracked by his negative Public Image but his AI takes were quite reasonable I also found out that he had access to gpt4 since last August man I need to become a billionaire quick yeah so AI has always been you know the Holy Grail of computer science I would say the AI is where I'm excited about software getting a lot better we'll have some immersive interface uh but compared to the web 3 things I think AI is far far more important and uh their great advances taking place there artificial intelligence is going to be extremely helpful and and the risk that it gets super smart that's way out in the future and uh probably we're talking about but now what we're seeing is that for the first time computers can see as well as humans that's pretty incredible if you combine that with the ability to have arm-like manipulation then they can make as far more productive but then you know the job market has to adjust to that uh Google Facebook Apple Microsoft are all moving ahead at a great speed and improving this artificial intelligence software so it's very exciting and uh the speed is is faster than it was five years ago Warren Buffett is a close friend of Bill Gates however his opinions on AI earns nearly as thoughtful as bills but hey he's the world's greatest investor so let's cut him some slack we keep talking about Chachi PT and potentially how that could transform AI how that could transform our economy in the future and obviously there's also lots of questions about whether AI is is dangerous and we have the right policy set around it and I I was curious if you've given much thought to any of it it's read every book every legal opinion I mean the amount of time it could save you if you were doing all kinds of things is unbelievable but what I said the bills I I said just let me know uh what I can ask you know how are you going to do ruin the human race and I don't really understand it I think it's an incredible technological advance in terms of showing what we can do but I don't know whether we know what what happens and it scares me in terms of the possibilities of I mean we we've done amazing things like we figured out how to create an atom bomb back in 1945 I don't know what an animal is or anything but Einstein told me it was going to change the world and then change the world so I I don't want to change the world too many times without knowing having some idea of the consequences of it and this hap I think this is extraordinary but I don't know whether it's beneficial I certainly have no special insights on artificial intelligence but I will bet a lot of things happen they would result in a significantly less employment in certain areas but that's good for society and it may not be good for a given business but let's take it to the extreme let's assume one person could push a button and essentially to various machines robotics all kinds of things turn out all of the output we have in this country so everybody there's just as much output as we have it's all being done by you know instead of 150 some million people being employed uh one person you know is the world better off or not Jack ma is the co-founder and former CEO of Alibaba his company completely revolutionized e-commerce and Retail in China he led Alibaba through its historic 25 billion dollar IPO in 2014 which remains as the largest IPO ever he built Alibaba into one of the world's biggest companies but his AI opinions are questionable at best I hate the word AI called artificial intelligence I call it Alibaba intelligence yeah I'm quite optimistic and I don't think artificial intelligence is a threat I don't think fish intelligence is something terrible but human being are smart enough to learn that and to me artificial intelligence is just like people worry a lot about this today are those people I called them called um called College smartness People Like Us Street Smart we're never scared of that we think it's a great fun and we want to change ourselves to embrace it yeah my view is that um computer may be clever but human being are much smarter yeah definitely not clever it's very academic it's knowledge driven smarter is experience driven computer is smart it's clever but it's human being we invented a computer I never see a computer invented a human being Jeff Bezos has been pretty quiet lately after retiring from the position of CEO but his thoughts on AI from four or five years ago still ring true today machine learning artificial intelligence this is it is a Renaissance it is a golden age we are now solving problems with machine learning and artificial intelligence that were you know kind of in the realm of Science Fiction for the last several decades and natural language understanding machine vision problems it really is it is an amazing Renaissance and for decades AI researchers kind of struggled and made very very slow progress and over the last 10 years it you know it looks like one of those s-curves you're just making a lot of progress for a rapidly over the last 10 years machine learning and AI is a horizontal enabling layer it will Empower and improve every business every government organization every philanthropy every basically there's no institution in the world that cannot be improved with machine learning I think natural language understanding I think machine learning in general artificial intelligence uh this it's probably hard to overstate how big of an impact it's going to have on society over the next 20 years so it it is Big um it is uh it doesn't mean that um you know phones are going to go away or anything like that it's not it's not like natural it's not like voice interfaces are going to replace screens so you know people have eyes and as long as people have eyes they will also want screens and then we have fingers we like to touch things and so on but it but it has been a dream ever since you know people started you know in the early days of Science Fiction to have a computer that you can talk to in a natural way and actually have a conversation with and ask it to do things for you and that is coming true um and you're seeing similar uh amazing progress with Machine Vision the combination of new and better algorithms vastly Superior compute power and the ability to harness huge amounts of training data those three things are coming together to solve some previously unsolvable problems and they're going to drive a tremendous amount of utility for customers and customers are going to adopt those things the idea that there's going to be a general AI Overlord that subjugates us or kills us all I think is not something to worry about I think that is over hyped first of all we don't know we're nowhere close to knowing how to build a general AI something that could set its own objectives we have no idea we don't even it's not even hardly it's it's not even a valid research area we're so we're so far back on that one I think that's a very long-term prospect that it could even happen but second of all I think it's unlikely that such a thing's first instincts would be to exterminate us it seems that would seem surprising to me maybe unemployed much more likely it will help us you know because we know we're perfectly capable of hurting ourselves you know maybe we could use some help um so I'm optimistic about that one and certainly don't think we need to worry about it today and then the jobless you know are we gonna is AI going to put everybody out of work I am not worried about this I I I find that people all of us I include myself we are so unimaginative about what future jobs are going to look like and what they're going to be you know if I took you back in time 100 years I mean everyone almost everyone was a farmer and I told you know we're having we're at some big farming convention or something and I say in the year 2018 there is going to be a job occupation called massage therapist they would not have believed you and in fact I was telling this story to a friend they said Jeff forget massage therapist there are dog psychiatrists and I I went I would probably find one on Amazon I went and looked that up on the Internet sure enough you can easily hire a psychiatrist for your dog Ray dalio is the founder of the world's largest hedge fund Bridgewater Associates he's been using Financial AI systems for over 20 years now so he knows what he's talking about but let me give you an a rule if the future can be different from the past and you don't have deep understanding you should not rely on AI okay how should I raise my children it's going to be a long time before AI you're going to say it has a good enough judgment to do that who should I marry on all of those things maybe you can get the computer to help you but if you just took data and do machine learning it's not going to find it but by and large the Mind should be due used for inventing and those creative things and then the computer should be used for processing because it could process a lot more information a lot faster a lot more accurately and a lot less emotionally so any notion of thinking in the form of processing type thinking should be done by a computer and anything that is in the notion of doing that other type of thinking should be operating with with the break operating in a way where you know you can say ah that makes sense I think what you're seeing with chat GPT is just the tip of the iceberg and how you're going to think that you will increasingly go to your device and you're going to be following that device you'll get better advice out of the new device than your your own thoughts and you're going to see it happen in an enormous number of areas for example you know it used to be that you needed to know something about math an arithmetic then you get a calculator then you evolve information you used to have to remember um things nowadays you can so easily look up all history it's at your device now you're going to more and more be able to say what is the best thinking who is the best thinking where am I going to get the best thing what can be done and you'll be following the instructions on your device and I think that that's not a bad thing this is a good thing in many ways because it elevates us it's part of an evolutionary process in which technology is increasingly replacing parts of man you know the physical youth in the in the old days but not man physical labor matters more and more than machines replaced at and as we go and Ascend to higher and higher levels of thinking that the brain increasingly is being able to use and that raises you because you can then think about how do I think what are the principles so I think all of this helps to elevate us but it's going to change the dimension of the world that we're in is the founder and CEO of SoftBank his vision fund is one of the biggest investment funds in the world with artificial intelligence being the main focus of the fund and when you think about AI right now how do you assess the startups that are coming up with AI projects versus the biggest companies in the world meaning the microsofts the Googles the Amazons the apples I would say all those big successful companies in our industry will be a big player continue to innovate and continue to fight each other but always new startup with young you know a guy who can who can think disruptively from different angles they're all always coming always coming artificial intelligence that becomes so smart than ourselves so it will redefine every industry agriculture industry the transportation industry medical industry and everything you know it is amazing that AI now solving uh the uh this drug Discovery you know the anti antibodies the vaccines that human could not create quick enough AI is helping it is helping creating Solutions right for the vaccine and the all those antibodies uh we could not solve this quickly without the help of AI one of our family company now has developed AI system uh that can detect heart attack 14 days before you have heart attack right with a 95 accuracy so people will no longer die from heart attack and uh for the cancer people would no longer die from cancer very soon right all kinds of drug Discovery is being done with a power of AI and people will no longer die from car accident right so there are many reasons cause of death of human which we could not solve in the past but with us help of AI now many one by one those causes of death is being you know eliminated or reduced dramatically so some people say AI oh that's the enemy of mankind no I said no no no it is a big help to the disaster or issues the the uh I'm productivity that mankind used to have the headache we used to have so we should be having a big smile and big excitement welcoming this [Music] Mark Cuban is the co-founder of broadcast.com which was acquired by Yahoo for 5.7 billion dollars back in 1999. he is best known for being on Shark Tank and he also owns an NBA team some say that Mark Cuban is just lucky but one thing is for sure he knows them a lot about AI artificial intelligence is going to change everything um it's it'll have a bigger impact on us than the internet than phones mobile Computing or mobile networking wide area networking you know it's just going to dwarf everything and it's harder to learn so it's harder to implement which means it's going to change a lot of things and not everybody's going to be able to adapt and so it's going to be really scary but also interesting and create a lot of opportunities as we go forward we're still in the first inning of the preseason games when it comes to AI but it's going to have a dramatic impact I think artificial intelligence is going to change everything everything 180 degrees all these things have happened that have changed how we do business changed how we lived our lives changed everything right on the internet but what we're going to see with artificial intelligence dwarfs all of that I've spent way too much time um teaching myself about machine learning neural networks deep learning writing code right teaching myself python just because I want to get a hands-on experience in this right right so when we have a conversation I may not be able to build all of it but I can understand it yeah I can understand it Vladimir Putin says the winner in AI controls the world China puts together a future plan saying you know whoever dominates in Ai and they're subsidizing you know tencent Alibaba Etc yeah right and they're they're that's they know it's a race it is a race we cut our office of technology and science to one person who is an assistant to Peter Thiel Satya Nadella is the current CEO of Microsoft and under his leadership the company has surpassed the mythical one trillion dollar market cap and lately he has been making some major moves in AI we will incorporate this in our own application so you can fully expect us to obviously at every product of Microsoft will have some of the same AI capabilities to completely transform the product like why are we talking about AI in January of 23 after all we were talking about it last year but but it turns out that you know even the chat GPT moment has I think captured people's imagination when you look at GPT 3 to 3-5 to what's coming these are non-linear developments so they're showing emergent capability and I'm not saying this is the last Model architecture Innovation there will be more to come but the fact is that these things by themselves are becoming platforms that I think truly can make a difference in one of those days where we get to reimagine everything uh related to search with AI Jensen Huang is the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia and currently he is the longest active CEO in all of Tech and his massive bets on AI are finally starting to pay off and so these are really really accessible Technologies now there are always Skeptics and people who are alarmed by how fast AI is taking off how powerful it's become with capabilities like deep fakes uh fake eye contact for instance that I've seen an example of what do you say to them well the first thing that everybody should do is to take advantage of the technology and to boost their own capability there's no question that the interest behind chat GPT has been so great it is the fastest growing application in the world and it's been used in all kinds of different ways the thing that's really amazing about artificial intelligence is that what is what PT has shown is that it has eliminated the digital and the technology divide everyone is a programmer now which then became this thing called an AI super computer and and I I remember delivering my very first AI supercomputer I hand delivered it myself I delivered it open AI the world's very first AI supercomputer was delivered to open AI chat GPT stable diffusion Dolly and mid-journey have awakened the world to generative AI these applications ease of use and impressive capabilities attracted over a hundred million users in just a few months Sundar pichai is the current CEO of Google and he played a key role in creating some of Google's best products like Google search Chrome Android you name it maybe 5 to 10 years out what do you see as the biggest impact to society from AI in the near term I think you would see a lot more what I call as assistive Technologies right so for example at a simple level in the past year to go to a DJ to get a custom music music list for you but now there is AI and pretty much all the music apps which kind of creates a nice music playlist for you that is an example of an assistive feature you will see many things like that AI will end up playing more profound roles across everything we do education Healthcare those will take time to play out finding what Larry Page thinks about AI was quite the challenge because this guy is very secretive for a long time he said the ultimate goal of Google is to build a superhuman intelligence otherwise known as AGI artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google so we have the ultimate search engine it would understand everything on the web he would understand you know exactly what you wanted and I'll give you the right thing and that's obviously artificial intelligence you know be able to answer any question basically because almost everything is on the web right Reed Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for 26 billion dollars he is also an early investor in open Ai and he is very active in the artificial intelligence field what is going to define the next decade of innovation and Technology if it was networks for the last decade is it AI for the next uh it is I think actually is as hot as it seems this year even next year it's even going to be hotter I think the question about having essentially the equivalent of a professional Aid like Microsoft has this product called copilot for engineers I think that will be within five years present for every profession those who are calling for some kind of moratorium temporary halt or something else to the development of this technology what do you make of that well I think there's a bunch of different uh parts that response I think a bunch of it's well intentioned I think the well-intentioned is kind of the question of look there's a bunch of different ways that AI can play out and we should be attentive to obviously protecting against the downsides as well as the amazing upsides I think some of it's a little bit less well-intentioned like hey everyone else slow down so I can speed up and this is of course one of the things where it's overall I think broadly a mistaken effort because actually in fact I think everything we've seen so far in the last few years of development is the best ways to get safety is through larger Scale Models they actually train to align better with human interests and so the the the the call to slow down is actually in fact a is is less um it's less safe than actually in fact what they're what they're proposing a lot of the kind of AI Technologies are actually going to be human amplifying I mean we already see this as you as you um automate factories more there's a lot more jobs for humans as well now obviously the productivity goes up of of like for example in Amazon sort of of package coming out of the factory per um you know kind of uh you know kind of per human being there and so you up productivity that's of course how productivity is generated and Society benefits from it but I think there will be a lot of roles for humans too but I do think this kind of humanoid robot once you're beginning to get the the software right and all the AI and the things that like open Ai and Microsoft and other folks are working on that will actually in fact create great enhancements and amplifications on the factory floor as well one of the ones that's personal to me is really looking at artificial intelligence because I've been looking at this saying how do we help startups how do we help the large companies catalyze the right kinds of outcomes because AI is going to transform like every industry it's going to have this kind of impact of a similar kind of thing of like electricity and one of the ones we've made several investments in a Greylock is autonomous vehicles which is a version of AI and once you actually have autonomous vehicles people say well wait a minute isn't that replacing jobs and you're like well look some jobs probably will get replaced but actually in fact like suburbs all the construction all of that started happening once the invention of the automobile you say well we're we're now we can now transform space and what space is being used and like think about like how cities get transformed and like for example if oh it's cheaper to live now because sure I can live an hour and a half out of town but as opposed to the exhausting driving myself in I could be napping I could be reading I could be on the phone no I actually wrote an essay about this uh which I posted on LinkedIn which is to say drinking and driving will go from dangerous criminal you know negligent bad behavior to you know maybe you know you have a glass of wine with your friend when you're when you're driving home no just like Larry Page Sergey Brin is a very secretive person so finding any good AI Clips was difficult but I've managed to dig up a few and then there's sort of more general intelligence um uh like the deepmind acquisition that you know in theory we we hope will one day be fully reasoning AI uh those are obviously Computer Sciences scientists have been promising that for decades and not at all delivered so I think it would be foolish for us to make prognosis about that but you know we do have lots of proof points that one can create intelligent things in the world because all of us around and uh and therefore you should presume that someday we will be able to make machines that can reason and think and do things uh better than we can I think thinking through sort of AI is the continuing of the automation that we've seen in the past 200 years and how that evolves society and economy and social order uh is that's the smart thing to do I don't think it's sort of impossible somehow but it deserves a lot of thought Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google and he is great in explaining Advanced AI Concepts do you think we're on the cusp of some new Revolution I do and partly this revolution is happening faster than I've ever seen uh chat GPT which was released a few months ago now has more than a hundred million users it took Gmail five years to get to the same point there's something about the diffusion of technology that we interact with at the human scale it's going to change our world in a really profound way much more profound than people think is these systems are going to soup up engagement and soup up your attention there's an old phrase about what the currency of the future in economics is attention and these systems are looking for your attention as a consumer so every time you go oh my God I had no idea remember that it's trying to get you to have that reaction now going back to the generative AI combined with large language models it's going to do some other things that are particularly powerful it will be able to generate insights and ideas that we as humans have not had think of them as existing as savants if I'm a physicist assist I'll have a savant that runs around and suggests physics problems for me to work on and that sort of thing all of that is very good so the power of AI in terms of improving science and biology and human health will be extraordinary but it comes with this impact on our on our societal discourse it's not going to be easy to get through this build me a copy of the 1918 bird flu virus show me a way to blow up this building and where to put the bomb things that are very very dangerous appears to have been discovered in the Raw versions of the models three years ago China announced its AI strategy because they love to announce their strategies and include dominating AI by 2030. so China of course has efforts in generative Ai and large languages models as well they also have large efforts in Quantum and biology which are doing well in the case of large language models they have not been as advanced as the American companies have the American and UK companies for reasons I don't fully understand one idea that I would offer is that the large language models because they are unpredictable today cannot be offered to the public in China because the Chinese government does not want unfettered access to information in other words how do the Chinese government know that these systems are not going to talk about chairman square or something which is not possible to talk in an area of lack of free speech so we will see Charlie Munger is known as Warren Buffett's right-hand man today he is 99 years old and his opinion on AI reflects that I think artificial intelligence is very important but it is also a lot of crazy hype on the subject artificial intelligence is not going to cure cancer it's not going to do everything that we want done and and there's a lot of nonsense in it too so I regard it as a mixed blessing all this artificial intelligence some people have used it in some things like Insurance underwriting pretty well but a lot of people try and use it in ordinary things like buying Office Buildings or something and I think that's way more I don't think it's going to help anybody in office building not very much anyway well I'm not sure how it's going to come out but of course I like the fact they're doing it and any kind of artificial intelligence is very much in the boat it may well work it's just I have no way of predicting I just realized that Charlie Munger is probably the world's oldest billionaire which is funny because now we're gonna look at the world's youngest billionaire Alexander Wang he is the CEO of scale Ai and he became a billionaire at the age of just 25. man I have to pick up the pace the long tail of real world problems and the fact that there's always unknown unknowns means that humans will never be fully removed from the AI development life cycle for example I remember back in 2016 when chat Bots were first starting to become a big thing it was right when we were starting scale we were all thinking there's no way to build a fully automated system there's so many different conversations that can have so many different Pathways it's hard to build AI systems that can properly handle all these possibilities for chatbots to work there are humans behind it who make the decisions once and from there the chatbots can replicate that over and over again that's again why it's impossible for AI to improve or change without human input a good example about how AI can be used in practice is Healthcare according to the association of American medical colleges the United States has seen estimated shortage of between 38 000 and 124 000 Physicians by 2034. AI could save doctor's time with Rogue tasks and ultimately enable them to serve more patients and help more people yeah so what we've done at scale is built the data platform for AI so AI is really built on top of data and these algorithms require billions and billions of examples of labeled data to be able to perform in a safe reliable way so what we've done is built a platform that allows these companies to get the data they need to be able to build these algorithms in a safe and reliable way and then they use the data to build their self-driving cards whether or not they're these impressive people in Silicon Valley or they're a small business owner it's about having that empathy so that you can actually you can understand their problems and really sort of pull those pains out of them should we be worried about elon's robocalopes let's put it this way are we working for the machines or are the Machines working for us yeah I I mean uh as of now for any machine you can just turn it off and we'll be able to do that for a while Tim Cook became the CEO of Apple after Steve Jobs but honestly it feels like Tim isn't paying enough attention to AI because at the moment apple is kinda sleeping on AI focused on augmented reality we're very focused on artificial intelligence uh we're very focused on autonomy we're focused on all of these things that are core Technologies and we'll use them in a variety of different ways we're focusing on autonomous systems and clearly one purpose of autonomous systems is self-driving cars there are others uh and we sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects it's probably one of the most difficult AI projects actually to to work on and so autonomy is something that's incredibly uh exciting for us and uh but we'll we'll see where it takes us we're not really saying from a product point of view what we're what we will do we're but we are being straightforward that it's a core technology that we view is very important