Bilawal Sidhu

Eric Schmidt, thank you for joining us.

Thank you.

You said the arrival of non-human intelligence is a very big deal.

What did you see that the rest of us might have missed?

If you fast forward to today, it seems that all anyone can talk about is AI, especially here at TED, but you've taken a contrarian stance.

You actually think AI is underhyped.

Why is that?

I mean, speaking of just the sheer compute requirements of these systems, let's talk about scale briefly.

I kind of think of these AI systems as hungry, hungry hippos.

They seemingly soak up all the data and compute that we throw at them.

They've already digested all the tokens on the public internet, and it seems we can't build data centers fast enough.

What do you think the real limits are, and how do we get ahead of them before they start throttling AI progress?

So as we push towards a zenith, autonomy has been a big topic of discussion.

Joshua Bengio gave a compelling talk earlier this week advocating that AI labs should halt the development of agentic AI systems that are capable of taking autonomous action.

Yet that is precisely what the next frontier is for all these AI labs and seemingly for yourself too.

What is the right decision here?

I think that brings us nicely to the dilemmas, and let's just say there are a lot of them when it comes to this technology.

The first one I'd love to start with, Eric, is the exceedingly dual-use nature of this tech, right?

It's applicable to both civilian and military applications.

So how do you broadly think about the dilemmas and ethical quandaries that come with this tech and how humans deploy them?