Eric Schmidt

In 2016, we didn't understand what was now going to happen, but we understood that these algorithms were new and powerful.

There was a new move invented by AI in a game that had been around for 2,500 years that no one had ever seen.

Technically, the way this occurred was that the system of AlphaGo was essentially organized to always maintain a greater than 50 percent chance of winning.

And so it calculated correctly this move, which was this great mystery among all of the Go players, who are obviously insanely brilliant mathematical and intuitive players.

The question that Henry, Craig Mundy and I started to discuss, right,

is what does this mean?

How is it that our computers could come up with something that humans had never thought about?

I mean, this is a game played by billions of people.

And that began the process that led to two books, and I think, frankly, is the point at which the revolution really started.

And I'll tell you why.

Most of you think of AI as, I'll just use the general term, as chat GPT.

For most of you, chat GP was the moment where you said, oh my God, this thing writes, and it makes mistakes, but it's so brilliantly verbal.

Right, that was certainly my reaction.

Most people that I knew did that.

It was visceral, yeah.

This was two years ago.

Since then, the gains in what is called reinforcement learning, which is what AlphaGo helped invent and so forth, allow us to do planning.

And a good example is look at OpenAI 03 or DeepSeek R1, and you can see how it goes forward and back, forward and back, forward and back.

It's extraordinary.

In my case, I bought a rocket company because it was, like, interesting.