The arrival of non-human intelligence is a very big deal, says former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt. In a wide-ranging interview with technologist Bilawal Sidhu, Schmidt makes the case that AI is wildly underhyped, as near-constant breakthroughs give rise to systems capable of doing even the most complex tasks on their own. He explores the staggering opportunities, sobering challenges and urgent risks of AI, showing why everyone will need to engage with this technology in order to remain relevant.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. AI and the future of humanity were huge topics at this year's TED conference. Central to all of this was a pretty existential question. In today's world, what is a human actually for?
To add to this discussion, Google's former CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt joined creative technologist Bilawal Sidhu for a conversation about AI and our collective future. They discuss what, if any, are the limits of AI, ethical questions about its rising use across various sectors, and why the AI revolution, as Eric puts it, is underhyped.
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?
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.
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?
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. And I know ... As one does.
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