Transcription
If we rank all the technological innovations throughout human history, let's go back, uh, maybe to the history of human civilizations 12,000 years ago, and you rank them by how much of a productivity multiplier they've been. So, uh, we can go to electricity, or the labor mechanization of the industrial revolution, or we can go back to the first agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago. Years ago. In that long list of inventions, do you think AI, when history is written a thousand years from now, do you think it has a chance to be the number one productivity multiplier?
It's a great question. Look, many years ago, I think it might have been 2017 or 2018. Um, you know, I I said at the time like, you know, AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. It'll be more profound than fire or electricity. So, I have to back myself. I, you know, I still think uh that's the case.
You know, when you asked this question, I was thinking, well, do we have a recency bias, right? You know, like in sports, it's very tempting to call the current person you're seeing the greatest yes player, right? And and so is there a recency bias? And you know, I do think uh from first principles I would argue AI will be bigger than all of those. I didn't live through those moments. You know, two years ago I had to go through a surgery, and then I processed that there was a point in time people didn't have anesthesia when they went through these procedures. At that moment I was like, that has got to be the greatest invention humanity has ever ever done, right? So look, we we don't know what it is to have uh lived through those times, but you know, many of what you're talking about were kind of this general things which pretty much affected everything, you know, electricity or internet or internet, etc. But I don't think we've ever dealt with a technology energy both which is progressing so fast, becoming so capable, it's not clear what the ceiling is, and the main unique—it's recursively self-improving, right? It's capable of that. And so the fact it is going—it's the first technology will kind of dramatically accelerate creation itself, like creating things, building new things, can can improve and achieve things on its phone, right? I think like puts it in a different league, right? And so, uh, different league. And so, I think the impact it will end up having uh will far surpass everything we've seen before. Uh, obviously with that comes a lot of uh important things to think and wrestle with, but I definitely think that'll end up being the case, especially if it gets to the point of where we can achieve superhuman performance on the AI research itself. So it's a technology that may—that's an open question—but it may be able to achieve a level to where the technology itself can create itself better than it it could yesterday. It's like the move 37 of alpha research or whatever it is, right? Like, you know, and when when Yeah, you're right. When when it can do novel self-directed research, obviously for a long time, we'll we'll have hopefully always humans in the loop and all that stuff, and these are complex questions to talk about. But yes, I think the underlying technology—you know, I've said this like if you watched seeing AlphaGo start from scratch, be clueless and like become better through the course of a day—you know, like, you know, kind of like, kind of like, you know, really it hits you when you see that happen. Even our like the V3 models, if you sample the models when they were like 30% done and 60% done and looked at what they were generating and you kind of see how it all comes together. It's kind of like I would say it's kind of inspiring, a little bit unsettling, right, as as a human. So all of that is true, I think.
Well, the interesting thing of the industrial revolution, electricity like you mentioned, you can go back to the again the agricultural, the first agricultural revolution. There's um what's called the Neolithic package of the first agricultural revolution that it wasn't just that the nomads settled down and started planting food, but all this other kinds of technology was born from that and it's included in this package. It wasn't one piece of technology. It's there's these ripple effects, second and third order effects that happen. Everything from something silly like silly profound like pottery that can store liquids and food uh to something we kind of take for granted but social hierarchies uh and political hierarchy, so like early government was formed cuz it turns out if humans stop moving and have some surplus food they start coming up with uh they get bored and they start coming up with interesting systems, then trade emerges which turns out to be a really profound thing, and like I said, government. There I mean there's just uh second and third order effects from that including that package is incredible and probably extremely difficult if if you'll ask one of the people in the nomadic tribes to predict that it would be impossible. And it's difficult to predict, but all that said, what do you think are some of the early things we might see in the quote-unquote AI package? I mean, most of it probably we don't know today, but like, you know, the one thing which we can tangibly start seeing now is, you know, obviously with the coding progress you got a sense of it, it's going to be so easy to imagine like thoughts in your head, translating that into things that exist—that'll be part of the package, right? Like it's going to empower almost all of humanity to kind of express themselves. Maybe in the past you could have expressed with words. But like you could kind of build things into existence, right? You know, maybe not fully today. We are at the early stages of VIP coding. You know, I've been amazed at what people have put out online with V3, but it takes a bit of work, right? You have to stitch together a set of prompts, but all this is going to get better. The thing I always think about, this is the worst it'll ever be, right? Like at any given moment in time.
Yeah, it's interesting you went there as kind of a first thought. So the exponential exponential increase of access to creativity, software software creation, are you creating a program, a piece of content for to be shared with others, games down the line, all of that like just becomes infinitely more possible.
Well, I think the big thing is that uh it makes it accessible. It unlocks the cognitive capabilities of the entire 8 billion. No, I agree. Think about 40 years ago maybe in the US there were five people who could do what you were doing. Mhm. Like go do an interview, you know, and you know, but today think about with YouTube and other other products, etc., like how many more people are doing it. So I think this is what technology does, right? Like when the internet created blogs, you know, you heard from so many more people. So I think, but but with AI I think that number won't be in the few hundreds of thousands, it'll be tens of millions of people, maybe even a billion people like putting out things into the world in a deeper way. And I think it'll change the landscape of creativity, and it makes a lot of people nervous. Like, for example, uh, whatever Fox, MSNBC, CNN are really nervous about this part. Like you mean this dude in a suit could just do this and and you and YouTube and and and thousands of others, tens of thousands, millions of other creators can do the same kind of thing. That makes them nervous. And now you get a podcast from Notebook LM that's about five to 10 times better than any podcast I've ever done.
True. I'm I'm joking at this time, but maybe not. And that changes. You have to evolve because I on the podcasting front, I'm a fan of podcasts much more than I am a fan of being a host or whatever. If there's great podcasts that are both AIs, I'll just stop doing this podcast. I'll listen to that podcast. But you have to evolve and you have to change. And that makes people really nervous, I think, but it's also a really exciting future. The only thing I may say is I do think like in a world in which there are two AI I think people value and uh choose, just like in chess, you and I would never watch Stockfish 10 or whatever and AlphaGo play against each—like it would be boring for us to watch, but Magnus Carlson and Gish that game would be much more fascinating to watch. So it's tough to say—like one way to say is you'll have a lot more content, and so you will be listening to AI generated content because sometimes it's efficient, etc. But the premium experiences you value might be a version of like the human essence wherever it comes through, going back to what we talked earlier about watching Messi dribble the ball. I don't know, one day I'm sure a machine will dribble much better than Messi, but I don't know whether it would evoke that same emotion in us. So I think that'll be fascinating to see. I think the element of element of podcasting or podcasting or audiobooks that is about information gathering that part might be removed or that might be more efficiently and in a compelling way done by AI, but then it'll be just nice to hear humans struggle with the information, contend with the information, try to internalize it, combine it with the complexity of our own emotions and consciousness and all that kind of stuff. But if you actually want to find out about a piece of history, you go to Gemini. If you want to see Lex struggle with that history, then you look or other humans, you look you look at that. But that's the point is it's going to change the nature uh continue to change the nature of how we discover information, how we consume the information, how we create that information. The same way that YouTube changed everything completely. Change news, and that's something our society is struggling with.
Yeah, you do. Look, YouTube enabled—I mean you know this better than anyone else—it's enabled so many creators. There is no doubt in me that like we will enable more filmmakers than that have ever been, right? You're going to empower a lot more people. Um, so I think there's an expansionary aspect of this which is underestimated. I think I think it'll unleash human creativity in a way uh that hasn't been seen before. It's tough to internalize. The only way is if you if you brought someone from the 50s or 40s and just put them in front of YouTube, you know, I think it would blow their mind away. Similarly, I think we would get blown away by what's possible in a 10 to 20 year time frame. Uh, do you think there's a future? How many years out is it that let's say let's put a marker on it? 50% of of content in a comp good content, 50% of good content is generated by V4, 5, 6? You know, I think depends on what it is, for um, like you know, maybe if you look at movies today with CGI, there are great filmmakers like you still look at like who the directors are and who use it; there are filmmakers who don't use it at all, you value that; there are people who use it incredibly. You know, think about somebody like a James Cameron, like what he would do with these tools in his hands. But I think there'll be a lot more content created, like just like writers today use Google Docs and not think about the fact that they're using a tool like that, but people will be using the future versions of these things like it won't be a big deal at all to them.