Ex-Google China President on How China Is Shaping the Future of AI w/ Kai-Fu Lee | EP #134

“Google will fail to do that just as any innovator facing innovator dilemma because Google is critically dependent on the advertising revenue and to do the flip would require going away losing all the revenue coming in going to an at best break even value proposition of a single answer search engine and then building rebuilding up the new business model whether it's subscription or advertising and that's going to cause a uh roller coaster ride mostly downwards for the stock price and that's not something that a publicly listed company can do it's kind of sad to see because Google is clearly in the best position to reinvent handcuffs right it's it's such a pity because Google clearly has one of the world's top two AI engines and by far the world's number one search engine and now we're talking about merging two areas in which they're the best yet they can't win because of this innovators dilemma it's unfortunate yeah”

“a lot of the B2B is becoming very much a parallel universe it's hard to sell B2B especially given uh export control and geopolitical issues uh especially in the Deep Tech areas which you and I care deeply about uh b2c areas are much easier you know Americans use um shien and temu and um Tik Tock and of course Chinese use a lot of American Products mac Apple windows and so on so that hasn't been as affected I would also say the um in pursuit of um scaling law AGI gen while the efforts are separate uh the uh collaboration or at least the sharing of ideas are pretty strong in paper publishing open source of course with the notable exception of open Ai and now Google who don't publish but they don't do it for geopolitical reasons they don't want the competitor to see yeah um that is fascinating we'll get we'll get into that because you've taken very much an open source uh focused mindset um and there have been many many that do I I I have to ask a question so you've seen you've been at Apple at Microsoft uh president of Google China you've seen so much and in Innovations I mean uh you're managing what like three billion in Investments thereabouts so you've seen it all I mean uh and of course here two excellent books which we've we've discussed on my state ages before um I am curious about something uh and I I'd love your opinion if you're willing which is I love Google um I love Google for many reasons what they've done their Investments their mindset of driving breakthroughs but they're an engine that has been powered by advertising um and they've been able to reinvest that but what happens now when geni is giving single Solutions and the ad powered models um is you I how long is that going to last do you think that's going to survive um or is there going to have to be a business model flip for Google I think there needs to be a business model flip at some point and Google will fail to do that just as any innovator facing innovator dilemma because Google is critically dependent on the advertising revenue and to do the flip would require going away losing all the revenue coming in going to an at best break even value proposition of a single answer search engine and then building rebuilding up the new business model whether it's subscription or advertising and that's going to cause a uh roller coaster ride mostly downwards for the stock price and that's not something that a publicly listed company can do it's kind of sad to see because Google is clearly in the best position to reinvent handcuffs right it's it's such a pity because Google clearly has one of the world's top two AI engines and by far the world's number one search engine and now we're talking about merging two areas in which they're the best yet they can't win because of this innovators dilemma it's unfortunate yeah”

“I need to go and build a company why yeah right by the way let's call it Z1 thatai we were flexible before but now that open AI has taken the 01 name we'll let him have it we'll just be01 01 a it is yeah yeah it it it really means recreating uh the world with 01 using AI Technologies so yeah I I was content doing investment in the early days of AI in the days of deep learning computer vision convolution neuron networks I was super excited because in my uh 40-year career in AI I basically saw two AI Winters and even the non-winter days were not that shiny uh so finally I saw wow this AI is becoming mature so I was very exited it's not a fad no no right and I was uh in the position of being a venture capitalist uh so I figure the role I should play is invest because I'm you know older hopefully in some ways wiser and experience and knows technology and knows business so I uh invested in about 50 AI companies uh mostly in China but some in the US and they did well we now have 12 AI unicorns uh we soon have half a dozen IPOs from just from the AI uh companies being the first investor which is pretty rare so I kind of got on the ride and enjoyed watching from the back seat uh the excitement that my uh entrepreneurs went through so that was good but then jna came about uh we all saw and understood gen but we didn't see how big it would be until open AI showed us with Chachi and at that moment I realized that uh I could invest in the area um in China and elsewhere I looked at a bunch of J companies but then I realized that uh to start one that late to start a gen company after Chad gbd had taken over World by storm would really be very very hard for any entrepreneur because you you're behind by six or seven years and if you don't already have a team or products or Technologies how could I fund these people because China did not have really a lot of genni companies there was one or two at most and I just thought hey if anyone could do it maybe I could do it it would still be a long shot but given my uh years of experience and people Network and understanding of the technology and business let's give it a shot it may be a long shot but you know I feel that you know when I'm really really”

“the PC era brought about an uplift of the global GDP then it kind of saturated then mobile brought another then it kind of saturated now there are many factors to the GDP I don't claim PC and mobile were the only factors but they were clearly a major factors that greatly enhance productivity and changed the way we worked we as humans do more or less the same things for thousands of years we work we play uh we communicate we learn um but the way in which we do them change from PC to mobile and I would say with AI it would be in some sense a similar change it would be a new platform that rather than infusing a computer on every desktop or allowing anywhere I need time uh mobile access we would make super intelligent AI in every app and we would have apps that are super intelligent that could do work for us that could give us answers and I think that is clear that this is not only the third um platform Revolution third um productivity Revolution but by far the largest one because of how much value uh it adds”

“as long as we can I think stay on a trajectory where eventually we create way more value for society than that and as long as we can figure out a way to pay the bills like we're making AGI it's totally worth it”

“next June it's expected to be 3 cents per million tokens”

“we're building 20 around the world”

“I think I think those really bringing us one step closer to Larry Page's dream”

“I think a lot of technological risks are best addressed by Technologies like when electricity went out the invention of circuit breakers when this internet went out the antivirus so Technologies are the best likely savior to technological problems”

“I think it's highly likely that it will arrive in the next 5 to 10 years and we do need to P put in the uh the safeguards”

“in other words in about two years every app we use will be replaced by another app or super upgraded by the same app”

“I think agents will be major technology where we delegate what we want rather than just get an answer”