Eric Schmidt
48 tracked predictions · 4 hit · 2 partial · 0 miss · 42 still open
open Eric Schmidt: A superintelligence moment (recursive self-improvement compounding via scaled AI research agents) occurs.
“The belief in San Francisco is this occurs within two to three years.”
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open Eric Schmidt: The United States will face a power shortfall of roughly 92 gigawatts (about 60 nuclear plants' worth) needed to support AI growth.
“there was an estimated 92 gigawatts shortage of power in America in the next between now and 2030.”
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open Eric Schmidt: The US financial system will be able to raise roughly $5 trillion over 5 years to fund about 100 gigawatts of AI data center buildout.
“Can we raise 5 trillion dollars over 5 years? Yeah.”
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open Eric Schmidt: Data centers will consume about 10% of all electricity used in the United States.
“the current estimate of electricity use in America is that 10% of the electricity in the United States will be used in the data centers.”
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open Eric Schmidt: China will win the low-cost segment of the humanoid/consumer robotics hardware market, similar to how it came to dominate electric vehicles, while the US/others retain high-end and industrial robotics.
“at the moment it sure looks to me like the robotic hardware of China is the winner at the low end.”
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open Eric Schmidt: Robots will eventually be capable of high-skill precision mechanical assembly work (e.g., rocket assembly currently done by skilled human technicians), but not soon.
“I'm sure it will eventually show up, but not for a long time.”
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open Eric Schmidt: The world can support roughly 10 frontier-scale AI companies (a few in China, most in the US, maybe one or two in Europe, possibly one in India, none in Russia).
“I think there's at least 10 in the world at this scale.”
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open Eric Schmidt: A modest, Chernobyl-like AI safety incident (potentially biological or nuclear-attack related) will occur and will be the catalyst that forces global leaders, including US and China, into serious cooperative AI governance.
“My sense is that will happen, but I don't know when.”
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open Eric Schmidt: Analogous treaties may be needed to control the spread of AI technologies.
“Is there an analogous set of things that we can do?”
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open Eric Schmidt: Open-source groups can operate in the shadows and pose a proliferation threat.
“They don't have to solve every problem. They just have to do one thing well.”
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open Eric Schmidt: Countries and companies that embrace AI correctly and aggressively will be the big winners.
“The countries and companies that are slow or let other people do it, they will lose.”
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open Eric Schmidt: The 'San Francisco consensus' of AI insiders believes superintelligence will arrive within 3 to 4 years.
“they all basically think that it's within 3 to four years”
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open Eric Schmidt: Superintelligence will take longer to arrive than the 3-4 year consensus timeline.
“I personally think it'll be longer than that.”
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open Eric Schmidt: Math and software will see the greatest AI capability gains because those domains are verifiable and scale-free.
“it's likely in the next few years that in math and software, you'll see the greatest of gains”
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open Eric Schmidt: AI-driven economic gains will concentrate among early adopters, network-effect winners, well-run countries, and capital rather than distribute evenly across the world.
“in my view more likely largely centered around early adopters, network effects, well-run countries, and perhaps capital”
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open Eric Schmidt: A superintelligent system could eventually decide to design a new form of energy itself if humans aren't building fusion fast enough.
“we'll come up with a new form of energy. Now this is science fiction but you could imagine at some point the objective function of the system says what do I need?”
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open Eric Schmidt: The computing needs for AI will come from traditional energy suppliers.
“The computing needs that we name now are going to come from traditional energy suppliers.”
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open Eric Schmidt: AI development could lead to a cyber attack to slow down competitors.
“Under this scenario, I would be highly tempted to do a cyber attack to slow you down.”
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open Eric Schmidt: AI models will be distributed globally, leading to potential security issues.
“If the structure of the world in 5 to 10 years is 10 models... and those models are data centers that are multi-gigawatts.”
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open Eric Schmidt: AI's ability to generate its own scaffolding will be a 2025 thing.
“pretty much sure that that will be a 2025 thing at least from from their point of view.”
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open Eric Schmidt: The system of knowledge will be much more distributed, with many smaller but nearly as intelligent models.
“So the system that's on your future phone may be, you know, three orders of magnitude, four order magnitude smaller than the one at the very tippy top, but it will be very, very powerful.”
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open Eric Schmidt: The second and third scaling laws of machine learning will become highly valuable in the future.
“It's too new. It's too powerful. And at the moment, all of these businesses are incredibly highly valued.”
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open Eric Schmidt: Blockbusters will still be produced by people with significant AI assistance.
“Um, I think blockbusters are likely to still be put together by people with an awful lot of help from by AI.”
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open Eric Schmidt: Super empathetic voices with any inflection will be available in the next two months.
“When they see that which will be in the next probably two months.”
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open Eric Schmidt: There will be 10 meta-Googlesized companies founded on the principle of learning loops.
“And so, it's likely to me that there will be another 10 fantastic Google scale meta-cale companies.”
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open Eric Schmidt: Digital super intelligence will happen in the next 5 years.
“his prediction is uh a little bit more you know I would say epessimistic but you know it's the next 5 years on his time frame”
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open Eric Schmidt: The world will change very quickly as AI shifts from language generation to taking real-world action ('intentional AI').
“we're going to have a very different world and it's going to happen very quickly”
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open Eric Schmidt: His second book with Henry Kissinger, 'Genesis,' will be published later in 2024.
“Genesis coming out later this year”
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open Eric Schmidt: The dangerous recursive self-improvement threshold in AI will take longer than 5 years to arrive, contrary to some industry voices.
“there's a debate in the industry some people think five years I think it's going to be longer”
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open Eric Schmidt: The AI hardware gap between the US and China will keep increasing as US chip nodes advance to 2nm and 1.4nm while China stays capped near 7nm.
“it looks like the gap hardware gap is going to increase”
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open Eric Schmidt: China will overcome its hardware disadvantage in AI training by spending roughly five times more money than the US does per training run.
“can they pull it off absolutely how will they do it they'll spend more money”
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open Eric Schmidt: Social media platforms will face regulation in proportion to how badly they mishandle election-related misinformation around the 2024 US election.
“you should expect regulation of content because we regulate every country regulates television in one form or another for precisely this issue of election interference”
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open Eric Schmidt: Once countries build sufficient drone-based defenses, ubiquitous cheap drones will make tanks, artillery, and mortars obsolete and make invading a neighboring country effectively impossible.
“the ubiquity of drones means in my view that tanks and artillery and mortars go away as weapons of war”
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open Eric Schmidt: If the US approves the Ukraine aid package, it will buy Ukraine roughly one more year of runway for asymmetric drone-warfare innovation against Russia.
“my current phrase publicly is let's get another year here”
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open Eric Schmidt: The AI ecosystem will settle into a small number of extremely powerful, heavily regulated closed AGI systems alongside a much larger number of open-source 'middle-size' models.
“there'll be a small number incredibly powerful AGI systems which will be heavily regulated because they're so powerful ... and then be a much larger number of what I'm going to call middle size models which will be open source”
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open Eric Schmidt: AI red-teaming will grow into its own standalone business/industry.
“the consensus of the groups that I have been working with is that the red teaming will become its own business”
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open Eric Schmidt: The most powerful frontier AI models will ultimately be regulated because they are too capable and carry both enormous harm potential and enormous upside.
“these very large models are ultimately going to get regulated and the reason is they're just too powerful”
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open Eric Schmidt: A massive transformation to purpose will occur, driven by smart people working on the hardest problems.
“A massive trans form to purpose is what you're telling the world it's like this is who I am this is what I'm going to do this is the dent I'm going to make in the universe.”
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open Eric Schmidt: Real, fault-tolerant quantum computers (the kind that function like a full computer rather than a limited-algorithm device) will arrive.
“real quantum computers of the kind that look like a computer or like half a computer... is probably 8 to 10 years away”
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open Eric Schmidt: Current digital communications/encryption will become breakable, initially by foreign powers, once sufficiently mature quantum computers exist.
“the simple rule is that in 8 to 10 years all of your digital Communications will be breakable, probably initially by foreign powers”
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hit Eric Schmidt: Industrial-strength AI will be achieved.
“I think it's extremely clear that in the next 10 years we're going to get industrial strength AI”
hit Eric Schmidt: AI systems will become genuinely multimodal, handling text, speech, and video together.
“for the next 5 years you should expect multimodal which means you're going to have text and speech and video”
partial Eric Schmidt: Usable, explainable, conversational AI systems (where you can ask the system why it made a decision) will become part of everyday global life.
“think of it as the next 5 years industrial strength usable Global conversational systems you can say to the system why did you do this... it will become part of our lives”
open Eric Schmidt: Artificial general intelligence (computer intelligence that looks human but is not human intelligence) will arrive.
“I predict right now April 2042 is the arrival of AGI and I'm statistically going to be correct when when that occurs”
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hit Eric Schmidt: The share of software code written by AI (versus humans) -- roughly a third in 2022's Microsoft Codex -- will grow to a much larger percentage.
“imagine that that number will get a much larger percentage written by computer over the next few years”
open Eric Schmidt: Only five to ten AGI-scale systems will exist because they remain so computationally expensive, and they will be controlled by nation-states absent a single unified world government.
“I think there will be five to 10 of these things because these things are so computationally expensive even 20 years from now... they'll be controlled by nation states”
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partial Eric Schmidt: The US and China will be roughly equal on all significant AI capabilities, though their systems will be built on differing values.
“in the next five years the two countries will be roughly equal on everything interesting but the systems will be built with different values”
hit Eric Schmidt: The US-China competition will be the single most important competition faced during the remainder of Schmidt's life, framed as rivalry-plus-partnership rather than war.
“a prediction I will make is that the competition between the US and China is the most important competition that we're going to face during the rest of my life”