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Hard Fork
Google DeepMind C.E.O. Demis Hassabis on Living in an A.I. Future
01:13:42
“The only thing we know for sure is there is going to be a lot of change over the next 10 years.”
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- [00:00]
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Kevin Roos
Now. There's a very large, what looks like a circus tent over there. What do you think's going on in there?
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Casey Newton
That is Shoreline Amphitheater. Oh, that's the amphitheater under that tent yesterday.
- [00:44]
Kevin Roos
I thought that was just some carnival that they were setting up for employees. Okay, my mistake. I thought Ringling Brothers had entered into a partnership with the It's a revival tent.
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Casey Newton
They're bringing Christianity back.
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Kevin Roos
I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at the New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork.
- [01:04]
Casey Newton
This week, our field trip to Google will tell you all about everything the company announced at its biggest show of the year. Then Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis returns to the show to discuss the road to AGI, the future of education, and what life could look like in 2030. Kevin being very old, for starters, won't be that old.
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Kevin Roos
Well, Casey, our decor is a little different this week.
- [01:33]
Casey Newton
Ed Sal said it looks better.
- [01:35]
Kevin Roos
Yes, we are not in our normal studio in San Francisco. We are down in Mountain View, California, where we are inside Google's headquarters.
- [01:42]
Casey Newton
I'm just thrilled to be sitting here surrounded by so much training data. That's what they call books here at Google.
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Kevin Roos
So we are here because this week is Google's annual developer conference, Google I O. There were many, many announcements from a parade of Google executives about all the AI stuff, stuff that they have coming. And we are going to talk in a little bit with Demis Asabas, who is the CEO of Google DeepMind, essentially their AI division, who's been driving a lot of these AI projects forward. But first, let's just sort of set the scene for people, because I don't think we have ever been together at an IO before. So what is it like?
- [02:18]
Casey Newton
So Google I O has a bit of a festival atmosphere. It takes place at the Shoreline Amphitheater, which is a concert venue, but once a year it gets transformed into sort of nerd concert where instead of seeing musicians perform, you see Google employees vibe coding on stage.
- [02:38]
Kevin Roos
Yes, there was a vibe coding demo. There were many other things I did actually see as I was leaving the Google acapella group. Goo Capella was like sort of doing their warmups in anticipation of doing some concert. So you've got some like old school Google vibes here, but also a lot of excitement around all the AI stuff.
- [02:56]
Casey Newton
Wait, no, I didn't see Google Pella perform. When was his performance?
- [02:59]
Kevin Roos
I didn't see them perform either. I just saw them warming up. They were sort of doing their scales. They sounded great.
- [03:03]
Casey Newton
You know what? I bet it was a classic acapella situation where they warmed up and someone came up to them and they said, please don't perform. All right, Kevin, well, before we get into it, shall we say our disclosures?
- [03:12]
Kevin Roos
Yes. I work for the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright violations related to training of AI systems.
- [03:18]
Casey Newton
And my boyfriend works at Anthropic, a Google investment.
- [03:22]
Kevin Roos
Oh, that's right. Yeah. So let's talk about some of what was announced this week. There was so, so much. We can't get to all of it, but what were the highlights from your perspective?
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Casey Newton
Well, so look, I wrote a column about this, Kevin. I felt a little bit like I was in a fever dream at this conference. You know, I think often it is the case at a developer conference where they'll sort of try to break it out into 1, 2, 3 big bullet points. This one felt a little bit like a fire hose of stuff. And so by the end, I'm looking at my notes saying, okay, so email's going to start writing in my voice and I can turn my PDFs into video TED talks. Sure, why not? So I had a little bit of fever dream mentality. What was your feeling?
- [04:04]
Kevin Roos
Yeah, I told someone yesterday that I thought the name of the event should have been Everything Everywhere all at once. Like that didn't actually feel like what they were saying is, like, every Google product that you use is going to have more AI. That AI is going to be better and is all going to make your life better in various ways. But it was a lot to keep track of.
- [04:23]
Casey Newton
Yeah, I mean, look, if we were going to try to pull out one very obvious theme from everything that we saw, it was AI is coming to all of the things, and it's probably worth drilling down a little bit into what some of those things are.
- [04:35]
Kevin Roos
Yeah. So the thing that got my attention and then I was sitting right Next to you. The one time when I really noticed you perking up was when they started talking about this new AI mode in Google Search, their core search product. So talk about AI mode and what they announced yesterday.
- [04:49]
Casey Newton
So Kevin, this gets a little confusing because there are now three different kinds of major Google searches. I would say there is the normal Google search, which is now augmented in many cases by what they call AI overviews, which is sort of AI answer at the top.
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Kevin Roos
Yeah, that's the little thing that we'll tell tell you like what the meaning of phrases like you can't lick a badger twice is, right?
- [05:09]
Casey Newton
That's right. And if you don't know the meaning of that, Google it. So that's sort of the thing. One Thing two is the Gemini app, which is kind of like a one for one like ChatGPT competitor that's in its own, you know, standalone app, standalone website. And then the big thing that they announced this week was AI mode which has been in testing for a little while. And I think this sort of lands in between the first two things. Right. It is a tab now within search and this is rolling out to everybody in the United States and if you other countries and you sort of tap over there and now you can have the sort of longer, you know, multi step questions that you might have with a Gemini or a chatgpt. But you can do it right from the Google search interface.
- [05:49]
Kevin Roos
Yeah. And I've been playing with this feature for a few weeks now. It was in their labs section. So you could try it out if you were enrolled in that. And it's, it's really nice. Like it's a very clean thing. There's no ads yet. They will probably appear soon. It does this thing called the fan out, which is very funny to me. Like you ask it a question and it kind of dispatches like a bunch of different Google searches to like crawl a bunch of different web pages and like bring you back the answer. And it actually tells you like how many searches it is doing and how many different websites it's doing. So I asked it for example, like how much does a Costco membership cost is search 72 websites for the answer to that question. So AI mode is very, very eager to answer your question, even if it's does verge on overkill sometimes.
- [06:35]
Casey Newton
Yeah, well, so you know, you and I had a chance to meet with Robby Stein who is one of the people who is leading AI mode and I was surprised by how enthusiastic about it you were. Like you said that you've really actually Found this quite useful in a way that I think I have not so far. So what are you noticing about this?
- [06:50]
Kevin Roos
I mean, the main thing is it's just such a clean experience. Like, on a regular Google search results page, you and I have talked about this. Like, it has just gotten very cluttered. There's a lot of stuff there. There's ads, there's carousels of images. There's sometimes a shopping module, there's sometimes a maps module. It's just. It's hard to actually, like, find the blue links sometime. And I imagine that AI mode will become more cluttered as they try to make more money off of it. But right now, if you go to it, it's like a much simpler experience. It's much easier to find what you're looking for.
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Casey Newton
Yeah, and at the same time, they're also trying to do some really interestingly complex stuff. Like, one of the things that they showed off during the keynote was somebody asked a question about baseball statistics that required finding, you know, three or four different kind of, you know, tricky to locate stats and then combining them all together in an interactive chart. That was just demo. We don't have access to that yet. But that is one of those things where it's like, well, if that works, that could be a meaningful improvement to search.
- [07:43]
Kevin Roos
Yeah, it could be a meaningful improvement to search. And we should also say, like, it's a big unknown how all of this will affect the main Google search product. Right. This is, for now, it's a tab. They have not sort of merged it into the main core Google search, in part because it's not monetized yet. And it costs a lot more to serve those results than a traditional Google search. But I imagine over time, these things will kind of merge, which will have lots of implications for publishers, people who make things on the Internet, the whole sort of economic model of the Internet. But before we get dragged down that rabbit hole, let's just talk about a few other things that they said on stage at Google IO. So I was really struck by the usage numbers that they trotted out for their products, Gemini. According to them, the App now has 400 million monthly users. That is a lot. That is not quite as many as ChatGPT, but it is a lot more than products like Claude and other AI chatbots. They said that their tokens that are being output by Gemini has increased 50 times since last year and is just like way like, so people are using this stuff. In other words, this is not just like some feature that Google is shoving into these Products that people are trying to sort of navigate around. Like, people are really using Gemini.
- [08:57]
Casey Newton
I think that that's right. And I think it's the Gemini number in particular is the one that struck me. Like 400 million is a lot of people. And I don't see that many obvious ways that Google could be like faking that stat. You know, in contrast to, for example, they said 1 1/2 billion people see AI overviews every month. It's like, well, yeah, you just put them in Google search results. Like, that's an entirely passive phenomenon. But like Gemini, you got to go to the website, you got to download the app. So that tells me that people actually are finding real utility there.
- [09:25]
Kevin Roos
So that's Gemini. But they also released a bunch of other stuff, like new image and video models. Do you want to talk about those?
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Casey Newton
Yeah. So, you know, like, like the other companies, they're working on text to image, text to video. And while OpenAI's models have gotten most of the attention in this regard, Google's really are quite good. I think the marquee feature for this year's IO is that the video generating model VO3 can also generate sound. So it showed us a demo, for example, of an owl flapping its wings. You hear the wings flap, it comes down to the ground. There's this sort of nervous badger character, and they exchange some dialogue, which was basically incomprehensible, just pure slop. But they were able to generate that from scratch, and I guess that's something.
- [10:09]
Kevin Roos
Yeah. They also announced a new Ultra subscription to Google's AI products. Now, if you want to be on the bleeding edge of Google's AI offerings, you can pay $250 a month for Gemini, Ultra and Kasey. I thought to myself, no one is going to do this. Who is going to pay $250 a month? That's a fortune for access to Google's leading AI products. And then I look over to my right and there's Casey Newton in the middle of the keynote, pulling out his credit card from his wallet and entering it into buy a subscription to this extremely expensive AI product. So you might have been the first customer of this product. Why?
- [10:51]
Casey Newton
Well, and I hope that they don't forget that when it comes time to feed me into the large language model. Look, I want to be able to have the latest models. And you know, one I think clever thing these AI companies are doing is they're saying, we will give you the latest and greatest before everyone else, but you have to pay us a ridiculous amount of Money. And you know, if you're a reporter and you're reporting about this stuff every day, I do think you sort of want to be in that camp. Now, is it true that I now spend more on monthly AI subscriptions than I paid for my apartment in Phoenix in the year 2010? Yes, and I don't feel great about it, but I'm trying to be a good journalist.
- [11:24]
Kevin Roos
Kevin, please, your family is dying. Another thing that made me perk up was they talked a lot about personalization. Right. This is something we've been talking about for years. Basically, Google has billions of people's email, their search histories, their calendars, all their personal information. And we've been sort of waiting for them to start weaving that stuff in so that you can use Gemini to do things in those products. That has been slow, but they are sort of taking baby steps. And they did show off a few things, including this new personalize smart replies feature that is going to be available for subscribers later this year in Gmail. So that instead of just getting the kind of formulaic suggested replies at the bottom of email, it'll actually kind of learn from how you write and maybe it can access some things in your calendar or your documents and really like suggest a better reply. You'll still have to like hit send, but it'll like sort of pre populate a message for you.
- [12:18]
Casey Newton
Yeah. You know, I have to say I'm. I'm somewhat bearish on this one, Kevin, only because I think that if this were easy, like it would just sort of be here already. Right. Like, when you think about how formulaic so much email is, it doesn't seem to me like it should be that hard to figure out, like what kind of email are you? Like I'm basically a two sentence emailer, you know, that doesn't seem like that. That's hard mimic. So that's just kind of an area where I've been a little bit surprised and disappointed. We also know large language models do not have large memories. So one thing that I would love for Gmail to do, but it cannot, is just sort of understand all of my email and use that to inform the tone of my voice. But it can't do that. It can only take a much more limited subset. Is that going to make it sort of difficult to accurately mimic my tone? I don't know. So what I'm trying to say here is I think there's a lot of problems here and my expectations are like pretty low on this one.
- [13:03]
Kevin Roos
Yeah, that was the part where I was Like, I will believe that this exists and is good when I can use this. But as with other companies like Apple, which demoed a bunch of AI features at its developer conference last year and then never launched half of them, I have become, like, a little bit skeptical until I can actually use the thing myself.
- [13:19]
Casey Newton
Yeah, it really is amazing how, looking back, last year's WWDC was just like a movie about what a competent AI company might have done in an alternate future. It had very little bearing on our reality, but it was admittedly an interesting set of proposals.
- [13:32]
Kevin Roos
So that is the. The software AI portion of IO. There was also a demo of a new hardware product that Google is on, which are these Android XR glasses. Basically their version of what Meta has been showing off. It's Orion glasses, where you have a pair of glasses, they have, like, sort of chunky black frames. They've got, like, sort of a hologram lens in them, and you can actually, like, see a little thing overlaid on your vision telling you, you know, what the weather is or what time it is, or that you have a new message, or they have this integration with Google Maps that they showed off where you can, like. It'll, like, show you, you know, the little miniature Google Map right there inside your glasses, and it'll sort of turn as you turn and tell you where. They did say this is a prototype, but what did you make of this?
- [14:18]
Casey Newton
Well, I think a lot of it looked really cool. Like, probably my favorite part of the demo was when the person who was demonstrating looked down at her feet because she was getting ready to walk to a coffee shop, and the Google Map was actually projected at her feet. And so she knew, okay, go to the left, go to the right. If you've ever been walking around a sort of foreign city and desperately wanted this feature, I think you would see that and be pretty excited. What did you think?
- [14:42]
Kevin Roos
Yeah, I thought to myself, google Glass is back. It was away for so long in the wilderness, and now it's back, and it might actually work this time.
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Casey Newton
Absolutely.
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Kevin Roos
I did get to try the glasses. There was a very long line for the demo, but.
- [14:56]
Casey Newton
And let me guess. You said, I'm Kevin Roose. Let me to the front of the line.
- [14:58]
Kevin Roos
No, they made me wait for two hours. I mean, I didn't literally wait for two hours. I went and did some stuff and then came back. But I got my demo. It was like five minutes long. And it was, you know, it was pretty basic, but it is cool. Like, you can look now look around and you can say hey, what's this plant? And it'll sort of. Gemini will kind of, like, look at what you're seeing and tell you what the plant is.
- [15:17]
Casey Newton
Totally. I did a demo a few months back and also, like, really enjoyed it. So I think there's something here. And I think, more importantly, Kevin, consumers now, when they look at Google and Meta, they finally have a choice. Whose advertising monopoly do I want to feed with my personal data? And you have consumer choice now, and I think that's beautiful.
- [15:35]
Kevin Roos
And that's what capitalism's all about.
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Casey Newton
Exactly.
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Kevin Roos
So, okay, those are some of the announcements, but what did you make of the sort of overall tenor of the event? What stuck out to you as far as the vibe?
- [15:45]
Casey Newton
The thing that stuck out to me the most was just contrasting it with last year's event, because last year they had this phrase that they kept repeating, let Google do the Googling for you. Which to me put me in the mind of somebody sort of leaning back into your, like, floating chair from the wall E movie and just sort of letting the AI, like, run roughshod over your life. This year, Google talked about AI very differently this time. They want you to sit up, they want you to lean in, they want you to pay them $250, and they want you to get to work. You know, AI is your superpower. It's your bionic arm, and you're gonna use it to get sort of further and farther than ever before. But even while presenting that vision, Kevin, they were also very much like, but it's. It's gonna be normal. It's gonna be chill. It's gonna be kind of like your life is now. You're still gonna be in the backyard with your kids doing science experiments. You're still gonna be planning a girls weekend in Nashville. Right. There was not really a lot of science fiction here. There was just a little bit of, like, oh, we put a little bit of AI in this. So that was interesting to me.
- [16:42]
Kevin Roos
Yeah. So I had a slightly different take, which is that I think Google is being AGI pilled. You know, for years now, Google has sort of distanced itself from the conversation about AGI. You know, it had DeepMind, which was sort of its AGI division, but they were over in London, and they were sort of a separate thing. And people at Google would sort of not laugh exactly, but kind of chuckle when you asked them about AGI. It just didn't seem real to them, or it was so remote that it wasn't worth considering.
- [17:09]
Casey Newton
They would say, what does this have to do with search advertising.
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Kevin Roos
Exactly. So now you know, it's still the case that this is a company that wants you to think about it as a product company, a search company. They're not like going all in on AGI. But once you start looking for it, you do see that the sort of culture of AI and how people at Google talk about AI has really been shifting. It is starting to seep into conversation here in a way that I think is unusual and maybe indicative that the technology is just getting better faster than even a lot of people at Google were thinking it would.
- [17:42]
Casey Newton
So I don't totally agree with you, Kevin, because while I'm sure that they're having more conversations about AGI here than they were a year ago, when you look at what they're building, it doesn't seem like there's been a lot of rip it up and start again. It seems a lot like how do we plug AI systems into Google shaped holes? And maybe that will eventually ladder up to something like AGI, but I don't think we've seen it quite yet.
- [18:06]
Kevin Roos
The other observation I would make is that I think The Google of 2025 has a lot more swagger and confidence when it comes to AI than the Google of 2024 or 2023. I mean, two years ago Google was still trying to make Bard a thing, and I think they were feeling very insecure that that OpenAI had beaten them to a consumer chatbot that had found some mass adoption. And so they were just playing catch up. And I don't think anyone would have said that Google was in the lead when it came to generative AI just a few years ago, but now they feel like there is a race and that they are in a good position to win it. They were talking about how Gemini stacks up well against all these other models. It's at the top of this leaderboard, LM arena for all these different categories. I don't love the way that AI is sometimes covered as if it were like sports, you know, who's up, who's down, who's winning, who's losing. But I do feel like Google has the confidence now when it comes to AI of a team that knows it's going to be in the playoffs at least. And that was evident.
- [19:10]
Casey Newton
Oh yeah. I mean, well, when you look at the competition, just what's happened over the past year, you have Apple doing a bunch of essentially fictional demos at WWDC and you have Meta cheating to win at LM arena, making 27 different versions of a model just to come up with one that would be good at one thing. Right. So I think if you're Google, you're looking at that and you're thinking I could be those guys.
- [19:28]
Kevin Roos
Right. So that is what it felt like inside Google IO. What was the reaction from outside? I noticed that for example, the company's stock actually fell like not, not by a lot but like you know, to a degree that suggested that Wal street was kind of meh on a lot of what was announced. But what was the reaction like outside of Google?
- [19:46]
Casey Newton
I think the external reaction that I saw was just struggling a little bit to connect the dots. Right. Like that is the issue with announcing so many things during a two hour period is sometimes people don't have that one thing that they're taking away saying I can't wait to try that. And when you're just looking at a bunch of Google products that you're already using, I think if you're an investor it's probably hard to understand. Well, I don't understand why this is unlocking so much more value at Google. Now maybe millions of people are going to spend, spend $250 a month on Gemini Ultra. But unless that happens, I can understand why some people feel like this feels a little like the status quo.
- [20:21]
Kevin Roos
Yeah, I see that. I also think there are like many unanswered questions about how all of this will be monetized. And you know, it's Google has built one of the most profitable products in the history of capitalism. In the Google search engine and the advertising business that supports is not clear to me that whatever AI mode becomes or whatever AI features it can jam into search. If search as a category is just declining across the board. If people are not going to google.com to look things up in the way they were a few years ago, I think it's an open question like what the next thing is and whether Google can seize on it as effectively as they did with search.
- [21:01]
Casey Newton
Well, I think that they gave us one vision of what that might be and that is shopping. Shopping. A significant portion of the keynote was devoted to one executive talking about a new shopping experience inside of Google where you can take a picture of yourself, upload it and then sort of virtually try things on. And it will sort of use AI to understand your proportions and you know, accurately map a garment onto you. And there was a lot of stuff in there that would just sort of let Google take a cut. Right. Obviously you can advertise the individual thing to buy. Maybe you're taking some sort of like cut of the payment, there's an, there's an affiliate fee that is in there somewhere. So one of the things I'm trying to do as I cover Google going forward is understanding that, yes, search is the core, but Gemini could be a springboard to build a lot of other really valuable businesses.
- [21:49]
Kevin Roos
Yeah, an important question. I know that I always ask you when I go to these things, how was the food?
- [21:54]
Casey Newton
Let's see. I think the food was really nice. So here's the thing. Last year, it was a purely savory experience at breakfast. And I am shamefully an American who likes a little sweet treat. When I woke up this year, they had both bagels and an apple cinnamon coffee cake. And so when I was heading into that keynote, I was a pretty good mood.
- [22:12]
Kevin Roos
I had some of that. They have like little bottles of cold brew and I, I'm like a huge caffeine addict. So I, I took two of them and boy, I was on rocket fuel all day. I was just humming around. I was like bouncing off the wall. I was like doing parkour. I was like, I was feeling great.
- [22:26]
Casey Newton
I thought I saw you warming up with the Acapella team. Now it all.
- [22:36]
Kevin Roos
When we come back, we'll talk with Demis Asabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, about his vision of the AI future.
- [23:01]
Casey Newton
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Advertiser
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Casey Newton
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Casey Newton
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- [24:06]
Kevin Roos
Well, Casey, I guess we behaved ourselves at I O because Google has made Demis Hassabis the CEO of Google DeepMind. Available for us to interview today.
- [24:14]
Casey Newton
We talked to him last February, but of course a lot has happened since then, starting with his Nobel Prize, but continuing on through a slew of announcements that he just made on stage.
- [24:23]
Kevin Roos
What kind of Nobel Prize would you want to win?
- [24:25]
Casey Newton
Probably just for being handsome.
- [24:26]
Kevin Roos
Yeah. Mine at peace for me.
- [24:30]
Casey Newton
Let's bring him in.
- [24:37]
Kevin Roos
Demis Hassabis, welcome back to Hard Fork.
- [24:39]
Advertiser
Thanks for having me. Again.
- [24:40]
Kevin Roos
A lot has happened since the last time you were on the show. Most notably, you won a Nobel Prize. Congrats on that. Ours must be still in the mail. Can you put in a good word for next year with the committee?
- [24:53]
Advertiser
I will do. I will do.
- [24:54]
Kevin Roos
I imagine it's very exciting to win a Nobel Prize. I know that had been a goal for a long time of yours. I imagine it also leads to a lot of people giving you crap during everyday activities if you're struggling to work the printer and people are just like, oh, Mr. Nobel, Laurie, does that happen a little bit.
- [25:14]
Advertiser
I mean, look, I tried to say, look, I can't. Maybe it's a good excuse to not have to fix those kinds of things. Right. So it's more shield.
- [25:24]
Kevin Roos
So you just had Google I O and it was really the Gemini show. I mean, I think Gemini's name was mentioned, mentioned something like 95 times in the keynote. Of all the stuff that was announced, what do you think will be the biggest deal for the average user?
- [25:40]
Advertiser
Wow. We did announce a lot of things, I think for the average user. I think it's the new powerful models and I hope this astrotype technology coming into Gemini life, I think it's really magical, actually, when people use it for the first time and they realize that actually AI is capable already today of doing much more than what they thought. And then I guess VO3 was the biggest announcement of the show probably, and seems to be going viral now. And that's pretty exciting as well, I think.
- [26:06]
Kevin Roos
Yeah. One thing that struck me about IO this year compared to previous years is that it seems like Google is sort of getting AGI pilled, as they say. I remember interviewing people, researchers at Google, even a couple years ago, and there was a little taboo about talking about AGI. They would sort of be like, oh, that's like demis and his DeepMind people in London. That's sort of like their crazy thing that they're excited about. But here we're doing like, you know, real research. But now you've got senior Google executives talking openly about it. What explains that shift?
- [26:43]
Advertiser
I think the sort of AI part of the equation becoming more and more central. Like I sometimes describe Google DeepMind now as the engine room of Google and I think you saw that probably in the keynote yesterday. Really if you take a step back and then it's very clear, I think you could sort of say AGI pilled is maybe the right word, that we're quite close to this human level general intelligence, maybe closer than people thought even a couple of years ago. And it's going to have broad cross cutting impact. And I think there's another thing that you saw at the keynote. It's sort of literally popping up everywhere because it's this horizontal layer that's going to underpin everything and I think everyone is starting to understand that. And maybe a bit of the DeepMind ethos is bleeding into the general Google, which is great.
- [27:25]
Casey Newton
You mentioned that Project Astra is powering some things that maybe people don't even realize that AI can yet do. I think this speaks to a real challenge in the AI business right now, which is that the models have these pretty amazing capabilities, but either the products aren't selling them or the users just sort of haven't figured them out yet. So how are you thinking about that challenge and how much do you bring yourself to the product question as opposed to the research question?
- [27:52]
Advertiser
Yeah, it's great, great question. I mean, I think one of the challenges I think of this space is obviously the underlying tech is moving unbelievably fast and I think that's quite different even from the other big revolution techs, Internet and mobile. At some point you get some sort of stabilization of the tech stack so that then the focus can be on product, right, or exploiting that tech stack. And what we've got here, which I think is very unusual but also quite exciting from a researcher perspective, is that the tech stack itself is evolving incredibly fast, as you guys know. So I think that makes it uniquely challenging actually on the product side, not just for us at Google and DeepMind, but for startups, for anyone really. Any company. Company small and large is what do you bet on right now when that could be 100% better in a year as we've seen. And so you've got this interesting thing where you need kind of fairly deeply technical sort of product people, product designers and managers, I think in order to sort of intercept where the technology may be in a year. So there's things it can't do today and you want to design a product that's going to come out in a year. So you've got to kind of Put you've got a pretty deep understanding of the tech and where it might go to sort of work out what features you can rely on. And so it's an interesting one. I think that's what you're seeing. So many different things being tried out and then if something works, we gotta really double down quickly on that.
- [29:14]
Casey Newton
Yeah. During your keynote you talked about Gemini as powering both sort of productivity assistant style stuff and also fundamental science and research challenges. And I wonder in your mind, is that the same problem that sort of like one great model can solve or are those sort of very different problems the just require different approaches?
- [29:39]
Advertiser
I think when you look at it, it looks like an incredible breadth of things, which is true. And how are these things related other than the fact I'm interested in all of them, but is that that was always the idea with building general intelligence, truly, generally. And in this way that we're doing it should be applicable to almost anything. Right. That being productivity, which is very exciting. Help billions of people in their everyday lives to cracking some of the biggest problems in science. 90%, I would say of it is the underlying core general models. In our case Gemini, especially 2.5. And in most of these areas you still need additional applied research or a little bit of special casing from the domain. Maybe it's special data or whatever to tackle that problem. And maybe we work with domain experts in the scientific areas, but underlying it, when you crack one of those areas, you can also put those learnings back into the general model and then the general model gets better and better. So it's a kind of very interesting flywheel and it's great fun for someone like me who's ranged in many things, you get to use this technology and sort of go into almost any field that you find interesting.
- [30:50]
Kevin Roos
I think that a lot of AI companies are wrestling with right now is how many resources to devote to sort of the core AI push on the foundation models, making the models better at the basic level versus how much time and energy and money do you spend trying to spin out parts of that and commercialize it and turn it into products. And I imagine this is both like a resources challenge, but also like a personnel challenge because say you join DeepMind as an engineer and you want to like build AGI and then someone from Google comes to you and says like, we actually want your help, like building the shopping thing that's going to like let people try on clothes.
- [31:24]
Advertiser
Yeah.
- [31:24]
Kevin Roos
Is that a challenging conversation to have with people who joined for one reason and maybe asked to work on Something else?
- [31:31]
Advertiser
Yeah, well we don't, you know, it's sort of self selecting internally. We don't have to. That's one advantage of being quite large. There were enough engineers on the product teams in the product area that can deal with the product development prod eng and the researchers, if they want to stay in core research, that they're absolutely, that's fine and we need that. But actually you'll find a lot of researchers are quite motivated by real world impact, be that in medicine obviously and things like isomorphic, but also to have billions of people use their research, it's actually really motivating. And so there's plenty of people that like to do both. So yeah, there's no need for us to sort of have to pivot people to certain things.
- [32:14]
Kevin Roos
You did a panel yesterday with Sergey Brin, Google's co founder, who has been working on this stuff back in the office and interestingly he has shorter AGI timelines than you. He thought AGI would arrive before 2030 and you said just after he actually accused you of sandbagging, basically like artificially pushing out your estimates so that you could, could like under promise and over deliver. But I'm curious about that because you will often hear people at different AI companies arguing about when the timelines are. But presumably you and Sergey have access to all the same information and the same roadmaps and you understand what's possible and what's not. So what is he seeing that you're not, or vice versa that leads you to different conclusions about when AGI is going to arrive?
- [33:02]
Advertiser
Well, first of all, there isn't that much difference in our timelines if he's just before 2030 and I'm just after. Also my timeline's been pretty consistent, consistent since the start of DeepMind in 2010. So we thought it was roughly a 20 year mission and amazingly we're on track. So it's somewhere around then I would think. I feel like between I actually have obviously a probability distribution of where the most mass of that is between five and ten years from now. And I think partly it's to do with predicting anything. Precisely five to 10 years out is very difficult. So there's uncertainty bars around that and then also there's uncertainty about how many more breakthroughs are required and also about the definition of AGI. I have quite a high bar, which I've always had, which is it should be able to do all of the things that the human brain can do right, even theoretically. And so that's a higher bar than Say what the typical individual human could do, which is obviously very economically important, that would be a big milestone, but not in my view enough to call it AGI. And we talked on stage a little bit about what is missing from today's systems. Sort of true out of the box invention and thinking sort of inventing a conjecture rather than just solving a math conjecture. Conjecture solving one's pretty good, but actually inventing the Riemann hypothesis or something as significant as that, that mathematicians agree is really important is much harder. And also consistency. So the consistency is a requirement of generality really. And it should be very, very difficult for even top experts to find flaws, especially trivial flaws in the systems, which we can easily find today. And you know, the average person can do that. So there's a sort of capabilities gap and there's a consistency gap before we, what I would consider AGI.
- [34:43]
Casey Newton
And when you think about closing that gap, do you think it arrives via incremental 2,5% improvements in each successive model just kind of stacked up over a long period of time? Or do you think it's more likely that we'll hit some sort of technological breakthrough and then all of a sudden there's liftoff and we hit some sort of intelligence explosion?
- [35:05]
Advertiser
I think it could be both and I think for sure both is going to be useful, which is why, why we push unbelievably hard on the scaling and the, you know, what you would call incremental. Although actually there's a lot of innovation even in that to keep moving that forward. Pre training, post training, infant time compute, all of that stack. So there's actually lots of exciting research and we showed some of that diffusion model, the deep think model. So we're innovating at all parts of that, the traditional stack, should we call it. And then on top of that, that we're doing more greenfield things, more blue sky things like alpha evolve. Maybe you could, you could include in that, which is there a difference between.
- [35:44]
Kevin Roos
A Greenfield thing and a blue sky thing?
- [35:46]
Advertiser
I'm not sure. Maybe they're, maybe they're pretty similar. So some new area, let's call it, and, and then that could come back into the main branch. Right. And we've, I've all, I mean, as you both know, I've been fundamental believer in sort of foundational research research. We've always had the broadest, deepest research bench, I think, of any lab out there. And that's what allowed us to do past big breakthroughs, obviously transformers, but AlphaGo, AlphaZero, all of these things, distillation and if to the extent any of those things are needed again, another big breakthrough of that level, I would back us to do that. And we're pursuing lots of very exciting avenues that could bring that sort of step change, as well as the incremental. And then they of course also interact because the better you have your base models, the more things you can try on top of it again, like AlphaVolve, add in evolutionary programming, in that case, on top of the LLMs.
- [36:44]
Kevin Roos
We recently talked to Karen Howe, who's a journalist, just wrote a book about AI, and she was making an argument essentially against scale, that you don't need these big general models that are incredibly energy intensive and compute intensive and require billions of dollars and new data centers and all kinds of resources to make that. Instead of doing that kind of thing, you could build smaller models, you could build narrower models, you could have a model like AlphaFold that is just designed to predict the 3D structures of proteins. You don't need a huge behemoth of a model to accomplish that. What's your response to that?
- [37:20]
Advertiser
Well, I think you need those big models. We love big and small models. So you need the big models often to train the smaller models. So we're very proud of our kind of flash models, which are the most, we call them our workhorse models, models really efficient, some of the most popular models. We use a ton of those types of size models internally. But you can't build those kind of models without distilling from the larger teacher models and Even things like AlphaFold, which obviously I'm a huge advocate of more of those types of models that can tackle right now. We don't have to wait to AGI. We can tackle now really important problems in science and medicine today. And that will require taking the general test techniques, but then potentially specializing it in that case around protein structure prediction. And I think there's huge potential for doing more of those things. And we are largely in our science work, AI for science work. And I think we're producing something pretty cool on that pretty much every month these days. And I think there should be a lot more exploration on that. Probably a lot of startups could be built combining some kind of general model that exists today with some domain specificity. But if you're interested in AGI, you've got to push again, both sides of that. It's not an either or in my mind, I'm an and right. Like let's scale. Let's look at specialized techniques combining a and hybrid system. Sometimes they're called and let's look at new blue sky research that could deliver the next Transformers. We're betting on all of those things.
- [38:52]
Casey Newton
You mentioned, Alpha evolve, something that Kevin and I were both really fascinated by. Tell us what Alpha evolved of this.
- [38:59]
Advertiser
Well, at a high level, it's basically taking our latest Gemini models, actually two different ones, to generate sort of ideas, hypotheses about programs and other mathematical functions. And then they go into sort of evolutionary programming process to decide which ones of those are most promising. And then that gets sort of ported into the next step.
- [39:20]
Casey Newton
And tell us a little bit about what evolutionary programming is. Sounds very exciting.
- [39:23]
Advertiser
Yeah. So it's basically a way for. For systems to kind of explore new space. Right. So like what things should we in genetics like mutate to give you a kind of new organism? So you can think about the same way in programming or in mathematics, you change the program in some way and then you compare it to some answer you're trying to get. And then the ones that fit best according to sort of evaluation function, you put back into to the next set of generating new ideas. And we have our most efficient model, sort of flash model generating possibilities. And then we have the PRO model critiquing that. Right. And deciding which one of those is most promising to be selected for the next round of evolution.
- [40:06]
Kevin Roos
So it's sort of like an autonomous AI research organization almost, where you have some AIs coming up with hypotheses, other AIs testing them and supervising them. And the goal, as I understand it, is to have an AI that. That can kind of improve itself over time or suggest improvements to existing problems.
- [40:25]
Advertiser
Yes. So it's the beginning of. I think that's why people are so excited about. And we are excited about it. It's the beginning of a kind of automated process. It's still not fully automated, and also it's still relatively narrow. We've applied it to many things like chip design, scheduling AI tasks on our data centers more efficiently, even improving matrix multiplication, one of the most fundamental units of training algorithms. So it's actually amazingly useful already. But it's still constrained to domains that are kind, provably correct. Right. Which obviously maths and coding are. But we need to sort of fully generalize that.
- [40:57]
Casey Newton
But it's interesting because I think for a lot of people, the knock they have on LLMs in general is, well, all you can really give me is the statistical median of your training data. But what you're saying is we now have a way of going beyond that to potentially generate novel ideas that are actually useful in advancing the state of the art.
- [41:15]
Advertiser
That's right. But we already had these. This is another approach, Alpha Evolve using evolutionary methods. But we already had evidence of that even way back in AlphaGo days. So, you know, it's. AlphaGo came up with new Go strategies, most famously move 37 in game two of our big Lisa Doll world championship match. And okay, it was limited to a game, but it was a genuinely new strategy that had never been seen before, even though we've played go for hundreds of years. So that's when I kicked off our sort of alphafold projects and science projects, because I was waiting to see evidence of that kind of spark of creativity, you could call it. Right. Or originality, at least in the. Within the domain of what. What we know. But there's still a lot further that has to, you know. So we, we know that these kinds of models, paired with things like Monte Carlo tree search or reinforcement learning planning techniques, can get you to new regions of space to explore. And evolutionary methods is another way of going beyond what the current model knows to explore, Force it into a new regime where it's not seen it before.
- [42:16]
Casey Newton
I've been looking for a good Monte Carlo tree for so long now, so if you could help me find one, it would honestly be a huge help.
- [42:22]
Advertiser
One of these things could help.
- [42:23]
Casey Newton
Okay, great.
- [42:24]
Kevin Roos
So I read the Alpha Evolve paper, or to be more precise, I fed it into NotebookLM and had it make a podcast that I could then listen to that would explain it to me at a slightly more elementary level. And one fascinating thing that stuck out to me is a detail about how you were able to make AlphaVolve more creative. And one of the ways that you did it was by essentially forcing the model to hallucinate. I mean, so many people right now are obsessed with eliminating hallucinations, but it seemed to me like one way to read that paper is that there is actually a scenario in which you want models to hallucinate or be creative, whatever you want to call it.
- [43:01]
Advertiser
Yes, well, I think that's right. I think hallucination, when you want factual things, obviously you don't want. But in creative situations where you can think of it as a little bit like lateral thinking in an MBA course or something, is just create some crazy idea ideas. Most of them don't make sense, but the odd one or two may get you to a region of the search space that is actually quite valuable, it turns out, once you evaluate it afterwards. And so you can substitute the word hallucination maybe for imagination at that point. Right. They're obviously two sides of the same coin.
- [43:36]
Kevin Roos
Yeah. I did talk to one AI safety person who was a little bit worried about Alpha Evolve. Not because of the actual technology and the experiments which this person said, you know, they're fascinating, but because of the way it was rolled out. So Google DeepMind created Alpha Evolve and then used it to optimize some systems inside Google and kept it sort of hidden for a number of months and only then sort of released it to the public. And this person was saying, well, if we really are getting to the point where these AI systems are starting to become recursively self improving and they can sort of build a better AI AI, doesn't that imply that when Google, if Google DeepMind does build AGI or even super intelligence, that it's going to keep it to itself for a while rather than doing the responsible thing and informing the public?
- [44:25]
Advertiser
Well, I think it's a bit of both actually. You need to. First of all, AlphaVolve is a very nascent self improvement thing. Right. And it's still got human in the loop and it's only shaving off, albeit important percentage points off of already existing tasks. That's valuable, but, but it's not creating any kind of step changes. And there's a trade off between carefully evaluating things internally before you release it to the public out into the world and then also getting the extra critique back, which is also very useful from the academic community and so on. And also we have a lot of trusted tester type of programs that we talk about where people get early access to these things and then give us feedback and stress test them, including sometimes the safety institutes as well.
- [45:09]
Kevin Roos
But my understanding was you weren't just like red teaming this internally within Google, you were actually like using it to make the data centers more efficient, using it to make the kernels that train the AI models more efficient. So I guess what this person is saying is like, it's just we want to start getting good habits around these things now before they become something like AGI. And they were just a little worried that maybe this is going to be something that stays hidden for longer than it needs to. So I don't like. I would love hear your response to that.
- [45:37]
Advertiser
Yeah, well, look, I mean, I think that system is not anything really that I would say, you know, has any risk on the AGI type of front. I think as we get, and I think today's systems still are not, although very impressive, are not that powerful from any kind of AGI risk standpoint. That Maybe this person was talking about. And I think you need to have both. You need to have incredibly rigorous internal tests of these things and then you need to also get collaborative inputs from external. So I think it's a bit of both. I actually don't know the details of the AlphaVolve process for the last few, you know, the first few months it was just function search before and then it become more general. So it's sort of evolved, it's evolved itself over the last year in terms of becoming this general purpose tool and it still has a lot of way to go before we can actually use it in our main branch, which is at that point, I think then becomes more serious, like with Gemini, it's sort of separate from that currently.
- [46:32]
Casey Newton
Let's talk about AI safety a little bit more broadly. It's been my observation that it seemed like the further back in time you go and the less powerful AI systems you have, the more everyone seem to talk about the safety risk. And it seems like now, as the models improve, we hear about it less and less, including, you know, at the keynote yesterday. So I'm curious what you make of this moment in AI safety. If you feel like you're paying enough attention to the risk that could be created by the systems that you have and if you are as committed to it as you were, say three or four years ago, when a lot of these outcomes seem less likely.
- [47:05]
Advertiser
Yeah, well, we're just as committed as we've ever been. I mean, we, from the beginning of DeepMind, we planned for success, so success meant something. Looking like this, this is what we kind of imagined. I mean, it's sort of unbelievable still that it's actually happened, but it is sort of in the Overton window of what we thought was going to happen. If these technologies really did develop the way we thought they were going to. And the risk and attending to mitigating those risks was part of that. And so we do a huge amount of work on our systems. I think we have very, very robust red teaming processes, both pre and post launches and we've learned a lot. And I think that's what's the difference now between having these systems have, albeit early systems, contact with the real world. I think that's actually been, I'm sort of persuaded now that that has been a useful thing overall. And I wasn't sure, I think five years ago, 10 years ago, I may have thought maybe it's better staying in a research lab and kind of collaborating with academia and that, but actually there's a lot of things you don't get to see or understand unless millions of people try it. So it's this weird trade off again between you can only do it when there's millions of smart people try your technology and then you find all these edge cases. So you know, however big your, your testing team is, it's only going to be, you know, 100 people or 1,000 people or something. So it's not comparable to tens of millions of people using your, your, your systems. But on the other hand, you want to know as much as possible ahead of time so you can mitigate the risks before that they happen. So this is interesting and it's good learning. I think what's happened in the industry in the last two, three years has been great because we've been learning when the systems are not that powerful or risky. As you were saying earlier. I think things are going to get very serious in 2, 3 years time when these agent systems start becoming really capable. We're only seeing the beginnings of the agent era, let's call it. But you can imagine, and I think hopefully you understood from the keynote what the ingredients are, what it's going to come together with. And then I think we really need a step change in research on analysis, on understanding controllability. But the other key thing is it's got to be international. You know, that's pretty difficult and I've been very consistent on that because it's a technology going to fit everyone in the world. It's been built by different countries and different companies in different countries. So you've got to get some international kind of norm, I think around what we want to use these systems for and what are the kinds of benchmarks, benchmarks that we want to test safety and reliability on. But there's plenty of work to get on with now. Like we don't have those benchmarks. We and the industry and academia should be agreeing to consensus of what those are.
- [49:42]
Casey Newton
What role do you want to see export controls play in doing what you just said?
- [49:46]
Advertiser
Well, export controls is a very complicated issue and obviously geopolitics today is extremely complicated. And I see both sides of the arguments on that. You know, there's proliferation, uncontrolled proliferation of these technologies, technologies. Do you want different places to have frontier modeling training capability? I'm not sure that's a good idea. But on the other hand, you want western technology to be the thing that's adopted around the world. So it's a complicated trade off. Like if there was an easy answer, I think we'd all you know, I would be shouting from the rooftops, but I think it's nuanced, like most real world problems are.
- [50:23]
Kevin Roos
Do you think we're heading into a bipolar conflict with China over AI if we aren't in one already? I mean, just recently we saw the Trump administration making a big push to make the Middle east countries in the Gulf, like Saudi Arabia and the UAE into AI powerhouses, have them use American chips to train models that will not be sort of accessible to China and its AI powers. Do you see that becoming sort of the foundations of a new global conflict?
- [50:49]
Advertiser
Well, I hope not, but I think short term, I feel like AI is getting caught up in the, in the bigger geopolitical shifts that are going on. So I think it's just part of that and it happens to be one of the most topical new things that's appearing. But on the other hand, what I'm hoping is as people, as these technologies get more and more powerful, the world will realize we're all in this together. Because we are. And so, you know, and the last few steps towards AGI, hopefully we're on the longer timelines, actually. Right. The more the timelines I'm thinking about, then we get time to sort of get the collaboration we need, at least on a scientific level, before then would be good.
- [51:32]
Kevin Roos
Do you feel like you're in sort of the final home stretch to AGI? I mean, Sergey Brin, Google's co founder, had a memo that was reported on by my colleague at the New York Times earlier this year that went out to Google employees and said we're in the home stretch and everyone needs to get back to the office and be working all the time because this is when it really matters. Do you have that sense, sense of like, of, of finality or sort of entering a new phase or an end game?
- [51:57]
Advertiser
I think we are past the middle game, that's for sure. But I've been working every hour there is for the last 20 years because I felt the how important and momentous this, this technology would be. And we thought it was possible for 20 years. And I think it's coming into view now. I agree with that. And whether it's five years or 10 years or two years, that they're all actually quite short time timelines. When you're discussing what were the enormity of the transformation of this techno, you know, this technology is going to bring that none of those timelines are very long.
- [52:31]
Kevin Roos
When we come back, more from Demis Hassabis about the strange futures that lie ahead.
- [53:06]
Casey Newton
This podcast is supported by Supermicro and Nvidia, working closely together in creating the largest AI supercomputer ever built at X and AI using Supermicro servers with Nvidia accelerated computing including 100,000 Hopper GPUs and Spectrum X networking. The Colossus supercomputer relies on direct liquid cooling technologies from Supermicro. Supermicro continues to develop the most advanced AI solutions in the industry. Everyone wants better. Better businesses, better cities and a better world. Maps help us get there. Specifically high tech maps that help us visualize what's happening where and uncover ways we can adapt to change. Over the last 55 years, ESRI has.
- [53:47]
Kevin Roos
Been expanding what these maps can do.
- [53:49]
Casey Newton
And today high tech maps can help us solve almost any problem. Map your way to a better future visit GIS.com.
- [54:00]
Kevin Roos
We'Re going to switch to some more general questions about the AI future. A lot of people now are starting to, at least in conversations that I'm involved in, think about what the world might look like after AGI. The context in which I actually hear the most about this is from parents who want to know what their kids should be doing. Studying, will they go to college? You have kids, they're older than my kid. How are you thinking about that?
- [54:26]
Advertiser
So I think that when it comes to kids, and I get asked this quite a lot is university students, I think first of all, I wouldn't dramatically change some of the basic advice on stem. Getting good at even the things like coding I would still recommend because I think whatever happens with these AI tools, you'll be better off understanding how they work and how they function and what you can do with them. I would also say immerse yourself now. That's what I would be doing as a teenager today in trying to become a sort of ninja at using the latest tools. I think you can almost be sort of superhuman in some ways if you got really good at using all the latest, latest, coolest AI tools. But don't neglect the basics too, because you need the fundamentals. And then I think teach sort of meta skills really of like learning to learn. And the only thing we know for sure is there's going to be a lot of change over the next 10 years. Right? So how does one get ready for that? What kind of skills are useful for that? Creativity skills, adaptability, resilience? I think all of these sort of, you know, meta skills is what will be important for the next generation. And I think it'll be very interesting to see what they do because they're going to Grow up AI native, just like the last generation grew up mobile and iPad and sort of that kind of tablet native and then previously Internet and computers, which was my era. And they always, I think the kids of that era always seem to adapt to make use of the latest, coolest tools. And I think there's more we can do on the AI side to make the tools. Actually, if people are going to use them for school and education, let's make them really good for, for that and sort of provably good. And I'm very excited about bringing it to education in a big way and also to, you know, if you had an AI tutor to bring it to poorer parts of the world that don't have good educational systems. So I think there's a lot of upside there too.
- [56:19]
Casey Newton
Another thing that kids are doing with AI is chatting a lot with digital companions. Google DeepMind doesn't make any of these companions. Yet some of what I've seen so far seems pretty worrying. It seems pretty easy to create a chatbot that, that just does nothing but tell you how wonderful you are and that can sort of like lead into some dark and weird places. So I'm curious what observations you've had as you like, look at this market for AI companions and whether you think I might want to build this someday or I'm going to leave that to other people.
- [56:49]
Advertiser
Yeah, I think we've got to be very careful as we start entering that domain and that's why we haven't yet. And we're being very thoughtful about that. My view on this is more through the lens of the universal assistant that we talked about yesterday, which is something, something that's incredibly useful for your everyday productivity, you know, gets rid of the boring, mundane tasks that we all hate doing to give you more time to do the things that you love doing. I also really hope that they're going to enrich your lives by giving you incredible recommendations, for example, on all sorts of amazing things that you didn't realize you would enjoy, you know, sort of delight you with surprising things. So I think these are the ways I'm hoping, hoping that these systems will go. And actually on the positive side, I feel like if this assistant becomes really useful and knows you well, you could sort of program it with you, obviously with natural language to protect your attention. So you could almost think of it as a system that works for you, you know, as an individual. It's yours and it protects your attention from being assaulted by other algorithms that want your attention. Attention, which is actually nothing to do with AI, most social media sites, that's what they're doing effectively. Their algorithms are trying to gain your attention and I think that's actually the worst thing and it'd be great to protect that so we can be more in creative flow. Whatever it is that you want, you want to do. That's how I would want these systems to be useful to people.
- [58:17]
Casey Newton
If you could build a system like that, I think people would be so incredibly happy. I think right now people feel assailed by the algorithms in their life and they don't know what to do about it.
- [58:25]
Advertiser
Well, the reason is because you have to use, you've got one brain and you have to, let's say whatever it is, a social media stream, you have to dip into that torrent to then get the piece of information you want. But then you've already, but you're doing it with the same brain. So you've already affected your mind and your mood and other things by dipping into that torrent and you know, to find the valuable, you know, the piece of information that you wanted. But if an assistant, digital assistant did that for you, you'd only get the useful nugget and you wouldn't need to, to break your mood or what is it you're doing the day or your concentration with your family, whatever it is. I think that would be wonderful.
- [59:00]
Kevin Roos
Yeah. Kasey loves that idea. You love that idea. I love this idea of an AI agent that protects your attention from all the forces trying to assault it. I'm not sure how the ADS team at Google is gonna feel about this, but we can ask them when the time comes. Some people are starting to look at the job market, especially for recent college graduates, and worry that we're already starting to see signs of a AI power job loss. Anecdotally, I talked to young people who, you know, a couple years ago might have been interested in going into fields like tech or consulting or finance or law, who are just saying, like, I don't know that these jobs are going to be around much longer. A recent article in the Atlantic wondered if we're starting to see AI competing with college graduates for these entry level positions. Do you have a view on that?
- [59:49]
Advertiser
I haven't looked at that, no. I don't know. I haven't seen the studies on that. But, you know, maybe it's starting to appear now. I don't think there's any hard numbers on that yet. At least I haven't seen it. I think for now I mostly see these as tools that augmenting what you can do and what you can achieve. I think the next era, I mean maybe after AGI things will be different again. But over the next five to 10 years I think we're going to find what normally happens with big sort of new technology shifts, which is that some jobs get disrupted, but then new, more valuable, usually more interesting jobs get created. So I do think that's what's going to happen in the nearer term. So today's graduates and the next five years, let's say, I think it's very difficult to predict after that. That's part of this sort of more societal change that we need to get ready for.
- [60:36]
Kevin Roos
I mean, I think the tension there is that you're right, these tools do give people so much more leverage, but they also reduce the need for big teams of people doing certain things. I was talking to someone recently who said they, they had been at a data science company in their previous job that it had 75 people working on some kind of data science tasks. And now they're at a startup that has one person doing the work that used to require 75 people. And so I guess the question I'd be curious to get your view on is what are the other 74 people supposed to do?
- [61:08]
Advertiser
Well, look, I think these tools are going to unlock the ability to create things much more quickly. So I think there'll be more people that will do startup things. I mean there's other lot more surface area one could attack and try with these tools that was possible before. So let's take programming for example. So obviously these systems are getting better at coding, but the best coders I think are getting differential value out of it because they still understand how to pose the question and architect the whole code base and check what the coding does. But simultaneously at the hobbyist end it's allowing designers and maybe non technical people to vibe code some things, whether that's prototyping games or websites or movie ideas. So in theory it should be those other 70 people, whatever could be creating new startup ideas. Maybe it's going to be less of these bigger teams and more smaller teams are very empowered by AI tools. But that goes back to the education thing. Then which skills are now important? It might be different skills like creativity, sort of vision and design sensibility could become increasingly important important.
- [62:18]
Casey Newton
Do you think you'll hire as many engineers next year as you hire this year?
- [62:22]
Advertiser
I think so, yeah. That's, that's the, I mean there's no plan to, to hire less. But you know, we, again you have, we have to see how fast the, the coding agents improve today. They, they, they, they're not, you know, they can't do things on their own. They're just helpful for, for the best, you know, for the best human coders.
- [62:40]
Casey Newton
Last time we talked to you, we asked you about some of the more pessimistic views about AI in the public. And one of the things you said to us was that the field needed to demonstrate concrete use cases that were just clearly beneficial to people to kind of shift this. My observation is that I think there are even more people now who are like actively antagonistic toward AI. And I think maybe one reason is they hear folks at the big labs saying pretty loudly, eventually this is going to replace your job. And most people just think, well, I don't want that, you know. So I'm curious, like looking on from that past conversation, if you feel, feel like we have seen some use cases, enough use cases to start to shift public opinion, or if not, what some of those things might be that actually change views here?
- [63:26]
Advertiser
Well, I think we're working on those things. They take time to develop. I think a kind of universal assistant would be one of those things if it was kind of really yours and working for you effectively. So technology that works for you. I think that this is what economists and other experts should be working on. On is does everyone have manage a suite of fleet of agents that are doing things for you and including potentially earning you money or building you things, does that become part of the normal job process? I could imagine that in the next four or five years. I also think that as we get closer to AGI and we make breakthroughs and we probably talked about last time, material sciences, energy, fusion, these sorts of things help by AI, we should start getting to a position in society where we're getting towards what I would call radical abundance, where there's a lot of resources to go around. And then again, it's more of a political question of how would you distribute that in a fair way. Right. So I've heard this term like universal high income, something like that, I think is going to probably be, you know, good and necessary, but obviously there's a lot of complications there that need to be thought through. And then in between there's this transition period, you know, between now and whenever we, we have that sort of situation where what do we do about the change in the, in the interim and depends on how long that is is too.
- [64:46]
Kevin Roos
What part of the economy do you think AGI will transform last?
- [64:51]
Advertiser
Well, I mean, I think the parts of the economy where, you know, it involves human to human interaction and emotion. And those things I think, you know, will probably be the hardest things for AI to do.
- [65:05]
Kevin Roos
So, you know, aren't people already doing AI therapy and talking with chatbots for things that they might have paid someone, you know, $100 an hour for?
- [65:14]
Advertiser
Well, therapy's a great, very narrow domain and I'm not sure exactly there's a lot of, you know, hype about those things. I'm not actually sure how many of those things are really going on in terms of actually affecting the real economy rather than just sort of more toy things. And I don't think the AI systems are like capable of doing that properly yet. But just the kind of emotional connection that we get from talking to each other and doing things in nature, in the real world, I don't think that AI can really replicate all of those things.
- [65:41]
Casey Newton
So if you lead hikes, it'd be a good job.
- [65:44]
Advertiser
Yeah, yeah.
- [65:46]
Kevin Roos
My intuition on this is that it's going to be some heavily regulated industry where there will just be like a massive pushback on the use of AI to displace labor or take people's jobs like healthcare or education or something like that. But you think it's going to be an easier lift in those heavily regulated industries?
- [66:04]
Advertiser
I don't know. I mean, it might be, but then we have to weigh that up as society, whether we want all the positives of that, for example, curing all diseases or, you know, I think there's a lot of finding new energy sources. So I think these things would be clearly very beneficial for society. And I think we need to for our other big challenges. It's not like there's no challenges in society other than AI, but I think AI can be a solution to a lot of those other challenges. Be that energy, resource constraints, aging, disease, you know, you name it, and water access, et cetera, A ton of problems facing us today, climate. I think AI can potentially help with all of those. And I agree with you. Society will need to decide what it wants to use these technologies for. But then what's also changing is what we discussed earlier with products is the technology is going to continue advancing and that will open up new possibilities like the kind of radical abundance, space travel, these things which are a little bit out of scope today, unless you read a lot of sci fi, but I think rapidly becoming, becoming real.
- [67:07]
Kevin Roos
During the Industrial Revolution there were lots of people who embraced new technologies, moved from farms to cities to work in the new factories, were sort of early adopters on that curve. But that was also when the Transcendentalists started retreating into nature and rejecting technology. That's when Thoreau went to Walden Pond and there was a big movement of Americans who just saw the new technology and said, I don't think so, not for me. Do you think there will be a similar movement around rejection of AI and if so, how, how big do think you think it'll be?
- [67:37]
Advertiser
I don't know if it'll be. I mean, there could be a get back to nature. And I mean, I think a lot of people will want to do that and, and I think this potentially will give them the room and space to do it. Right. If you're in a world of radical abundance, I fully expect that's what, what a lot of us will want to do is use it to, you know, I think again, I'm thinking about it sort of space faring and, and more, you know, kind of maximum human flourishing. But I think that will be, that will be exactly some the things that a lot of us will choose to do but have time and the space and the resources to do it.
- [68:08]
Casey Newton
Are there parts of your life where you say, I'm not going to use AI for that, even though it might be pretty good at it for some sort of reason, wanting to protect your creativity or your thought process or something else?
- [68:21]
Advertiser
I don't think AI is good enough yet to have impinged on any of those sorts of areas where I would. It's mostly I'm using it for things like you did with NotebookLM, which I feel find great, like breaking the ice on a new topic, scientific topic, and then deciding if I want to get more deep into it. That's one of my main use cases, summarization, those things. I think those are all just helpful, but, you know, we'll see. I haven't got any examples of what you suggested yet, but maybe as AI gets more powerful, there will be.
- [68:47]
Kevin Roos
When we talked to Dario Amadeh of Anthropic recently, he talked about this feeling of excitement mixed with a kind of melancholy about the progress that AI was making in domains where he had spent a lot of time trying to be very good. Like coding.
- [69:03]
Advertiser
Yes.
- [69:03]
Kevin Roos
Where it was like, you see a new coding system that comes out, it's better than you. You think that's amazing. And then your second thought is like, ooh, that stings a little bit.
- [69:10]
Advertiser
Yeah.
- [69:10]
Kevin Roos
Have you had any experiences like that?
- [69:12]
Advertiser
So I maybe, maybe one reason it doesn't sting me as much as I've had that experience when I was very young with Chess. So, you know, chess was going to be my first career and you know, I was playing pretty professionally when I was a kid for the England junior teams. And then Deep blue came along, right. And clearly the computers were going to be much more powerful than the world champion forever after that. And so. But yet I still enjoy playing chess. People still do. It's different, you know, but it's a bit like I can, you know, Usain Bolt, we celebrate him for. For running the 100 meters incredibly fast. But we've got cars. But we don't care about that, right. Like it's. We. We're interested in other humans doing it. And I think that'll be the same with robotic football and all of these other things. So. And that maybe goes back to what we discussed earlier about what I think in the end we're interested in other human beings. That's why even like a novel, maybe AI could write one day a novel that's sort of technically good, but I don't think it would have the same soul or connection to the reader that if you knew it was written by an AI, at least as far as I can see for now.
- [70:14]
Casey Newton
You mentioned robotic football. Is that a real thing? We're not sports fans, so I just want to make sure I haven't missed something.
- [70:19]
Advertiser
I was meaning soccer. I don't know, I think there are robocop sort of soccer type little robots trying to kick balls and things. I'm not sure how serious it is, but there is a field of robotic football.
- [70:33]
Casey Newton
You mentioned the. Sometimes a novel written by a robot might not feel like it'd have a soul. I have to say, for as incredible as the technology is in VO or imagine, I sort of feel that way with it where it's like, it's beautiful to look at, but I don't know what to do with it. You know what I mean?
- [70:49]
Advertiser
Exactly. And that's what I was. That's why we work with great artists like Darren Arundel, Aronofsky and Shankar on the music is. I totally agree. I think these are tools and they can come up with technically good things. And I mean, VO3 is unbelievable. Like when I look at the. You know, I don't know if you've seen some of the things that are going viral being posted. The moment with the voices. Actually, I didn't realize how big a difference audio is going to make to the video. I think it just really brings it to life. But it's still not, as Darren would say. Yesterday when we were discussing on an interview, he Brings the story, storytelling. It's not got deep storytelling like a master filmmaker will do or a master novelist, you know, the top of their game. And it might never do. Right. It's just always going to feel something's missing. It's a sort of a soul, for a better word of the piece, you know, the real humanity, the magic. If you like the great pieces of art, you know, art too. When I see a Van Gogh or a Rothko or, you know, why does that touch your. You know, I spill, you know, sort of, you know, hair's garment, back of my spine. Because I remember, you know, and you know, about what they went through and the struggle to produce that. Right. In every brushstroke of Van Gogh's brushstrokes, his sort of torture. And I'm not sure what that would mean. Even if the AI mimicked that and you were told that it was like, so what? Right. And so I think that is the piece that at least as far as I can see out to 5, 10 years, the top human creators will always be bringing. And that's why we've done all of our tools and Vo lyria in collaboration with top creative artists.
- [72:28]
Kevin Roos
The new pope, Pope Leo, is reportedly interested in AGI. I don't know if he's AGI pilled or not, but that's something that he's spoken about before. Do you think we will have a religious revival or a renaissance of interest in faith and spirituality in a world where AGI is forcing us to think about what gives our lives meaning?
- [72:48]
Advertiser
I think that potentially could be the case. And I actually did speak to the last Pope about that. And the Vatican's been interested, but even prior to this Pope, haven't spoken to him yet. But on these matters, how does AI and religion and technology in general and religion interact? And what's interesting about the Catholic Churches, and I'm a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, is they've always had, which is strange for a religious body, a scientific arm, you know, which they like to always say Galileo was the founder of and those interesting.
- [73:21]
Kevin Roos
They're not great.
- [73:22]
Advertiser
So, so, so. But then, but then, but then they really. And it's actually really separate. And I always thought that was quite interesting. And people like Stephen Hawking and, and, you know, avowed atheists were part of the academy. And that's partly why I agreed to join it, is because it's a fully scientific body and it's very interesting and I was fascinated. They've been interested in this for 10 plus years. So they were on, you know, on this early in terms of like how from a philosophical point I think a this technology will be and I actually think we need more of that type of thinking and work from philosophers and theologians actually would be really, really good. So I hope the new Pope is genuinely interested.
- [74:03]
Kevin Roos
We'll close on a question that I recently heard Tyler Cowan ask Jack Clark from Anthropic that I thought was so good and decided to just steal it whole cloth. In the ongoing AI revolution, what is the worst aid to be?
- [74:16]
Advertiser
Oh, wow. Well, I, I don't, I mean, you know, gosh, I haven't thought about that. But I mean, I think any age where you can live to see it is a good age because I think we are going to make some great strides with things like, you know, medicine. And so I think it's going to be incredible journey. None of us know, you know, exactly how it's going to transpire. It's very difficult to say, but it's going to be very interesting to find out.
- [74:45]
Casey Newton
Try to be young if you can.
- [74:47]
Advertiser
Yes, young is always better. Yeah, I mean in general, young is always better.
- [74:52]
Kevin Roos
All right, Demis Asabis, thanks so much for coming.
- [74:54]
Advertiser
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- [75:48]
Casey Newton
This podcast is supported by Worklab. Why should you listen to the Worklab podcast from Microsoft? Because it delivers actionable insights on how business leaders can leverage AI to access untapped value, turbocharged decision making and sharpen their competitive edge in a world of rapid change and economic uncertainty. In each state, episode host Molly Wood has an illuminating conversation with a thought leader who has a vital perspective on AI and the future of work. Find the knowledge you need on Worklab. That's W O R K L A B no spaces available wherever you get your podcasts. Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. We're edited this week by Matt Collette. We're fact checked by Ana Alvarado. Today's show was engineered by a list Alyssa Moxley. Original Music by Pat McCusker, Rowan Nimisto and Dan Powell. Our executive producer is Jen Poyon. Video production by Chris Shot, Sawyer Roquet, Pat Gunther and Ann Roth. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube@YouTube.com hardfork Special thanks to Paula Schumann. We Wing Tam, Dalia Haddad and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us@hardforknytimes.com what would you tell the Pope about AI.
- [77:19]
Kevin Roos
McCrispy strips are now at McDonald's. Tender, juicy and its own sauce. Would you look at that?
- [77:25]
Casey Newton
Well, you.
- [77:25]
Kevin Roos
You can't see it, but trust me, it looks delicious. New McCrispy strips now at McDonald's.