Eric Schmidt
50 tracked predictions · 4 hit · 2 partial · 0 miss · 44 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: China will dominate the market for inexpensive humanoid robots, similar to how it came to dominate EVs and solar panels.
“the arrival of humanoid robots um is likely to be dominated by China”
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open Eric Schmidt: US frontier AI training may end up depending on electricity secured through deals with Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE due to domestic power shortfalls.
“American intelligence, is actually being developed in kingdoms and that may be the only fall back we have”
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open Eric Schmidt: One of misinformation, cyberattacks, or a biological incident will cause a crisis significant enough to force governments to seriously address AI's downside risks.
“most people believe that one of those three will create some kind of mini crisis”
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open Eric Schmidt: The biggest US AI models will eventually never be publicly released, with companies instead distilling smaller public versions to protect the frontier model.
“the biggest models will never be released and that the companies will distill their own models down”
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open Eric Schmidt: Most governments and countries outside the wealthy West will standardize on open Chinese AI models over closed US models, mainly because they are free.
“will end up standardizing on Chinese models not because they're better, but because they're free”
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open Eric Schmidt: Self-replicating forms of reinforcement learning will emerge and drive further AI acceleration.
“eventually two or three years, you'll start to have various forms of reinforcement learning which are self-replicating”
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open Eric Schmidt: The next trillion-dollar company will emerge from self-replicating reinforcement learning systems, succeeding the current Anthropic/OpenAI-scale tier.
“That's the most likely path for the next trillion dollar company”
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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: Digital superintelligence arrives and becomes generally available and generally safe.
“Within 10 years.”
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open Eric Schmidt: AI-based world-class mathematicians emerge.
“worldclass mathematicians emerge in the next one year that are AI based”
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open Eric Schmidt: AI-based world-class programmers appear.
“worldclass programmers... going to appear within the next one or two years”
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open Eric Schmidt: Specialized AI 'savants' exist in every professional field.
“we're going to have specialized savants in every field within five years. That's pretty much in the bag”
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open Eric Schmidt: AI systems gain the ability to generate their own scaffolding (frameworks/pathways) for open-ended tasks rather than needing humans to lay them out.
“The AI's ability to generate its own scaffolding is imminent... pretty much sure that that will be a 2025 thing”
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open Eric Schmidt: The world's frontier AI capability consolidates into roughly 10 massive, multi-gigawatt data-center models (about 5 US, 3 China, 2 elsewhere), each effectively nationalized.
“If the structure of the world in 5 to 10 years is 10 models... they will be all nationalized in some way”
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open Eric Schmidt: Junior and journeyman-level programmer jobs are eliminated by AI coding systems.
“It's pretty clear that junior programmers go away.”
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open Eric Schmidt: Super-empathetic, fully customizable AI voice companions become publicly visible and change public perception of AI.
“they're going to completely open their eyes to what this [is]... in the next probably two months”
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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”