Eric Schmidt gave a talk at Stanford Business School, that was so censored it took me about 2 seconds to find it on YouTube -- oh wait, it's gone from YouTube. I guess it really is censored after all. And it's subtitled in Chinese, suggesting this talk is of interest to Chinese people. Er, was subtitled in Chinese. I guess it's gone now. Anyway, it was Eric Schmidt answering audience questions, moderated by Erik Brynjolfsson.
Anyway, Eric Schmidt has 2 predictions:
He predicts that LLMs will soon have 1 million token context windows. Which he says is 20 books, but I estimated 1,500 pages which is more like 3 books.
The next thing he predicts is "text-to-action" AIs. You give it text, and it does the actions you ask for. How it does this is by writing code (e.g. Python) and then running it. This is also called "agentic" AI.
There's a chemistry lab where knowledge from experiments is fed back into the AI which it uses to plan the next experiments, which are carried out overnight (by humans? by robotics?) and this is accelerating knowledge in chemistry and material science. I don't remember the name, but if you watch the video, eh, oh wait.
He envisions a future where, for example, TikTok gets banned, and you could go to an LLM and say, "Make me a TikTok clone", and you can just repeat that over and over and over until you hit upon a clone that "goes viral".
A few other points of note: He said he oscillates between thinking open source models and closed source models will win. It seems like only closed source is possible because of the huge amount of money involved. But then open source catches up and he flips to thinking the other way.
With regards to China, he says the US is ahead and has to stay ahead. Because of the huge amounts of money and expertise involved, only a few countries can compete -- the US and China and maybe a few others -- but not the EU because Brussels screwed them. Everyone else just lives in the AI world the giants are creating. With regard to national security, countries will align themselves with the US or China, with the EU, South Korea, Japan, etc, in our camp.
Brrrrrp! I found a video with clips from the Stanford talk with commentary (from Matthew Berman) that seems to have not been taken down. He (Berman) focuses on things in the talk I didn't mention, like how CUDA locks people into Nvidia and that's responsible for Nvidia's disproportionately high market cap, and how people at Google aren't working 80-hour weeks any more but he thinks they should be.
