Eric Schmidt on AI, the Battle with China, and the Future of America

**Eric Schmidt** (0:02)
I honestly believe that the AI revolution is underhyped. Now, why is this all important?

**Chamath** (0:09)
Eric Schmidt is here. He's the former Google Executive Chairman and CEO.

**Eric Schmidt** (0:12)
These agents are going to be really powerful, and they'll start to work together. We're soon going to be able to have computers running on their own, deciding what they want to do. Now we have the arrival of a new non-human intelligence, which is likely to have better reasoning skills than humans can have.

**Chamath** (0:29)
So if you were emperor of the world for one hour...

**Eric Schmidt** (0:33)
The most important thing I'd do is make sure that the West wins. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome...

**David Sacks** (0:40)
Eric Schmidt.

**Eric Schmidt** (0:49)
Looking good. Thank you. Good to see you.

**Chamath** (0:52)
Good to see you.

**Eric Schmidt** (0:52)
You're looking Schveldt, Eric.

**Chamath** (0:54)
You're looking Schveldt.

**Eric Schmidt** (0:55)
Very nice.

**Chamath** (0:56)
Schveldt and Dapr.

**Eric Schmidt** (0:57)
David, good to see you.

**David Sacks** (0:59)
David Sacks is here as well.

**Eric Schmidt** (1:00)
It's like a reunion of all of our former companies, David. Why did you quit after all?

**David Sacks** (1:06)
Yes. My old boss.

**Eric Schmidt** (1:10)
What was it like working with young Friedberg? Take us back.

**David Sacks** (1:14)
Can I tell a story? We have to come down to Orange County and they're like, hey, we're going to take the plane. It was Eric's plane. We get on the plane and then he goes up and flies the plane. I'm in the back of the plane by myself.

**Eric Schmidt** (1:25)
King Air?

**David Sacks** (1:25)
I'm like the CEO of Google flying me down to Orange County. It was incredible. That was my first time actually hanging out with Eric.

**Eric Schmidt** (1:32)
It was my Gulf Stream. That's right. He was way too smart. Way too smart. Way too smart. Was he focused? Did he contribute? Did he move the needle? But he was very smart.

**Chamath** (1:42)
Okay.

**Eric Schmidt** (1:44)
That's kind of our consensus on the plot as well. Look, you guys know this guy well. He's really that smart. So he taught me more stuff than most of any of the employees at Google. And then you left.

**David Sacks** (1:56)
Well, tell us what you've been doing. So, no, no, before that, I got to ask you this question.

**Eric Schmidt** (2:00)
It was a recently deleted video from Stanford. Oh, no. You had a moment of clarity where you said, hey, you know, like, at Google, people are like too much work life balance.

**David Sacks** (2:11)
They need to commit.

**Eric Schmidt** (2:12)
They need to work harder. We had Sergey at the last event. He's going back to work. So Sergey got the message. Predicting Sergey's behavior is something I can fail at. I tried for 20 years. I am not in favor of essentially working at home. And the reason I mean, many of you guys all work at home to some degree, but your careers are already established. But think about a 20 something who has to learn how the world works. And you know, they come out of Berkeley or Dartmouth and they're very well educated. When I think about how much I learned when I was at Sun, just listening to these elder people who were five or 10 years older than I was, argue with each other in person. How do you recreate that in this new thing? And I'm in favor of work-life balance. And that's why people work for the government.
Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. If you're going to be in tech and you're going to win, you're going to have to make some trade-offs. And you remember, we're up against the Chinese. The Chinese work-life balance consists of 996, which is 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week. By the way, the Chinese have clarified that this is illegal. However, they all do it. That's who you're competing against. I brought everybody back to office. It's so much better.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:38)
So let's just pick up on that theme.

**Eric Schmidt** (3:40)
So you don't need to defend the government.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:42)
No, no, believe me, I don't see the need to. I'm an unpaid part-time advisor to the government. So, but we are in this high-tech competition with China. They obviously care about AI too. They're trying to race ahead. How do you, I understand that you recently made a trip there. How do you handicap this, this, this competition?

**Eric Schmidt** (4:03)
Well, you and I just talked about this as part of your, as your incredibly important work in the White House. I have thought that China and the United States were competing at the peer level in AI and that the good work that you have done and your predecessors did to restrict chips were slowing them down. They're really doing something more different than I thought. They're not pursuing crazy AGI strategies, partly because of the hardware limitations that you put in place, but partly because the depth of their capital markets don't exist. They can't raise, based on a wing and a prey or a hundred million dollars or an equivalent to build the data centers. They just can't do it. And so the result is they're very focused on taking AI and applying it to everything. And so the concern I have is that while we're pursuing AGI, which is incredibly interesting and we should talk about it, all of us will be affected by this, we better also be competing with the Chinese in day-to-day stuff. Consumer apps, this is something you understand very well, Chamath. Consumer apps, robots and so forth and so on. I saw all the Shanghai robotics companies and these guys are attempting to do in robots what they've successfully done with electric vehicles. And their work ethic is incredible, they're well-funded. It's not the crazy valuations that we have in America. They can't raise the capital. But they can win across that. The other thing the Chinese are doing, and I want to emphasize this is a major geopolitical issue, is that my own background is open source. In the audience you all know open source means open code, open weights means open training data. China is competing with open weights and open training data, and the US is largely and majority focused on closed weights, closed data. That means that the majority of the world, think of it as the Belt and Road Initiative, are going to use Chinese models and not American models. Now I happen to think the West and democracies are correct, and I'd much rather have the proliferation of large language models than that learning be done based on Western values.