Eric Schmidt: Singularity's Arrival, the 92-Gigawatt Problem, and Recursive Self-Improvement Timelines | 241

**Peter H. Diamandis** (0:00)
We're living through a historic moment right now.

**Eric Schmidt** (0:02)
The next thing that's really interesting and terrifying also is recursive self-improvement, but we don't have it yet. What we do have, I keep asking my friends, when does the asymptote arrive and when does the curve slow down? It is actually true that there is a limit to our craziness. We have not found it yet. And that's the great thing, frankly, about America. The American competitor, not enemy, but competitor, is China. They have lots of money, they are very, very smart, their work ethic is equal or stronger than ours, and they dominate key industries. But at the moment, it sure looks to me like the robotic hardware of China is the winner. I don't want to lose the robotic revolution, in my view, the way we lost the electric vehicle revolution, at least on the low end. It's possible, but it requires...

**Peter H. Diamandis** (1:02)
Eric, do you remember the first time we met?

**Eric Schmidt** (1:05)
Yes, Larry Page introduced me to you because he was on your board.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (1:08)
Yes, yeah. So I got a call from Eric out of the blue, which was a great honor, and said, Larry says I should meet you. When are you going to be down here in, or up here in San Francisco? I was in LA, and I said, how about tomorrow?

**Eric Schmidt** (1:25)
Typical beater.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (1:27)
And I remember something which was so, I love the story. We sat down to lunch at Charlie's Cafe, and of course I'm running a non-profit, and my mission is always raising capital for a non-profit. And so we sit down to lunch, and before we get started, you said, Peter, so what is your highest level of giving of membership? And I said, well, Eric, it's our vision circle for $2.5 million. And you go, okay, I'm in. Now let's have a conversation.

**Dave Blundin** (1:56)
I'll buy them all.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (1:57)
It was crazy.

**Dave Blundin** (2:01)
Oh, there you go.

**Eric Schmidt** (2:03)
But you know, somehow you have the reason that when we spoke, the reason I wanted to come here is this has become the epicenter of the abundance movement. And the abundance movement is correct. That's the important thing.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (2:17)
Thank you.

**Eric Schmidt** (2:17)
Yeah.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (2:21)
I just want to thank you for all the support you've given myself, Xprize, all these years. So grateful for that. So let's start with a question that I'd love to hear you expand on, which is we're living through a historic moment right now. Right? Could you define the moment we're in and give us sort of a state of the union of what's going on in AI?

**Eric Schmidt** (2:48)
We're 10% or 15% into the impacts of this. And you can see it, you can feel it, and some of it will happen, some of it will take longer. Right? So for example, hardware takes longer than software. Sort of robots take longer than digital systems on traditional hardware, things like that.
We've not, the next thing that's really interesting and terrifying also is recursive self-improvement. It's not happening yet. And so it's easy to convince yourself that you're gonna have human agents, sorry, computer agents that are human-like completely within a year or two. We don't have the science for that yet. People are working on it. I can describe how I think it will play out. But we don't have it yet. What we do have is reasoning systems that are perfect partners for human beings, for good and bad. And that has a lot of implications. So if we stop today, which we're not, and it's not stoppable or controllable by any government or any single individual or corporation, we would still have advanced humanity because of these reasoning agents.

**Peter H. Diamandis** (3:59)
How fast do you imagine this is going to accelerate?

**Eric Schmidt** (4:05)
There's a thing which I call the San Francisco Consensus. And the reason I call it is because everyone in San Francisco believes this. Everyone I know anyway. Which is that it's easy to understand. This is the year of agents, which we can discuss, why agents will take over everything this year. During this year, the scaling of the use of agents and reasoning will sort of grow at this enormous rate. Everybody is out of hardware, everyone is out of electricity. It's a real boom, right? It's like the biggest boom I've seen, and I've been through three or four of these in my career.
In this thinking, once you have recursive self-improvement, where the system can begin to improve itself, you have intelligence learning on its own. And it will, in this argument, it will learn faster than we can because we're biologically limited. And the way this is expressed in San Francisco, and I'll give a simple example, you have a tech company with a thousand fantastic AI researchers.