How Companies Are Getting AI Wrong (ft. Kai-Fu Lee)

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Kai-Fu Lee (0:30)

I think Western societies will not tolerate it. I think Asian societies will tolerate it if there is a tremendous benefit. Then the two cultures will diverge because the Asian cultures will be super powered with this digital immortality, infinite memory thing that knows everything.

Ann Berry (0:48)

That's Kai-Fu Lee, a 40-year AI veteran speaking just before Jensen Huang resigned as CEO of NVIDIA, whose work started in the lab, including building a program to play a fellow that won the US National Computer Tournament in 1989, and whose path has taken him through Apple, Microsoft, and Google to venture investing and the role of CEO of Zero One AI today. Born in Taiwan, growing up in Tennessee from the age of 11, and working in both the United States and China, Kai-Fu has a uniquely global perspective on the real corporate use cases for AI. The jobs that are at risk, the new skills that will be prized. And how cultural differences between the East and the West are likely to have those uses diverge. We discuss all of this and his new book, AI Native, in an incredible conversation that I just wished could have gone longer. Let's get into it.

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Kai-Fu, talk to me a minute. You've had such a storied career. You were just saying before the cameras rolled that Andrew Ross Sorkin called you the OG of AI. And you've been in these places with halos around them from a tech perspective, Google and Microsoft and Apple.

Just clarify, you're based now in Beijing. What are you up to there?

Kai-Fu Lee (3:17)

So most of my time, I spend running a company called 01AI.

And we focus on AI transformation for traditional companies. Because I think that's a huge challenge, imperative, but critical for them to do.

Ann Berry (3:34)

Well, that's what your new book's about. So AI Native is your new book. And I absolutely tore through it. My copy is just every page is dogged. I've got notes written inside it. And I'll explain why. Look, I've run businesses, I've been a CEO, including in manufacturing, not tech, per se.

Everything you said resonated. This idea that bad news never tends to get to the top in time, that people sort of nod their heads and agree they need to adopt a new technology and then it kind of disappears and getting the way with all to do it's tough. So I agreed with so many of the premises you laid out, but talk to us if you don't mind Kai-Fu about the number one way you think companies should start really getting their arms around putting AI to work.

Kai-Fu Lee (4:22)

Yeah, it's the number one way is the CEO must use it and must use it to run the company better because AI is getting so smart that this IQ 300 person walks into your company and you say go work at customer service. That can't be right. You should say, well, go help the CEO make decisions and go fetch more data because you have an infinite memory. So what we propose is that build a special tool for the CEO. It has to be a special tool because many CEOs don't use tools, right? You would think CEOs ought to use ERP, but I don't know a single CEO who can actually use ERP. They tell their assistant to do it and they flip through the papers. But this time is different. This time, this is not a ChatGPT. This is a special agent built for the CEO to better manage the company. So, and this agent has access to all of the company's data. That, of course, the CEO is privy to that. These are all company property.