[SNIPPET] Eric Schmidt - "Every high school in the world should teach prompt engineering"

Matthieu Stefani (0:05)

We are the average of the people we spend the most time with. My name is Mathieu Stéphanie, and I invite entrepreneurs, athletes, and artists to raise my average, and yours. Just before we begin this episode, I'll switch to French for a brief moment to thank my sponsors.

And this next generation, so I have three kids, Julie is eight years old, Eli is 11, and Louis is 14

Eric Schmidt (0:30)

You're lucky.

Matthieu Stefani (0:31)

Yeah, I am.

Eric Schmidt (0:32)

It's a gift.

Matthieu Stefani (0:33)

Yeah, it is.

What should they study ? I mean, I know it's a tough question, but it's...

Eric Schmidt (0:39)

I used to say biology, because I thought that the next frontier was biology. What I think now is it's deep reasoning. And deep reasoning is getting the computer to do the thinking that you as a human are unable to do, because it's smarter in some dimension than you.

So, for example, every high school in the world, including for your kids, should have a class of what the technical term is called prompt engineering, learning how to use the tools. Now, you are already, you yourself are doing this with OpenClaw and others, but if you think about it, your 14-year-old, his or her life will be determined by how effectively they can use these powerful tools.

Matthieu Stefani (1:26)

See, Eric, I'm glad because yesterday I was explaining to her, she was telling me her physics teacher was dramatic. She couldn't understand anything. He would say, that's the result, just deal with it. And she told me, I understand it. And I'm ashamed to say to you, dad, but thanks to Chad GPT. And I was like, don't be ashamed as far as you just...

Eric Schmidt (1:45)

Explain this to me again.

Matthieu Stefani (1:47)

And as far as you understand how it works. And then afterwards she explained it to the whole classroom. And I said, you should be proud of it.

Eric Schmidt (1:54)

No, no, no, no shame. And if you're a teenage girl, the ability to master something is part of that identity. One of my friends is a very famous mathematician. And I said, what was it like ? And he said, well, I was 15 or so forth. And I was upset and confused about who I was. And then I discovered that I could discover things.

And it gave me, he didn't say it, but what he meant was street cred. You know, he looked hot or powerful or whatever he cared about to his classmates. You know, he was like, I'm cool.

So I think one of the things that we should try to do in society is to get the joy of discovery, especially in the high school period, where a lot of that happens, and get people to say, you know, I'm good. Another example, I have a large, because of my success, I have many assets and I have a large organization that manages them, philanthropic donations, personal assets, that kind of stuff. And I've been running around asking everyone to show me their latest ideas of how they will use these to make their jobs better. So an example would be that I have a group that works on a house and they said, well, we thought we would just check all the bills. And I said, okay.

Matthieu Stefani (3:09)

Cool.

Eric Schmidt (3:09)

And it turns out there are so many bills that they had not been tracking what was going on. And they were very proud of themselves. It doesn't matter whether I thought it was good or bad. They were proud of themselves because they discovered it on their own.

The person who runs MyFinances, who's very, very talented, called me up one day and said, do you realize that I can get my financial reports in an hour instead of waiting a week ? And I go, yes, but she discovered it.

So the key thing about AI in terms of teaching it is that the individual has to get their head around why it's good for them. If you treat it as a, you have to do this, you have to do this, you're gonna lose. But if you tell people the joy of discovery, another example, I have a friend who's decided that all of the architectures that we're using are wrong. Now, he's a scientist and I have no idea if he's right or not, but he makes an assertion, excuse the technical stuff for a minute, that the way all the AI works is it's Gaussian. It uses the most probable next word. So technically what this means is that in you have a very many parameterized space, you're picking the most likely point in each of those spaces. And somehow that predicts the right word and it produces great pros. But there are plenty of systems in the world that are non-linear, they're non-Gaussian. And deep inside of these systems, there's a presumption of a Gaussian world or statistically, in your audience that's mathematical, know what I'm talking about.