Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google: "The AI revolution is underhyped. None of us is prepared for the implications of this." He opens with a warning: "The arrival of this new intelligence will profoundly change our country and the world in ways we cannot fully understand." He explains what's happening right now in the industry: "We're very very quickly developing AI programmers. And these AI programmers will replace traditional software programmers. We're building in the next year AI mathematicians that are as good as the top level graduate students in math. This is happening very quickly." Schmidt argues most people fundamentally misunderstand what AI has become: "Today you think of AI as ChatGPT, but what it really is is a reasoning and planning system that we've never seen before." The implications, he warns, extend far beyond software. These new systems demand resources at an industrial scale we've never encountered. "They're going to need a lot more computation than we've ever had. They're going to need a lot more energy." To illustrate the scale of the energy crisis ahead, Schmidt offers a sobering comparison: "People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers. Now just to do the translation, an average nuclear power plant in the United States is 1 gigawatt. How many nuclear power plants can we make in one year where we're planning this 10 gigawatt data center? Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is." @ericschmidt shares an estimate he finds most likely: "Data centers will require an additional 29 gigawatts of power by 2027 and 67 more gigawatts by 2030. These things are industrial at a scale I have never seen in my life." Schmidt says the industry needs high skills immigration, light touch regulation around cyber and bio threats, and most critically, energy in all forms. He's personally investing in fusion, but acknowledges it won't arrive in time. He closes with the stakes: "When you build these systems, you have intelligence in the computer and then eventually human level intelligence. Some people think it's within 3 to four years. Then after that, you have something called super intelligence, the intelligence that's higher than of humans. We believe as an industry that this could occur within a decade. It is crucial that America get there first."
