Latest interview of Elon Musk.
Bill Gates said there is no one in our time who has done more to push the bounds of science.
Innovation than you.
What's kind of going to say, well, that's a nice thing to have anyone say about you. Nice coming from Bill Gates. But oddly enough, when it comes to AI, actually, for around a decade, you've almost been doing the opposite and saying, hang on, you need to think about what we're doing and what we're pushing here, and what do we do to make this safe? And actually maybe we shouldn't be pushing as faster or as hard as we are.
I mean, you've been doing it for a decade, Like what was it that caused you to think about it that way? And you know, why do we need to be worried?
Yeah? I've been somewhat of a Cassandra for quite a while where people would I tell you, like, we should really be concerned about AI, and the'd be like, what are you talking about? Like I've never really had any experience with it since I was immersed in technology. I have been immersed in technology for a long time. I could see it coming, so, but I think this year
was that there's been a number of breakthroughs. I mean, you know, at the point in which someone can see a dynamically created video of themselves, you know, like so you can make a video of you say anything in real time or me, and so there's sort of the deep videos, which are really incredibly good, in fact, sometimes more convincing than real ones and deep real and then and then obviously things like chat GPT were quite remarkable, and now I saw a GPT one, GPT two, GPT three,
GPD four that you know, the whole sort of lead up to that, So it was easy for me to kind of see where it's going. If you just sort of extrapolate the points on a curve and as seeing that tread will continue, then we will have profound artificial intelligence, and obviously at the level that far exceeds human intelligence. So but I'd see at this point that people are taking safety seriously, and I like, I say thank you for holding this AI safety conference. I think actually it
will go down in history as being very important. I think it's really quite profound, and I do think overall that the potential is there for artificial intelligence AI to have most likely a positive effect and to create a future of abundance where there is no scarcity of goods and services. But it is somewhat of the magic gene problem where if you have a magic gene that can grab all the wishes, usually those stories don't end well. Who careful what you wish for? Including wishes?
So you talked a little bit about the summit and thank you for being engaged in it, which has been great and people enjoyed having you there pulling in this dialogue. Now, one of the things that we achieved today in the meetings between the companies and the leaders was an agreement that externally, ideally, governments should be doing safety testing of models before their relief. I think this is something that
you've spoken about a little bit. It was something we worked really hard on because you know, my job in government is to say, hang on, there is a potential risk, and not a definite risk, but a potential risk of something that could be bad. And my job is to protect the country and we can only do that if we develop the capability we need in our safety institute and then go in and make sure we can test the models before they are released. Delight, did that happened today.
But you know, what's your view on what we should be doing. Right, You've talked about the potential risk. Right again, we don't know, but you know, what are the types of things governments like ours should be doing to manage and de gate against those risks.
Well, I generally think that it is good for government to play a role when the public safety is at risk. So, you know, really, for the vast majority of software, the public safety is not at risk. If the app crashes on your phone, your laptop, it's not a massive catastrophe. But when talking about digital superintelligence, I think, which does pose a risk to the public, then there is a role for government to play to safeguard the interest of
the public. And this is of course true in many fields, you know, aviation, cars, you know, I deal with regulators throughout the world because of stalling being communications, rockets being aerospace, and cars, you know, being vehicle transport. So I'm very familiar with dealing with with regulators, and I actually agree with the vast majority of regulations. There's a few that I disagree with from time to time, but zero point one percent, probably less than one percent of regulations I
disagree with. So there is some concern from people in Silicon Valley who who have never dealt with regulators before, and they think that this is going to just crush innovation and slow them down and be annoying. But and it will be annoying, It's true. They're not wrong about that. But I think there's we've learnt over the years that
having a referee is a good thing. And if you look at any sports game, there's always a referee, and nobody's suggesting, I think, to have a sports game without one. And I think that's the right way to think about this, is for governed to be a referee, to make sure the sportsmanlike conduct and that the public safety is you know, is addressed. That we care about the public safety because I think there might be at times too much optimism about technology. And I speak I say that as a technologist.
I mean, so I ought to know and like I said that, on balance, I think that the AI will be a forcible good most likely, but the probability of it going bad it's not zero percent. Yeah, so we just need to mitigate the downside potential.
And then how you talk about referee and that's what we're demonstrate.
The yeah, well there we go, I mean, you know, and we talked about this in Demos and I discussed this a long time.
Ago, like literally facing right and actually.
Demoster his credit and the credit of people in the industry, did say that to us.
You say it's not right. Yeah, that Demis and his colleagues are marking their own homework.
Right.
There needs to be someone independent, and that's why we've developed the safety Institute here. I mean, do you think governments can develop the expertise. One of the things we need to do is they hang on you know, Demis and Exam all the others have got a lot of very smart people doing this. Governments need to quickly tool up capability wise, personnel wise, which is what we're doing.
I mean, do you think it is possible.
For governments to do that fast enough, given how quickly the technology is developing, or what do we need to do to make sure we do it quick enough?
No, I think it's a great point you're making. The pace of AI is faster than any technology I've seen in history by far, and it seems to be growing in capability by at least fivefold peraps tenfold per year. It'll certainly grow by an automatitude next year.
Yeah.
So and government isn't used to moving at that speed. But I think even if there are not firm regulations, even if there's not even if there isn't an enforcement capability, so we're having insight and being able to highlight concerns to the public will be very powerful. So even if that's all that's accomplished, I think that will be very good.
Okay, y, well, hopefully we can do better than that.
Hopefully.
Yeah, yeah, no, but that's how fair. Actually we were talking before it was striking. You know, you're someone who spent their life in technology. They're living More's law. And what it was interesting over the last couple of days talking to everyone who's doing the development of this, and I think you concur with this is just the pace of advancement here is unlike anything all of you have seen in your careers and technology.
Is that fair because you've got these kind of.
Compounding effects from the hardware and the data and the personnel.
Yeah, I mean the two currently the two leading centers for a development are the San Francisco Bay area and the sort of London area, And there are many other places where it's being done, but those are the two leading areas. So I think if you know, if the United States and the UK and China are sort of aligned on safety, that's all going to be. That's really that's where that's where the leadership is general.
And you actually you mentioned China there.
So I took a decision to invite China to summit over the last three days, and it was not easy decision. A lot of people criticize me for you know, my viewers, if you're going to try it essential serious conversation, you need to. But what would your thoughts? You do business all around the world. You just talked about it there. Should we be engaging with them? Can we trust them? Is that the right thing to have done?
If we don't, If China is not on board with AI safety, it's somewhat of a moot situation. The single biggest objection that I get to any kind of AI regulation or sort of safety controls are well, China is not going to do it, and therefore they will just jump into the lead and exceed us all. But actually China is willing to participay in safety and thank you for inviting them, and they you know, I think we should thank China for for attending. When I was in China,
earlier this year. My main subject of discussion with the leadership in China was AI safety and saying that this is really something that they should care about, and they took it seriously and you are too, which is great. And having them here I think was essential. Really, if they're not participants, it's pointless.
Yeah, that's and I think we were pleased.
I think they were engaged yesterday in the discussions and actually ended up signing the same communicy that everyone else did. Great, which is a good stop, right, And I said, if we need everyone to approach us in a similar way, if we're going to have a realistic chance of resolving it. I was going to You talked about innovation earlier and regulation being annoying.
There was a good debate today we had about.
Open source and I think you've kind of been a proponent of algorithmic transparency and making some of the ex algorithms public and actually we were talking about every hint and on the way in. He's particularly been very concerned about open source models being used.
By bad actors.
You've got a group of people who say they are critical to innovation happening in that distributed way.
Look, it's a trick.
There's probably no perfect answer, and there is a tricky balance. What are your thoughts on how we should approach this open source question or where should we be targeting whatever regulatory or monitoring that we're going.
To do well. The open source algorithms and data tend to lag the closed source by six to twelve, but given the rate of improvement that there's actually there for quite a big difference between the closed source in the open If things are improving by a factor of let's say five or more than being a year behind is you're five times worse. So it's a pretty big difference.
And that might be actually an okay situation, but it certainly we'll get to the point where you've got open source AI that can do that, that will start to approach human level intelligence or PAPS succeeded. I don't know quite what to do about it. I think it's somewhat in neeverment, there'll be some amount of open source, and I guess I would have a slight bias towards open source because at least you can see what's going on. It wears a closed source. You don't know what's going
on now. It should be said with AI that even if it's an open source, do you actually know what's going on. Because if you've got a gigantic data file and you know sort of billions of days of weights and parameters, you can't just read it and see what it's going to do. It's a gigantic file of inscrutable numbers. You can test it when you run it. You can test it. You can run a bunch of tests to see what it's going to do. But it's probabilistic as
opposed to deterministic. It's not like traditional programming where you've got you've got very discrete logic and the outcome is very predictable and you can read each line and see what each line's going to do. A neural net is just a much of probabilities. I mean, it sort of ends up being a giant Comma separated value file. It's like our digital guide is a CSP file. Really, Okay, that is kind of what it is.
Yeah, Now at that point you've just made is one that we have been talking about a lot, because again conversation with the people are developing their technology.
Make the point that you've just made. It is not like normal.
Software where there's predictability about inputs improving leading to this particular output improving, and as the models iterate and improve, we don't quite know what's going to come out the other end. I think we'd agree with that, which is why I think there is this bias that we need to get in there while the training runs are being done before the models are released, to understand what is this new iteration broad about in terms of capability, which it sounds like you would agree with.
I was going to shift goes a little bit on.
You know, you've talked a lot about human consciousness human agency, which it actually might strike people as strange given that you are known for being such a brilliant innovator and technologist, but it's quite heartfelt when I hear you talk about it and the importance of maintaining that agency in technology and.
Preserving human consciousness. Now it kind of links.
The thing I was going to ask is when I do interviews or talk to people out and about in this job about AI, the thing that comes up most actually is it probably not so much the stuff we've been talking about, but jobs. It's what is AI mean for my job? Is it going to mean that I don't have a job or my kids are not going to have a job.
Now.
Answer as a policymaker, as a leader is actually, AI is already creating jobs, and you can see that in the companies.
That are starting.
Also, the way it's being used is a little bit more as a co pilot necessarily versus replacing the person. There's still human agency, but it's helping you do your job better, which is a good thing. And as we've seen with technological revolutions in the past, clearly there's change in the labor market.
The amount of jobs.
I was quoting an MIT study today that they did a couple of years ago, something like sixty percent of the jobs at that moment didn't exist forty years ago, So hard to predict. And my job is to create an incredible education system, whether it's at school, whether it's retraining people at any point in their career, because ultimately, if we've got a skill population, they'll be able to keep up with the pace of change and have a
good life. But you know that it's still a concern, and you know, what would your kind of observation be on AI and the impact of labor markets and people's jobs and how they should feel about that as they think about.
This, well, I think we are seeing the most disruptive force in history here. You know, where we have for the first time, we will have the first time something that is smarter than the smartest human and that I mean it's hard to say exactly what that moment is, but there will come a point where no job is needed. You can have a job if you want to have a job for sort of personal satisfaction, but the AI will be able to do everything. So I don't know
if that makes people comfortable uncomfortable. You know. That's why I say, if you wish for a magic genie that gives you any wishes you want and there's no limit, you don't have those three limits three wish limits, not since you have many wishes as you want. So it's both good and bad. One of the challenges in the future will be how do we find meaning in life if you have a magic genie that can do everything you want. I do think we's it's hard, you know.
Whene's when when there's new technology, it tends to have usually follow an S curve. In this case, we're going to be on the exponential portion of the S curve. For a long time and we have to ask for anything, and it won't be if we won't have universal basic income, we'll have universal high income. So in some in some sense, it will be somewhat of a leveler or an equalizer, because really, I think everyone will have access to this magic gene and you're able to ask any question. It
will certainly be good for education. It'll be the best tutor you could, the most patient tutor sit there all day, and there will be no shortage of goods and services. Will be an age of abundance. I think if I'd recommend people read in Banks, the Banks culture books are probably the best in visioning. In fact, not probably, they're definitely by far the best envisioning of an a future. There's nothing even close. So I'd recommend, really recommend Banks.
I'm a very big fan. All these books are good. There's not Jay which one all of them. So that's that'll give you a sense of what is a I guess a fairly utopian pro toopian future with with Ai, Yeah, which is.
Good from an as you said, it's a universal high income, which is a nice phrase, and that's it's good for a materialistic sense of abundance. Actually, that kind of then leads to the question.
That you pose. Right, I'm someone who believes, you know, work gives you meaning. I write a lot about that. As you know, I think work is a good thing.
It, you know, gives people purpose in their lives. And if you then remove a large chunk of that, you know, what does that mean?
And where do you get that?
You know, where do you get that drive, that motivation, that purpose. I mean, you're talking about it. You work a lot of our you know, as I was.
Mentioning when we were talking earlier, I have to somewhat engage in the liberty suspension of disbelief because I'm putting so much blood, sweat and tears into a work project and burning the you know, three am oil. Then I'm like, wait, why am I doing this? I just wait for the AI to do it. I'm just lashing myself for no reason. It must be a glutton for punishment.
Called demos and tell them to hurry up and then you can have a holiday. Right, it's a plan. Yeah, No, it's a Look, it's a tricky.
It's a tricky thing because I think, you know, part of our job is to make sure that we can navigate to that very I think largely positive place and help people through it between now and then, because these things bring a lot about change in the labor market as we've seen.
Yeah, I think it's probably is generally a good thing because you know, there are a lot of jobs that are uncomfortable or dangerous or which sort of tedious, and the computer will have no problem doing that. We're happy to do that all day long. So you know, it's fun to cook food, but it's not that fun to wash the dishes, but the computer is perfectly happy to
watch the dishes. I guess there is. You know, we still have a sports like where where humans compete and like the Olympics, and obviously a machine can can go faster than any human, but we still have we saw humans race against each other and have all, you know, have these sports competitions against each other where even though the machines are better, which there's all I guess compunity who can be the best human at something, and people
do find pulforment in that. So I guess that's perhaps a good example of how even when machines are faster than.
Us, stronger than us, we still find a way.
We still enjoy competing against other humans, so at least who's the best human.
It's a good it's a good analogy, and we've been talking a lot about managing the risks. Just before we move on and finish on AI is just talk a little bit about the opportunities. You know, you're engaged in lots of different companies. You're being an obvious one, which is doing some exciting stuff. You touched on the thing that I'm probably most excited about, which is an education. Yeah, and I think many people will have seen sous video
from earlier this year. Is ted talk about as you talked about it's like a personal tutor.
Yeah, an amazing personal tutor.
An amazing personal tutor.
And we know the difference in learning having that personal his tutor is incredible compared to class from learning. So if you can have every child have a personal tutor specifically for them that then just evolves with them over time, that could be extraordinary. So that you know, for me, I look at it, I think, gosh, that is within reach at this point, and that's one of the benefits
I'm most excited about. When you look at the landscape of things that you see as possible, what is it that you know you are particularly excited about.
I think certainly AI tutors are going to be the amazing perhaps already are. I think there's also perhaps companionship, which may seem odd because how can the computer really be your friend? But if you haven't that has memory, you know, and remembers all of your interactions and has read every you're going to actually like give it permission to read everything you've ever done, so really will know
you better than anyone, perhaps even yourself. And where you can talk to it every day and those conversations spoiled upon each other, you will actually have a great friend as long as that friend can stay your friend and not get turned off or something. Don't turn off my friends. But I think that will actually be a real thing.
And I one of my sons is sort of has some learning disabilities and has trouble making friends actually, and I was like, well, you know, he AI friend would actually be a great friend.
Okay, you know that was a surprising answer. That's actually it's worth worth reflecting on that. That's really interesting. I mean we're already seeing it actually as we deliver psychotherapy anyway, now doing far more by digitally and by telephone to people and it's making a huge difference, and you can see a world in which actually, you know, AI can provide that social benefit to people. Just a quick question on X and then we should open it up to everybody.
You made a change when in one of the made many changes, but one of the one of.
The changes that letter. Yet thing about it, you really.
Do, really do one of the changes which you know kind of you know, it goes into the space that you know we have to operate in. And this balance between free speech and moderation is you know, we grapple.
With as politicians.
You were grappling with your own version of that, and you moved away from a kind of manual human.
Way of doing it the moderation to the community and that.
Yeah, and I think that's it was an interesting change, right, It's not what everyone else has done. It would be good, you know what's what was the reasoning behind that and why do you think that is a better way to do that?
Yeah. Part of the problem is if you if you empower people as sensors, then well there's going to be some amount of bias that they have. And then whoever appoints the sensors is effectively in control of information. So then the idea behind community notice, well, how do we have a consensus driven I mean, so it's not really censoring it, but consensus driven approach to truth. How do we how do we make things the least amount untrue? Could you say, like you can't perhaps get to pure truth,
but you can aspire to be more truthful. So the thing about comurnity notes, it doesn't actually delete anything, It simply adds context. Now that context could be this thing is untrue for the following reasons. But importantly, with community notes, everything is open source actually, so you can see the software, every line of the software, you can see all of the data that went into a community note, and you
can independently create that community note. So if you've got if you see manipulations of data, you can actually highlight that and say, well this this appears to be some gaming of the system, and you can suggest improvement. So it's maximum transparency, which.
Is I think combined with the kind of wisdom of the crowds and trying to get to a better answer.
And really one of the key elements of community notes is that in order for a note to be shown, people who have historically disagreed must agree, and there is a bit of AI usage here. So this will populate a parameter space around each contributor to the community notes, and then a parameter space so everyone's got basically these vectors associated with them, which so it's not as simple as right or left, it's saying, it's more it's several
hundred vectors. That that because things are more complicated than something right, right or left. And then we'll do sort of inverse correlation, say like, okay, these people generally disagree, but they agree about this note, so then that so then that that that gives the note credibility. Okay, yeah, that's that's the core of it, and it's working quite well. I get to see a note actually be present for more than a few hours, but that that is incorrect.
So the batting average is extremely good. And when I ask people say, oh, they're worried about community notes sort of being disinformation, like send me one, and then they can't, so so I think it's I think it's quite good. I mean, the general aspiration is with the X platform is to inform and entertain the public and to be as accurate as possible and as truthful as possible, even if someone doesn't like the truth. You know, people don't
always like the truth always, but that's the aspiration. And I think if we are, if we stay true to the truth, then I think we'll find that people use the system to learn what is going on and to I think actually truth pays, so I think it'll be well, I mean, assuming you don't want to engage your self delusion, then I think it's the smart move.
Excellent, very helpful. Right, let's open it up to all our guests here, and.
We've got some microphones that'll company I find you have, We've got yes, go for it.
Thank you, good evening.
Alice Bentink from Entrepreneur. First, thank you for a fascinating conversation. I suppose a question for each of you, Prime Minister. The UK has some of the best universities in the world, we have the talent. What will it takes the UK to be a real breeding with unicorn companies? Being a founder in the UK is still a non obvious career choice for the most exceptional technical talent. What are the cultural elements that we need to put into place to change this?
Thank you? You want to go first?
Go for it? Sure? Well, You're right that there are cultural elements where you know, the culture should celebrate creating new companies and there should be a bias towards supporting small companies because the ones that need nurturing. The larger companies really don't need nurturing. So you know, just you can think of it's sort of like a garden. If it's a little sprout that needs needs nurturing, if it's a mighty ogre, doesn't need quite as much. So I
think that is a mindset change that is important. But I should mention that London is you know, London and San Francisco or the Bay Area are really the two centers for AI. So that so London is actually doing very well on that front. That the two I said, the two leading locations on Earth. You know, San Francisco's probably head of London, but London's really very strong. But London Area greater London home counties, I guess. So I'm just saying objectively this is the case. But you do
need that. You need the infrastructure, you need the landlords who are willing to rent to new companies. You need more firms and accounts that are willing to support new companies. And it's generally it is a mindset change, and I think some of that is happening, but I think really it's just culturally people need to decide this is a good thing. Yeah.
Yeah, no, Actually, well thanks for what you said about the UK. It's something that we work hard on. Lots of people in the room are part of what makes this a fabulous place for companies, including Alice. So that's what i'd say is my job is to get all the you know they're nuts and volts right, make sure that all of you are starting companies can raise the capital.
That you need everything from.
You know, you'll see funding with our incredible you know EI tax release all the way through.
To your late stage rounds.
And we need reform of our pension funds and the Chancellor's got a bunch of incredible reforms to unlock capital from all the people who have it and deploy it into growth equity.
Right.
That is a work in progress. We're not there yet, but I think we're making good progress. We need talent, we need people, so that means an education system that prioritizes the things that matter.
And you've seen my reforms.
I go on about more maths, more maths, more maths, but I think that it's important but also attracting the best and the brightest fit. If you look at our fastest growing companies in this country, and I think it's probably the same in the US, over half of them have a non British founder, right, And so that tells you we've got to be a place that is open
to the world's best and brightest entrepreneurial talent. So the visa regime that we've put in place, I think, does that makes it easy for those people to come here. And then actually it's the thing that we've spent the beginning of the session talking about the regulation, right, making sure that we've got a regulatory system that's pro innovation.
That.
Yeah, of course we always need guardrails on the things that will worry us, but we've got to create a space for people to innovate and do different things. Now, those are all my jobs. The thing that is tougher is the thing that Elon talked about, which is culture. Right, It's how do you transpose that culture from places like Silicon Valley across the world where people are unafraid to give up the security of a regular paycheck to go and start something and be comfortable with failure.
You talk about that a lot.
I think you talked about it more in when you're playing games, right, But you've got to be comfortable failing and knowing that.
That's just part of the process.
And that is as a tricky cultural thing to do overnight, but it's an important part of I think creating that.
Kind of environment.
Yeah, if you don't succeed with your first startup, it shouldn't be a sort of a catastrophic career ending exactly thing, it should be you know, well good I think should like should be like, well, you know, you gave it a good shot, you know, in now try again and exactly. Yeah. And it's so one thing I'm going to mention is, like I've seen, creating a company is sort of a
high risk, high reward situation. But I don't know quite what the how works In the UK, I think probably better than contenttle Europe, but I'm not sure how does the new give it. But if somebody's basically going to risk the life savings and with the beast story of startups fail, so I mean you hear about the startups that succeed, but most companies are most startups consist of you know, a massive amount of work followed by failure.
But that's actually most companies, and so it's a high risk, high reward and so the higher reward part does need to be there for it to make sense.
I think that was a very soft pitch for a tax policy. I mean, but actually I can tell you so like AI agree, and we have so we have I think relative to certainly European countries, but certainly the US is definitely California a much lower rate of capital gains tax, right, So for those people who are risking and growing something like, we think the reward should be there at the end. So it's twenty percent capital gains tax right.
And on stock options, I.
Don't know if we've got anyone from Index Ventures in the room. So Index one of our bleeding VC funds here, Okay, they do a regular report looking at most countries tax moment of stock options. And you know, when I was a Chancellor of Treasury sexual equivalent, you know, we were I think down we were pretty good, but we were fourth or fifth, and I said we need to for exactly the reason that you mentioned. I was like, this
has got to be the best place for renovative. We need to move that up and I think in the last iteration of that report we had because of the changes that Jeremy and I had made, we have moved up to I think second from memory. Hopefully that actould give you and everyone else some comfort that we recognize. That's important because when people work hard and risk things, yeah, they should be able to.
Enjoy the rewards and pigh award. Yeah.
And I think we have a We very much have a tax system that supports that. And those are the values that you know, I believe in, and I think most of us in this room probably do as well. Right, next, next question, I've got seven front of me, and then I'll come over here.
Gone, thanks so much.
We've talked about some really big ideas, global changing ideas. I'm really interested, particularly in the context of creation of science and technology superhubs and so on. How does that map onto the everyday lives of people living in say Austin, Texas, to choose not aroundin the more in my case Nottingham, East Midlands. What is how do you see that evolving for people you know every.
Day sort of every day effective AI for.
Context, Elon so Seib runs are equivalent of CDs, right or Walgreens. So you know, as I visited, right, so he's got millions of people coming in the shops every day, and it's making sure how do we make this relevant? I think that your question how is this relevant to that person? You know, maybe actually let me go I'll go first on that because I think it's a fair point.
I was just going over with the team a couple of things that we're doing because I was saying, how are we doing AI right now that it's making a difference to people's lives. And we have this thing called gov dot which is which actually when we when it happened several years ago, was a pioneering thing all the government information together on one website, so you need to
get a driving license, passport, any interaction with government. It was centralized in a very easy, relatively easy to use way.
Better than most.
So we're about to deploy AI across that platform. So that is something that I think you know, several million people a day use, right, So a large chunk of the popular is interacting with gov dot UK every single
day to do all these day to day tasks. Right, every one of your customers is doing all those things, and so we're about to deploy AI into that to make that whole process so much easier, because you know, some people will be like, look, well I'm currently here and I've lost my passport and my flights in five hours. At the moment, that would require you know how many
steps to figure out what you do. Yeah, Actually, when we deploy the AI, it should be that you could just literally say that and boom, this is what we're going to do, walk you through it, and that's going to benefit millions and millions of people every single day, right, Because that's a very practical way in my seat, that I can start using this technology to help people in their day to day lives, not just healthcare discoveries and
everything else that we're also doing. But I thought that's quite a powerful demonstration of literally your day to day customer seeing actually their just day to day life get a little bit easier because of something that you know, Elon Demis and others in this room of help.
Create Yeah, exactly. The most immediate thing is just being able to ask, like having a very smart friend that you can ask anything, you know, ask how to make something, how to solve any problem, and it'll tell you so. And obviously companies are going to adopt this, so I think maybe you'll have much better customer service. I guess
essentially that'll probably be the first thing you notice. And then if we talked about education, so having a tutor, so if you're trying to understand a subject, like having a phenomenal tutor on any subject, is that that's really pretty much there already almost. I mean we need to obviously, I need to stop hallucinating before you know it can't
give you. I mean that we still have a little bit of the problem where it can give you an answer that's confidently wrong with great grammar, you know, bullet points and everything in citations. It was not real. So that's to be Okay, we need to make sure it's not it's not it's not giving you confidently wrong tutor answers. But but that's going to happen pretty quickly where it is actually correct.
Yeah, say for any parent who was homeschooling and realizing what their kids needed to be helped with, yeah, that will.
Come as an enormous relief.
I think they're very good.
Right, have we got let's go questions over here, who have got only microphones or brand that perfect.
Brent Herman, So you know you've spoken eloquently about abundance in the Age of abundance, so it feels obviously with AI it's everything everywhere, all at once, but with robots, and to get the age of abundance will need a lot of robots. I know you're working out on robots
as well. Are there sort of constraints that we should think of our politician should be thinking of that we might get one country might get heavily behind in robots that can do all these things and end to the age of the bunds and therefore be it a strategic disadvantage.
Well, really, anything that can be actuated by a computer is effectively a robot. So you can think of frankly Tesla cars or robots on wheels. Anything that's connected to the Internet is effectively an endpoint actuator for artificial intelligence. So you've got Bust and Dynamics. Obviously they've been making
impressive robots for a while. I think they are at this point mostly owned by Hundai, So I guess I was probably gonna make robots that are humanoid and some interesting shapes that I wasn't just beating, like the one that looks like a has wheels and looks sort of like a kangaroo on wheels. I'm sure what that is, but it's a little demanded, frankly, but there's going to be all sorts of robots. You've got the company Dison, in which I think there's some pretty impressive things, and
I think the UK will not be behind. Actually on that front, the UK also has ARM, which is really the best one, one of the best peraps, the best in trip design in the world. Tesla uses a lot of ARM technology. Almost everyone is actually, so I have the UK is in a strong position. Germany obviously makes a lot of robots, industrial robots. I mean, I think generally countries that make robots of any kind, even if
they seem somewhat conventional, will be fine. I do think there is a safety concerned, especially with humanoid robots, because at least the car can't chase you into this building, not very easily, you know, or chase you over a tree, or you know, you can sort of run up a flight of stairs and get away from a tesla. I think it's a Stephen King movie about that. If your car gets possessed so, but if you have a humanoid robot,
it can basically chase you anywhere. So I think we should have some kind of hardwired local cutoff that you can't update from the internet. So anything that could be after updated from the internet obviously could be overridden. But if you have a local sort of off switch where you have to say a keyword or something, and then that puts the robot into a safe state, it's some kind of localized safe state ability and off switch, you know, where you don't have to get too close to the robot.
I don't know. So we've got millions of these things going over the place.
You're not selling it, just you know, I know.
I'm saying this is something we should be quite concerned about because Robert can follow you anywhere. Then you know what if they just one day get a software update and they're not so friendly anymore. We've got a James Cameron movie on our house.
It's actually, that's it's funny you're saying that, because in our session.
That we had today, I just I would say, who they.
Made exactly the same point right then, So we're talking about they talking about movies, actually about mentioning James Cameron. They're talking about James cameraon movies the same. If you think about it, it's not just those movies, but any of these movies, trains, subways, metros. They said, all these movies with the same plot fundamentally all and with the person turning it off right or finding a way to shut
the thing down. And they were making the same point that you were about the importance of actual.
Physical off switches.
Yeah, and so all the technology is great, but undamentally, the same movie has played out fifty times. We've all watched it and it's all fundamentally you know, you know the point I'm revenge right, all ends in pretty much the same way, with someone finding their way to just do the wrong. Which is kind of interesting that you've said a similar point. Right, it's not the it's not the obvious place you'd go to.
But I be one of the tests for the AI, which is so like blank is your favorite Gamers camera movie? Blank?
Excellent? Right, Yes, we got over there, yep, perfect, Hi.
Question for you both.
So I'm a founder of a AI and mL scale up in the third Center for AI which is leads in the North of England and bit biased. Since the launch of chat GBT. Three months after that, we saw a real increase in phishing attacks using much more sophisticated language patterns. What do we do to protect businesses consumers they trust this technology better, and how do we bring them along that journey with us?
Well, I think we shouldn't trusted that much. Actually, it is actually quite quite a significant allenge because we're getting to the point where even open source AI can pass human capture tests. So you know, this is are you're human identify all the traffic lights in this picture. You're like, okay, yeah, it's going to have no problem doing that. In fact, it'll do it better than the human and faster than human.
So we're like, how do you know it's the point which is a better human better passing human tests than humans? Then well, what tests actually make sense? That is a real problem. I don't actually have a good solution to it.
That.
One of the things we're trying to figure out on the X platform is how to deal with that, because it really we really are at the point where even with open source you know, readily available AI, you don't need to be sort of leading in the field. You can actually be better than humans at passing these tests, and that's sort of why we think, well, perhaps we should sort of charge a dollar or a pound a year.
It's a very tiny amount of money, but it's still makes it privatively expensive to make a million bots, So especially if you need a million payment methods, then you run out of sort of stolen credit cards pretty quickly. So that's that's sort of where we're thinking, like we might have to sort of just charge some very tiny amount of money three cents a day effectively to deal with the onslought of AI power advance. And that is not a growing problem, but it will be I think,
perhaps an insurmountable problem next year. So and then you have to worry about, well, manipulation of information is making something seem very popular when in fact it it's not, because it's getting boosted by all these likes and reposts from AI powered barts. So that's why I sort of think somewhat inevitably it leads to some small payment in
order to dramatically increase the cost of a bot. So I frankly I think probably any social media system that doesn't do that will simply be over OneD by bot.
You know, I think my general answer would be you know, we need to show that we are on top of mitigating the risks right so people can trust the technology. That's what actually the last couple of days has been about on the Safety Summit is just showing, you know, we're investing in the Safety Institute, having the people who can do the research on these things to figure out how we mitigate against them, and we have to do it fast and we have to keep iterating it is.
All of us probably in this room, believe that the technology can be incredibly powerful, but we've got to make sure we bring people along that journey with us, that we're handling the risks that are there and as there's a job to do, and the last couple of days, I think we make good progress on it because we want to focus on the positives and manage these things. But that requires action, and that's what the last couple of days has been about. Your story, you know, analogy.
There was part of the research that actually, you know, the team working on the task force here published and presented yes day. I don't know if you saw it was, which is essentially that it was using AI to do to create a ton of fake profiles on social media and then infiltrate particular groups with particular information. And actually, at the moment that, as I said, to your point, and there's a cost free.
It's getting to the point where it's like, really, you're going to have one hundred for a penny sort of thing. Ridiculous.
And if you think about some of these social networks at quite a neighborhood or town level, it's not that many fake profiles. Quickly suddenly they're everywhere, and there's some local issue that might be of importance, and you know, the team of run versions of how that would look like, and suddenly they're interacting with everybody and then spreading and misinformation around. Yeah, challenge we literally as part of the
research that we published on this information yesterday. It's a real challenge.
Yeah, exactly to your point. I mean, the images. You don't even need to steal somebody's picture because then that's traceable. But you can actually just say, create a new image of a person, realistic looking it doesn't exist, and then create a biography realistic but doesn't exist, and do that en mass and practically the only way of able to tell us that the grammar is too good. Don't give away typhos come on.
Now, I'm getting waved at because I think we are out of time. I don't we take one.
Very brief last question and let's make it go on? Yes, sir, going, you're right in front of me, go on.
Question for you related to the X platform. Are there simple things we can do, especially when it comes to visual media. You alluded to the fact that it's fairly straightforward and effectively free to make people like yourselves say and do things that you never said or did. Can we do something like cryptographically signed media? I'm from Adobe working on this project. Twitter was a member. Love to
see X come back. Digitally sign media to indicate not only what was created by AI, but what came from a camera, what was real to imview, a sense of trust in media that can go viral.
That sounds like a good idea. Actually, so if some way of authenticating would be good. So, yeah, that sounds like a good idea, which probably do it.
There you go, and actually on that on that point already, And this is particularly partner for people in my job, right and I've already had a situation happened to me with adopted image that goes everywhere negative.
By the time everyone realizes well.
That's fake and we should stop sending it the damages damage. And actually we were again reflecting today. If you think next year, you've got elections in you know, I think you know, the US, India, I think Indonesia probably here there you go for massive news and actually you've got just an enormous junk of the world's population is voting next year, right, and you've got EU elections as well.
You know.
Actually, just these issues are right in front of ours. Next year is where a big election across the globe, probably the first set of elections where this has been a real issue. Yeah, So figuring out how we manage that is I think kind of mission critical for the people who want the integrity of our democracy.
Yeah, I mean some of it it's quite entertaining, Like the pope and the puffer jacket. Have you seen that one? That's amazing. But I mean I still write too people who think that's real. I'm like, well, one of the answer is wearing a puffer jacket in July, right, be sweating, but it actually looks quite quite dashing of things. In fact, I think AI fashion is going to be a real thing. So a bit of doing gloom, like we learn in
the most interesting times. And I think this is it is, you know, like eighty percent likely to be good and twenty percent bad. I think if we're cognizant and careful about the bad part, on balance, actually it will be the future that we want or for the future that is preferable, and it actually will be somewhat of a leveler, an equalizer in the sense that you know, I think everyone will have access to goods and services and education, and so you know, I think probably it leads to
more human happiness. So I guess i'd probably leave on an optimistic note.
Tough act. Yeah, well, that's it.
That is a great note to end on. I think that we all want that better future. I think it's that the promise of it is certainly there. Lots of people in this room, including yourselves, are working hard to make it happen. Our job in government is to make sure it happens safely. But on the basis of this conversation in the last couple of days, I'm certainly leaving more confident that we can make that happen. It's been a huge privilege and pleasure to have you here.
Thank you very much.
For me, Thanks for listening, See you in the next episode.