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In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · 3 min · Oct 21, 2026

AI can use known knowledge, but novel discovery remains uncertain

Eric Schmidt says current systems can work across known facts but still struggle to make genuinely new discoveries. He estimates that capability may be five to 10 years away.

Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt is a former CEO of Google and technology executive.

Scaled Google as CEO through 2011, now runs rocket maker Relativity Space and co-founded Schmidt Sciences.

About this segment

Eric Schmidt says current systems can work across known facts but still struggle to make genuinely new discoveries. He estimates that capability may be five to 10 years away.

From “Eric Schmidt: Are We Ready for Superintelligence? | Podcast | In Good Company”, Oct 21, 2026. Watch the full episode

Answers “What will AI look like in the next few years?” See all 39 answers

“we don't know, it's somewhere between, my estimate is five to 10 years.”
Eric Schmidtat 11:14 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen11:14

Takeaways

  1. Knowing existing mathematics may not be enough to discover new theories.
  2. Cross-domain pattern recognition could help AI make discoveries.
  3. Schmidt estimates discovery may be five to 10 years away.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 11:22AI agents could flatten business and speed up work6:14
  2. 17:41Europe needs to make it easier to build AI companies3:16
  3. 35:56AI could remove the coordination tax in large companies2:22
  4. 24:03Free Chinese models could win users despite trailing by months3:14
  5. 3:23Anthropic surpassed Google's revenue-growth record2:07

  6. 8:40AI can use known knowledge, but novel discovery remains uncertain2:41

  7. 21:06A bot incident showed why AI containment matters2:59Up next
  8. 29:34Online recommendation loops can boost false claims2:30

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 8:42

    Absolutely. Given what you said, how close are we now to AGI, the artificial general intelligence? The way I would like to describe it is I think that there is a current boundary, a current event horizon. And the current horizon goes something like this. I can have a computer that works with you and me because you and I are good friends, helps us work through everything. It does their physics. They're called tools. It figures stuff out. It can think for hours. It can write all code. I was a professional programmer. My job is dead. I can just ask it. It can write all the code. I don't have to remember how to do all that anymore. All of that stuff is over. There appears to be a limit for things which are not already discovered. And it goes like this. You and I, with our AI, we'll know everything. We'll know every fact, every book, every math formula,

  2. 9:37

    and so forth. It appears that real discovery is still a while away. And the example that's used in the in the industry is build a model that has all the math known in 1902 can you discover general relativity in other words you know nothing past 1902 the current evidence is that you can't right there are a couple of proposed techniques for this there's something called recursive self-improvement which is the technical term for learning and learning and learning and learning and the command would be learn everything start anywhere that's the command to the computer and it randomly decides french literature and then it studies war and then it studies physics and so forth and eventually it knows everything but how does this discover something new so there's two theories of how that would occur one is literally the monkey on the keyboard you just

  3. 10:37

    keep randomly going in different directions it's called reinforcement learning you go a b c d and you do this at billions of times and eventually you discover something through randomness a better idea is that the theory of how extraordinary discoveries occur again this is unproven is you have a physicist who studied fluid flow and then they're working in energy and they see a pattern that's not fluid flow, but it kind of reminds them of that.

  4. 11:06

    And then they apply the old techniques in a new field. It appears that that is going to be the solution. We don't, this is a long-winded way of saying, we don't know, it's somewhere between, my estimate is five to 10 years.