Vision and ambition become scarce as AI gets more capable

Transcript

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

1. 20:00

   Let's see. So, one question. I mean, when you look back on the decade, what do you think they'll say was obvious in hindsight about AI that people are just missing in real time right now? You know, so much of the debate that happens these days is around, oh, how good are the models actually getting? And can the models actually bridge this issue? And, you know, when are we going to get super intelligence? Is that in like two years or five years? And, you know, are we going to hit a wall? And, you know, so much of that debate is like, I think, in some ways, a little bit of a waste of time, because, you know, I think it's inevitable that we're going to have very powerful models.

2. 20:42

   And, you know, rather than I think we'll look back and say, oh, all this arguing around like when exactly it was going to happen was sort of was short sighted because the reality is we are just as a entire human civilization on this incredible exponential. But you cannot look at the progress of AI over the past decade and not just be totally awestruck by how far it's come. Like a decade ago, the best AI models could recognize cats in YouTube videos.

3. 21:14

   And now, you know, we're talking to, you know, a digital god that can, you know, I mean, we've all seen some of the hacks and some of the things these systems are capable of. And you just can't help but be awestruck. And I think this trend will just continue. Like these models are going to become more and more powerful. And so I think a decade looking back, it'll be obvious that intelligence became abundant and that agency became abundant.

4. 21:42

   Like, the current trends we're on are just going to keep continuing. And this will be very strange. I mean, I think for the history of humanity, you know, groups of smart people getting together towards a shared goal was the bottleneck of progress. You know, the United States of America, in some sense, was an example of this. like the United States of America is formed from a group of very smart people getting together and having a vision for the future that they wanted to enact. And that's the story of nearly every company in America and the story of every YC company. And that's going to change. Like all of a sudden, the scarce resource isn't going to be intelligence or agency. I really think it's going to be vision and ambition. It's like, do you have a clear view of what you want the world

5. 22:29

   to look like in the future? What is the one way in which you want to put your finger on the scale for how the future of the world will develop and how the world will look like in five to 10 years that it does not look like today? And you have the ambition and drive to go through all the crap to make that happen. And AI will make that easier. Agents and AI makes that maybe 10 times or 100 times easier than it was a decade ago. But the flip side of that is that all of a sudden you can dream bigger like i think and the world is like um you know there's so many things that need to evolve for us to be able to fully embrace this technology um you know the world is like really just you know barely even ready for this technology today and i think you know as a builder we have a responsibility to prepare the world right like we have to help enterprises and

6. 23:19

   governments you know to adapt to this new technology we have to help figure out how we secure the world from a biosecurity perspective or a cybersecurity perspective. We have to figure out how we're going to manage all these risks that we see with this new technology. But on the flip side, it's also the time of unprecedented opportunity for humans. We can develop new sciences. We can solve problems in health and biology that have been forever unsolved. We can build new businesses that you couldn't have even imagined before. There's new creative opportunities that couldn't have existed before so it's like it's just this incredible cradle of of opportunity and risks that uh that i think makes it like no better time to be someone who's a builder and has a strong view of how the world should change.

7. 24:06

   Do you think the path has changed?