Astro Teller

“Taking moonshots is really easy. Super easy. If you don't care about efficiency, you find really high energy people who think they're right and are pretty smart. You dump a bunch of money on them and you'll get some moonshots or anyway, some like fairly big co…”

“In this extreme situation, we can see that if you built the pedestal, you're half done, but you're really zero percent done at burning down the risk. [1649] Pablo Srugo: That's right. [1650] Astro Teller: The point of a testable hypothesis, especially at X, …”

“We insist on just called kill criteria. So if your project has moved past the investigation stage, now a few of you are going to be full-time on this thing. We're tracking the costs. It's probably not public yet. There might only be three or four of you full-t…”

“And so far I've seen no evidence that we can be at our creative best when we're remote from each other. I think people work somewhat less hard, but they also work in much more siloed ways.”

“Astro Teller, who would take over running Google X after Sebastian Thrun left, he would get quoted in the New York Times in a profile of Google X that the gains to Google's core businesses in search and ads and YouTube from Google Brain Have way more than fund…”

“We met with Astro Teller, the head of Google X, over 10 years ago, we were talking about self-driving cars, and we thought self-driving cars were going to happen. So we avoided a lot of things thinking self-driving cars were going to happen.”

“Lots of people who signed that letter, and lots of other people in the world are going to keep working on it, no matter what letter they're signed.”

“I think that the world is overrun with serious problems. I would put at the top of that list, climate change. Nowhere close to second place. I would put nuclear weapons, just since we use that as an example, and I would put AI doing something particularly horr…”

“Do I believe that anything particularly extreme in our lifetime is going to happen? I don't. I'm sorry, but I've been working on robots trying to open doorknobs for like the last 30 years, and it's been a slog.”

“And I really think if we get to that line and then some half of humanity says, okay, we're out, the other half of the humanity is just going to keep going.”

“We're going to see this sort of thing play out In every discipline in the world over the next 30 or 40 years, and it will take a long time.”

“We are not the right place to move something from, yeah, we have something special here to it's ready in a really thoughtful, responsible way to serve a billion people a day.”

“The world spends sort of pushing 10 trillion dollars a year making stuff.”

“Right now it costs a billion dollars to seriously automate a factory.”

“Audacious enough that we'll try almost anything, but then humble enough that we're honest right after we start out on each of these investigations that we're probably wrong and that we need to spend our money figuring out that we're wrong rather than trying to…”

“I, one of the core axioms at X is I do not believe that anyone, certainly including myself, is any better than random at predicting the future.”

“The number of dollars it costs for you to sequester a ton of carbon is like the only thing that really matters at the end of the day.”

“When you're approaching a problem, you want to think about what are the bottlenecks? What's the really hard thing that needs to happen in order for me to be able to unlock this problem? And that's the thing that you're supposed to go after first. You're not su…”

“When you're trying to make continuous improvement, that's actually a pretty good approach when you're trying to make discontinuous improvement optimized for learning. So basically ask yourself, what is my biggest unknown right now? What's the number one thing …”