What-if
Teller: Climate change wouldn't be happening if society embraced nuclear power
“The disaster which is climate change right now would not be happening if we as a society had not let our fears about the first thing translate into an inability to use the upside of nuclear power to save us from what is now arguably the biggest problem in the …”
Opinion
Teller: AI catastrophe ranks far behind climate change and nuclear weapons
“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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Teller: Extreme AI outcomes will not happen in our lifetime
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Teller: Missing digital grid maps cause 10-year delays for connecting solar power
“If you go to a system operator and say, show me the digital map of where every inverter, every transformer, every wire is in your grid, they will just say, we don't have that. And that's why it takes them 10 years. When you wonder why there are 10 year waits i…”
Insight
Teller: No one is better than random at predicting the future
“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.”
Insight
Teller: Artificial intelligence is just 'algebra on steroids' and math
“Artificial intelligence number one is algebra on steroids. Just so we're clear. It is a very big field of study. And when you get out of microscope and you like look down inside the computer, you cannot find the AI in there anywhere. It's just math.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Teller: Modern commercial airplanes fly themselves almost entirely using AI
“The plane that flew you here flew itself almost the entire way using artificial intelligence, and we all rely on artificial intelligence every day, whether we realize it or not.”
Prediction Held up
Teller: Signers of AI pause letter will keep working on AI regardless
“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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Teller: If half the world halts AI, the other half keeps going
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Teller: Completed wind and solar farms are idling due to grid bottlenecks
“Think about the tsunami of renewables that are already waiting. They've literally already been built. They're just sitting there in the dirt, wind farms and solar panels waiting because we don't have a virtualization of the grid.”
Disclosure
Teller: Alphabet's X is not structured to scale products to billions
“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.”
Insight
Teller: Innovation labs must spend capital disproving hypotheses, not proving them
“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…”
Assertion Partly supported
Teller: Project Taara delivers 20 Gbps over 20 km at sub-0.1% fiber cost
“If you plug the internet like a fiber optic cable into one, you have 20 gigabits per second up to 20 kilometers away for less than one 1000th the cost of trenching fiber.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Teller: AI-guided design will transform every discipline over 30 to 40 years
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Teller: Fish has one-eighth the carbon footprint of beef
“And because the carbon footprint of a pound of fish is one eighth the carbon footprint of a pound of beef, we are wildly better off as humanity moving to producing food through aquaculture.”
Assertion Supported
Teller: Google Brain and Transformer foundations originated inside Alphabet's X lab
“One of the early things that we did was a thing which, when we graduated back to Google, was called Google Brain. Google Brain is the origin of much of what you now think of as Bard, and so that was an example in the earlier days of X of us making something, r…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Teller: Seriously automating a factory currently costs $1 billion
“Right now it costs a billion dollars to seriously automate a factory.”
Disclosure
Teller: More than half of X's current projects target climate change
“More than half of what we're doing right now is in the climate change space, but not because I mandated that, but because that's what people were excited about”
Insight
Teller: Autonomous driving delays stem from human drivers' legal gray areas
“One of the things that I think caught Waymo by surprise, got us by surprise, is that there are a lot of things that human drivers do that if we want to follow the laws, we can't do. Those humans just kind of like are in the gray area a lot about how they choos…”
Assertion Partly supported
Teller: Project Loon worked technically but failed on commercial spectrum deals
“We built it. It was working. We were beaming LTE and five G 200 of thousands of people in multiple countries. We couldn't figure out how to get the business to close with the owners of the spectrum that we had to work through in those different companies. So w…”
Assertion Open · timeframe Jun 2023
Teller: Taara moves more daily data than Project Loon's entire history
“And we're rolling these out right now in mainly Africa and India. And that project is now moving more data to real customers per day than Loon moved in its entire history.”
Insight
Teller: Cost per ton is the only metric that matters in carbon capture
“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.”
Disclosure
Teller: Alphabet X shut down Project Foghorn over $15-per-gallon floor
“This project was called Foghorn. Like, that felt like a real save the world moment. It was actually working. And we could not convince ourselves we were going to get it cheaper than about 15 dollars gallon of gas equivalent. And that's just not going to save t…”
Assertion Supported
Teller: Humanity derives up to $3 trillion annually from oceans
“So the humanity gets about two and a half, almost three trillion dollars a year from the oceans.”
Astro Teller