The Exchanges

Q past, we've done a school project together. We're doing something around malnutrition together. I think the impact and the effort that they're putting into India in improving society, uh, is, is, uh, is great. And I hope you guys continue this association with India for a long time. Do you want to talk a little bit about your relationship with India and how it's evolved over the last many years?

A Well, I mean, I've had a fantastic relationship with India, starting with the Microsoft experience where, and we hired some very smart IIT graduates, brought them to Seattle. Later, they go back, uh, create a development center for us, uh, that's now in four locations, 25,000 people, and, of course, a lot of the amazing people I work with and have so much fun, uh, in the Microsoft success with are, Uh, part of the team who had hired from India, you know, top of that list is Satya, uh, who know, uh, is doing a great job as CEO. So in my digital first career, uh, the connection to India was, uh, fun and made a huge difference, um, In what the company was able to achieve. It was during that time that I was kind of learning, oh, wow, India is such a study in contrast, you know, you know, first class in so many ways, but still a lot of poverty, uh, and challenges, and, uh, you know, I was beginning to think, okay, how do I give this money back, uh, together with, uh, Melinda, and so she came over as we were starting to do foundation work. Um, I start the foundations, I fund it in the year 2000, so I'm 45 years old and still, um, full-time. I stay full-time for another, uh, eight years. Um, but India becomes, you know, an important place for us because we realize that vaccines, Uh, were this missing, uh, thing, and it was a crime that these, uh, diarrheal rotavirus vaccines were gett…

AI assessment note: “I've had a fantastic relationship with India, starting with the Microsoft experience”

Q Is there a starting point though? Let's assume I have no capital at hand, and I'm 22, Starting off in Bangalore. How do I, how do I go about attempting to be a part of the energy transition solution?

A The ideal is actually to find a philanthropist. Breakthrough Energy has a fellows program where we look for people with really, ah, good early stage ideas, and we do that as a grant. Uh, with a little bit of, of options, but you don't need a business plan. Then if you get past that stage, either on your own or with a, uh, fellows type grant, then there are venture capital groups that really specialize in finding climate technologies, and they're willing to fund very risky stuff. Um, and I know all of them, including Breakthrough Energy are like, gosh, are we missing some in India? And so, You know, there's a network, you know, if you have a good idea, you know, if you pass it to me, if Nandan pass it to me, there's a bunch of U.S. venture capitals, and hopefully some who would also come in domestically. Uh, so for risk capital, uh, this is a very good time if you have something that looks attractive, could have a significant impact.

AI assessment note: “The ideal is actually to find a philanthropist. Breakthrough Energy has a fellows program”

Q focus and cram many hours of work at one go, or Be not cognizant to the things happening in the world around you, but focused on one thing. Where does that come from? I know in the last part of your book, you spoke about how today you might be diagnosed as autistic, and is it that, or is it some kind of drive which is coming from somewhere else?

A I think there's a, a strong genetic component to that ability to focus. Uh, you know, particularly as people get older, their willingness to be very confused and just live with their confusion, you know, and, and until they really figure it out, uh, they almost, you know, give yourself a hard time and, You know, think about why can't I understand this? Uh, you know, I think that's, that's something I was lucky, uh, from nature, you know, um, my, my parents didn't push me, uh, to be that way, and it was there, you know, pretty early on, you know, even the thing where it, It was fascinating to me that my grandmother was so much better at cards than I was, and I had to think a long time to figure out, okay, she is running a, uh, a state machine. She is remembering every card that goes by, and if you remember every card that goes by, okay, there is, uh, an impact on all these different card games, because we played a lot of different games. Um, and she would never, you know, kind of give it away. She sort of forced me to, to think it through on my own. So that's an early sign that, yeah, I, I can go off and kind of ignore, uh, uh, what's going on. And, you know, I'm very lucky, uh, even at, you know, this age, if somebody hands me a, uh, a new book about something I'll, you know, Shut the door, and four hours later, hopefully I've, I've, I've, I've been able to get through it.

AI assessment note: “I think there's a, a strong genetic component to that ability to focus.”

Q I think another very interesting question is if we all don't work, do we get the same? Humans inherently are competitive with their peer groups, I think. So if I don't work, say we are born tomorrow, me, you, him, him. We all don't work, but we are bestowed upon with the same resources and same social position. Will that work for us?

A No, I, I, your, your point's a good one. We want to differentiate, uh, you know, whether it's for our own ego or to be attractive or, uh, it's so we, we, Are so adapted to this world of shortage. Uh, that, you know, maybe You know, we'll create competitions, and, you know, creativity, or, you know, maybe we'll take some part of human activity. I mean, in extreme cases, we're not going to have robots play cricket. You know, that's boring. We'll let, we'll reserve that just for the humans. Even if the robots could be, you know, way, way better, that's, that's not interesting. And so, What activities might a country say, no, we're reserving this, you know, nurses are going to be humans, or, uh, you know, psychiatrists, uh, you know, are, we're going to, you know, decide that the, and so we might artificially, uh, Ignore the fact that the, the machines can, ah, can substitute for some of that. It's, it'll really, you know, get down to the core of, of human instinct.

AI assessment note: “No, I, I, your, your point's a good one. We want to differentiate”

Q But you got, you got into trouble almost for using the computer without the requisite permission from the, Administrator, but that's not really trouble. You know what I mean?

A I was, at the time, it felt like it might be, ah, you know, because they, ah, they were acting pretty tough. Um, but, you know, I'm not somebody who had a traumatic childhood that explains my, you know, whatever energy or ambition I have. I had a great childhood. You know, I had some, Conflict with my mother where she would try to get me to, you know, fit what she wanted. And, you know, in a sense she succeeded in, in making me want to exceed even her expectations. So there's some energy that I got, you know, from trying to, uh, you know, get my freedom or impress her. Um, but I'd say the simple story is that it, You know, it's almost ideal. I wish everybody had the stability. Uh, you know, my dad was really, uh, in terms of his values, you know, he'd grown up in a very poor household. His father had only gone to sixth grade. Um, and, and yet he was very sophisticated, always calm about everything. It's nice having parents who are calm.

AI assessment note: “at the time, it felt like it might be, ah, you know”

Q I happened to meet Satya and Sundar when I was in the US, and we were having dinner at a certain place together, and these guys seem to talk about AGI in a very precocious manner, like it's much closer than anybody's thinking it is. Do you think that there's, there could be one day when suddenly we are surprised, like a couple of years down the line?

A There's so much. There's not really a really good definition. These models already today, when you have lots of lots of documents, you know, more than a human could read in a lifetime, it is able to find things and reason across these documents in a superhuman way, and so when you think about a lawsuit or a drug filing, and anything that gets to be over, say, 10,000 pages, human cognition, even a great specialist person, you get 10,000 pages. I dare you. And these things, it's not just keyword search. This is semantic representation of that level of complexity. So we're already superhuman in a dimension that It's kind of surprising. I mean, I thought robots, you know, would be taking over the warehouse, you know, 10 years before they'd be studying our legal and regulatory documents, and we know that we have brute force scale up. We have a lot of external algorithms, you know, to help the AI know how hard to work. I mean, most people don't realize today, It works exactly the same amount where it puts out the next word is, and it doesn't think in advance. It doesn't think, okay, I have to write this poem. Let me figure it all out. No, it, it, it, it's generating word by word. And so getting it to go faster when it's easy or take more time, like math problems, you know, we, we all laugh because it, it, it's actually quite bad at certain type of recursive math things like Sudoku pu…

AI assessment note: “So we're already superhuman in a dimension that It's kind of surprising.”