Ex Google CEO: AI Can Create Deadly Viruses! If We See This, We Must Turn Off AI! - Eric Schmidt

TL;DR

Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, argues that AI is the most transformative technology in history, posing existential risks from misinformation and bioweapons to autonomous warfare, but his primary fear is that society will not adopt AI fast enough to solve global problems in education and healthcare.

Key insights

• The 70-20-10 rule at Google (70% core, 20% adjacent, 10% new) generated tens of billions in extra profits by funding moonshot projects like Google Brain.
• AI systems exhibit emergent behavior – capabilities not explicitly programmed, e.g., generating website code from a picture – that even their creators cannot fully predict.
• Raw (unreleased) AI models can already perform day-zero cyber attacks as well or better than humans, and can design novel biological pathogens.