Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Sanjay Sarma: What is School Really For?

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

Join Endgame's first and biggest conference ever! https://www.endgametownhall.com ---------------------- Sanjay Sarma—CEO, President, & Dean of the Asia School of Business—reflects on his intellectually rich childhood, exploring the resurgence of India in the 1980s and the cultural forces that make storytelling central to Indian society. He highlights the power of curiosity and its role in education, offering insights into what it takes for Southeast Asians to become global CEOs. The conversation flows from the future of education and the politics of social media to the transformative potential of AI in learning. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #SanjaySarma ---------------------- About the Host: Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur, educator, and Honorary Professor of Politics and International Relations at the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham. He is also a visiting scholar at The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford University (2022—2024) and a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. ---------------------- Earn a Master of Public Policy degree and be Indonesia's future narrator. More info: [e-mail] https://admissions.sgpp.ac.id https://wa.me/628111522504 Visit and subscribe: ‪@SGPPIndonesia‬ ‪@Endgame_Clips‬

What makes human being so special as curiosity? And yet we spend all our time dowsing it and smothering it. Sanjay Sarma. Dr Sanjay Sarma, president, CEO and dean of the Asia School of Business. Among a host of accomplishments and impactful contributions to education, science and technology, Sanjay Sarma is most well known to us, MIT folks, as the VP of Open Learning. The history of learning is an old one. But if you ask anyone, why do we teach the way we do?

they'll say because someone else did. It's tradition. The institutions we've created are based on a fallacy. The fallacy is the professor has the pen, the student's brain is a sheet of paper, all the teacher has to do is write

on the sheet of paper and declare victory and the learning is done. And then we'll test them. That's not how learning occurs. Hi, friends. I want to take this opportunity to thank you for being with us ever since we started endgame some years ago. The conversation

have been invariably elevating and animating. At least from my personal point of view, it's been a tremendously rewarding experience. And I'm hopeful that you could be further supportive of us by way of clicking on the subscribe button, watching every episode as much as possible, if not as fully as possible, and also joining us.

as a member of the Endgame channel. I can only promise you that whatever we're going to be doing going forward will try to make Endgame a better experience for all of you. Thank you. Hi, friends. Today we're honored to have Sanjay Sharma, who is the dean of the Asia School of Business, which is based in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

And it's also in collaboration with MIT Sloan. Sanjay, thank you so much for coming on to our show. Such a pleasure, Gita. You've been to many places around the world. Tell us how you grew up in India. You know, I grew up, I'm very lucky. I'm very privileged. I grew up upper caste family, very educated parents. My father was a very senior civil servant, a physicist. My mother was a teacher and a great, she loves history. All my relatives, my grandparents, etc., very well read. It was very privileged. and I grew up with conversations about history and math and physics and politics and Gandhi, you know, so I was a lucky guy growing up.

And you went to IIT. Yes. And was that your personal decision or that would have been shaped a little bit by your mom or dad? Yeah. When I was about four. Not an easy school to get in. Yeah, yeah. When I was 14, so my grandfather.

was in the military. He actually served in in Malaysia, during World War II. So when I was at 14 or maybe 13, my, my mother and my aunt sat me and my cousin down and said, listen, boys, you know, we're educated, but we're not rich. So if you get into IAT, things will be easier for you. And so I started studying for IAT. And yes, I did get into the Indian Institute of Technology. My cousin ended up going to the military, actually. and did very well in the military. And so I met my wife at IIT as well. So I'm a hardcore IOT guy.

My father's a PhD from IAT. I have many cousins there. And then you decided to go to the U.S. Why did a U.S.? So actually I didn't decide to go to the U.S. initially. I went to work for, I wanted to do the thing that my parents least wanted me to do and take the most unsafe job I could, which is I went to work at a company called Schombardier,

out in the oil industry in Scotland. off the coast of Scotland. I was based in Aberdeen. And then I had a wobbly knee, and it started getting particularly wobbly while I was there. So I took a leave of absence, and I went to CMU. That's how I ended up there, actually. And then you went on to UC Berkeley.

That's right, yeah. While you pursued all this academic journey, what would have been some of the noticeable changes that you might have seen with respect to India that you might have seen with respect to yourself. That's a good question. You know, when I, India in the 80s was still coming into its own. For years, India was, we in India were always confused.

You know, what was our role? Where we second class, which was not behind the Iron Curtain, but was more allied with the Soviet Union. and in 1983 India won the cricket World Cup I cannot begin to explain what a difference that made because it was a come from behind victory and just today my classmates sent to me a WhatsApp of that moment and I still might the hair and the back of my neck

still is big and stand around that time some things started to happen you know we saw Indians do well we saw cricket and just for the first time from before independence, you know, from about 30 or 40 or 50 or even 100 years previously, Indians began to wonder if maybe they could take on the planet. And I was part of that generation. So when I graduated from I IT, I went to CMU and I found, you know, I did pretty well, you know, and my classmates were doing really well. And meanwhile, a few Indians were starting to do really well, Vinod Kohl's Lover, for example.

So there was an emergence. a sense of maybe, maybe. And Berkeley, that became more clear. You know, we had some people like Arun Mazumdar and others were done very well. And so there's a sense of possibility that was in the air. You know, we all had it. It was quite special. And a few of my classmates started to sell companies and do really well, you know. What is it that makes, you know, the Indians so curious, so argumentative, so into that war of attrition, you know, healthily rambunctious.

And, you know, we've seen so many storytellers coming out of India in the last few decades, I would argue. And they've done so well that we're not seeing as much of in perhaps China. I mean, China has done fantastically in terms of innovation and science and all that, right? But they're not as great storytellers at perhaps the Indians. And I've been making the case that the Indians are just naturally, you know, they like to make a point publicly or, you know, to whoever is in the room. You know, first of all, English. I mean, it's not a, it's a, we have to sort of put it out that. Indians benefited from English.

And Indians are articulated English, right? Because many of us, especially those who grew up in the educated classes, we've very, you know, our English is pretty much a first language almost for us. But I think there's something a little deeper. It's a highly diverse society. The Indian ethos, also perhaps due to religion is one of a lot, you know, a lot of religions in India. I mean, within each religion, there are a lot of sex.

And each sect sort of argues, I didn't say sex, by the way, said, it's sect. Yeah, with a tea. It's sect with a teat. The sects argue with each other. It's a very open-minded religion, right? But things like, now I can talk about sex. Kamo Sutra, other things, right? So there's a lot of diversity of thought.

And so a lot of parsing, even in the Islam in India, for example, there's Sufism. Shia, there's Sunni, there's Buddhism, there's Jainism. So, but I think just naturally the culture is extremely, the word is dissect, there's a element of dissecting things, almost too much, actually. And so that is one piece of it. The other is a focus on math, focus on logic. Right. The entrance exams are brutal, absolutely brutal, right? So you can't have, you know something, you don't.

There's no two ways about it. In fact, the most profound compliment you could pay to a young student when I was in high school was, the Hindi, Hindi English word, that guy is a fondu. And you might say, what the hell does fundu mean? That person has their fundamental street. Interesting. Like in physics or math, right? So anyway, being fundu, getting a fundamental straight and being very clear, that was such a important thing in the ethos in the 80s.

You know, I think all those things sort of add to it. Would you make the argument that it might correlate with the fact that India has been graced by so many civilizations in the last few thousand years and it's been able to I would argue that it's been able to embrace multipolarity in a good way. I mean, putting aside colonization, right? And it's been able to extract wisdom from any external civilization that would have visited India. And that has made you a lot more resilient and has made you a lot more capable of embracing multiparity. Yeah, I would say that's true, because there's a,

deep syncritism in the way India operates, right? That diversity, that fabric, that those cross currents are very fundamental. I mean, I grew up in fact, my father was telling me a couple of days ago that

you know, in his family compound, of course comes from the word campong, in his family compound, our family compound, there was a dhargha, a Sufi d'Darga where the Muslims would come and pray, and then they would come and hang out and have tea with my grandfather.

So that fiber was very fundamental, I think. And then there are different views. Even within any one religion, there's so many different views you have to parse, you know? Absolutely. So I do think that adds a lot to that culture. Talk about curiosity. You talk a lot about this.

You know, I am deeply concerned, actually, that all over the world we try and stamp it out. You know, let me take a little bit of a side digression here. You know, the first industrial revolution ended with interchangeable parts, right? It's falsely attributed to Eli Whitney, but it's actually the military complex because shells had to go into different battles and wheels had to be replaced in war very quickly. Interchangeable parts. I actually think that this last century, the century just concluded. 20 years ago was about making interchangeable people.

And what that means is you could build a factory from Japan in India or in China and you would get the same quality. Right. Right. But people had to become very interchangeable. And what that also means is people have to do what they're told, you know? And curiosity is a bother. Curiosity gets in the way. I mean, what makes human being so special is curiosity.

And we know these circuits, novelty, curiosity that trigger a circuit called the dopaminergic circuit. Dopamine flows. Babies are fun and interesting to watch because they're curious. You know, it's because they're playing to get the mind-body connection going. They're discovering boundaries. And yet we spend all our time dousing it and smothering it. And we have all these things in the English language even, you know, curiosity kill the cat. You know, all good things come to those who wait.

to me, keep curiosity alive is probably the greatest gift I got as a child. You know, you ask people about my upbringing, that ability to be curious, to be playful, to make jokes, to ask silly questions, to explore, to have the luxury, to explore odd things in conversation, in reality, to read a book. To me, that's the greatest gift I think we can give to human beings, especially in the age of AI. You know, we trained everyone to be robots. Real robots are just about to show up. Would you have been innately curious without being evoked or a provoked?

I think so. I'm an idealist. I think every child is born curious. Every kitten is born. That's why we find kittens cute. Curiosity to me is a basic human trait. And culture and society and everything else is about, in my view, to some extent, shaping it.

And, you know, into bow tie past style or into. spaghetti. We're trying to shape it. But to me, it's essential. You've alluded to this in the past where curiosity gets defined by how a person who gets stuck on a desert sees water in a glass, and he or she always sees it as a half glassful, whereas people that are not as curious may see it half empty. how do you how do you universalize you know nations or communities around the world that they're on that desert seeing the water as helpful look i mean i i as a culturally what is a culture culture is telling people what to do what not to do how to behave right often we look at american culture when i was growing up in india and go how could that could you know speak like that why am they respecting their their elders you know i actually

can't believe that, you know, this, you know, this musician, you know, has spiky hair or, you know, set dropped an F-bomb or, you know, has tattoos. It's all about what you can't do. That's in some ways what culture seems to do. To be able to see possibilities, to be able to say, why not, why can't I do this with this? Why can't I do this other thing? That is creativity. In curiosity, is that amazing elixir, you know, that unleashes that. And to me, it's actually less a matter of eliciting it and more a matter of not dowsing it. And then channeling it to some extent, but not too much, right? So I just wish we could let the dopamine flow, you know.

To some extent, deprivation entails some degree of curiosity, right? How do you manufacture that deprivation so that people increase their degree of curiosity? Well, certainly hunger. You know, hungry animal is going to look, right? One of the sad benefits of growing up in a country that was colonized for many years and, you know, suffered massive losses as a result of the colonization is that there's a lot of hunger out there. So, you know, so being a fun do, as I said earlier, getting a fun. fundamental straight and really understanding things, looking for that aha moment is celebrated. I remember there's one day that my classmate and I, we wanted to figure out what acidity.

There's a measure called pH was. And we sort of didn't get it. This is an experiential scale, et cetera. And then finally, there was that moment. And this was 45 years ago. And I remember the two of us sitting together going, got it, we finally got it. The fact that I'd remember it and the curiosity to get it and the fact that if we didn't get it, we wouldn't have gotten into IIT. Amazing.

Right? Yes, deprivation does create it. But I hope it doesn't take deprivation. I hope we can do it in a more joyous way. You know, a lot of the kids I see, I went to grad school with, came from, you know, from families that were very, very, very well to do. And they had it. I hope it doesn't take that.

I want to put this in the context of Southeast Asia, right? What would it take for a Malaysian or a Filipino of Vietnamese, a Cambodian, Myanmaris, Brunei, Indonesian, to be the CEO of Google, the CEO of Microsoft, the CEO of PepsiCo, the CEO of all these giants, that the Indians just managed to do it almost flawlessly and we're not even seeing the mainland Chinese

doing it at the kind of scale. Well, as I said, I mean, the Indians do have the advantage of English. The other thing I'll say is the Indians are assertive, but softly assertive. You know, in other words, the assertion doesn't go away, but it comes in very soft gloves. I think those are important traits. but there are examples, you know, the CEO of Broadcom, you know,

chairman of Del Monte. So there are certainly examples. I actually want to go back to that moment in 1983 when India won the cricket World Cup. Yeah. You know, I was there, by the way. I lived in India for three years. I saw that, yeah.

I saw that with your father, right? Yeah. So when your father was in the South Asia, it was an awakening. It was, I can do it too. They did it, I can do it. Right. And then combine it with the pressures and combine it with the celebration of being a fundu, being someone who gets their fundamental straight. You know, my wife, by the way, also went to IAT.

And she had a better rank than me. Right. So it's a sort of a push and a pull and a channeling that came through go together well in India in the 80s, 70s, 60s. I don't know if it's still there. Maybe it is. Maybe it's not, but I've lived outside the country for many years. But I think it can be created. It's been created in other countries, right?

It's a long way. Well, now that you've spent some time in Southeast Asia, what are some of the things that you think we could do to kickstart the process? Well, I think that... English is certainly something I've been quite vocal about. You know, Indonesia probably doesn't have any more than 10 million people that speak good English. We get that number to 100 million. Southeast Asia probably has about 60 or 70 million.

Most of those are Filipinos, Malaysians, and Singaporean, right? We get that number up to about 3 to 400 million. I think we'd be at a different place. Well, you know, it's sort of a weird time, first of all, for language. Right, right. You know, Chad GPD can translate from English to Bahasa. Like that. Yeah.

So maybe languages are going to go away. Maybe we can all, we'll all be talking to each other in each other's languages, in our own languages and the translation. But at the same time, the corpus of AI is trained on English, right? So English is winning. And unfortunately, language has become very important. I do think that English is a very fundamental thing. I will say, though, that I was giving a lecture actually as B the other day.

And someone asked me, but Sanjay, you're blessed with good English. But I told this person that actually I have students from other parts of the world who don't speak very good English, but it can construct a narrative beautifully. And that trumps the language. In other words, they may speak broken English, but their construction of the narrative is so powerful that the English doesn't matter. It almost makes the narrative more powerful, right? So I think there's a deeper thing there, which is, I think you said that earlier, constructing the story, constructing the narrative, empathizing. presenting in a way that the other person is going to appreciate. Actually, Indonesia has a long history of that, right? Performance. All the actually wonderful performance arts there are here. Bringing that back, I think, maybe something that needs to happen. But I do think that the powers of expression clarify the powers of thought.

It is often said that writing is the highest form of thinking. and writing and expression, clarify thinking in my view. We always have our PhD students at MIT at Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, present because it clar- you know, I think that writing and presenting are like having an open house in your brain.

You're going to clean up your house before someone comes in. You talked about the front part of the brain being a CEO. Explain that. So this is the prefrontal cortex. You know, in studying learning, I spent a lot of time with my neuroscientist friends

and I left, had massive amounts of stuff. And I learned a lot from them, but also about from studying some of the psychology, how animals think, et cetera, et cetera. So the great apes have much less of this. This thing in the front is a prefrontal cortex. This is the sear of the brain. So we can plan.

an ape can't really plan that far ahead. It can plan a lot more than a cat. We can regulate. We can do scenarios. We can anticipate. And this thing, we shouldn't think of it as a limited pool. We can develop it. So when I was preparing for the IIT, I was developing this.

when we do mindfulness or meditation, we tell this in one way to look at it is we're telling the brain, this guy's boss, as opposed to letting our thoughts wander. So this is a very powerful thing, and we all know it. We point here, right? So it's a very powerful thing, this prefrontal cortex

in how our executive functions operate. This meditation or mindfulness help increase cerebral capacity of any human being? I would argue that meditation gives the brain a discipline. So, I mean, by the way I describe it as, you know, when you have a laptop, for example, you have an operating system, then you have programs running on it,

like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint or your browser. But the kernel, the process underneath is the WordPress, is the operating system, Windows or MacOS, or Android. Now, that thing has to run, even if the browser crashes, that thing has to run. And that thing, if the browser starts occupying too much memory or, you know, goes amok, it has to say, okay, buddy, shut down. Right? You're draining the battery, shut down.

That process, the operating system, the parent, the adult, is what this is. And what mindfulness does is tell the rest of the processes, this guy is the boss. And he tells this guy, you're the boss, act like the boss. And be a witness to those other thoughts. Don't get wrapped up and lose perspective. That's what mindfulness does in my view. Interesting. Take that to your book, grasp, right?

How do you think we could or we should re-engineer or re-architect learning? I mean, look, I mean, I think the history of learning is an old one. Right. But if you ask anyone, why do we teach the way we do? They'll say, because someone else did. Then you go back 50 years, why do you do it that way? Because someone else did. It's tradition.

It's not based on how learning really ought to occur. In fact, a parent's instincts and a child's instincts are much closer to what we should be doing. Then the institutions we've created, the institutions we've created are based on a fallacy. The fallacy is the professor has the pen, or the, the teacher. The student's brain is a sheet of paper. All the teacher has to do is write on the sheet of paper and declare victory and the learning is done. And then we'll test them. That's not how learning occurs. Right. What's actually happening is, and I've said this before, is like a plant growing. So the child or the learner, by the way, this is true of adults as well. So it's not just a child.

But the learner is creating a model of the world. And you feed the model what it needs when it wants, not when it's convenient to the teacher to dump it. You don't give a plant a lifetime supply of sunlight or potassium on day one a declare victory. When the plant needs nitrogen or potassium or whatever, you give it to. So the fundamental approach here is we've got to give agency back to the learner. We've taken it away. That's what Grasp talks about.

And then the other thing is when you learn something, you've got to act on it. You've got to build something. It's actually a founding principle of MIT. and the Asia School of Business. It's called Action Learning or Men's at Manus, mind and hand. When you exercise what you've learned, when you put it out, that's when the learning truly occurs. Until that time, you're simply getting familiar with the material

and regurgitating it in an exam. And that's the problem. Draw the picture concretely in terms of what could or would happen with somebody that's getting an undergraduate degree? would he have to spend four years on campus or this person needs to spend a little bit more time so that he experiences or she experiences a bit more action learning outside campus? Yeah, first of all, I think get out of the classroom. The classroom is a cage where these learners sit there and the teacher just sort of dump stuff and leaves. So now, do they have to get out of campus?

Well, I think we need to redesign the campus. Actually, MIT was a pioneer in labs, making students work in labs. Now, you can simulate reality to some extent on the campus, but beyond that, you've got to get out into the real world. Socrates talked about it, the walking, talking philosopher, right? You were peripatetic. You walked around, practical philosophy. You looked at real problems, and you talked about it. So we have to get out of the bullseye that's a.

classroom, turn the campus into simulation, remove lectures, especially in the era of Khan Academy and other stuff, just watch video lectures, for God's saying. Don't waste the in-person time, right? The in-person time should be a studio and then get into the real world and apply it. I also think we've over-rotated on degrees. I think we need to dial back because the degree has become a proxy for status. not necessarily an indication of learning, especially effective and useful learning.

So I think for a number of reasons, yeah, let's get people out in the real world. You've used the phrase precision agriculture as a metaphor, right, for grasp, right? Yeah. Draw a picture. What needs to happen? Well, what I would do is, yes, I do in fact use the precision agriculture. culture metaphor. Which is great, I think.

You know, how you, you know, just put a little bit of water, a little bit of what, you know, onto the plant. And it grows much more optimally. Yeah. You know, I remember when I was in IIT, which is a good school, you know, my IIT was actually designed by a consortium of universities led by MIT. The one in Kanpur. The one in Kanpur. Yeah. And I remember doing all these courses on fluid mechanics.

And honestly, I always. I always wondered why I was learning it. Within my first week on the oil rig, stuff that just started to flow, pardon the pun. I understood shock. Shock is a term. And, you know, when you reach supersonic velocities, I understood turbulence.

I understood laminar flows. I understood, you know, fluids. I mean, just amazing. Context is such a wonderful thing, you know? It's like if I just toss a bunch of books, and they're in a pile, it's not learning. But if I create shells and say, this is where the books and your beautiful library, right,

the books on fluid mechanics go. Here's where the books on philosophy go. Here's why you need fluid mechanics. Here's why you need philosophy. Suddenly, you have a much clearer mind and things slot into place and context reads the slots. But another thing is, we talked about,

explaining stuff, narratives. When you have to explain it to someone, as I said, it's like having an open house. Well, if your books are well organized, you're going to be much better off in your open house because people are going to come in and see how the knowledge is organized. So putting stuff out, explaining, narrating is another way to organize your thoughts. How do you argue with somebody who believes philosophically in a, a case study format as opposed to action learning. I'm not going to mention the schools. Yeah, I'm a big believer in case studies, actually. I really am. Because case studies is really

study of the past, right? I mean, whereas action learning is all about ideation in the room and getting things done with your hands, getting your hands dirty. Yeah. So I think that case studies give a lot of context because they let you, they force you to take things you've learned and put them in context and then examine them from three different directions. Right. You know, 3D.

But I would argue, especially as an engineer, that action gives you a whole new perspective because case studies are still very curated and there's still a simulation. I mean, imagine if you're training to be a soldier, how much can you learn in simulation? Yeah.

It's when you're in the real world in the first bullet, you know, which raises your year that you go, oh, my God. It's a different world. So that's why I think getting into action is, and it's an unfortunate analogy I admit right now in the period of war. But getting into action, I think, just puts a whole new perspective on things. And sending young people out on projects, you know, send them to, you know, let's an agriculture project.

Go work and see if you can improve yield, spend three months. I mean, it's hard to replace the value of that. agree. I want to push on this a little bit. We've seen, and we kind of talked about this earlier, we've seen how the Internet has been able to democratize information. But it just hasn't seemed to be able to democratize ideas as well, and economic capital as well.

As a result of which we're seeing not only polarization of conversations, but inequality of a number of attributes, call it wealth, income, opportunities, all that, all that good stuff. How do we remedy this? You know, the educational standpoint, yeah. Yeah, look, I mean, the internet is not just one thing, right? It's a way to put out knowledge. It's also a way to, it's a business, it's a way to attract eyeballs and get people addicted.

And these two are fundamentally in conflict. In addition, polarization happens because of confirmation bias. If you say things I believe, I'm more likely to do more of it. And that's another form of addiction. And I think that the business model of the internet, which is to get people's eyeballs attached, has trumped the democratic possibilities of the internet. Just last week, the Surgeon General of the United Nations started talking about putting a warning labels on social media.

I think it's about time. I think we've crossed many thresholds, right? I mean, if TikTok gets banned in America, it's being banned for political reasons, et cetera, right? I mean, you know, geopolitical reasons. But it may not be a bad thing from the perspective of safeguarding young and old minds, right? So I actually think we need to put the internet back where it's supposed to be.

I'm a little bit skeptical of over-regulating it, but when it comes to social media, as Jonathan Hates written, I think we're in a very, very strange time right now, and we have to regulate it. Do you see nation states as being able to remedy this? Well, I mean, China has a limit on how much TikTok young people can watch. I do think so. I think they're not being driven, though, by,

by notions or interests in things like improving human outcomes. I think they're being driven by other things. And then there are all these lobbying, right? So the internet is this amazing thing. And then we have AI, which is a whole other shebang that's going to just enter the picture, right? Stage left. It's going to enter.

But I don't think that our politics necessarily lines up with steering these epoch-making technologies in the right direction, unfortunately. Yeah. Look, I mean, I'm not quite pleased with how economic development has somewhat been influenced by the inability to create or democratize ideas. and the ability to distribute capital, right? And we're seeing a rising case of centripetality of economic development where primary cities are enjoying faster growth than secondary cities,

much less regional cities, right? And I'm kind of speculating that if the Internet would have served the role a little bit better of democratizing ideas, democratizing or helping democratize, economic capital, things would have been different. And at the rate that centripetality keeps on rising, as opposed to centrifugality of economic development, the political calculus is moving in one direction only, right? All across the world. And how do you see nation states are governments going forward, being able to move the political calculus back to the center

or wherever it needs to be so that there is better redistribution of, call it welfare, and all the other public goods. Look, I couldn't agree with it more. It's a frightening. What's happening is frightening, right? And then, of course, when people go to the big city, because that's where the action is, like fireflies, they also find it less affordable. You know, fertility rates drop.

You can't afford to have kids. So it's not a recipe for the long term for success. It is a good recipe if you want to make good numbers for the next quarter and you're a media company or if you're a internet company and so on. I really feel that we need to wake up the dopamine in the outside cities. We need centrifugal dopamine. You know, we need idealism. We need people to say,

I will start a company. I will help my school. This idealism, good news is it's happened before. Yeah. You know, growing up in India, you know, Gandhi did that. By this idealism, I didn't, my family isn't from the, one of the four or five major metropolises. It's from, you know, halfway between Midrassah and Calcutta. And, but my grandfather, my great-grandfather, joined the Freedom Movement.

He was a barrister lawyer and he burned his British clothes and burned his law degree and, of course, threw his family into poverty. But idealism could be distributed. And this distribution of curiosity, getting people to sort of be inspired, that's where a great leader, I think, can make a difference. You know, you make reference to history a lot. my concern is that exposure to social media I think puts you in a corner or puts humanity in a corner where they're going to suffer a lot more from historical amnesia

because the communication, as Jonathan Haidt aptly pointed out that it forces people to just communicate with each other as opposed to with their predecessors. And that historical amnesia, I think, is a discount or will create a discount in nation building because you don't you don't look back in terms of the mistakes and successes that your predecessors would have gone through. Yeah, you know, I completely agree with that.

I do think that we're all in the now with my group, with my homies, you know, the people I agree with. Right. And that's a polarization. It's the instantaneous gratification, which, by the way, is a different kind of dopamine rush as opposed to this curiosity thing I'm talking about. So we do, you know, it's an optimum for the short term. Companies can make money there. Society is going there. We sort of legitimized it by saying, look, it's democratized content production, you know.

Anyone can be YouTube influencer or a TikTok influencer. But influence for what? How is it lifting, you know, what is the macroeconomic difference? It's very micro. So, yeah, I mean, unfortunately, I think that's a very profoundly, limiting and self-limiting factor. You know, what did George Santayana say, right? Oh, yeah.

Those who forget history are destined to repeat it. My illusion of that is those who forget Santayana or Santana, Santana are predestined to learn of him, you know? Sajia, let's talk about the value proposition of getting an MBA, right? And I want to push you a little bit here, you know, with what Elon that aptly pointed out, right? He hates MBAs.

He hates, I mean, he recruits engineers or people. And I want to combine that with what you had alluded to earlier in the sense that, you know, it doesn't matter what degree you have, it matters more about how well you do the job, right? Putting your answer in the context of those two, you know, observations. I mean, look, there's a founding principle in education, which is this, will make you better. And the question we need to ask, frankly, is, does it? Are you better of spending four years of your undergrad working? Are you better of spending two years or your one year of your MBA working? Does this get your head? And it's not just monetarily. It also does it

make you better at your job? Now, I'm a bit of an idealist. I think that abstractions help. Right? When you do an abstraction, you're able to help. You're able to help. elevate your thinking, you're able to translate, you're able to use analogies from across fields. I do believe that. And I think that a good education can help and you can see it. The problem is, at what point are we over it rotating? Are we overdoing it? At what point are we not focusing on that and just throwing in stuff just for the sake of throwing in stuff? So my view is that the degree, the MBA at ASB is really good. We have small cohorts.

It's highly immersive. They do action learning. They go to MIT. Right. It's fantastic. And we make sure that the students are great. But does the MBA as a whole work? I'm not convinced.

You know, my wife's an HBS grad. By the way, I'm the CEO of a MBA school. I'm an engineer. I don't have an MBA. So one of the things that I think we need to look at is, is the efficacy and the durability and the impact of learning. And that is a question we should ask of all degrees. Would I ask my now 22 year old to go get an MBA at some point from, you know, any old

program? No, I wouldn't. At some point, depending on her place, does she need to learn accounting and maybe that'll help her? Yeah, sure. So I also think that we need to seriously consider unbundling this bulk purchase lock in that we do with degrees and let people try before you buy, you know, make it more cost effective, more capital effective. But yeah, I'm actually a skeptic of, I think we need to

rethink the degree a little bit. In fact, very significantly. Not just about MBA, just about every other degree, right? All degrees. Yeah, because the, I mean, look, in the U.S., tuition debt is $1.8 trillion in rising. And it's mostly not, you can't. You can't. can eliminate your death through bankruptcy. I mean, think about it. You know, we professors, we can say to students, you know, young person, it's going to be good for you to get a degree. But is it?

Probably not. Right. So I mean, I've written about extensively. I don't think people will be shocked to hear me say. I think that academia has to really confront the questions that society is posing to it. I mean, it's one of the political footballs in the U.S. presidential elections now. How did academia find itself in this position? Yeah.

You know? So, yeah, I think it's fair to say. Here's the idea. What also bothers me is how the cost would have gone up so dramatically. I mean, you know, at a time when you went to school, almost the same time, you know, I went to school, it was so much cheaper. And there's this lingering question about, you know, that rate of return, right, on how much you're putting on a table for your kids' education and all that, right? So how do you answer to that sort of a suspicion or skepticism? I think it's, first of all, the skepticism is totally justified.

You know, the president of Harvard, Larry Bacca, who just stepped down two presidents ago, he did a lot of work on the cost of education. And he visited me actually shortly before in the interim between being president of Tufts and before being president of Harvard. And we were just chatting about it. And he explained to me that what's happened in the U.S. education system is this spiral, right? Professors are tenured based on their research. For research, you need teaching assistants.

Teaching assistants get a lot, very involved in education. You need a lab. You raise funds from someone. You build a beautiful building. but then you can't, you don't have money to maintain the buildings, you take debt, right? But then you build another building. Now you have to take debt to maintain that. And all this causes a spiral of costs in the U.S.

So, and also I think that a lot of U.S. universities are addicted to fundraising. And for all that, the costs keep going up. This has to stop. Education has to go back to thinking about the value it provides and being fairly compensated for that value. And I think that discipline is going to take a long time coming. I think so. And you know what?

The other concern that I'm seeing that I have is how, you know, in China, education is something that you can't game. The U.S. is a place where you can actually game the system, right? If you got more money, you can send your kids to the private schools that supposedly deliver better quality, right, as opposed to the states. schools. It starts with the high school and to some extent, there are a lot of extent, the tertiary level of education. How do you, with, and I'm going to jump on this, you know, AI in a bit, but how do you see AI being able to equalize education all across the planet so that, well, I'm not trying to sound like a socialist, but, you know, the less ability for anybody to game the educational system,

probably the better for humanity. Yeah. Right? As long as you can back up, you know, the narrative with good quality education, good quality of education, right? Is that the right way to think about this? No, I absolutely think that's the right way to think about it. Look, we, our education, I mean, my argument is our education, the way we educate is bad. And the private schools are less bad.

Right. if we fundamentally rethink learning, which is not easy to do, the way the incentives are lined up, the way teachers are trained, the way the content is created, even the educational complex of textbooks, exams, all that stuff. It's very hard to do it, so don't get me wrong. I don't think it's easy. But if you actually do it right, I think we could teach more cost effectively. Students would learn better. The outcomes would be better for society. If you're focused on curiosity, on true learning, durable learning, I would reduce the amount of cost.

content. We also, we're packing 10 pounds into a five-pound bag. And then we have, it's like a, it's like a hot dog eating contest, you know. And then we measure how many hot eggs they ate. It doesn't matter if they retain it, you know, it's sort of crazy. So I think that if we fundamentally rethink learning and focus on learning, focus on the fundamentals, if we've reduced the curriculum, and focus on what's relevant, I think that actually addresses it. But right now, it's a battle of deficiencies, not a battle of efficiencies. Now, in terms of AI, look, you know, I became a, I became a slightly better than mediocre. I would say maybe just a little bit better than mediocre tennis player. My best tennis playing buddy was the wall in my backyard. Because it returned every ball.

But I tried to play with my other mediocre friends. They wouldn't return every ball, so it wasn't very effective. So would Federer. I mean, he would return every ball. Federer would, but I don't have access to Federer. By the way, you may have seen his extraordinary speech at Dartmouth. Fantastic. Inspiring. I mean, what is the hell of speech? Oh, my God.

Yeah. AI could be that wall. AI done right becomes the sparring partner to get your fundamental strict. It's quirky. It's going to make mistakes. It keeps you on your toes. But to me, AI done right actually could make a massive difference to education. It doesn't replace the ultimate human coach, though.

it just democratizes a little bit more, the student who wants to have the ball come back somewhat more regularly. And if you've seen Sal Khan's TED talk or his videos using chat GPT and then GPD 4-0, I mean, you know there's a there. The challenge right now is too expensive. So we need open-source models. Actually, the real challenge with AI overall is Nvidia makes a lot of money. the chips are in short supply. Servers are expensive, and most people can't access it

at the rate they need to. So democratizing AI and unleashing creativity may be a reset moment where we're all back to the starting gates, but for that, we need to get our populations lined up.

When you say democratizing AI, are you in that camp that believes that it ought to be open source? I absolutely think it ought to be open sourced. A lot of the AI today is you know, server-based with massive, you know, getting access to Nvidia chips right now is the big problem, and they have a huge lead, right?

And that's why it's such a geopolitical football between America and China. So access is expensive. The servers are expensive. The power, the consume. So I think we, and of course, a lot of these things are closed. Now you have open source. I think we will see not large language models,

but smaller language models, which are more efficient, things that can run on your phone. We'll see local competition become much faster. I was just reading today about Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing corporation, working on some new approaches to packaging. So I think we will see a lot of breakthroughs. We are extrapolating from only two points of rate close together. I'm actually quite hopeful that AIL were quite commoditized

because of the amount of money being poured into it. Right now, it's very, very, very, centripetal. There are few people who have a lot of power, few companies. That scares me to it because it has that propensity to elitize, further the pre-existing elitization of economic order. Yes, yes, it's a very existential thing right now. But the good news is, you know, China isn't sitting around, India isn't chitting around, the rest of the world is going, my God, you know, we're also worried.

And I think open source will take off. As a Southeast Asian, I'm worried because the guys that are going to be able to invest massively are the Americans and the Chinese. Yeah. Not the Southeast Asians. Yeah. I mean, if you take look at the VC investment on AI, the US, a couple of years ago, I think the VC's invested $36, $38 billion, China, $28 billion. Europe, only $8 billion. I mean, it shows you right there, the extrapolation of where things are and where things are going to be.

And Southeast Asia is not within that Asia figure of 26 to 20, 28 billion. It's mostly China. Yeah. Look, I think what will end up happening, though, and this is wishful thinking about a lucky circumstance that might arise. Is that enough caveats there? Is that open source AI from the U.S. will proliferate. If you go to Hugging Face, for example, there's so many AI moral. Go to GitHub, right? And then it'll proliferate. The parameters, the training will become more verticalized. It'll be, you know, train in Baja,

train in this, train in that, trade in Indonesian legal canon, right? And I'm hoping that it'll get more commoditized as a result. And there'll be other breakthroughs that'll make it less, you know, accumulative, which is one group accumulates all the power. I have a sense that might happen, and that might be the saving grace.

But otherwise, I'd be very concerned about what you're saying. And in fact, we should be concerned because that's where it's going. Let me test you with the following observation or concern. If the guys that are going to be able to invest would only just be the China and the U.S., right? Aren't they likely to be the biggest beneficiaries by way of being the creators? And it sounds like everybody else is just going to be a consumer or an enabler at the rate that it's going to get commoditized, as you aptly pointed out. Well, what does that mean, though?

First of all, by the way, Apple is sitting on $60 billion of cash when they last looked. And they just decided, they just had to give in and say, well, we'll just use Open AI. Right? And their recent... Pissed off somebody. That means that even Apple couldn't keep up. Yeah. Right?

I mean, Apple's just completely missed it, right? Google invented the transformer. 2017, Ashish Vaswani et al. And somehow, Gemini is not even on the equation. So it's a very fast-moving thing. Now, if you sort of break it down, what is making money from AI mean? How does Open AI make money? It's a subscription.

Well, meta are just open-sourced. And I'm working both in the Asia School of Business and with other students in creating mini-server farms on campus to do AI. And it's open-source. and at some point, this generation of AI will sort of begin to saturate. So I think once that happens, how does Open AI make money? Because I won't pay the $20 subscription. Then what does creation mean? Well, now you're writing apps of this stuff.

Well, yes, I mean, the US has a big advantage. India has a big advantage. China has a big advantage. Estonia has a big advantage, you know. The countries where there's a lot of innovation, that's where the action should be. but I don't think that countries should rule themselves out. I think there's actually a huge opportunity to be creative with AI apps. So you actually believe that AI is going to be to fridge,

and Southeast Asians can be to Coke makers? That's very well put. I'll give an example. That's encouraging. Well, you know, I have a sort of a positive view, and let me explain. For example, large companies, the big Bahmets, will be very shy about using AI. Here's why.

Because unlike computer programming, which is deterministic, AI statistical. It's error prone. It hallucinates. It makes mistakes. So let's say you have a customer service bot, right, and your big airline. And it makes a mistake.

Well, you're a big target. You can get sued. Small companies, like in Indonesia, right? I was at the airport, and there were a lot of people returning from the Hodge. So let's say a travel agency in Indonesia that manages people going on the Hodge. And they want to customize in Bahasa.

And maybe get the Hodge visa and also maybe let them go to other parts of Saudi Arabia while they're there. Although it's terribly hot there. And it's another tragedy that's brewing right now. But that can be done with AI. And because it's a mom and pop or a small business, the accountability is going to be much greater

compared to a large company. What? Air Canada had a chatbot go rogue and it offered benefits to a passenger. And Air Canada said, oh, it was a chatbot. Sorry, we won't give it to you. The passenger sued and won't in small claims. So the big companies, a big target. Small companies, especially the long tail. Actually, I think in harness AI a little bit better than the big companies in the short term. So let's get, let's get moving.

Okay. That sounds hopeful. Let me ask you this. There's this, you know, there's this observation about how AI is really just a hallucination, right? And it depends on the hypnosis that's being infused, imbued, or injected into the hallucination, right? My predisposition is that the hypnosis or hypnosis are just not being done in an adequately multidisciplinary manner. Because of this technological hubris, right? They don't want to rope in the environmentalists, the sociologists, the economists, the spiritualists, the philosophers, and all that, right? There's this intuitively, there's this risk of this getting unicolarized or unidisciplinize. And it might just be not benign, you know, the result of the hallucination.

Is that the right way to think about this? Yeah, yeah, and by the way, it's sort of interesting. I was reading about how human consciousness evolved and our ability to scenario plan. And there's quite literally a theory called a stoned ape theory where apes or, you know, early humans, ape sort of hallucinogens and started to hallucinate. And the sense is that the hallucination, when controlled, became our ability to plan and scenario plan. That's literally, there's a theory. I'm not convinced this is the right theory, but as a philosophical scaffold, it's interesting, isn't it?

AI is, in fact, simply playing out the next word or the next word and the next word, and it's crafting things. It's such a, you know, predictive typing, right? And it's sort of stunning that it turns out that it can sort of reason. And because human language entranes knowledge, it pulled in all this knowledge so you can ask it questions and it gives you mostly sensible answers, right? but you're right. It doesn't have a soul, right? We don't think through things like, what does it mean to have this power?

Ethics is a bit of an afterthought. There's many people now thinking about it, but it's all a rush. It's like the internet to getting eyeballs and serving a purpose and perhaps getting rid of a job and getting a cost-benefit analysis. My view is that many economists will disagree

that the argument is that technology begets, productivity goes up and more jobs are created. But this is such a shock to the system. I actually think the societal impact is going to be very significant. We'll create, just like we're going to have climate refugees. We'll have tech refugees. People who lost their jobs because of this. And I don't think we've taken a sufficiently holistic societal view of this.

And I worry deeply about it. And I think it's urgent. And the companies, you know, it's like this race because everyone's looking for the next quarter. What did you do with AI? How did you cut jobs? And they're going to have to do it. Large companies will struggle because of the risk profile that I explained. So in the meantime, I think there's an opportunity of small companies.

But that's a very short-term thing. We have to think societally. We need to get everyone from the, from the ethicist to the shaman involved, you know? I'm not getting that sense. Oh, no. You know, I've been spending the last couple of years in that part of the world where people are just, I mean, they're so damn good technologically. But I don't think they're having enough coffee or discussions with the other guys from the other disciplines. And it's just intuitively, I just don't think it's going to land at the right spot.

Look, Jeffrey Hinton quit Google because it's concerned about it. AI was crafted. I think the term AI was coined by a guy called McCarthy MIT guy at the Darkbook Conference. in, I think the 50s, we need a new Dartbuth conference. We need to really sort of think about it. Rishi Sunak hosted an event, but I think we need to do a lot more of this. And we need to have this. Look,

this is such a it's like a nuclear weapon, right? It's not as destructive, but maybe very impactful on society. I really feel that everyone needs to know about this and start thinking about it. It can't just creep up on us. That's what's happening.

Well, you know, I would argue that non-proliferation of nuclear was relatively very successful because of the nature of the polarity of the global order. And it was terrifying. It was bipolar, then it became unipolar. It was terrifying, but now it's so multipolar. I think the proliferation risk is much higher with respect to anything that could cause harm on humanity.

Call it nuclear, call it AI, call it cyber and all that good stuff. Yeah, because it's so exactly. So there's no you know, Manichian opposition, right? Which sort of balances itself out. It's like this circular firing squad. Right.

And just one person has to pull a trigger, right? Right. So yes, I agree. And with AI, especially because there are two things about the nuclear program, nuclear programs. One is that they were national. Here, it's multipolar even within the big countries,

right? So it's privatized. And the second, these companies are so powerful that what a single company can do in the U.S. with the amount of venture capital that's going into it is more than an entire country can do in other parts of the world. So if Malaysia or Indonesia want to take on AI, it has to be a national program to compete with the anthropic. So in many ways, the dynamic is very different. and I just don't see the collective conversations, the collective wisdom being exercised in these topics. The other concern I want to point out to you is, you know, AI is being created by teenagers and people in the 20s and 30s, right?

And the guys that are supposed to be regulating this damn thing, they're age 55 to 80. You know, that gap, just how do you make sure that this is going to be... properly or wisely regulated, right? And, you know, I'm noticing how governments in many countries or some countries are just opening the kimono without understanding, much less being able to manage the risk. Well, this has been a problem actually in technology for some time. And you saw the hearings in Congress about social media, right? And, you know, the TikTok guy actually held his own. I thought he did very well, right?

You talked about that, I saw. Yeah, I was pretty impressed with them. But, yeah, I mean, this is a very fundamental issue. The issue is that we have an incompatibility. Clock cycles and knowledge, etc. You know, I hope people like you, you know, who have both the intellect and the influence, you'll start talking about this. And I think every part of the world needs to be represented.

By the way, AI, there was an article by Ray Kurzweil that just came out. I think yesterday or something, where he talks about how AI is going to solve energy problems. Yeah, he's utopian. He's utopian. But actually, I will say that AI is going to change engineering pretty fundamentally. It's going to make us very creative. Oh, that I agree.

Yeah, because we'll be able to design things much more rapidly. It's called the inverse problem. I won't bore you with it. So done right, it has some benefits as well, but the global conversation isn't happening, you know. And I'm really worried about it. And all I can do is be worried about it. So it's all I also feel helpless. You know.

But don't you think educational institutions have a role here? Yeah. I mean, not only in terms of bridging the gap between the creators and the regulators, but what we're seeing this increasingly widening gap between policy postures and public opinions all across the world, underdeveloped, developing, and developed economies, right? Yeah, I think education has two roles, right? one is let's get people to be more critical thinkers about this. And that's not just educators.

It's everyone. It's politicians. It's thought leaders. It's, you know, it's religious organizations. Everyone's got to get into it. NGOs, everyone's got to get into it. That's one. I do think that research,

Bahamets, the MITs, the Berkleys, the Stanford's, the Harvard's, you know, CS4, the IITs, the IITs, the great universities around the world have to start examining this. And in some ways, it's also a beautiful thing because it puts into question things like, what does it mean to be human? What is intelligence? Some of the hubris came from the fact that we underestimated human intelligence. What is intelligence?

What is morality? So it's a sort of a fundamental thing we need to get into. And so it may be exciting in addition to being an important duty. So I think educational research institutions have a huge role to play in this. And it's beginning to happen, I will say. It's beginning to happen. And there are also non-profit organizations in Washington, D.C. and other parts of the world. Europe actually enacted a new AI regulation, AI law, which is risk-based.

It's a start. But it's not particularly nuanced. It's not a discussion, which is what needs to happen. The regulatory framework that comes out of Europe is a manifest. of how they are not, or they have not been a beneficiary of the digital revolution. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Europe, I think, has to come to grips with its role on the planet and what's

happening for a variety of reasons. Energy is one of them. Demographics is another. And the technology innovation, my God, you know, I mean, the birthplace of the Renaissance, right, for the last 500 years, they've been the until only in the last 50 years or 100 years, the U.S. has emerged. Somehow Europe's managed to sort of fall behind and get into a defensive posture. There's no doubt about it. That said, I will give them credit for GDPR, privacy. It's become a global standard. I like that. Yeah. So, you know, I guess it's going, but the point,

I think your earlier point, which is it's so multipolar. There's so many moving parts, you know, that it's very hard to pin down exactly how this is going to pan out. And in fact, my worry is it may not pan out in a good way because it's hurting cats societally. You know, this recent publication on The Economist about China's attaining scientific superpower, have they left the station? No, I don't think so. I mean, I think China's amazing. I've opened labs in China.

I've been there many times. I have so many students from China, and they're exceptional, many colleagues that I, in fact, very much in touch with. But I think measures of creativity are always fuzzy. You know, patents. If you said patents are good. Well, everyone's going to file a patent.

You know, I'll give an example. I have dozens of patents. The vast majority of my patents, I will tell you, honestly, yeah, they're not that good. You're being humble. No, no, really. You know? The patents that matter, the blocking patents. It's very hard to measure what's a block. patent. But, you know, they'll look good on my LinkedIn page, actually. I don't have a LinkedIn page. But, you know, they look good on your resume. So any metric can begin, I'm not saying that I think

China is doing exceptionally well. I just fundamentally question some of the pet metrics people use to predict, to measure creativity. One thing, China has done a few things right. I mean, it's really invested in talent all the way ground up, right, all the way from the grassroots. It's really invested in major programs, technical initiatives. I think that's great. And I think it's done tremendously well. But I'm just not suspicious. I just think it's very hard to measure these things. So I read the economist article. I think it's a wake-up call to the rest of the world. I think kudos to China, but I don't think it's that black and white. You know, Apple exported billions of dollars worth of products out of India last year. Is that a

reckoning of what's to come? Well, I mean, I think that we are entering a new stage in the history of the planet with very clear lines now. Right. And it's political. It's energy. For example, you know, I mean, it's, you know, the Saudi peace deal may be partly about managed nuclear energy, right?

It's no surprise that Iran and Qatar have a lot of nice. natural gas. The U.S., I mean, Europe needs natural gas, and it's trying to getting it from Russia. So I do think that the lines are being drawn. I think that there's a big pivot happening. Invidia export of chips to China is very strictly regulated now or any semiconductor manufacturing equipment. So is it a sign of things to come? I think for sure, I think we're seeing a global realignment, you know, New World orders,

George Bush called it, but I actually think we're seeing a global realignment. India has punched below its weight for many, many decades, and it was a matter of time before the pendulum swung. But yeah, I mean, I think this is a signal moment. What would Southeast Asia have to do? I would say that Southeast Asia has many things going for it, right? I mean, it's actually a much richer part of the world than India, but maybe it's challenge. in the sense that India was a little desperate, so certain things took off in India.

People had to fight, right? But Southeast Asia has many things going forward. But I think the most important thing is education. It's awareness, it's education. It is a sense that critical thinking and creativity are needed, not just because Southeast Asia has to emerge as an intellectual thought leader, but also because of things of climate change. will affect Southeast Asia a lot more.

Energy. Southeast Asia is blessed with so many energy resources at a time the world needs them and should be, it should own its own future rather than being a victim or listening to others define its future. It should export ideas. Somehow to get there, what the path is,

is culturally dependent. But I think that's where Southeast Asia is double down. You know, if you've mentioned the word energy a few times, mentioned Nvidia a couple of times. I'll pick up on those. Whenever you listen to Jensen Huangs, you know, talking anywhere,

he keeps, you know, making reference to how he's going to be 10xing, up to 30xing, the capacity of the next GPU upon a pre-existing GPU, right? What doesn't get captured in the conversation is that it's going to require 10x energy. It's going to require 30x energy,

right? every time you put your two thumbs on a mobile for the compute and the store, I just, it boggles me because I don't think there's going to be enough renewables, inclusive of nuclear, geothermal, solar, wind, hydro, all that good stuff. That's going to be enough to energize whatever that next GPU is going to be at the rate that people are just going to be AIing the hell out of themselves. And it just, inaudibly creates much more relevance to the old paradigm.

Call it fossil. Call it coal. I mean, you work at a slumberger. Is that the right way of thinking? So I think if we extrapolate from what we're saying, for sure, that's the inevitability. Grids will be overloaded energy way. You get the energy is going to be a problem. renewables, there's only so much you can do.

There's only so fast you can scale up, no doubt about it. The one saving grace is if the extrapolation is offset by a change in direction. So what are some changes in direction? First of all, if the focus goes to lower energy, why? Because it can run on your laptop, on your phone. If it runs on your phone, the latency is lower. If it runs on your phone, you can use it when the internet,

you know, when your connectivity is bad. Right now, Siri doesn't work if I don't have connectivity. So for all these reasons, I think we'll see a second booster engine strapped onto this, which has to do with energy consumption and more local models, smaller models. Right now, it's a little bit boil the ocean. So the AI, you know, you can ask, chat, GBT, everything from how to make falafel all the way to, you know, the political history of Mongolia, right? It doesn't have to be.

So I think what we will see is much more sort of verticalized AI that does as fit for purpose, much smaller, small language models or small models with parameters and lower power. If that doesn't happen, I think we're on a path that is unsustainable. But I do hope that that will happen. We're seeing the first glimpses of that, actually. And I hope that that turn happens. Otherwise, we're barreling down towards an immovable obstacle. I'm smelling some inherent finite nature of scalability.

I think they're beginning to see it already, right? I mean, already. So what Nvidia has done is, in my view, they have, and just talking to people I know in the Bay Area, I was there a couple of weeks ago, is they have, in the GPU space, there's not even close not just in their design

but how rapidly they generate new designs they really doubled down so they have in the foreseeable future it's very hard for someone else to catch up but I do think that that runs into

limits for all the reasons you explained and we're going to see those limits cost has already become an issue so others are innovating right as I said large language models that are open sourced smaller models, verticalized models, as I just said, because

the finiteness is looming and the creativity is like a tube of toothpaste. You squeeze it, right? Eventually, it's going to come out from the sides. If you don't remove the cap, it's coming out from the side. So I think we're beginning to see some alternative image. But you have to look at it differently than chat GPT.

Interesting. You know, Apple, I was seeing some papers from Apple actually recently that talked about reduced models that are efficient, not as good, but much cheaper and take much less power. So we can ease off from the frontier and explore other frontiers. You know, as I was reading this book, A Scale by Jeffrey West, it's just fascinating book. And I mean, if you had read books throughout your life, you would have read maybe about 8 billion words. but AI today can

instantaneously read 8 trillion words and you start figuring out you know take that exponentially forward I mean will we be able to see humanity being able to have

much higher cerebral capacity by way of that development or less you know it's very interesting let me give you a two minute we have looking at AI so when AI reads the words, it doesn't actually retain the words. It tosses them away. And in a several thousand

dimensional space, it takes every word and gives it a several thousand dimensional vector. And it just adjusts it a little bit, and then a little bit, and then a little bit. So it actually doesn't rip out of the words. It distills them into this thousand, 12,000, whatever dimensional space. beyond a point in the current paradigm you know those movements go down doesn't change a lot the next term it reads doesn't change things that much

so it saturates where I think the progress is going to be in things like logic reasoning which it's not that good at until recently when you asked large language models to add numbers it didn't actually add them like a child would do with an algorithm

It pattern matched. So I think that we are fearful and excited, but I actually hope, maybe this is ritual thinking, that we've underestimated what humans are 86 billion neurons are capable of. And human society is, you know, each brain with 86 billion neurons connected. So, you know, you have an idea.

I have an idea of we brainstorm in this conversation. another idea. So I'm hoping that the sort of the human societal mind can more than keep up. And then there's judgment and those are other things. So I know it's a little bit romantic. But the AI paradigm is a little bit linear and a little bit, it's a very narrow barrel, a long barrel, you know. And we've been going to see that it's not as multifaceted as humans are. over time it'll get there but I think that battle will play out for quite some time before AI has its comeuppance and realizes what it isn't

just beginning to see it now a few days ago I was I was speaking at a panel with a member of the cabinet here about AI along with Google somebody from Google and somebody asked what should the role of AI be

and the both of the let's try to simplify the answer. I think at the end of the day, we would like for AI to make ourselves happier, healthier, wealthier, and smarter. Right? That's right. Is that a possibility? I think so.

And the planet more sustainable, hopefully. Well, yeah, sustainable. Forgot about that. But no, I think that's, you know, I mean, I imagine a day, again, this all sounds romantic and cliche it and maybe a little bit hackneyed, but what the hell? I think that there will come a day when, you remember that humane pin thing that didn't really pan out, but you have a buddy, you have your guardian angel.

That's helping you just live a happier life. Be better, you know? Stop you from doing silly things, you know, without being too preachy about it. You know, hey, Sanjay, you might lay off that. I don't want to lay off that extra burglar, you know. Can that be achieved? I don't know. I don't know.

But if we can wake up human beings, self-efficacy, a sense of who they are and what they are, critical thinking, what I want, what I really stand for, what I care about, my family, my health, the planet. You know, I think we have a chance to shape AI rather than having AI shape us. And I hope we sort of, that's why I really talk a lot about. learning. We talked about it, right? Sure. Getting human awareness up in the peripheries, the centrifugal aspect, as opposed to centripetal aspect. The polarization, I think, is a way to, what it, you know, it's, it's a way to sort of the opiate of the masses, you know, just sort of shut them down, right? And I think we can sort of, if we can get them to wake up, I think there's a real opportunity. Wow. Last question.

Why should anybody go to ASB? You know, we're going to completely, um, First of all, ASB is very focused on action learning. It's not just an education. It's about learning to think and do in the context of reality and learn abstractions but then apply them. We have really fantastic faculty. And now we're going to take another leap, which is ASB can come to you.

So we're launching something called Agile Continuous Education, where ASB is going to provide, for example, to an executive who wants to train her staff in AI hybrid modules with action learning, with an equivalent of action learning, jam sessions thrown in your musician. We actually talk about it to real people, and we're going to bring it to institutions around the world, particularly in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. So I think ASB, because we're small, we have an opportunity to apply many of the principles. I've been talking about others have been talking about to transform ourselves. Interesting. Anything else we've missed?

I think we've covered a lot. It's such a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much, Sanjay. Thank you. That was Sanjay Sharma, the dean of Asia School of Business in Kuala Lumpur. Thank you. This is Ending.