Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - The Coming Global AI Conflict w/ Gilman Louie | EP #54

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

In this episode, recorded during this year’s Abundance360 summit, Gilman and Peter discuss the rapid advancement of AI and its implications on global governance, particularly focusing on the competitive landscape between the United States and China. You will learn about: 01:28 | The AI Race: US vs China 11:36 | The AI Race: Leadership Matters 27:44 | Investment in the AI Race Gilman Louie is a technology venture capitalist who initially began his career as a videogame designer. He co-founded and managed In-Q-Tel, the venture capital fund of the CIA. Louie is currently the CEO of America’s Frontier Fund. His contributions to the field of technology and his leadership in venture capitalism have made him a notable figure in the industry.  Learn about America’s Frontier Fund. >Become a part of my community. Learn about my executive summit, A360. _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsor:  Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That's the sound of unaged whiskey transforming into Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around 1860, Nearest Green taught Jack Daniel how to filter whiskey through charcoal for a smoother taste, one drop at a time. This is one of many sounds in Tennessee with a story to tell. To hear them in person, plan your trip at tnvacation.com. Tennessee sounds perfect. Will you rise with the sun to help change mental health care forever? Join the Sunrise Challenge to raise funds for CAMH, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health, to support life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show

those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. How do you see these two superpowers? They actually have a timetable. They want to be in a leadership position as the global AI leader. We got there first. We now face a competitor nation. Are we moving fast enough? The answer is no, we're not moving fast enough.

Their view of alignment and my view of alignment are very different. Is it going to be fundamentally Chinese, American, fundamentally European? It scares me sometimes. It will change everything. The way we live, the way we play, the way we have relationships, the way we learn, right? Everything. The goal is to lead, not to win. Because winning defines a finite game.

We're in an endless game. I think this is our AI moment. Welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. One of the conversations that is going on right now is, is the United States prepared for the speed at which AI is going to transform everything, including governance? And is China better situated to utilize AI? I brought on stage this year at Abundance 360 the Honorable Gilman Lewis to have that conversation. A look at AI in the U.S. government versus AI in China. Gilman is the past CEO of In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA. Today, he's the CEO of America's Frontier Fund, which is effectively our sovereign wealth fund here in the United States.

It's an amazing conversation and one that we need to be thinking about as the speed of AI is accelerating. And it's going to have some extraordinary impact on who and how we run this planet. All right, check out this conversation from March 2023 at my private summit, Abundance360, with the Honorable Gilman Louie on the future of AI and governance. I'm thrilled to have you here, and thank you for your willingness to take on this conversation because it's a very real conversation in the world today. You have been overseeing so much, and we're in the midst of these tumultuous times. And we don't talk about the downside, dystopian side here,

and A360 too much, but we need to talk about reality. And part of reality is the fact that AI is going to drive a lot of change in the world. It was Alex who said, I think it was Alex who said, you know, whoever's the dominant AI players in the world in the next five years will remain the dominant player. I mean, we're playing for keeps in some ways here. So if you don't mind, paint the picture for me. Where are we in the USA and AI China relationship here? How much is the US government really leading? And how much is the US government really leading and how much is the Chinese government really leading? How do you see these two superpowers?

That's a great question. I think first of all if anybody spends any time understanding AI it's not because of what either governments are doing. Most of the AI innovation work is happening in academia, in our companies, though both countries have seeded a lot of AI research. We do it through our organizations like DARPA, IARPA, our National Science Foundation, our national labs. China does it with its national champions, its university systems and its regional organizations I think the real question and the challenge for both countries is it is clear that both countries View that this is a competitive race. It's sort of the issue of winner takes all and what that really really means and trying to kind of

led First in the world to go out there and said as a nation for for where they wanted to go that AI was going to be critical they actually have a timetable they said by 2030 they want to be in a leadership position as the global AI leader right I used to take a group to China every year up until things started devolving, but it was clear that the party and the mayors and governors were making huge capital investments. They were recruiting, they were creating policies, they were creating cities that were focused on AI. Do we see the US doing the same?

Well, I think right now, because of the current situation, it's not just because of chat GPT, though that has accelerated things. The US kind of woke up and said, you know, we now face a competitor nation, right, that's committed, that has integrated this as a part of a national strategy.

Is this the equivalent of the US versus Russia in the space race? Absolutely. They had their Sputnik moment when AlphaGo beat the best gold champion. Yes, Lisa Dahl. So that was their moment. In fact, even though I participated in this great study in this commission, a 750-page report that we put out two and a half i'm gonna

have chat gpt right it's just like that thick and chat can probably compress it down to you know a few pages um but i think this is our ai moment yeah right this is our sputnik moment you know people are waking up in washington and looking at chat gptT and are saying to themselves, what does this mean for our economy, for national defense? How should we look at these particular technologies in a much more profoundly different way than we looked at narrow AI? Yeah. By the way, once again, please put your questions into the chat and upvote them. I'll be going to your questions here in a little bit. I mean, listen, I'm thankful. I'm a libertarian capitalist. I'm thankful to be American. I love this country.

But when I think about linear sclerotic systems, I think about the government. And so the notion, it scares me sometimes. I'm super happy that we have amazing entrepreneurs like we just saw on the stage here, who are able to do that. You're investing in, I'll get to that in a little bit. But do you think that, are you seeing from within the president's AI commission and so forth,

are you seeing the internal attention and awareness and significance here? Are we moving fast enough the answer is no we're not moving fast enough okay the governments have a very difficult time dealing with non-linear change functions yes they really make change they they can't understand how to put that in perspective and so and it's it's not just the US government or the Chinese government, I just got back from Brussels, right? The EU is trying to wrestle with this. Now, all three countries at some level is afraid of, particularly the new technologies around generative AI and other AI technologies that's on the bubble. Because unlike narrow ai where we can focus it on the problem right we

can't necessarily control its outputs and that's frightening for governments so you know in brussels what they want to do at least some in the commission you know they want to regulate it right so the first thing they do they want to regulate it that you know that's the first reaction of government always right on the u.s side is let's let's create tort law basically sue people right because it's the american way so what we do and then the chinese are kind of go like this might come out and say things that are not on the party line right and so you have to understand that kind of uh cultural realities of government as they look at these technologies and all three are wrong i mean i can give this example you know i got this phone call i won't say from whom and said

like we got to stop this thing like we got we got to do a timeout it's like stem cells all over again and here's what we need to do we need to call a moratorium until we figure this thing out right try to explain it's already out there there are these companies the code is totally available it's open source it's open source you know that strategy is not going to work but they said but it acts like a nine-year-old right it's like it it says stupid things and but it can like put together dangerous combinations you can you can build weapons systems off of this and I said look if your nine-year-old acts out in your house she throws food right kicks kicks things around throws a temper tantrum do you kill it right no

you train it you train her to be smarter you put some rules around it right you get her to think about what are the ethical considerations of what it's doing. So our goal, all the countries, you know, even our competitor nations, needs to use AI in a way and mature it in a way so that it gets smarter, not dumber. You know, one of the lessons we learned in the ukraine right now yes is dumber is deadly right so this idea that i know there's been a huge debate about how ai is used on the battlefield but dumber systems leads to higher casualties right and worse non-intentional and so you know generally smarter is better same thing is true with ai this episode is brought to

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is likely to win the AI race between US and China? But before I do that, when I think about communism and socialism as experiments run over the last century, one of the reasons they failed is because you couldn't run that system without having actual knowledge. Could communism or socialism, where socialism is basically technological socialism, technology is taking care of you and communism is understanding

the markets better than the market's forces could be, are those systems potentially better structured for an AI world? So it's pretty clear that authoritarian governments or socialist communist governments want to use AI to better serve its public, right? I mean, we have a very Western point of view, right? Which is we're kind of grounded in the American style of democracy, which I think is a good thing. I think ultimately that's the better model. But if you're in China and- By the way, it could be made better with AI. Oh, absolutely. All systems can be made better with AI. But if you're in China and you- By the way, it could be made better with AI. Oh, absolutely. All systems can be made better with AI.

But if you want to deliver higher quality, the things that any government, democratic or authoritarian worries most is unhappy populations. Unhappy populations leads to- Equals revolt. Revolution and revolt. So China's putting a lot of effort of using their AI to deliver better services, right? So they put a lot of energy in things like smart cities, you know, making sure their garbage is picked up on time, making sure that the public workers are actually doing their jobs.

They're doing some other stuff that I find not necessarily great, the social scoring, the monitoring or tracking. But again, culturally in China, this issue around using technologies for harmony. Yes. Harmony is making sure that- Increasing happiness. Increasing happiness and alignment. It's just their view of alignment and my view of alignment are very different. So how important is it, do you think, for the U.S. to win this AI China arms race?

If I were to polarize it that way, and where do you think we are in that? What would the U.S. have to do to get there? So we're playing this big game of chess or go, I don't know your favorite game. And we're in a very early moves. So I think winning and losing is the wrong conceptual framework. It's really about leadership. So if you kind of think about, you heard some great speakers today talking about, you know, data sets and algorithms and open source.

It is what platforms are companies and countries going to build their AI driven applications on top of and in the old days all of us technologists you know because I'm kind of old right we thought technology you're young and we'll have a longevity conversation later yeah I wrote 120 by the way okay good but but the challenge that we have is this this concept that Okay, good. But the challenge that we have is this concept that technology is neutral. And by the way, what did you write as your number? 120. What's that?

No, I know for your age, but what about one through five about how you feel about AI? Oh, five. Five. Okay, great. Right, right. I mean, it will change everything. Yeah. Everything, the way we live, the way we play, the way we have relationships, the way we

learn, right? Everything. And it is going to be such a global accelerator it'll make everything go non-linear all at the same time everywhere always all right but here's the thing we're at physical 1.0 yes right i mean literally this is like windows 1.0 the stuff you who don't know what that is that that's like really early. Yeah, that's in really early days. But I go back to the framework of how these countries kind of look at this technology and what winning means. Whoever puts the data sets together, whoever puts the training sets together, whoever builds these models out can't help but building bias

into those systems, right? this idea that systems are not biased is impossible right because bias is how we do judgment it's the thing that we go it's our shorthand of how we got like shortcuts in the brain shortcuts in the brains and ai is going to develop those same shortcuts and so but we want them biased the way we want them biased in a positive way the way we view so the competition between china the way, the way we view. So the competition between China and the US is not just who has a better missile system or who can shoot down the other guy's hypersonics faster. All that's really, really important.

But how we build all of our information systems and what cultural biases we put into there, right? Is it going to be fundamentally Chinese, fundamentally American, fundamentally European, right? Those cultural biases are going to be built in, at least in this current generation of generative AI, it's going to be built into those systems. Let me remind you please put your questions in the Slido and we can bring Slido up when there's some, let's bring it on back here and we'll get some of the

participation. Can AI be regulated? I've been dying to ask you this question. I mean, there are regulators who want to regulate it through whatever mechanism, but is it even regulatable? Well, clearly, people will try to regulate it, right? For example, they're going to try to regulate it so you can't build the next toxin to kill everybody. Sure, we want

regulations like that so there will be regulation um but i think this concept that we can can put the genie back in the bottle is false right that is this not going to happen and so if anything if anything we got to move faster not slower Because the danger point is between that nine-year-old and that 30-year-old. Yeah. So I love that, right? I think about AI is about to enter adolescence. Yes. It's where you're strong enough, but you don't know your strength yet. Yeah. You're kind of stupid. And the frontal lobe hasn't evolved yet. Right. My kids are 11. I'm told it's going to be blurry for a few years, and then they wake up in their early 20s. And we're going to use that blurriness to our advantage. People talk about AI,

particularly generative AI, hallucinating. It's a bad thing. But if you actually look at what is hallucinating, it is actually its form of creativity. you know, I give you a great example. I just said, name all the awards that Gilman Louie has won. So it lists like a bunch of my CIA medals and then three other medals I don't have. Right. So one of them was the Presidential Medal for Innovation. So I took it to the White House and asked them to deliver the medal next week to myself. Right. So, so look, we're seeing these AIs be be super creative we just think it's a hallucination we're not leveraging the power of these pattern recognitions to our advantage let me go to a couple questions here uh what is the likelihood of stacking ai on blockchain to keep government uh transparent a fact-based scoreboard. So there are a couple of problems.

First of all, blockchain is hugely energy inefficient, which I have my own challenges around that. And the security models itself will last for a little while. I know we have a bunch of quantum-resistant algorithms who we're playing with. That's tomorrow night is quantum computation. But I would say this. That question might be grounded in this idea that AI fundamentally is explainable.

That's kind of like lean coal. When I ask my child, how did she come up with that idea to eat that candy all at one time at the dinner table? She says, I don't know. It's the neural net. So she doesn't know what neuron fired at what time to make that decision AIs are like that now can it be more transparent yes can we do things to make it more understanding a kind of how it got there but at the end at the end of the day neural networks are neural nets and anybody understands that space understands it's not it's statistical

it's not bright determin It's not deterministic. McMahon from our Singularity community asks, why have we not heard of a Chinese chat GPT competitor? That's interesting. Well, they're clearly working on one. Many companies, Chinese companies, are working on this. Again, we got there first. It's sort of like vaccines.

We got there first. It's sort of like vaccines. We got there first. It doesn't mean that we'll continue to provide that leadership going forward. I think we have to give the Chinese companies and government credit for being able to actually apply these technologies faster than we do. faster than we do, right? So that's why for the US and for the Western countries, moving faster is going to be more important because if we don't, those foundational tech, all of that foundational AI could easily be built upon Chinese technologies. A few questions. You previously served as the CEO of In-Q-Tel, which is an extraordinary venture fund, the venture fund of the CIA, which I always thought was amazing as a concept. I'm curious, one of those subjects we talked about here last year, we'll talk about again next year, is the field of brain-computer interface.

Is In-Q-Tel investing in BCI? Well, I'm going to go specifically to In-Q-Tel because I'm not actively involved in In-Q-Tel anymore. But this is an area of interest, and it has been an interest for 30 years. I would imagine every defense organization is going to try to increase intelligence well yeah well here's our problem right our problem is our mental models is based on what humans do so all of our data is based on what are we call these marked ones our eyeballs can see what we can hear what we can understand we design all of our information that are human centric and the problem with that model is humans become it's the limitation right if you're going to

design systems in the future you got to break out of those sensory things a direct brain interface now why is the military interested in it well for obvious reasons right if i'm underneath you know nine g's i'm waiting my head weights 2,000 pounds I can't move my hands right thinking about what that system should do for it to do it it's probably better than me having that physically trying to reach out you know at 9 G's to pull that aside also because the stakes is much higher you know it's one thing for an AI to make a bunch of mistakes on you know picking a stock it's another thing if the AI picks the

wrong things that ultimately leads to somebody's death. So it sticks much higher in the military. Let's talk about your newest venture, which is amazing, America's Frontier Fund. I've heard it described as America's sovereign wealth fund. And I've always wondered why doesn't the US have a sovereign wealth fund like Saudi has PIF and many other countries? So talk to us, what is America's frontier fund? So our view is, particularly because of this revolution in AI,

that because AI modeling and simulation, digital twins, as we call them, it's moving along at such a rapid rate yes that those technologies are going to revolutionize right foundational or frontier technologies for the next decade so things that might have seemed 20 years off are now only gonna be five to ten years off you can talk about quantum yeah right quantum is always 20 years away right fusion is always 20 years away, right? Fusion is always 20 years away,

right? Being able to decode and actually simulate a human cell is always 20 years away until now, right? And so America's Frontier Fund is to make sure that the U.S. begins to actually invest in the technologies that are going to transform the world. It's not just the AI. It's the application of AI to improve all of humanity. Hey, everybody. This is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net, the way I see the world, by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology,

how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandist.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode.

We'll go to these last two questions here in our four minutes. How can we as taxpayers advocate for the development of AI technologies and the race to embrace these technologies in the U.S. to maintain our competitive advantage? So should American citizens be saying to the White House and Congress, guys, you got to get in the game here? Well, absolutely. And look, the Defense Department was the first department of any military in the world to actually create its own AI ethics, which is amazing. Trust me. I was in there when the sausage was made.

You don't want to know how we made that sausage. But what we said is, if we're going to have leadership in the world, the goal is to lead, not to win. Right? I love that distinction. Lead, not win. Because winning defines a finite game right it's like video games you know we're we're in an endless game hopefully it's endless the only way to win is not to play right exactly so in in that particular case right i think the public

needs the demand from the government what are the frameworks of how we should be using these technologies so you know i remember in the 1980s, when I was in medical school, I was playing with restriction enzymes, the first ability to chop up DNA. And there were these very famous Asilomar conferences where all the gene jockeys got together and they self-regulated before the government regulated them.

Is that going on in the AI world now? I think the AI companies are beginning to get real about this. And our view is this, and we try to communicate, we being, you know, some of us who are trying to wear our government hats talking to our companies. And that is, if you don't have some level of self-regulation, right, and responsible use, then somebody's going to tell you what responsible use and regulate you so so in the european world that means ban right if the european courts make a ruling that's it there's no appeal right that's not like the political system here you just wait for the next administration to show up to go again right um and the same thing

that's on the chinese side right if you if you do the wrong thing you're out of there you might be gone for six months and you know and come back later as a high school teacher so so stakes are high it's it's really really high and so companies we cannot and i'll be really tough on my technology companies in America, right? Please. We cannot have this idea that we're US-centric first when it deals with the rest of the world. Because when we go into a place like Europe and we say, you know, we don't consider their values, what they've gone through as a group of countries, and we apply just blindly, blindly right our ethical overlays on those models it doesn't work right and so so we culturally have to be much more open-minded and understanding the baselines and maybe chat gpt could help our diplomacy a little bit better and dealing with

these particular issues when it comes to company diplomacy for countries overseas one more question from slido here in the space race the public rallied behind the government's investment, put people on the moon. Do you think we might see that in the race to win AI, or I'll translate it, in the race to lead humanity in AI? I've already seen it, right? 750-page report, AI? I've already seen it, right? 750 page report, two and a half years, you had the CEO of Oracle, the former CEO of Google, the current CEO of Amazon, a bunch of scientists. There were 15 of us who put together this 750 page report. Now, here's what happened to some of the 150 page reports in the government. You'd stick it on the shelf and you move on to the next commission, right? That didn't happen this time. time congress both republicans and democrats embraced that report we put together over 250 billion

dollars of spending some of it you're seeing in the chips act in many other areas as a country we're going to spend 1.6 trillion dollars on technology so we haven't seen this kind of spending since the Apollo program. Wow. Right. So we want to win, right? Not win in the sense of, you know, winner take off. We want to win this leadership competition. I'm going to use that. It's a beautiful thing. Because that's what we got to do. Let me close on this question. The America Frontiers Fund, your fund, what are you investing in now we are we're just setting up so how big a fund is that 500 million dollar fund is this fun that people can invest into or people can if you're qualified invest into the fund um though much much of our funding will come from uh states and and pension programs sure um but we are doing a couple things a little bit

differently so the first thing that we're a couple of things a little bit differently. So the first thing that we're doing differently, and you heard a little bit about this from the other speakers, is you have to build these technologies with intention because the capital cost is so expensive. So it means rather than simply coming up with incubators, you actually had to do company building,

matching technologists with scientists, with people who know how to run companies. The second thing you have to do company building, matching technologists with scientists, with people who know how to run companies. The second thing you have to do is, look, our coasts are great. It generated 90% of our innovation jobs for the last 10 years, five cities, right? That's not an economic model that's viable for the next 20 years. We got to involve the rest of the country. And what's interesting is if you look at these key foundational technologies, these frontier technologies, they're being done in places like Purdue, Georgia Tech, right? They're being built in Austin, in places like New Mexico, in Arizona, in Colorado, right? Ohio, you know, in places like Taylor, Texas.

That's the foundation of our next wave. It doesn't mean that the coasts aren't going to be a participant, but those economies are overcooked right now How long you'd be with us when do you have to leave I'm gonna have to leave tomorrow morning Unfortunately, I've been called by a governor won't tell you which state You're here tonight. Join us for the celebration. Absolutely. Let's it up for the Honorable Gilman Louie.