Name: Mustafa Suleyman & Yuval Noah Harari -FULL DEBATE- What does the AI revolution mean for our future?
Uploaded: 2025-02-10T09:39:54.000Z
Duration: 46 min 17 s
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Historian Yuval Noah Harari and entrepreneur Mustafa Suleiman are two of the most important voices in the increasingly contentious debate over AI.

The economists got them together to discuss what this technology means for our future, from employment and geopolitics to the survival of liberal democracy.

If the economic system is fundamentally changed, will liberal democracy as we know it survive?

You are a bestselling author, historian, I think a global public intellectual, if not the global public intellectual.

Your books from Sapiens to 21 Lessons from the 21st Century have sold huge numbers of copies around the world.

Mustafa Suleiman, wonderful that you can join us too.

You're a friend of The Economist, a fellow director on The Economist board.

You are a man at the cutting edge of creating the AI revolution.

You're now a co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI.

You are building this future, but you've also just published a book called The Coming Wave, which makes us a little concerned about this revolution that is being unleashed.

You're both coming from different backgrounds.

You are a historian, a commenter, a man who I believe doesn't use smartphones very much.

Mustafa, as I know from our board meetings, is right at the cutting edge of this, pushing everyone to go faster.

So, two very different perspectives, but I thought it would be really interesting to bring the two of you together to have a conversation about what is happening, what is going to happen, what are the opportunities, but also what is at stake and what are the risks.

So, paint us a picture of what the future is going to be like.

And I'm going to give you a timeframe to keep it specific.

So, let's say, I think you wrote in your book that within three to five years that you thought it was plausible that AIs could have human-level capability across a whole range of things.

Well, let's just look back over the last 10 years to get a sense of the trajectory that we're on and the incredible momentum that I think everybody can now see with the generative AI revolution.

Over the last 10 years, we've become very, very good at classifying information.

We can understand it, we sort it, label it, organize it, and that classification has been critical to enabling this next wave because we can now read the content of images.

We can classify audio and transcribe it into text.

The machines can now have a pretty good sense of the conceptual representations in those ideas.

The next phase of that is what we're seeing now with the generative AI revolution.

We can now produce new images, new videos, new audio, and, of course, new language.

And in the last year or so, with the rise of chat GPT and other AI models, it's pretty incredible to see how plausible and accurate and very finessed to these new language models are.

In the next five years, the frontier model companies, those of us at the very cutting edge who are training the very largest AI models, are going to train models that are over 1,000 times larger than what you currently see today in GPT-4.

And with each new order of magnitude and compute, that is 10x more compute used, we tend to see really new capabilities emerge.

And we predict that the new capabilities that will come this time, over the next five years, will be the ability to plan over multiple time horizons.

Instead of just generate new text in a one shot, the model will be able to generate a sequence of actions over time.

And I think that that's really the character of AI that we'll see in the next five years.

Artificial capable AIs, AIs that can't just say things, they can also do things.

What does that actually mean in practice?

Tell me what my life will be like in 2028.

I've actually proposed a modern Turing test, which tries to evaluate for exactly this point.

The last Turing test simply evaluated for what a machine could say, assuming that what it could say represented its intelligence.

Now that we're kind of approaching that moment where these AI models are pretty good, arguably they've passed the Turing test, or maybe they will in the next few years.

The real question is, how can we measure what they can do?

So I've proposed a test which involves them going off and taking a $100,000 investment, and over the course of three months, trying to set about creating a new product, researching the market, seeing what consumers might like, generating some new images, some blueprints of how to manufacture that product, contacting a manufacturer, getting it made, negotiating the price, drop shipping it, and then ultimately collecting the revenue.

And I think that over a five-year period, it's quite likely that we will have an ACI, an artificial capable intelligence, that can do the majority of that task autonomously.

It won't be able to do the whole thing, there are many tricky steps along the way, but significant portions of that.

It will be able to make phone calls to other humans to negotiate.

It will be able to call other AIs in order to establish the right sequence in a supply chain, for example.

And of course, it will learn to use APIs, Application Programming Interfaces, so other websites or other knowledge bases or other information stores.

And so, you know, the world is your oyster.

You can imagine that being applied to many, many different parts of our economy.

So Yuval, a man who doesn't use a smartphone very much, you listen to this, does it fill you with horror, and do you agree with it?

Do you think that's the kind of thing that is likely to happen in the next five years?

I'm not coming from within the industry, so I cannot comment on how likely it is to happen.

But when I hear this as a historian, for me, what we just heard, this is the end of human history.

Not the end of history, the end of human-dominated history.

History will continue with somebody else in control.

Because what we just heard is basically Mustafa telling us that in five years, there'll be a technology that can make decisions independently and that can create new ideas independently.

This is the first time in history we confronted something like this.

Every previous technology in history, from a stone knife to nuclear bombs, it could not make decisions, like the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima was not made by the atom bomb.

And similarly, every previous technology in history, it could only replicate our ideas.

Like radio or the printing press, it could make copies and disseminate the music or the poems or the novels that some human wrote.

Now we have a technology that can create completely new ideas.

And it can do it at a scale far beyond what humans are capable of.

So it can create new ideas and in important areas within five years, we'll be able to enact them.

Before we go on to the many ways in which this could be the end of human history, as you put it, and the potential downsides and risks of this, can we just for a second, just indulge me?

Because there are many, and they are really substantial.

I think you wrote that there is the potential that this technology can help us deal with incredibly difficult problems and create tremendously positive outcomes.

So can we just briefly start with that before we go down the road of the terrible things?

When I say the end of human history, again, I'm not talking necessarily about the destruction of humankind or anything like that.

It's just that control, power, is shifting away from human beings to an alien intelligence, to a non-human intelligence.

We'll also get to that because there's a question of how much power, but let's stick with the potential upsides first.

Everything that we have created in human history is a product of our intelligence.

Our ability to make predictions and then intervene on those predictions to change the course of the world is, in a very abstract way, the way we have produced our companies and our products and all the value that has changed our century.

If you think about it, just a century ago, a kilo of grain would have taken 50 times more labor to produce than it does today.

That efficiency, which is the trajectory you've seen in agriculture, is likely to be the same trajectory that we will see in intelligence.

Everything around us is a product of intelligence, and so everything that we touch with these new tools is likely to produce far more value than we've ever seen before.

I think it's important to say these are not autonomous tools by default.

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Mustafa Suleyman & Yuval Noah Harari -FULL DEBATE- What does the AI revolution mean for our future?

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