Name: Part 1: Eric Schmidt and Fei-Fei Li: Human Life After Artificial Superintelligence | EP #206
Uploaded: 2026-01-22T12:50:28.000Z
Duration: 26 min 33 s
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What does superintelligence mean and when is it likely to be here?

Superintelligence is defined as AI's ability to know from chemistry to biology to sports.

It's already super to human in many ways.

But the collaboration between humans and AI will be the most productive and fruitful way of doing things.

All of the evidence and Fei Fei said this very well is going to be human and computer interaction.

I think that to get to real super intelligence, we probably need another algorithmic breakthrough.

It's so important as we talk about AGI, asi that the most important thing that we keep in mind is.

Ladies and gentlemen, everybody, welcome to Eric Schmidt week.

Two episodes this week, both with Eric talking about some of the most important developments.

The first is with me and Eric and Fei Fei Lee, who's building world models.

This is a conversation we had live at FII in Saudi Arabia talking about digital superintelligence.

This is rare because Fei Fei doesn't travel.

It was her first trip to Saudi, and it was an extraordinary conversation.

The second episode is between my moonshot mate, Dave Blunden and Eric Schmidt, talking about us versus China and how to avoid critical breakdowns and what might be catastrophes in the future due to accelerating AI.

All right, get ready for two incredible episodes.

The first one, myself, Eric and Fei Fei Li on digital superintelligence.

We're going to be discussing superintelligence.

What does that mean and what happens when it arrives?

We've been talking about AI, AGI, now perhaps digital superintelligence or asi.

I want to start with the obvious question, and

it's one that I don't think anybody has it perfect answer for, but

what does superintelligence mean and when is it likely to be here?

So a simple thank you, Peter, and thanks for everybody for being here.

And obviously thanks to Fei Fei, our very close colleague.

The general accepted definitions of general intelligence is its human level of intelligence.

AGI and human intelligence you can understand because we're all human.

You have ideas, you have friends, you have.

Super intelligence is defined as the intelligence equal to the sum of everyone, right?

And there is a belief in our industry that we will get to super intelligence.

There's a group of people who I call the San Francisco Consensus consulting, because it's all.

Maybe it's the weather or the drugs or something, but

they all basically think that it's within three to four years.

I personally think it'll be longer than that.

But fundamentally, their argument is that there are compounding effects that we're seeing now which will race us to this much faster than people think.

And Fei, Fei, I don't think anybody's expected the performance that AI has given us so far.

The scaling laws have given us capabilities that are extraordinary.

You know, you're the CEO of a new company, the founder of World Labs, you've been at Stanford working on this.

How do you think about superintelligence?

Do you discuss superintelligence at all in your work?

And you know, when Alan Turing dared humanity with the question of can we create thinking machines?

He was thinking about the fundamental question of intelligence.

So the birth of AI is about intelligence, is about the, the.

The profound general ability of what intelligence means.

So from that point of view, AI is already born as a field that tries to push the boundary of what intelligence mean.

Now, in Fast forward to 75 years after Alan Turing, this phrase superintelligence, is pretty hot in Silicon Valley.

And I do agree with Eric that the colloquial definition is what is the capability of AI and computers that's better than any human?

But I do think we need to be a little careful.

First of all, some part of today's AI is already better than any human.

For example, AI's ability of speaking many different languages, translating between, you know, dozens and dozens of language.

Or AI's ability to calculate things really fast.

AI's ability to know from chemistry to biology to sports, know the vast amount of knowledge.

So it's already super to human in many ways.

But it remains a question that, can AI ever be Newton?

For example, we have all the celestial data of the movement of the stars that we observe today.

Give that data to any AI algorithm, it will not be able to deduce Newtonian law of motion.

It's the combination of creativity, abstraction.

I do not see today's AI or tomorrow's AI being able to do that yet, Eric.

Fei, Fei, of course, got it right, is to think about if you had all of the knowledge in a computer that existed in 1902, could you invent relativity?

So for example, if you look at what is called test time compute where the systems are doing reasoning, they can't take the reasoning that they learned and feed it back into themselves very quickly.

Whereas if you're a mathematician, you prove something, you can base your next proof on that.

It's hard for the systems today, although there are appro.

Approximations, so we don't know where the boundaries are.

The example that I'd like to use is, let's imagine that we can get computers that can solve everything that we normally can do as humans, except for these amazing set of creativities.

The best examples are that they are experts in one area, they see another area and they have an intuition that the same mechanism will solve a problem of a completely different area There.

That's an example of something we have to learn how to do with AI.

An alternative would be to simply do it in brute force using reinforcement learning.

The problem is that combinatorially the cost of that is insane.

And we're already running out of electricity and so forth.

So I think that to get to real superintelligence, we probably need another algorithmic breakthrough.

The technical, the technical term is called non stationarity of objectives.

What's happening is the systems are trained against objectives.

But to do this kind of creativity that Fei Fei is talking about, you need to be able to change the objectives as you're doing them.

We've seen this past year, I think GPT5Pro reach an IQ of like 148, which is extraordinary.

And of course there is no ceiling on, on this.

I mean it, it loses meaning at some point.

But the ability for every human on the planet to have an Einstein level, not in the creativity side, but

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Part 1: Eric Schmidt and Fei-Fei Li: Human Life After Artificial Superintelligence | EP #206

extraordinary

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profound

evidence