Andy Kessler: “If you haven’t figured it out, the main export of the U.S. is our standard of living. It isn’t in decline but the envy of the world, hence the rush to our borders. You won’t find that export in economic statistics, but it drives demand for our technology, medical practices and more. The other thing we export is freedom, which drives innovation and lifts living standards elsewhere. Global growth and productivity will be so strong that we’re rapidly inventing robots and artificial intelligence to handle logistics.”
Sunder Pichai: “I’ve always internalized speed. Let’s call it latency for this purpose, and as one of the distinguishing features of a great product. Also, it almost always reflects the technical underpinnings of the product having been done well. There’s a different speed which matters, too, which is the speed of shipping and iteration and release cycles. Both are important.
WSJ: “Forget the keyboard and the mouse. In 25 years, most people will be using brain-computer interfaces to control devices with their thoughts, says Bin He, professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. These interfaces will be able to interpret brain activity and convert people’s intentions into commands that a computer can understand. “The brain-computer interface will become a technology like the smartphone, where the vast majority of people have one,” says He. “It will make everything so convenient: You just have a thought, and then you control your environment.” In 25 years, He says, billions of people will be using brain-computer interfaces to do everything from messaging friends to switching on the lights and making coffee.”
Greg Brockman (OpenAI): “When we look at the list, there’s consumer, which you can think of it as many things, but there’s a personal assistant — something that knows you, that’s aligned with your goals, it’s going to help you achieve whatever it is that you want in your life. There’s also creative expression and entertainment and many other applications. On the business side, maybe if you zoom out, it looks more like: You have a hard task, can AI go do it? Does it have all the context to do all these things? For us, it’s very clear that the stack rank includes two things at the top. One is the personal assistant, the other is the AI that can go and solve hard problems for you. And when we look at the compute we have, we are not even going to have enough compute to fund those two things. And then once we start adding in many other applications, many other things that AI is going to be very useful for and is going to help people with, we just can’t possibly get to all of them.”
