Venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel delved deep into the emerging narratives in technology while appearing on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which aired Friday.
AI The In Thing: The core technology narrative has completely flipped to artificial intelligence and an important thing about AI is that it is very centralized, said Thiel, who co-founded tech ventures such as PayPal and Palantir. He is of the view the big tech companies in the San Francisco Bay area will dominate the technology.
2 Early AI Premises: Crystal ball gazing into how AI will evolve over the next five years, Thiel said nobody has a clue, adding that he initially thought it was an “incredible abstraction.” Outlining the history of AI, he said it all started in the 2010s and the tech was anchored on two visions of what it meant. One was from Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom, who wrote a book called Superintelligence in 2014, which envisaged AI as a “super duper intelligent thing,” “God-like intelligence,” way smarter than any human being, he said.
The other was outlined in the Kai-Fu Lee book from 2018 – “Ai Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, And The New World Order,” which sort of painted AI as if it was a fairly low-tech; it was just surveillance and facial recognition technology,” Thiel said. The premise of the book was AI didn’t require much Innovation and it just required that you apply things, he said. The subtext was China was going to win because there isn’t ethical qualms in China about applying this sort of basic machine learning to sort of measuring or controlling the population, he added.
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Enter The ChatGPT: The advent of ChatGPT in late 2022 and early 2023 showed that the technology was neither superintelligence nor merely surveillance, Thiel said. People have always said the definition of AI is passing the Turing test, which means the computer can fool you into thinking that it’s a human being, he said.
After being nowhere close to passing in 2021, the ChatGPT passed the Turing test at least at an average person’s IQ level of 100, he said. “That was the holy grail of AI research for the previous years, he added.
Way Forward For AI: There could be ways to refine AI and it might take a long time to apply it, said Thiel. There are discussions about artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which he said is a “hopelessly vague” concept. The AGI could be just a generally smart human being – a person with an IQ of 130, or it could be superintelligence or God-like intelligence, he said.
The AGI question, Thiel said, is less important than passing the Turing test. If the humans got superintelligence, they could become a competition to God, Thiel said. “Surely, the touring test is more important for us humans because it’s either a complement or substitute to humans,” he said.
The entrepreneur expects AI to rearrange the economic, cultural and political structure of our society in extremely dramatic ways. “Maybe AI in 2023 and 2024 is like…the Internet in 1999,” he said. The thought on one level was the Internet was going to dominate the economy and rearrange the society in the 21st century and at the same time, it was considered a complete bubble, he said.
It took 15-20 years for it to become super dominant but it didn’t happen in 18 months as people fantasized in 1999, Thiel said, adding that “maybe what we have in AI is something like this.”
For AI, it is “going to take something like two decades but that doesn’t distract from it being a really big deal,” he said.
The Global X Artificial Intelligence & Technology ETF AIQ ended Monday’s session up 1.14% at $35.58, according to Benzinga Pro data.
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