Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs Peter Thiel took a close look at the emerging narratives in the technology sector as part of the “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, which aired on Friday.
AI is trending: The core of technology has shifted entirely to artificial intelligence, and an important aspect of AI is that it is very centralized, said Thiel, the co-founder of technology companies such as PayPal And Palantir. He believes that the big technology companies in the San Francisco Bay Area will dominate technology.
2 Early AI premises: Thiel, who predicts the development of AI in the next five years from a crystal ball, has no idea. He added that he initially thought it was an “incredible abstraction.” He outlined the history of AI, saying that it all started in the 2010s and that the technology was based on two visions of what it meant. One of them came from Professor Nick Bostromwho wrote a book in 2014 called “Superintelligence” in which he described AI as a “super-duper intelligent thing,” a “godlike intelligence” that is much smarter than any human, he said.
The other was outlined in Kai-Fu Lee’s 2018 book “Ai Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, And The New World Order,” which portrays AI as a relatively simple technology; it’s just surveillance and facial recognition technology,” Thiel said. The premise of the book was that AI doesn’t require a lot of innovation and just requires applying things, he said. The subtext was that China would win because there are no ethical concerns in China about applying this kind of basic machine learning to measure or control the population, he added.
See also: Best stocks for artificial intelligence
Enter the ChatGPT: The emergence of ChatGPT in late 2022 and early 2023 showed that the technology was neither superintelligence nor mere 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 it’s human, he said.
After failing even close to passing in 2021, ChatGPT at least passed the Turing test with an average IQ of 100, he said. “This has been the holy grail of AI research in recent years,” he added.
The way forward for AI: There may be ways to refine the AI, and it could take a long time to apply it, Thiel said. There is discussion about artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which he said is a “hopelessly vague” concept. The AGI could simply be a generally intelligent human — a person with an IQ of 130, or it could be superintelligence, or godlike intelligence, he said.
The question of AGI, said Thiel, is less important than passing the Turing test. If humans were to gain superintelligence, they could become a rival to God, said Thiel. “Surely the Turing test is more important for us humans because it is either a supplement or a replacement for humans,” he said.
The entrepreneur expects AI to change the economic, cultural and political structure of our society in an extremely dramatic way. “Maybe AI in 2023 and 2024 will be like … the internet in 1999,” he said. On the one hand, it was assumed that the internet would dominate the economy and reorder society in the 21st century, but at the same time it was considered a complete bubble, he said.
It took 15 to 20 years for this technology to become absolutely dominant, but not in 18 months as people dreamed in 1999, Thiel said, adding: “Maybe we are dealing with something like that with AI.”
In the field of AI, it will “take about two decades, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a really big deal,” he said.
The Global X Artificial Intelligence and Technology ETF AIQ ended Monday’s session up 1.14% at $35.58, according to data from Benzinga Pro.
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