Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, discusses Trump's AI push, expressing caution about the increasing detachment of AI conversations from reality and the concentration of money and power in the hands of a few large tech companies.
00:00You can get it. Well, Neil Lawrence is a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge.
00:05Thank you very much for joining me today. Trump's AI push. Let's talk a little bit more about this.
00:10It involves deregulation. It involves 90 billion dollars in investments.
00:16Is this a game changer, do you think, for the whole industry or is this just a sense of political theater?
00:22Well, I suppose it could be both. I think one of the challenges with the conversation around AI is it's becoming increasingly detached from the reality of what regular citizens and customers are experiencing and becoming a very large money investment game.
00:40So in that environment, political theater can be a game changer, whether it will be a game changer in terms of addressing the needs of citizens around the world, I think is a separate question.
00:52We're looking now at favoring export friendly policy when it comes to AI, aren't we?
00:59How do you think that could reshape global competition, say, for instance, with China or with the EU?
01:07I think it's tricky because when we look at the situation in the United States where a large amount of the economy now is dependent on these large tech companies that are having a large say in the creation and deployment of these technologies.
01:21Let me be very clear, they were not the originators in many cases of these ideas, but they are certainly the deployers.
01:29That puts the whole world in a difficult position, including the U.S. government, because what we're talking about is a technology that is going to dominate information channels for the next foreseeable future.
01:43That is in the hands of private companies where there is very little regulation.
01:47So how that pans out is going to differ depending on whether you're a sort of, as we say in the U.K., an AI maker or an AI taker.
01:56But the U.S. is certainly an AI maker and most of the rest of the world outside China is an AI taker at the moment.
02:03Looking at these huge bonuses, 200 million dollars just to sign up to do this work.
02:09What do you think this means and what do you think it will mean for competition and for talent going forward?
02:18Well, it's clearly an absurdity.
02:20I mean, we are not talking generational talents like Lionel Messi being paid these amounts of money.
02:25This is a fight between these large tech companies for perception of what they believe the AI future will be,
02:32which is, as I say, increasingly disconnected from their customers and citizens of the countries which we're hoping this technology serves.
02:39But when you get a fight like that and you've got sort of very few tech CEOs arguing about what that future is
02:46and in some sense competing over a sort of phantasm that they agree about, you can get these sort of unusual effects.
02:54Because there is definitely a shortage of such talent.
02:57But what we would prefer these companies were doing was supporting the addressing of that shortage
03:02and supporting the very difficult work that universities now face in creating a generation of people that can address these works.
03:09And, you know, universities being the origin of these innovations in the first place.
03:13And I think it represents a significant distortion of how some of our societies are working,
03:18that we should be talking about such salaries as a credible idea.
03:22Indeed, it demonstrates somewhat something dystopian about what these companies view this technology as.
03:30I think we need to get something much more serious about the technology that is addressing the needs of regular citizens
03:35and is usable and steerable by those citizens.
03:40Neil Lawrence from the University of Cambridge. Thank you very much indeed.
