Eric Schmidt’s net worth around $22 billion
He gave an interview at Stanford that mysteriously vanished from YouTube. Luckily, I managed to snag it before it disappeared completely.
In this interview, he shared his views on AI, the future of IT roles, energy sector, and more.
Some of the things he said were
- a bit shocking
- somewhat controversial,
- and might even give someone a fever or knock them out.
Let’s dive in
For those who don’t know, Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google who led the company to tremendous growth. He’s an investor and advisor in numerous startups and a huge evangelist of technology.
AI Agents
AI agents are about to turn the work world upside down.
In the interview, Eric Schmidt discussed the huge opportunities of AI agents:
“There are people who are now building essentially LLM agents… they read something like chemistry, they discover the principles of chemistry, and then they test it and add that back into their understanding.”
What this means is that agents can autonomously perform complex tasks by integrating knowledge and testing hypotheses.
Much like a human would.
He gave an example related to TikTok:
“If TikTok is banned, here’s what I propose each and every one of you do: say to your LLM, ‘make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines.’”
This isn’t just about using AI automations in Zapier;
it’s much bigger.
This involves deeper reasoning, smarter planning, and better execution. It can be achieved using Agentic AI.
Energy Consumption
Now, here’s where things get a bit… shocking.
Schmidt highlighted:
“We need to become best friends with Canada… because we as a country do not have enough power to do this… electricity starts becoming the scarce resource.”
All this AI awesomeness comes with a huge power bill.
We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars.
Schmidt dropped a bombshell when he mentioned the enormous energy requirements for advancing AI.
Large AI companies are stating the need for investments in the range of $10 billion to $100 billion, with some even considering figures as high as $300 billion.
Now, I’m no energy expert, but this situation raises some big questions.
Who are these companies that AI giants are going to be paying billions to? Which energy titans will be pulling the strings, assuming that fossil fuels still make up 80% of the world’s energy sources?
But let’s circle back to AI for a moment.
Nvidia Dominance
Schmidt had some really interesting things to say about Nvidia’s dominance in AI hardware. It’s all about their CUDA software, apparently. It’s like they’ve got a decade-long head start in a race that’s only just beginning for everyone else.
You know what this reminds me of?
It’s like when I was a kid, and I had an older friend who always won me at Tekken, because he’d been playing longer.
But in this case, the stakes are a lot higher.
Job Market Shakeup The job market is about to go through more changes
Schmidt hinted at a future where traditional roles might go the way of the dodo.
“Imagine that each and every human on the planet has their own programmer that actually does what they want, as opposed to the programmers that work for me who don’t do what I ask… imagine a non-arrogant programmer that actually does what you want, and you don’t have to pay all that money, and there’s an infinite supply of these programs.”
Ouch, that’s a solid rock thrown into the engineers’ garden.
The key?
Adaptability, my friends.
You can no longer be the “I’ll not work on it if there’s no Jira ticket” guy.
It’s time to get ready to evolve.
Should You Still Learn Coding?
Don’t panic.
Schmidt says that coding skills will be as crucial as knowing your language. Knowing how to code is becoming really important as AI technology grows.
But it’s so hard to keep up as this technology evolves so quickly, that predictions should be reviewed every six months.
Finishing this thread with some stats on how the current IT roles look like
Software Developer: Estimated Jobs (2024): 900,000, Growth Rate: 13%
IT Manager: Estimated Jobs (2024): 500,000, Growth Rate: 11%
Data Scientist: Estimated Jobs (2024): 400,000, Growth Rate: 22%
Network Engineer: Estimated Jobs (2024): 350,000, Growth Rate: 10%
Cybersecurity Engineer: Estimated Jobs (2024): 300,000, Growth Rate: 15%
UX/UI Designer: Estimated Jobs (2024): 250,000, Growth Rate: 12%
Cloud Engineer: Estimated Jobs (2024): 200,000, Growth Rate: 14%
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