Eric Schmidt: Google

Lex Fridman introduces Eric Schmidt as Google's CEO for ten years and chairman for six more, who guided the company through a period of growth and world-changing innovations. The conversation took place as part of the MIT course on artificial general intelligence and the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

Asked when he fell in love with technology, Schmidt recalls growing up in the 1960s, when every boy wanted to be an astronaut, and launching model rockets in the cow pasture behind his house. He notes that for today's generation the equivalent would be video games and what can be done online.

Fridman cites Berkeley mathematician Edward Frenkel's book Love and Math and its analogy that teaching painting the way math is taught would mean asking students to paint a fence. Schmidt answers that people like him become math-enabled early and then discover they can use it to find new insights themselves. That sense of building something with your name on it drives learning; for him it was programming, which he likens to open source contributions before open source existed.

He says that a teenager today would probably aspire to contribute like the open source heroes of the world, and calls GitHub and open source libraries an enormous bank of knowledge. A lesson he took from Google is that the world is very big, with many smart people who are underutilized, which makes contributing parts of programs and new ideas an opportunity for society.

Fridman notes that in 1975 Schmidt created a program called Lex, and asks whether he could have predicted where computers would go in the following decades. Schmidt says he could not and would not have gotten it right, crediting many people who saw more clearly. He built Lex with his supervisor Michael Lesk, and it is still in use. He then worked at Xerox PARC, where the Alto, a predecessor of the modern personal computer, was invented; he would skip classes and drive an hour from Berkeley to use the rare machines.