Peter Norvig: Transforming AI Into the Ultimate Human Advantage | Artificial Intelligence | AI Vault

After decades leading AI research at NASA, Google, and Stanford, Peter Norvig has watched artificial intelligence advance at an incredible pace, often without enough consideration for the people it’s meant to serve. While the systems grew better at optimizing algorithms, far less focus was placed on fairness, human agency, and real-world impact. That realization led Peter to champion a more human-centered approach to AI. Now on Spotify Video! In this final episode of the AI Vault series, Peter breaks down how to design and use AI in ways that elevate human abilities, support better decision-making, and promote fairness across business, education, and leadership. In this episode, Hala and Peter will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (02:28) His Transition From Academia to Corporate (06:05) The Evolution of Google Search Technology (12:59) How Artificial Intelligence Has Changed Over Time (17:53) Human Intelligence vs. AI Capabilities (23:38) What Is Human-Centered AI? (29:42) AI-Powered Learning and Workplace Training (35:47) AI for Entrepreneurs: The New Advantage (39:10) Artificial Intelligence and Income Inequality (41:19) The Risks and Rewards of Artificial Intelligence Peter Norvig is a computer scientist, AI pioneer, and former Director of Research at Google, where he led significant advancements in search and machine learning. He is the co-author of Artificial Intelligence, the leading AI textbook used in more than 1,500 universities worldwide. Today, as a Fellow at Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, Peter focuses on building AI systems that are fair, inclusive, and aligned with human values. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/PROFITING Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Revolve - Head to REVOLVE.com/PROFITING and take 15% off your first order with code PROFITING DeleteMe - Remove your personal data online. Get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans at to joindeleteme.com/profiting Spectrum Business - Visit Spectrum.com/FreeForLife to learn how you can get Business Internet Free Forever. Airbnb - Find yourself a cohost at airbnb.com/host Northwest Registered Agent - Build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes at northwestregisteredagent.com/paidyap Framer - Publish beautiful and production-ready websites. Go to Framer.com/design and use code PROFITING Intuit QuickBooks - Bring your money and your books together in one platform at QuickBooks.com/money Resources Mentioned: Peter's Website: norvig.com Peter’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/pnorvig Peter's Book, Artificial Intelligence: bit.ly/ArtficialIntelligence Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, ChatGPT, AI Marketing, Prompt, AI in Action, AI in Business, Generative AI, Future of Work, AI Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hala Taha?

  Today's episode is sponsored in part by HeyGen, Shopify, Life at the Speed of Play, and Indeed. HeyGen helps you create AI avatar videos without constantly being behind the camera. Get your first three videos free at heygen.com/profitting. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Start your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/profitting. Life at the Speed of Play by Mark Pincus helps entrepreneurs quickly test ideas and find the ones worth pursuing. Get two books for the price of one at GetMark'sBook.com/Yap. Indeed helps you attract, interview, and hire all in one place. Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/podcast.

• 0:45Hala Taha?

  As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at YoungAndProfiting.com/deals.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  You know, I'm not worried about these Terminator scenarios of an AI waking up and saying, "I think I'll kill all humans today." I guess I'm more worried about a human waking up and saying, "I want to do something bad today." In human-centered AI, the goal is to build systems that do the right thing for everyone. And part of it is saying, "You want to consider everybody involved." And I think when you do that, you don't end up with good results.

• 1:16Hala Taha?

  We're diving into the world of human-centered AI with none other than Peter Norvig. He's not only authored major AI textbooks and established software tools, but also implemented numerous successful AI systems, including the Google Search Engine.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  I don't want technology that makes me disappear. I want technology that respects me and let me choose how much the machine is going to be doing and how much I'm going to keep control.

• 1:40Hala Taha?

  A lot of jobs might get replaced by AI. So do you feel like AI is going to generate a lot more entrepreneurs and solopreneurs in the future?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think...

• 1:52Hala Taha?

  Hey yap fam, we're still continuing with the AI Vault series and by now I hope you realize that artificial intelligence is no longer some futuristic concept. It's here and it's reshaping everything. For some, AI sparks excitement and limitless possibility. For others, it raises tough questions about ethics, control, and what it means for the future of work. That dilemma is exactly why today's conversation matters. We're diving into the world of human-centered AI with none other than Peter Norvig, a true pioneer who's been at the forefront of AI for decades. He's not only authored major AI textbooks and established software tools, but also implemented numerous successful AI systems, including the Google Search Engine. Peter believes that AI shouldn't be about replacing

• 2:36Hala Taha?

  humans, but about amplifying what we can do, making us more capable, more creative, and more efficient. So get ready yap fam, because this episode will challenge the way that you think about AI. And by the way, if you're new to the channel and new to Young and Profiting Podcast, first off, welcome. You're gonna love it here. And secondly, make sure you follow and subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode like this. Without further delay, here's my conversation with Peter Norvig. Peter, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 3:07Hala Taha?

  I'm really looking forward to this conversation. I love talking about AI and I can't wait to pick your brain on that topic. But first, I want to talk a little bit about your career journey. So I learned that you worked at some awesome companies like NASA, you actually worked at Google, but it turns out you started in academia. So I'm curious to understand, why did you decide to transition from academia to the corporate world?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yes, so I've been in a lot of places. I'm an AI hipster. I was doing it before it was cool. Started out, you know, got interested in it as a subject in the 1980s. And at that time, really, the only way to pursue it was through academics. So got my PhD.

• 3:52Speaker 01

  And it was sort of the assumption back then that you get a PhD, you're gonna go be a professor. There was much less back and forth between academics and industry than there is today. So that's the path I took. But then I started to realize, you know, we didn't quite have the word big data back then. But I saw that that's the way things were going. And I saw as a young assistant professor, I couldn't get the resources I needed. You know, you could write a grant proposal, get a little bit of money, get a couple of computers and a couple of grad students. But I really couldn't get the resources to do the kind of big projects I wanted to do. And industry was the only way to do that. So I set out on that path.

• 4:36Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I love that. It's so funny that you say like, you were doing AI before people knew it was a thing. For me, it was like surprising because I feel like we hear about AI so much. But it turns out that AI has been a thing for decades. Can you talk to us about kind of when you first discovered AI and how long ago that was?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's definitely been here sort of right from the start, you know, so Alan Turing, one of the founders of the field, writing about it in 1956, sort of foreseeing the chat box that we have today. But of course, we didn't know how to build them back then. But it was definitely part of the vision of where we might go. So I guess I got interested. I was lucky that I had a high school that at that time had a computer class and also had a class in linguistics. And I took those two classes and talked to the teachers in the classes and say, hey, it seems like there's some overlap between those two. Can we get

• 5:38Speaker 01

  computers to understand English? And they and they said, yeah, that's a great subject, but we can't really teach you that. That's kind of beyond what we know how to do. So you're on your own pursuing that goal. And that's more or less what I've been doing since with with some side trips along the way.

• 5:58Hala Taha?

  So I always say that skills are never lost. They're really just transferred. So I'm curious to understand, what skills do you feel like were an advantage for you in the corporate world that you took from academia?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I certainly agree with that idea of transfer. I guess the idea of being able to tackle a complex problem, being able to move into an area that hadn't been done before. And so, you know, academia is all about kind of invention of the new. And for industry, it's a mix of you want to make successful products, but sometimes in order to do that, you've got to invent something new. And that's harder to do because you don't know what the demand for it is going to be. There's nothing to compare to.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  And yet you have to design a path to say, we're going to go ahead and build this and we're going to put it out and customers are going to have to get used to it because it's not going to be familiar to them.

• 7:04Hala Taha?

  Yeah. And speaking of building something new, you were responsible for Google Search. And that was a while back when Google really was just not starting off, but there was only 200 employees when you joined them in 2001. So what was it like working for Google back then?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. So it was an awesome time. The company was 2001, so it was three years old, 200 people, all in one building. I came in and I got the honor of getting to lead the search team for a while, for about five years. So it was a time when, you know, it's not like I invented it. Google Search was already there. But they were three years old and it was really the time when they were trying to ramp up the advertising business. So a lot of the key people who had built the search team had moved over to help build the advertising platform.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  And so there was an opening and I was had just come on board and so I got the opportunity to be a leader of the search team and bring that forward over the next five years. So that was super exciting to be sort of right in the middle of a transformative time in our industry.

• 8:25Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and I think a lot of my listeners, they don't realize that the Internet was actually much different before Google. Like, Google really changed the way that we use the Internet. Can you help people understand what it was like before Google Search?

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I guess there was a couple of things. First of all, there was directories and lists of sites. And so I remember from the various early days, you know, 1993 or so, and there was a site that was an Internet site of the day, right? And so it was just, you go there and it says, hey, look, here's a new website that you might not have heard of before. And it was like, wow, you know, today, 10 new websites joined the web and they picked out a good one. And you could sort of keep up that way. But then, a year or two later, that no longer worked, because there were thousands of new sites every day,

• 9:22Speaker 01

  not just a couple. And so Yahoo was one of the first to try to deal with that. And they took this, you know, it's not going to be just one person saying, here's my favorite site today. It's going to be a company organizing the sites into kind of a directory structure. And that worked okay when the web was a little bit bigger. But as it continued to grow, that no longer worked. And then we really needed search, rather than manually curated lists of directories and so on. But in the early days, the search systems just weren't that good. I guess, you know, we had some experience as a field of doing, it used to

• 10:05Speaker 01

  be called information retrieval, rather than search. And it was sort of, it worked. The techniques we had at the time worked for things like libraries. But the problem there was in a library, you know, everything that was published is like a real book or a real journal article that's already been vetted. And so the quality is all at a pretty high level. On the web, that just wasn't true. And so we needed new systems that not only said what's relevant to your query, but also what's the quality of this content? And other companies really hadn't done that. And Google said, we're going to take this really seriously, and we're going to work as hard as we can to solve that problem.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  And I think others didn't really see that as an opportunity. Right? So there's a story of in the very early days, people were saying, you know, here's Google. It's rising. Yahoo was was far bigger and far better known. Maybe Yahoo should buy Google. And that never happened in part because the Google founders thought they had something more important. Whereas Yahoo said, oh, yeah, you know, search, that's kind of important. We've got a homepage and it's got all this stuff on it. And you got to have search on the homepage. But you also need like daily comics and Horoscope. So why would search be more important than Horoscope? You know, that's sort of how they felt about it.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  And and Google felt, no, we we think search is really, really important and we're going to do an excellent job of it. And so that was something new that that other people hadn't thought about.

• 11:43Hala Taha?

  Totally. And people who are my age and all these listeners who are tuning in, Google is a verb for us. Google is how we use the Internet. But something is changing now with AI. Now, a lot of us, instead of going to Google, we're going to chat GPT. And instead of, you know, putting in a search query and then digging around for information ourselves, we're just asking a question and getting chat GPT to spit out the information. So how do you think AI is going to change search and the way that we use the Internet?

• 12:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's always been changes and that's always been true. So so Google's had a dominant position. But there's always lots of places that people go to, you know, so. If you wanted breaking news, you went to Twitter. If you wanted a short explanation of something, you might go to TikTok or YouTube to see a video. So there's always going to be lots of ways to access this. And we'll see how that changes as AI gets better. Right now, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. So it's a little bit of a frustrating experience. But there certainly seems to be a path to say, we can have something that's a much better guide

• 13:00Speaker 01

  to what's out there, both in terms of answering a question immediately is one aspect, rather than saying, I'm going to be pointed to a site that has an answer. I can get the answer right away. And then also kind of guiding you through and maybe summarizing or giving you a whole learning path. You know, so right now you sort of have to make up that path yourself. But I think AI can do a good job of saying, you know, where are you now? What do you know? What do you want to know? And we're going to lead you through that.

• 13:32Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and AI also is just using the information that was inputted into the system, right? So it might not have all the information available that you could potentially find on the internet. Is that right?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's certainly true, right? Depends on what it's trained on. And we're at a point right now where the training of these big AI models is very expensive. And so it's harder to keep them up to date, right? With the internet search, if something new happens, some new news is there, it's pretty fast of getting that indexed to making it available. But with the large AI models, it's just too expensive to update them instantaneously. And so you miss out on the newest stuff. But that will change over time and, you know, we'll come up with new ways of getting things out faster and faster. You know, when I first started at Google, you know, this sort of this transition when it started,

• 14:29Speaker 01

  we said, well, we're kind of like a library where you can go to look things up. So it's okay that the library catalog only gets updated once a month. And now that would seem crazy to say you're only getting information that's a month old, but in the earliest days of Google, that was the case. And then, you know, we went to daily and then hourly and then even hourly wasn't fast enough and you had to get faster and faster.

• 14:55Hala Taha?

  Yeah, it's so interesting how fast technology changes. I know that you wrote a book about AI with Stuart Russell in 1995. You wrote a textbook, the first edition of artificial intelligence. How has AI changed since you wrote that textbook?

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Yes. So we did the first edition in 95 and we're up to the fourth edition, which we did a year or two ago. And there definitely are changes. And first of all, I think we did the book because we saw changes even back in 1995, where in the earlier days in the 80s and the start of the 90s, the sort of dominant form of AI was called expert system. And what that meant was you build a system by going out and interviewing an expert, say, an expert doctor, and ask them, in this situation with this patient, what would you do? And then you try to build a system that would duplicate what the doctor

• 15:53Speaker 01

  said. And it was all built by hand, you know, programmers sitting down, trying to understand what the doctor said and trying to encode that into rules that they would write into the system. And it worked to some extent, but it was very brittle and it just often failed to handle problems that were just slightly outside of what it had anticipated. So in the 1990s, there was a big switch away from this expert system hand-coded approach towards machine learning approaches, where we said, rather than telling the system how to do it, you just show it lots of examples and let it learn by itself. And so we felt like the existing books had missed that change. We wanted to write a book about it. So we

• 16:37Speaker 01

  did that. But of course, things continue to change. And so I guess, what can I say about what's changed over the four editions? I guess one was, at the start, we felt like, well, AI, this is part of computer science, and computer science is about algorithms. So we're going to show you a bunch of cool algorithms. And we did that. And then in the second edition, I think we felt more like, okay, you still got to know all the cool algorithms. But if you had a choice, you're probably better off getting better data rather than getting better algorithms. So we're going to focus a lot more on what the data is. And that continued to be more true in the third edition.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  And now I feel like, okay, now we've got plenty of data, we've got plenty of algorithms, you still have to know about them. But really, the key to future progress is neither of those. The key is deciding what is it that you want? What is it that you're trying to build? So we have a great system that says, if you give me a bunch of data, I've got an algorithm that can optimize some objective that you're shooting for. But you got to tell me what the objective is. What is it that you're trying to do? And for some tasks, that's easy. You know, if I'm playing chess, it's better to win than to lose. But in other tasks, that's the whole problem.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  And so we look at things like, we have these systems that help judges make decisions for parole, who gets out on parole and who doesn't. And you want to parole somebody if they're going to behave well, and you want to not parole them if you think they're going to recommit a crime. But of course, these systems aren't going to be perfect, they're going to make mistakes. And so the question you have to answer is, what's the trade off between those mistakes? You know, how many innocent people should we jail to prevent one guilty person getting away, right? And so there's this trade off. You're going to make false positives and false negatives, and what's one worth against another?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  And, you know, we've, even before there was AI or any kind of automation, we've had these kinds of discussions in our societies, going back to Judge Blackman in England more than a century ago, who said, it's better that ten guilty men go free than that one innocent man be jailed. Now, I don't think he meant it that literally, like, you know. Ten's the boundary and nine's okay and 11 would be bad. But with today's AI systems, you have to specify that, right? So you have to build the system and there's got to be an exact number in there of saying, what is the trade off point?

• 19:30Speaker 01

  And we're not very good at at understanding how to do that, right? So we've got, you know, we built a software industry and we have 50 years of experience in building debugging tools and so on. So we're pretty good at at making reliable software. There is still, you know, every week you'll see some kind of bug or something, but we're getting pretty good at that. But we don't have a history of tools for saying, how do we specify the right objective? What are the trade offs? You know, how important is it to avoid this mistake versus that mistake? And so we're kind of going by the seat of our pants and trying to figure that out. And so I think that's where a lot of the the focus is now is is how do you decide what you really want?

• 20:14Hala Taha?

  I want to dig into this a bit because I think it ties in with this idea or the fact that AI is not yet in all instances at human level intelligence, right? And that's not always the goal. I read some of your work where you said, human level intelligence is really not always the goal when it comes to AI. So I want to read you a quote from Dr. Fei Fei Li, who came on the podcast, episode 285. She's the co director of the Human Centered AI Institute, which you're also a fellow. And it was an awesome conversation and she said, "The most advanced computer AI algorithm will still play a good chess move when the room is on fire."

• 20:55Hala Taha?

  So she's trying to explain that like AI doesn't have like human level common sense, you know, it's still going to play a chess move even when the room is on fire. So let's start here. How do you feel AI stacks up right now against the human brain as a tool?

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's great and Fei Fei is awesome. And I've heard many of her talks where she makes great points like that. Let's see. So I guess I would try to avoid.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Trying to make metrics that are one dimensional, right? How does AI compared to humans for a couple of reasons? One is, you know, I don't want to say the purpose of AI is to replace humans, right?

• 21:43Speaker 01

  We already know how to make human intelligence. My wife and I did it twice, the old fashioned way.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  It worked out great. So instead of saying, can we make an AI that replaces a human? We should say, what kind of tools can we make so that humans and machines together will be more powerful? Right? What's the right tool? And so we don't want a tool that replaces a human. We want a tool that kind of fills in the missing pieces. And, and we've always had that. And there's always been a mix of subhuman and superhuman performance. All right, so my calculator is much better at me at dividing 10 digit integers. So I rely on it rather than trying to work it out myself. And I think we'll see more of that of saying, what are the right tools for people to use?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Now, in terms of this generality versus general AI versus narrow AI, I think that's really important. And, and so there's, there's multiple dimensions we want to measure. You know, so we want to focus on both generality and performance. So how good are these machines and how general are they? So yes, we have fantastic chess playing programs that are, are better than the best human chess players. And, and recently it's also true in Go and, and we see sort of every week it's true at something else.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  But we haven't done quite as well at, at making them good at, at being general. Right? So we have these, these large language models, the chat GPT and Gemini and so on. And they're good at being general, but they're not completely competent yet at, at doing that. Right? So they'll surprise you in, in both ways. So they'll give you an amazingly good answer one time and then the next time they'll give you an amazingly bad answer.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  So they're not reliable yet at being general. And then we have incredible tools that are narrow. And so we're kind of looking at this frontier of how can we make things both more perform better and more general. And so I think we'll get to the point where we'll say, here's an AI and it can make a chess move and it can also operate in the world. But right now, we separate those two things out. And we say, we're going to have the chess program that only plays chess. And then we're going to have the large language models. And it won't be as good at chess, but it will be good at some aspects of figuring out what to do in unusual situations.

• 24:31Hala Taha?

  Could you give us some concrete examples of AI that we might want a superior human level intelligence versus AI that we wouldn't want to have human level intelligence with?

• 24:48Speaker 01

  So I guess, you know, it's always better for it to be better, but sometimes we need that and sometimes we don't. Sometimes we want to make our own decisions. And I guess part of that is I see too much of people saying AI is going to be one dimensional and automation is going to be one dimensional and the more the better. And I think that's the mistake that I'm worried about. And there's a great diagram from the Society of Automotive Engineers of level of self-driving cars. And they define that as five levels of self-driving. And they did a great job of that, and that's really useful. Now you can say, you know, where is Waymo or Tesla?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Are they at level two or level three or what level are they at? And that was useful, but the diagram they used to accompany those levels was worrying to me because they've got this diagram and at level one, they have this icon of a person behind the car holding on to the steering wheel. And then when you get up to level five, that person has disappeared and they've just become a dot-like outline. Right? And so it's like, I don't want technology that makes me disappear. I want technology that respects me. And I don't want this trade off to be one dimensional of if I get more automation,

• 26:14Speaker 01

  then I disappear more. I'd rather have it be two dimensional and let me choose. So sometimes I might want to say, I've got a self driving car and I trust it. I just want to go to sleep. It should take over completely. But sometimes I might want to say, it can do all the hard parts, but I still want to be in control. I want to be able to say, oh, let's turn down that street, or go faster, or go slower, or let's make an unscheduled stop. So I don't want to say just because I have automation, that I've given up control. I want me to come first and let me make the choice of how much the machine is going to be doing and how much I'm going to keep control.

• 26:55Hala Taha?

  So like Dr. Lee, you are an advocate for human centered AI. Can you help us understand what that is?

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So a couple of things. So first of all, you know, I'm, I'm essentially a software engineer or programmer at heart. And so I look at what are the definitions of these various things. And so software engineering is building systems that do the right thing. But artificial intelligence is also building systems that do the right thing. So what's the difference? And I think the difference is that the enemy in software engineering is complexity. We have these programs with the millions of lines, we have to get them right. And the enemy in AI is uncertainty. We don't know what the right answer is. And then in human centered AI, the goal is to build systems that do the right thing for

• 27:47Speaker 01

  everyone and do that fairly. And so that kind of changes how you build these systems. And part of it is saying, You want to consider everybody involved. So you want to consider the users of your system, but you also want to consider the stakeholders and the effect on society as a whole. So we go back to us talking about this aid for judges in deciding who gets parole. If you took a normal software engineering approach, you'd say, well, who's the user? Okay, it's this judge. So I want to make this program be great for them. You know, I want a pretty display with graphs

• 28:30Speaker 01

  and charts and so on and numbers and figures and diagrams so that they can understand everything about the case and make a good decision. And yes, you want that in human-centered AI. But human-centered AI says, we also got to consider the other stakeholders. So what's the effect on the defendant and their family? What's the effect on past victims and potential future victims and their family? What's the effect on society as a whole of mass incarceration or discrimination of various kinds? And so you're not just serving one user. You're serving all these different constituents. I mentioned this idea of bearing autonomy and control,

• 29:15Speaker 01

  so not having to give up control if you have more automation. And I think there's the aspect that it's multidisciplinary and multicultural. And I think too often you see companies say, okay, I want to build a system. So the engineers will build it and get it working. And then afterwards, we'll kind of tack on this extra stuff to make it look better or make it more fair or less biased and so on. And I think when you do that, you don't end up with good results. You've got to really bring in all these people right from the start. And both in terms of being aware of what it means to build a system like this

• 29:59Speaker 01

  and then also that You know, as we were saying before, a lot of these problems is deciding what is it that we want? What is it that we're trying to optimize? And different people have different opinions on that. And so if you get a homogeneous group of engineers, they might all think the same thing. And they say, great, we're agreed, we must have the right answer. But then you go a little bit broader to other people from other parts of society, and they might say, no, you know, you forgot about this other aspect. You're trying to optimize this one thing, but that doesn't work for us. So you've got to bring those people in right from the start to understand who all your potential users are and what's fair for all of them.

• 30:41Hala Taha?

  So one of the things that worries me is that we live in a capitalistic world. So while it's nice to think that people are going to have like a human centered approach with AI, I do feel like at the end of the day, companies are going to do whatever is going to impact their bottom line the best, like most positively, right? So what are the ways that you think that there'll be some guardrails against not using AI in a human centered way?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's certainly an issue with capitalism, not specifically for AI at all, right? That's so that's kind of across the board. And so what do we have to combat that? So so part of it is regulations of various kinds. So governments can set in and get rules. Part of that is pressure from the customers saying, here's the kind of company we want. Here's the kind of products we want. And part of that would be competition of saying, you know, if you build a system that doesn't respect something that users

• 31:51Speaker 01

  want, somebody else will build one that's better. And I think we're in this kind of Wild West period now where we don't quite know. What the bounds are going to be. And so, you know, there's so many of these sets of AI principles now. So the all the big companies have have their own sets. I helped put together the Google one. Various countries have have legislation or or sets of principles. The White House put out their set of AI principles a couple of months ago. The professional societies

• 32:28Speaker 01

  like the Association of Computing Machinery has theirs. I actually joined an AI Principles Board with Underwriters Laboratory. And I thought that was interesting, because the last time, more than 100 years ago, there was a technology and people were worried that it was going to kill everyone. And it was electricity. And, right. And so, Underwriters Laboratory stepped in and said, Okay, y'all are worried about getting electrocuted, but we're going to put this little UL sticker on your toaster, and that means you're probably not going to die. And consumers trusted that mark, and therefore, the companies voluntarily

• 33:09Speaker 01

  submitted themselves to certification. And I kind of feel like this third-party nonprofit certification can be more agile than a government making laws. And so I think that's part of the solution. But I don't think any one part of it can do it all by himself. I think we need all those parts.

• 33:32Hala Taha?

  Yeah, very cool. Very interesting. I agree. A third-party solution sounds like it could work pretty well. So we had Sal Khan on the show, and he, as the Khan Academy, he talked a lot about how AI could help education. Do you have any ideas of how AI could support education and students?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's awesome. I think the work Sal is doing has been great, right from the start. And recently, over the last year or so, with the Konmigo Large Language Model. So, you know, back in two thousand and eleven, Sebastian Thrun and I said, we want to take advantage of this capability for online education. And we put together an online course about AI. We signed up a hundred thousand students, far more than we ever expected to sign up. And we ran that course. But of course, at that time, the leading technology was YouTube. We would show students a video, and then we'd have them answer

• 34:34Speaker 01

  a question. And we could do a little bit, you know, if they got this wrong answer, we could show them one thing. And if they got another wrong answer, we could show them something else. But basically, it was very limited in the flow you could do. And now, with these large language models, you have a much better chance to customize the results for the student, both in terms of the learning experience, and then, I think, also in terms of the motivation for the student. So that was the one thing we learned in doing the class, is that we came in saying, well, our job is really information. If we can explain things clearly, then we're done, and we're a success. And we soon realized that that's

• 35:17Speaker 01

  only part of the job. And really, the motivation is more important than the information. Because if a student drops out, doesn't matter how good our explanations are, if they're not watching them anymore, it doesn't do any good. And so I think AI has this capability to motivate much better, to allow students to do what they're interested in, rather than what the teacher says they should be interested in. But we got a ways to go yet. And we don't quite know how to do that, right? So you can't just plug in a language model and hope that it's going to work. So yes, it would be useful. But you have to train

• 36:00Speaker 01

  it to be a teacher, as well as to understand what it's talking about. And we haven't quite done that yet. We're kind of on the way to doing that. You know, you look at, there's a dozen different problems to be solved, and we have candidate solutions, but we haven't done it all. Right? So right now, the language models can be badgered too easily. You say, here's a problem, and the student says, tell me the answer. And, you know, at first, the language model would say, no, you wouldn't learn anything if I told you the answer. But then you say, tell me the answer, please. And it says, oh, okay. Right. And so we have to teach these things. When is it the right thing to give the student the answer?

• 36:45Speaker 01

  When is it the right thing to be tough and refuse to do that? When should you say, oh, you're right, that's a hard problem. Here's a simpler problem. Why don't you try the simpler problem first? Or to say, looks like you're getting frustrated. Why don't we take a break? Or why don't we go back and do something else that would be more fun for you? And so there's all these moves that teachers can take. And so doing education well is this combination of really knowing the subject matter and then really knowing the student and the pedagogical moves you can make. And we haven't quite yet built a system that's an expert on both of those.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  But Khan and others are working on it. And so I think it's a great and exciting opportunity.

• 37:35Hala Taha?

  Do you feel like some of this learning and training could be applied to the workplace?

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And some of it, I think, is easier and better done for workplace training. And I think that's going to be really important. I think, you know, we've built this bizarre system now where we say, you should go to a college for four years and then we're going to hand you a piece of paper that says you never have to learn anything again.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  That shouldn't be the way we do things. And, you know, there's a value to college. Maybe it doesn't have to be for everybody. Maybe more people could be learning more on the job or learning just in time when they need a new skill.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  So I think there's a great opportunity for that. I think that the systems we have right now are kind of better at shorter subjects anyways. Right? So it's hard to put together a class that says, you know, let's do all of Biology One or something. But it's easier to say, why don't you get trained in this specific? Workplace thing, how to operate this machine or how to operate this software and so on. So in some sense, we're better at that kind of training than we are at the traditional schooling. So, so yeah, there's definitely a big opportunity there. The thing that mitigates against it is, you know, we could spend a lot of investment on making the perfect biology one class

• 39:07Speaker 01

  because there's going to be millions of students that take it. But for some of this on the job training, you know, maybe, you know, I'm in a small company and we do things a specific way. And there might be only five people that need to be trained on it. And so, so right now it's not really cost effective to say, can I build a system that will do that training?

• 39:29Hala Taha?

  Totally.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  But that's one of the goals to say, can we make it easier for somebody, you know, who's not an expert programmer, not an AI expert to say, here's some topic I want to teach and I should be able to go ahead and teach that. And, and I think that's something that's oddly missing from our, our, our sort of standard playbook, right? So you look at, you know, we have these office suites. And what do they give you? They give you word processing and, and spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. And sure, that's great. Those are three things that I want. But I would think a lot of people want this. I want to be able to train somebody on a specific topic

• 40:15Speaker 01

  more than they want spreadsheets. But we don't have that yet. But, you know, maybe someday we will. Maybe that'll be a standard tool that would be available to everyone.

• 40:23Hala Taha?

  So this conversation made me realize that there really is no better time to be an entrepreneur. Because as we were talking about, a lot of jobs might get replaced by AI. And when you're an entrepreneur, when you own the business, you're sort of in control of all those decisions. And you're the one who might end up benefiting from the cost savings of replacing a human with AI. So do you feel like AI is going to generate a lot more entrepreneurs and solopreneurs in the future?

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think it's, it's a combination. So I think AI is a big part of it. I think the internet and access to data was part of it.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  The cloud computing was a big part of it, right? So it used to be. You know, if you were a software engineer, the hardest part was raising money because you had to buy a lot of computers and just to get started, you know. Now, all you need is a laptops and a Starbucks card. And you can sit there and start going and then, you know, rent out the cloud computing resources as you need them and pay as you go. And so I think AI will have a similar type of effect. You can now start doing things much more quickly. You can prototype something and go to a release product much faster.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  And it'll also make it more widely available. Right, so you know, there's a lot of, you know, so I live in Silicon Valley, so I see all these notices going around of saying, uh, uh, looking for a technical co-founder. Right, so there's lots of people that say, well, I have an idea, but I'm not enough of a programmer to do it, so I need somebody else to help me do it. I think in the future, a lot of those people will be able to do it themselves. Right, so I had a great example of a, of a friend who's a biologist. And he said, you know, I'm not a programmer. I can pull some data out of a spreadsheet and make a chart, but I can't do much more than that.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  But I study bird migrations and I always wanted to have like this interactive map of where the birds are going and play with that. And he said, and I knew a real programmer could do it, but it was way beyond me. But then I, I heard about this co-pilot and I start playing it around with it and I built the app by myself. And so I think we'll see a lot more of that, of people that are, you know, non-technical or semi-technical, who previously thought, here's something that's way beyond what I could ever do, I need to find somebody else to do it. Now I can do it myself.

• 43:03Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I totally agree. And we're, we're seeing it first with like the arts. For example, now you can use Dolly and be a graphic designer, you can use ChatGPT and be a writer. So so many of the, the marketing things are already being outsourced by AI. It's only a matter of time where some of these more difficult things like creating an app like you were saying is going to be able to be done with AI.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 43:27Hala Taha?

  Cool. So what are the ways that you advise that entrepreneurs use AI in the workplace right now?

• 43:36Speaker 01

  I guess, so you know, you could help build prototype systems like that. You can do research. You can ask, you know, give me a summary of this topic. What are the important things? What do I need to know? As you said, creating artwork and so on. If that's not a skill you have, they can definitely help you do that. Looking for things that you don't know is useful. And so I think just, just being aware of what the possibilities are and having that as, as one of the things that you can call upon. It's not going to solve everything for you, but it just makes everything go a little bit faster.

• 44:20Hala Taha?

  Yeah. Do you think that AI is going to help accelerate income inequality?

• 44:29Speaker 01

  I think it's kind of mixed. So, you know, any kind of software, any kind of goods with zero marginal cost tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. And so that's definitely something to be worried about. With AI, we also have this aspect that the very largest models are big and expensive. They require big capital investments. And if you'd asked me two years ago, I would have said, oh, you know, all the AI is, is going to migrate to the, the big cloud providers because they're going to be the only ones

• 45:11Speaker 01

  that can build these, these large state of the art models. But I think we're already going past that. Right? So we're now seeing these much smaller open source models that are almost as good and that, you know, don't impose a barrier of huge upfront costs. So I think there's an opportunity, you know, yes, the big companies are going to get bigger because of this, but I think there's also this opportunity for the small opportunistic entrepreneur to say, here's an opening and I can move much faster than I could before. And I can build something and get it done and then have that available. So that's part of it.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Then the other part is, well, what about people who aren't entrepreneurs? And

• 46:03Speaker 01

  We've seen some encouraging research that that says AI right now does alleviate inequality. And so there've been studies looking at, well, you bring AI assistance into like a call center and and it helps the less skilled people more than than the more skilled people, which kind of makes sense, right? Sort of the the people who are more skilled, they already know all the answers. And the people that were less skilled, it brings them up almost to the same level. And so I think that's encouraging because that means there's going to be a lot of people who are able to upskill what they do and they'll

• 46:45Speaker 01

  get higher paying jobs, right? They're not going to found their own company, but they're going to do better because they're going to have better skills.

• 46:52Hala Taha?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Okay, so as we close out this interview, let's talk about the future a bit. What scares you the most about AI right now?

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, you know, I'm not worried about these Terminator scenarios of a of an AI waking up and saying, I think I'll kill all humans today. So so what am I worried about? Well, I guess I'm more worried about a human waking up and saying, I want to do something bad today. And so what could that be? Well, misinformation, we've seen a lot of that. And I think it's mixed of how big an effect AI will have on that. I mean, it's already pretty easy to go out and and hire somebody to create fake news and and promulgate

• 47:45Speaker 01

  it. And and the hard part really is getting it to be popular, not to create it in the first place. So in some sense, maybe AI doesn't make that much difference. It's still just as hard to get it out. And and maybe I can fight against that misinformation. So I think the jury's still out on that. But, you know, if you did get to the point where an AI could create, knew enough about an individual user to say, I'm going to create the fake news that's going to be effective specifically for you, that would be really worrying. And and we're not there yet. But but that's something to worry about. I worry about the the future of warfare.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  So you're seeing these things today. We just saw, you know, a tiny little personal size drone shot down a Russian helicopter. So, you know, we've had half a century of or so of mostly a stalemate of saying the big countries have the power to impose themselves on the others, but none of them are really gonna, you know, do it on a large way. And we have smaller regional conflicts. Now we may be transitioning into a world where we say the power is not just in the big countries, it's in lots of smaller groups.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  And that becomes a more volatile situation. And so there could be more of these smaller regional conflicts and more worries for civilians that get caught up in it. So I'm worried about that as well. And then, you know, like you said, the income inequality, I think is a big issue.

• 49:31Hala Taha?

  Well, let's end on a positive note. I guess what excites you the most about AI?

• 49:39Speaker 01

  So a big part of it is this opportunity for education. That's where I spent some of my time and I'm really interested in that now. So I think that can make things better for everyone. Just making everyone more powerful, more able to do their job, able to get a better job. So that's exciting. I think applications in healthcare are a great opportunity. And, you know, I got involved a little bit in trying to have better digital health records. And that really didn't go so far, mostly because of bureaucracy and so on. But I think

• 50:20Speaker 01

  we have the opportunity now to do a much better job, to invent new treatments, new drugs. You've seen things like Alpha Fold figures out, here's how every protein works. And, you know, it used to be. You could get a PhD for figuring out how one protein worked. And Alpha Pho said, I did them all. So I think this will lead to drug discovery, lead to healthier lives, longevity, and so on. So that's a really exciting application.

• 50:51Hala Taha?

  Yeah, it's so interesting to me that AI can do so much good. And then there's also such a risk of it doing so much bad. But I feel like any good technology kind of brings that risk along with it.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I think that's always true, right? If it's a powerful technology, it can do good or bad specific, you know, especially if there are good and bad people trying to harness that way. And some of it is intentional bad uses and some of it is unintentional. Right? So internal combustion engines did amazing things in terms of

• 51:25Speaker 01

  distributing food worldwide and making that be available, making transportation be available. But there are also these unintended side effects of pollution and global warming and and maybe some bad effects on the structure of cities and so on. And, you know, we would be a lot better off if, you know, when cars were first starting to roll out in 1900, if somebody had said, let's think about these long term effects. So, so I guess I'm optimistic that there are people now thinking about these effects for AI as we're just starting to roll it out. So, so maybe we'll have a better outcome.

• 52:04Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I hope so. Well, Peter, thank you so much for joining the show. I end my show with two questions that I ask all of my guests. What is one actionable thing our young improfitters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 52:20Speaker 01

  I guess keep your eye on.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  What it is that people want, you know, so I said, the problem in AI is figuring out what we want. I'd worked some with, with people at Y Combinator and, and I still have this T-shirt that says on the back, make something people want. And very simple advice to entrepreneurs, but, but sometimes missed. And, and so I think that's true generally. And I think AI can help us do that.

• 52:51Hala Taha?

  Yeah, it's so true. The number one reason why entrepreneurs and startups fail is because there's no market demand. So make something that people want. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond today's episode topic.

• 53:09Speaker 01

  I guess, you know, keep, keep around the, the people you like and be kind to everybody.

• 53:22Hala Taha?

  Love that. Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?

• 53:27Speaker 01

  You can look for me at norvig.com or on LinkedIn or thanks to Google, I'm easy to find.

• 53:39Hala Taha?

  Awesome. I'll stick all your links in the show notes, Peter. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Great to join you, Hala.

• 53:45Hala Taha?

  It was so great to connect with Peter and dig into a perspective on AI that feels grounded and deeply human. Peter spent decades at the center of technology. And what stands out to me is how committed he is to creating tools that elevate people rather than overwhelm them. His lens on human centered AI is a powerful framework for anybody building, leading, or innovating in this new era. Here's a couple takeaways from this conversation. First, clarity matters more than complexity. Peter reminded us that great technology doesn't start with bigger models or fancier algorithms. It starts with defining the right goal. Entrepreneurs who know exactly what outcome they're aiming for will use AI more effectively than those

• 54:25Hala Taha?

  who are just chasing the trends. Next, human judgment remains irreplaceable. Even as AI becomes more capable, its value depends on the choice. Choices we make. Peter emphasized that people will set the objective, interpret the results, and decide what good looks like from AI. For founders, that means leaning into your tastes, your creativity, and your intuition. AI can accelerate your work, but it can't choose your mission and it can't replace your human intelligence. Finally, learning must become a lifelong habit. Peter offered us a refreshing view of education as something that is continuous, adaptive, and personalized. Entrepreneurs that have that mindset in this new era, those who stay curious, update their beliefs quickly, and experiment often,

• 55:08Hala Taha?

  will thrive. When you stay adaptable, you stay ahead. All right, Yap fam, if this conversation got your wheels turning, I want to hear from you. So take a second and share your thoughts on Peter's human-centered approach to AI. Let's keep this dialogue going and build a community that uses AI with intention. And if you want to follow me on social media, you can find me at Yap with Hala on Instagram or LinkedIn. Just search my name, it's Hala Taha. All right, Yap fam, this is your host, Hala Taha, AKA the Podcast Princess, signing off.