[0:01:24] So roughly two weeks ago, when I agreed to be the moderator of this panel, I posted a message by Duqueba. So this being questions from the internet users. I got more than 500 questions for two of you. And I'm going to select one question for each. So for Bill, we have a question from a very ambitious person.
[0:02:04] As a young man who intends to overtake you as the world's richest man, what kind of vision do I require and what specific advice would you give me?
[0:02:42] The amount of software that was needed was very, very modest. And so it wasn't even considered the magic element of the system. The hardware just keeping it running and buying it and babysitting it was the center of the industry. And yet, because the microprocessor trend was coming along, and essentially, from my point of view, making computing free and storage free and eventually even programming free, I could conceive
[0:03:10] Thank you very much.
[0:03:40] For this gentleman, hopefully at the end of the age, he'll see how to make robots or how to make a system or some way of making software development far more efficient than it is today. Even though so many things have changed, if you look at, say, the code you write for business applications, I have to say, if you'd ask me what that would look like, it would be much easier to do business applications.
[0:04:16] It's much easier to write highly reliable code. So there's an opportunity for somebody. And it's not just in software. If they can invent a way of making energy cheap and CO2 free to do that, I would say that would be a good for innovation. The speed for innovation is better. In my case, I didn't sit down and say, OK, I have confidence that this person had. I knew I loved software. I wanted to mess around with it. And it led to being able to create. I didn't know.
[0:05:02] At any point, part of the reason I think I ran the company is I thought, okay, maybe the company will be twice as big. Let me get ready for that. I never said it was going to be gigantic, because then you might skip all the hard work scaling up that back. If you said to me, hey, you'll have 100,000 people, I would have laughed. 100,000 people, I don't want 100,000. So you're saying you don't really need to be this ambitious in order to be successful, right? Well, I don't think I can ask Elon.
[0:05:48] I don't think any of us assumed that things would line up to create, in his case, multiple successes. If you had that, you knew that, you didn't think it was at risk, I'm not sure you would actually get there. What other characteristics would you look for potential? Well, people who haven't been successful are often, not always, they're pretty fanatical about the thing they're trying to do.
[0:06:30] I remember one industry panel where there were about seven people, and the debate was, would the computer interface be this character mode thing, or would it be graphics user interface? And at the time, the graphics user interface stuff was so slow, it was laughable. And writing software was so bad. It was Windows 1.0. And so the people on the panel were saying, no, no, this is kind of a stupid thing. And I was saying, no, no.
[0:07:00] Believe me, this will be great. And one of the guys on the panel said that, hey, Bill is wrong, but Bill works harder than the rest of us. So even though it's the wrong solution, he's likely to succeed. And that was the best compliment I ever had, was just by working day and night, I send the industry to some. But with that, I didn't believe in vacation. I didn't believe in. So it turned out that we got our company going at a speed.
[0:07:36] That allowed it to make mistakes, fastest mistakes. And many software companies at the time thought of themselves as a single product company. And they were literally designed to be a single product company. And they thought that their sales were mostly going to be in the United States. We, from the beginning, planned to be a multi-product company. BASIC, I don't know if people have ever heard of that, was our basic interpreter that ran on a bunch of computers. It was our very first product. And of course, today, they're still around.
[0:08:10] People use JavaScript for a lot of the things that BASIC was using for them. So we had a conception of a very big company. And we knew what we were about was software. Hiring software people and writing lots and lots of software. Not a specific piece of software. So that helped us a lot. We said, we're going to have the world's most digital software factory. Elon has to actually build buildings and buy equipment to make the Gigabat. We set up the Gigabat for you.
[0:08:40] We were somewhat ahead in terms of being serious about high quality software development.
[0:09:10] Sure, well, first of all, it's, I mean, I go back to what Will said, you know, space startups, so some came very close to both Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity all dying at the end of 2008, so.
[0:10:31] I thought there were important problems that needed to get solved and it didn't seem as though anyone was really solving them. With respect to Tesla and SolarCity, it's about trying to accelerate the advancement of sustainable energy.
[0:11:30] The follow-up question would be, how can you manage so many things that depend on screen companies? Well, I don't recommend this. It's not good for quality of life. I run SpaceX and Tesla, but I don't run Silver City. It's like one day a month. Tesla and SpaceX are kind of like every holiday. You're not just a CEO. You're also in charge of technology products. Are you a very detail-oriented person? I'm a team member, so I just want to emphasize that.
[0:12:23] So among the 500 questions, when I went through those questions, one thing I noticed is that for questions to build, most of the questions are Microsoft related. And I understand you spend more time on your foundation than Microsoft does. Do you really think
[0:13:12] You are making a bigger contribution to humanity through your foundation than you did through Microsoft. In other words, let's say 100 years from now, would you rather be remembered as the founder of Microsoft or as a great philanthropist? Well, I hope I'm alive 100 years from now.
[0:13:41] They don't have to remember me as long as I get to do fun work like I am now. The biggest part of the economy is the private sector. And when you think, why are things going to be better 20 years from now, 30 years from now, the vast majority of that's going to come out of private sector companies. The digital revolution. And so companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, they're making a huge contribution. The tools that they create.
[0:14:17] They get used in so many domains. Just think education is one domain that over time, we haven't seen it yet, but over time, that should make ability to connect up to what somebody's learning and what their goals and aspirations are. So this is incredible stuff. And anybody who had a chance to be part of that, particularly to build a good-sized company, made a huge difference. What I saw was that the most unique thing I could do,
[0:14:50] Starting in my 50s was to be full-time at the foundation. That is, that there were other great people who could take the mantle of Microsoft. When I was running Microsoft in my 20s and 30s, I always thought, you know, for sure it should never have a CEO over it, because who could keep up with all this stuff? So then, you know, as I found myself in my 50s still, the company was like, boy, I told myself I shouldn't still be here. And anyway, the foundation work,
[0:15:24] is in partnership with Michael Linda became more appealing. And I was saying to myself, gosh, who's going to work on malaria? It appeared to be more of a vacuum that organizing science and government to take these problems that are a little bit hidden away in these poor countries where most people actually don't see the depredations of malnutrition and infectious disease. And so it appeared like an opportunity that showed up that could take all the skills
[0:15:53] Organizing people and energizing people. In the software evolution now, in a slightly different domain, but the skills of running teams, picking scientists, and being patient about things that take 10 or 15 years, have a breakthrough. I can take all of that. And so I think for this phase of my life, this is my biggest contribution and the most fun. It's nice when you decide those things are the same. But in my 20s, I would not have...
[0:16:27] So I think in China, the image is more about the Microsoft, because the foundation isn't that visible. Most of the work of the foundation is in poor countries. We are trying to build more and more relationships, because once innovation in China, that can help in Africa, whether it's in health or agriculture or cell phone magic. So that's a growing... So you should come to China more often. I do. So you and I have had...
[0:16:59] Short debate on artificial intelligence last. I want to bring that topic to understand. Recently you said that artificial intelligence advances is like summoning the demon. That generated a lot of hot debate. But I think chief scientist Andrew Yin recently said during an interview that worrying about the dark side of artificial intelligence
[0:17:29] How would you address that? He said it's a distraction to the scientist thing.
[0:18:48] Bill, I know you share similar views with Ilan, but is there any difference between you and him? I don't think so. I mean, he actually got money out to help get some of the coin on this, and I think that is absolutely fantastic.
[0:19:38] If you want to read about this, I highly recommend this Bostrom book called Superintelligence. But the basic point that Elon just made, that we have a general purpose learning algorithm that evolution has endowed us with. And it's running in an extremely slow computer. Very limited memory size, ability to send data to other computers. We have to use this coming around thing here.
[0:20:06] Whenever we build a new one that starts over, it doesn't know how to walk. As soon as this algorithm of taking experience and turning it into knowledge, which is so amazing, and of course we have not done in software, as soon as you do that, it's not clear you'll even know when you're just at the human level. You'll be at the superhuman level.
[0:20:35] Almost as soon as that algorithm is implanted in silicon. And actually, as time goes by, that silicon piece is even ready to be implanted. The amount of knowledge, as soon as it has that learning algorithm, it just goes out on the internet and reads all the magazines and books and things like that. We have essentially been building the content base for the superintelligence. You think you're using the internet. That's actually what you're doing.
[0:21:06] Get to exercise about this. People say it's not a problem. Then I can start. Yeah, we all understand this will have huge impacts on society in the future. And many companies, we all invest in intelligence. During this days, I'm reading a book by Walter Isaacson, The Innovator. There are lots of, I guess his point is that innovation comes usually from collective people.
[0:22:05] But what I also took away is that the U.S. government, especially the military, played a very important role in technology. For example, that generated a very large and steady demand for microchip, which resulted in the flourishing of diplomatic companies. And the Internet was a net. So the U.S. government played a very important role in this kind of technology advancements.
[0:22:47] Earlier this month, I was at the CBPC meeting in China. I made a public speech advocating a project called China Brain. It's basically an artificial intelligence infrastructure put out by the Chinese government. We're hoping to build the largest AI infrastructure so that companies, entrepreneurs, universities can do research based on this platform.
[0:23:19] For the two of you, do you have any advice on this project? Well, basically, it's fantastic that China is stepping up to fund more basic research, whether it's in medicine or computer science. That's going to help strengthen its universities. It's going to speed up innovation. President Xi talks a lot about the importance of innovation. So China has a lot to contribute. You have to be careful how you structure the government's relationship to innovation.
[0:23:50] For example, in Japan, they picked some very specific goals and approaches, so-called fifth generation project. And it was the wrong way to go. In fact, in the 1980s, the U.S. was feeling like, okay, Japan's better than us. They know how to make things better than us. They know how to plan a government AI project better than us. They know how to do HD television better than us. And actually, that was a very good period in the U.S. because people were kind of humbled.
[0:24:17] And they looked at our sort of scattered system of many universities and no central plan. But in fact, the work in the 1980s was the very best work that was laying the foundation for so many advances, including the PC, the internet. It was being done by a very distributed system that funded a bunch of... Put aside the Manhattan Project, because that was special. The way they did their computer science stuff was backing...
[0:24:48] Dozens and dozens of different approaches. They're having contests like the DARPA driving challenge. Now they're having this pretty cool DARPA robot challenge. So I would highly recommend not doing what Japan did. Why the US model, decade in and out, has been the best.
[0:26:05] Did you have a company before PayPal or was that your first? Not really. I had some ideas but it was not in the form of a company. Speaking of that, I think you became famous way before Ilan and I started our company.
[0:27:14] So you'll probably have the chance to know some of the last generation of entrepreneurs. Is there anyone that you have contact with and you have respect and you learn things from? Is there anyone like that? Well, when I started Microsoft, IBM was the dominant company. And they were sort of this behemoth. And then we ended up
[0:27:45] We worked a lot with Intel. I learned a lot from Andy Grove. Andy was not always nice to me, but that still allowed me to learn. You were partners, right? Yeah, that partnership was more challenging.
[0:28:16] Then it might appear from the outside. But anyway, Andy was a brilliant person, very good. Gordon Moore, who did more of the chip-level technologies, amazing person I worked with. And he's also a great philanthropist now. You know, Steve Jobs was an incredible person. And part of the reason he was so incredible is he was so good at engineering great products, even though he didn't know much about engineering. His ability to pick people and define what the
[0:28:49] Without really understanding the rules of software, our chip actually made his talent all the more amazing. The way he built groups and the way he... So there were a ton of great people I learned. I may have learned more from Warren Buffett, who's completely outside all the crazy computer industry stuff. His basic views about business and how he worked in business actually had more influence on me than any other single person. Also, I'd say having the Japanese for customers, even though...
[0:29:25] I'm saying in the 1980s, they weren't structuring things well. Their emphasis on quality, and Microsoft had about 40% of the sales coming from Japan for five of our early years. Their emphasis on quality really woke us up and changed a lot of how we did things. So that was a huge evolutionary push for us.
[0:29:56] Well, now that I'm in philanthropy, I'm getting to meet different business areas. But when I was starting Microsoft and people would say to me, you're an entrepreneur, I'd always say, what does that mean? I'm a software guy. You know, I didn't wake up and decide, shall I do, I'm a generic entrepreneur, and shall I do barbershops or cookies or, oh. So I was a software person.
[0:30:32] At age 12, I was writing software. At age 13, I was writing software. There was only one thing that I had a chance to be world-class at, which was the thing I was obsessively doing from age 11 to 17. And so it's not like I could have started a company doing anything else in the universe. I'm a software person, and then I had to learn, oh, God, you have to hire people. Oh, God, you have to fire people. That's a lot of fun.
[0:30:58] You have to do budgets. You have to sell things. You have to go to conventions and have boobs and stand there and flog your wares. So I wanted to have software for myself that would be empowering for myself. And then I had to learn, OK, there's contracts and many things that go along with that. So in some ways, the drive all came from the dream about software, not some dream about, OK, I'm going to have a company.
[0:31:27] Let's just pick an industry and go get it done. It's been some years since you were 13. When you look back, when you reflect on your previous life and compare yours with other successful entrepreneurs, and when you look at the younger generation, do you see any difference between each generation of entrepreneurs? I guess there are probably a lot of commonalities among different generations.
[0:31:59] But is there a sort of evolution that the next generation of entrepreneurs are better or smarter or stronger? Do you see anything like that? Well, I'm very impressed with Mark Zuckerberg. I've gotten to know him well. And I'm impressed that the current generation is actually pretty good about asking us old me. Because I'm older than these guys. What mistakes did you make?
[0:32:29] How should things work? Our generation was, in a sense, it was a cleaner sheet of paper. So every conference I would go to would be people our age. There weren't older people. And then all the analysts or venture capital people who we worked with all kind of grew up. But it was an industry of people in their 20s and then in their 30s. Now it's much more age diverse. Mark's, what, 32 or something, and he's not anywhere near the youngest.
[0:32:59] He's the youngest guy with a mega, mega success. I think maybe this group is a little more mellow. You know, Steve was kind of crazy in a certain way, and I was kind of crazy in a certain way. Maybe it's a little harder to be more mellow. A twin? Do you see that? No, I don't know. It's hard to characterize because there's very diverse personalities. Some of whom I'd like to meet, but I don't have a chance to. Like the guys at 10.
[0:33:36] Well, check mine. And people tend to be on their best behavior when they're meeting at the engineering meeting where somebody comes in and tells you, oh, this thing isn't working. It's going to be late. Or, hey, it's just too damn slow. We have to rebuild it from scratch. That's where I would love to be in there and see how they deal with the various challenges. Because all these businesses get...
[0:34:07] Externally, internally, to the point where they have to rethink some of the assumptions they've made. And at every point Microsoft was more successful, people were saying, well, that's their final success. And it really bugged me because we were saying, oh, eventually they'll get it wrong. I knew that was true. I mean, the companies I grew up admiring, I wonder if anybody's ever heard of, Wayne and Digital Equipment.
[0:34:33] You know, which are long, long gone. But those were the great companies. And it was probably good for me to see them fail because it meant that just the wonderful technology and the great people they've had in no way protected them from when the marketplace turned left and they didn't notice that was happening, that none of their excellence protected them from missing a market change.
[0:35:04] There are probably a lot of commonalities among those entrepreneurs. I also read something about you. You were quite rebellious when you audited those in graduate school. And you would not stop working for like 36 hours in class before. When you wake up, you do. Do you think that's the kind of thing a successful entrepreneur needs to do? Well, as I said, I think Steve and I are on different ways, not the same ways. I had as much acid as he did.
[0:35:47] We're kind of crazy, and I don't think that's a necessary part. You know, people debate, you know, could Steve have still been great and been nicer to people? My answer is yes. He was great, I'm not taking anything away from him. But on people, on myself, and we have to learn management style, which is kind of, that I've been a, you know, in my school, I was, and so then I went, I was in this class with 80 people, personal position, and so 79 of us were fraud.
[0:36:35] Eventually, I came in second in the class, and the guy who came in first is a very successful lawyer in New York City. But this idea of never attending classes, that was to have some unique positioning that I wasn't the same as all those other 80. Yeah, but have you ever thought of this saying that, okay, I'm younger than Bill Gates, and I don't want to exactly copy him. Is there any difference? I was supposed to be a sophomore, and then, yeah.
[0:38:28] And I was like, well, like people who do a really global space thing, a space thing, give it a try. All you lose is learn how you make cardboard. So I didn't even know if the CNC machine laid out cardboard fiber or, you know, I didn't know any of these things. But if you read books and talk to your experts, you can pick it up pretty quickly. In fact, I think people self-limit their ability to learn. But just read books and talk to your experts.
[0:39:22] Basically, the data rate reading is . What's the output rate of a few thousand bits per second if you're really going for that reading? That's the main reason I didn't go to it, because the data rate was too slow. So, to me, this is like a bedtime story, isn't it? Thank you, this. Since we have, wow, this is not a pure technology conference here.
[0:40:18] Yesterday, I think both of you met with the funding premier, Asa Wei. He's a very well-respected statesman. President Xi also said he made outstanding contributions to the peace and development of the Asia region. I think Chinese leaders from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping and Mr. Li Guangyao,
[0:40:53] They share something in common. They believe in graphic running a country or government using an engineering type of methodology. This is very different from the U.S. I think U.S. are pretty much ruled by lawyers. What are the pros and cons in your eyes between these two different systems?
[0:42:05] You met a lot of officials, different generations on board to say about this. Well, I was very lucky that I could have a number of dinners with Lee Kuan Yew. And he was not only just thoughtful, just the very idea that he would take parts of the Western system and say, oh, this part is good, this part may not apply everywhere, this part he disagreed with. It was kind of bold because, of course, the Western system was succeeding.
[0:42:37] Basically, all the rich countries in the world had followed the Western system. And so the idea that he thought he would do it slightly differently was a huge contribution. And Singapore is a city-state, so you can do things in terms of there that may not scale. What we really want is this mix of democracy and expertise.
[0:43:12] Has that balance right? If you err on the side of democracy, there's certain extreme things about the wrong person getting in power. If you kick them out, then how do you get new people in? So the democracy side, they have some huge advantages. The US, quite a bit. It is a little scary now when we have complex problems, like how do you run a healthcare system efficiently? Why is the US paying so much?
[0:43:42] There really isn't, at this time, any elected representative. You can have a good discussion about the dynamics of that and why it's different than other and how we might change that. So government has to do with very complex issues. And the Chinese government, although I'd say the trend a tiny bit away from it, willingness to also this notion that if you're going to have a policy, you'll often try to see if it works and then tune the policy before you try and scale it up in a very. Chinese government is a student of policy more than just a
[0:44:28] Say, UK Parliament or US Congress, we're kind of yelling each other. It's not like, oh, let's go do an experiment. I've never sat in the US Congress and said, oh, write yours out, and one state will try it out, mine, and we'll come together and combine the best features. That's not a typical right now. So it's a work in progress. There are things like how you run universities where the US model, other people should just adopt it. Then there's things like health systems and governance where they maybe should think we get the benefit of it.
[0:45:11] We have a very strong government. They have very strong execution capabilities when it comes to infrastructure, high-speed rail or highways. We have massive constructions, and now it's probably the largest infrastructure in the world. But when you have a strong government, are you concerned about innovation?
[0:45:48] I think Chinese innovation is going at a very high speed. I think the government could raise how much its science research, even more than it is, it's raising those things. You know, there have been areas like in the media where you have to say why the Chinese market, although this is starting to change, has been media companies. I think a little bit of the reason the media sector hasn't come for a long time.
[0:46:31] But in terms of things like how do you make energy, the state policies are not holding back somebody figuring out some big invention. In fact, I have a company that really, China's the most natural generation of nuclear because China's a lot like the United States was in the 1960s, where the idea that you want to go forward and do new things, it's very clear. The idea that the state's flow isn't where you want to be. The US today is very careful that
[0:47:05] Hey, we're pretty happy with the current conditions. So if somebody wants to build a new building or take some new approach, there's a lot of maybe no. There's like five levels to go through, maybe no. Whereas the bias towards doing new things, which has a small downside but a huge upside as well, I'd say in terms of breakthroughs in some areas, more likely to come out of bias towards the US. In the 70s, it started to be Japan. Korea took that big engineering.
[0:47:56] So, Elon, you are very futuristic. Let's see, 50 years from now, how would you envision a conference like Boab done? Do you think we still have to come to this stage and meet face-to-face, or is there a better way for people to communicate at the conference? The airport will be closer.
[0:48:57] Speaking of transportation, there are lots of buzz about self-driving cars. How long do you think it's going to take for self-driving cars to become mainstream in the US, in China, and in other parts of the world?
[0:49:58] So what do I think the... Yeah, but for mainstream adoption, there needs to be laws and... That's why I said we're technically running... Yeah, my point to add to that is that it won't be monolithic. That is, companies like Microsoft will keep coming in all the time saying, we're going to do the most advanced city in the world. Well, now it's clear, if you want to design a city that assumes that drones are allowed to deliver things and come up with ways of onboard,
[0:51:31] Client-side collision avoidance. And you want to assume you need no parking garages because these self-driving cars are around. We should have a few dozen jurisdictions in the world that decide to get out there in front and get the benefits and the challenges of that, just so we get hundreds of millions of hours of this software seen all come into the street and all that. And pioneers, there's some downside with it.
[0:52:01] So that's why it's good we don't have one government. Even in China, they should pick super liberal. We're a few years away from applying this in. In a decade. So besides the government, is there any other factors or people who need to be prepared about this driverless cars? What kind of preparation, like us, need? The benefits are mainly when you design a city from scratch, assuming that you get
[0:52:47] You get this thing. We don't have that kind of luxury in most cases. That's right. Megacities and how can we smoothly transition to that kind of society? You can have a regulatory environment where things like Uber are allowed to come in. Uber's a form of a driverless car. It's just using sort of on-demand human labor to efficiently provide that service. So you think about Uber for everything.
[0:53:18] It's pretty exciting that the very market mechanism of when resources should be used in a different way was very inefficient until we had this digital template. And now we're seeing that the matching of I want to use an asset, I have an asset, has been amped up. That matching function is way less friction now than ever before. So it's changing a ton of things about capital goods and labor.
[0:53:51] Do you see Uber as a partner or competitor or what's going to happen when you drive the car?
[0:54:30] Because 2 million cars and trucks, 100 million new cars and trucks being massive capacity. So if you're panicked, what are you going to do? The only thing you'd like to do is do their jobs. The moment of self-driving car lives. It's like, that's impossible. They work for one. So in that environment, do you have a faster way to do that? Well, one hour is a...
[0:55:05] Very short time, but I think we covered a lot. We talked about history, about our future. And I think a lot of times, history can tell us what the future will look like. And I sincerely hope that our generation can learn from the history and make contributions to the next few generations so that they can benefit from our effort. And with that, I thank you all.
[0:55:34] Thank you both for coming to this session. Thank you.