Parmy Olson, AI expert: Who controls the future?

This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

Hello, I'm Oliver Conway from the Global News Podcast.

We have the latest on the US Iran ceasefire and what happens next.

Join us twice a day on weekdays and daily at weekends for all the breaking news.

Search for Global News Podcast wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Hello, I'm Misha Glenny and this is the interview from the BBC World Service.

The best conversations coming out of the BBC with people who are shaping our world from all over the world.

If you're not a little bit afraid, then you're not paying attention.

You have never seen a people so united.

Do not make that boat crossing. Do not make that journey.

Being born in America, feeling American, having people treat me like I'm not.

We're more popular than populism.

For this interview, I speak to AI expert and writer Parmi Olsen

about the battle for supremacy at the heart of the artificial intelligence revolution

and how this fast developing technology is going to change our world.

She challenges the claim by tech leaders that AI is a democratising force

putting powerful capabilities in the hands of people.

Instead, she believes it can reinforce inequality

with John technology firms now valued in the trillions of dollars.

Such as their financial status, she says,

it's now increasingly difficult for governments to regulate them effectively.

These companies don't really, they don't care what governments do.

Their priority is their shareholders and is their own existence and their own

the next quarter of growth.

I know there is the possibility that governments can regulate them,

but they just don't. They don't regulate them properly.

The most they get are multi-billion dollar fines,

which sounds like a lot, but actually in the grand scheme of things,

it's pocket change. It's like a parking ticket for these companies.

Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Parmi Olsen.

How important is AI going to be for the future of the world?

I think it's going to be very important, but I think it's going to be hard at first

to see the impact, and I think one way to think about it is the internet.

When people in the 1960s, 1950s and 1960s tried to imagine what the future would look like,

they imagined robot butlers and flying cars, and of course we don't have that,

but we have something that was just as monumental, if not more so, which was the web,

and it created this entire economy. It changed the way people speak to one another.

It connected people globally in ways we couldn't imagine, and I think AI will be similar in the

sense that if we look 20, 30 years from now, we'll still be walking around in the rain,

and our coat says I was just now looking at our phones on the train, but we'll be thinking

differently, and our culture will be changed, and our human relationships will be different,

and our jobs will probably be very different as well. I think there will be a big disruptive

impact on jobs. I think many jobs will get lost. We're seeing this already in the creative sector.

I just saw some stats recently that 58% of photographers and two-thirds of illustrators

say they've lost work because of AI, and 86% of authors say they're earning less money now because

of AI. These are detrimental effects, but in other ways there are positive effects. If you're

an entrepreneur, this is a fantastic time to start a business because you can get your invoices

automated. You can get legal advice. You can get all sorts of administrative help that would

have cost a lot of money in the past. These are the kinds of impacts that I think there will be

lots of second and third-order effects. What happens when you suddenly have more people building

businesses? What happens when inside a company that is building software instead of having

three people on a team, a designer, a marketer, and a programmer? You just have one person.

Both the proselytizers of the internet and AI promise that this will take us into a land of

plenty, and yet what we're seeing in the age of the internet and now in the age of AI is actually

growing inequality in wealth and social status around the world. Is there going to be any point

where people say enough is enough? We need a better distribution of resources than we're getting now.

Yes. Again, if there is some kind of popular uprising, let's say, who do you protest against?

Do you protest against Google or OpenAI? The tech companies and the tech leaders

would argue that they are, quote unquote, democratizing this incredibly powerful technology,

putting it in the hands of people in order to empower them to, as I said before, build a business,

be more productive. Yes, I completely agree with you that we are moving in a direction where

this kind of technology can actually make inequality so much worse, because when we look at

who truly is benefiting financially from generative AI, it's the world's largest tech companies.

I mean, you can just look at their market capitalizations, for example, over the last three years.

Those numbers have gone up by something like $6 to $8 trillion for the six biggest tech companies.

That's not even how much they're worth. That's just how much they've gained in market value.

Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are able to raise hundreds of billions of dollars.

Some of the biggest fundraising rounds in history. So, yes, a lot of people are becoming enriched

and powerful, and there's a real question about how those financial benefits are trickling

down as it were to the rest of the public. It's not clear yet. Let me project 20 years ahead.

The US and China, they're competing with each other for superiority in various technological sectors,

but let's say one has a significant advantage in AI. Is that going to give them a decisive advantage

in the battle for geopolitical control around the world?

I sometimes wonder if the element of geopolitics is overplayed a little bit with technology.

Yes, I suppose you would have the upper hand, but I also just think these companies don't really,

in a way, they don't care what governments do. They are their priority is their shareholders

and is their own existence and their own the next quarter of growth. I know there is the

possibility that governments can regulate them, but they just don't. They don't regulate them

properly. The most they get are multi-billion dollar fines, which sounds like a lot,

but actually in the grand scheme of things, it's pocket change. It's like a parking ticket

for these companies. Yes, there are bragging rights, I suppose. It's interesting how different

countries frame what they see as winning the AI race. What does that even mean? For Britain,

they see winning that race as a race of adoption. If the British public and British businesses

can adopt AI more quickly than the Americans or the Chinese, which is very unlikely because China's

way ahead on adoption as well, but let's just say that was the goal, then maybe Britain could win

the AI race. It's interesting because in your book you focus less on that US China competition and

more battle between the Silicon Valley giants. First of all, the paradox of these tech visionaries

who wanted to build artificial general intelligence with this very deeply utopian vision of making

the world a better place. It's a little bit of a cliche to talk about tech bros wanting to save

the world, but these guys really did have a Messiah complex. I'm talking about Sam Altman,

the founder, OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of DeepMind. Demis was actually the first one

who wanted to start a company expressly for the purpose of building artificial general intelligence.

No other company like that existed before 2010 when he and his co-founders did that.

When ChatGPT came out in November 30th, 2022, I remember thinking to myself,

there's so much more to this story than just this AI, incredible little AI bot that is probably

going to change things. There has been this effort to build AI for the betterment of humanity,

and that effort has been co-opted by enormous corporate interests, and both these visionaries

had been worried about that. Both of them had tried to create governance structures

that would protect this technology, this AGI they were trying to build, so that it wouldn't

fall prey to vested interest, corporate interests, or a single person's financial interests,

but would be guided responsibly, and actually both of them failed to set up those structures,

and they had both kind of sold out to Big Tech in, you know, in crude shorthand.

You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service.

Hello, I'm Oliver Conway from the Global News Podcast. We have the latest on the US Iran's

ceasefire and what happens next. Join us twice a day on weekdays and daily at weekends for all

the breaking news. Search for Global News Podcast, wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

So for many years now, I've been giving talks on cybercrime and cyber security,

and when I give those talks, I often find myself staring out at an audience, a sea of men.

Recently, however, I've noticed that more and more women are writing about and engaging in

technology. This is very important because technology impacts on women in very different ways

than it does men. And when I was talking to Parmi Olsen, I was particularly struck

about how she analysed not just the technology but the sociology of technology, and in particular

the people, men mainly, who run these industries. It's quite eye-opening, in my opinion.

So let's return to that conversation with Parmi Olsen. How do you assess China's AI capability?

China has moved incredibly quickly on AI, and one of the reasons is this real embracing of open

source in the country, or what you might call open weight models. So these are models that are

free to use and free to copy and free to develop on. And this means that tech companies in China,

when they're building a new AI model, they don't have to start from scratch because their competitors

AI is not proprietary. They can just take that model and build on top of it and make it better.

So it's been almost a kind of collaborative effort of companies in China that has sort of a

tide that has raised all boats, I suppose you could say, for the ecosystem there. And now we're at a

point where there's a little bit of disagreement about how good AI models are. Funnily enough,

people in China will say they're still behind Silicon Valley. You talk to technologists in Silicon

Valley and they'll say they've caught us, or they're almost ahead. It's a bit of both. If you look

at big corporations who are using AI models today, they're primarily using the likes of open AI's

model, Google, Anthropic. They're using the Silicon Valley technology. But look at startups,

smaller businesses in the US, even in Europe, they're using open source models from China because

they're cheaper and they're just as capable. If you look at some of the rankings of the best

large language models available today, models like Alibaba's quen from China, deep seek,

Kimmy is another one. They're right up there with Chatchee PT and Gemini.

Provided you don't ask them whether Xi Jinping is a good president.

There's a little bit of that, I'm sure. So how important do you think in Silicon Valley was

the launch of deep seek around the time of Trump's second inauguration? Did it spook them?

The launch of deep seek caused a freak out in Silicon Valley because here was a model that was

as good as Chatchee PT but built for seemingly a fraction of the cost and it suddenly raised these

questions. Well, Open AI and Google and Facebook and Anthropic, they're spending billions of dollars

on all these data centers. Is that just a waste of money? And so in January of last year,

gosh, we're kind of in the anniversary of that moment right now, shares and companies like

Nvidia, I think Nvidia dropped like 10 percent at one point. And of course, the stocks recovered

because there was an understanding that actually businesses were still buying the Silicon

Valley products. But I think there was a lingering sense still, but China is catching up.

It's not just deep seek. There are more companies just like it that are coming.

And it strikes me, you mentioned Nvidia. Nvidia is one of the few companies along perhaps with

TSMC, the market chip manufacturer in based in Taiwan, that actually make any money out of this.

The rest of the companies, you know, the Chatchee PT's and deep mind and so on don't appear to be

making any money. Is that going to change at any point or is it just going to be Nvidia laughing

all the way to the bank? Well, I don't think Nvidia is in necessarily the strongest position either.

It kind of, you could say has all its eggs in one basket, right? It has a few big customers. And

if anything happens to them, that's a problem for Nvidia. I think that's why Nvidia is trying to

move into robotics so that they can diversify a little bit. I would also push back a little bit on

some of these other companies not making money. Anthropic actually has a thriving enterprise

business. It is selling AI models to businesses and it's making billions of dollars. I think it,

you know, sorry, I don't quote me on the run rate, but it's, I think it was six billion. Yeah,

better not quote me on that. Okay. But companies like Anthropic and even open AI, massive financial

constraints. Sure. They're on the hook for something like, this is crazy. 1.4 trillion dollars

in computing commitments, which is something like 100 times more than the revenue they made

in 2025. So in order to meet those obligations, they have to make tens of billions of dollars

over the next few years, hundreds of billions, really. So how are they going to do that? Well,

they're going to sell their AI models to businesses. That's one. But Sam Altman also just

turned on the spigot for advertising on chat GPT. Advertising is one of the most successful

business models of all time. And it's what kind of keeps the internet going. It's why meta has become

a multi trillion dollar company. 98% of their revenue comes from ads. Google, it's 80%. You know,

ads can make a huge amount of money. So I see there certainly being a possibility that open AI

could get close to meeting those obligations. It could make a lot more money. And Google as well,

they have incredible distribution, just like Microsoft. You mentioned Great Britain and its approach

to AI. How is Europe doing? Is Europe lagging behind everything? Or are there some encouraging

developments there? Europe definitely has some encouraging developments. We have Mistral,

which is an AI model maker, open source AI model maker in Paris. And Hugging Face, which is

another open source AI model company. And Jan Le Kun, who was known as a godfather of AI because

of his contributions to deep learning, left as Metta's AI chief, said goodbye to Mark Zuckerberg,

and he's starting his own company in Paris as well to build world models. So Paris is really

becoming a hub, I think, right now for artificial intelligence. London as well. There's a lot of AI

startups here. We've got Wave, which is a self-driving car company. We've obviously got DeepMine. Of

course, it's part of Google, but you have a lot of people leaving that company and starting their own

businesses and they're able to raise a lot of money. On that point, this is where Europe is really

struggling. It's raising money. If you're a startup and you want to raise 20 million pounds,

100 million maybe, you can probably do it. You want to raise more than that.

You're going to really struggle. So this is a well-known issue in the UK and across Europe.

We don't have a startup problem. We have a scale-up problem. And pension funds in this content,

in Europe, are just not spending on new technology and on startups. So if you look at the

pension fund assets across Europe, it's something like 10 trillion euros. The proportion of that

money that goes to venture capital, which is like the funds that fund startups, it's 0.018%.

It's tiny. It's like almost nothing. If you look at the same proportion in the US,

it's two to three percent. So that sounds small, but it's actually orders of magnitude more.

We're talking oceans of capital that are available to startups in the US because of that. So

often tech companies like meta, like Google will complain about regulations holding back

tech and startups here, but I don't think that's true. I think that's a red herring. The real problem

is the lack of funding by pension funds, by the financial districts in London, in Paris,

in Amsterdam, into startups. You've written about quantum technology. How far away are we from

a feasible quantum computer? Well, we have quantum computers now. I think the question is, can we

actually build them at scale? And is it possible to do them cheaply so that lots of banks can have

them? I know HSBC recently said that they used a quantum computer in quite a financially

beneficial way through some bond trading exercise. But I think it's, it really depends on who you

talk to. If you talk to people who work in quantum computing, they will tell you that it's imminent.

And that's the same kind of rhetoric you hear from people who work in AI, AI is imminent.

But the real answer is nobody knows. But when it does happen, and by the way, this is another

area of technology where China is doing really well and is catching up, I think there's going

to be some real questions about the security of our data, which doesn't, it's not the first thing you

think of when you think of quantum computing, you think, oh, this is going to be a huge impact on

the markets and we'll be able to kind of do all these tasks and run AI models much more, much

more quickly. But actually, another kind of second order effect of that will be any kind of

encryption that you have protecting your financial data, your personal data. That can very easily be

broken now by a quantum computer. You say that has real geopolitical implications? Yes, that is

something. See, it's funny you say that because when we were talking about artificial intelligence

and the geopolitical implications, I see the kind of the back, the kind of global trade of

ideas and open source models and scientific research on AI as just being a little bit more

fluid. Whereas with quantum computing, there are huge security implications. And so for me,

the geopolitical fallout from that is much more obvious and meaningful.

What about energy environmental considerations? We've heard about data centers

soaking up huge amounts of energy, water. Do we have even the capacity to generate this amount

of demand? It's interesting. Whenever I talk to teenagers, I've been to a few schools and talked

about AI to secondary school students. And whenever they ask me questions, the number one thing

they always ask is about the impact on the environment. They're really worried about that.

But I'm actually less worried about it than maybe I should be more worried. But having spoken

to people in Silicon Valley who work for Google Cloud, who work for Amazon AWS,

for these people, it is in their financial interest for these data centers to not be so

power hungry because it's really expensive for them. So they are working very, very hard to find

more efficient ways to design algorithms, more efficient ways to use all that computing power,

all the power from those chips. And I think when the incentives are set up like that,

my hope is that they will find a way to do this more cheaply and more efficiently.

Thank you for listening to the interview. If you enjoyed this conversation,

you can find many more episodes of the interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts,

including ones with Google Boss, Sunda Pichai, and Mustafa Suleiman, CEO of Microsoft AI.

Until the next time, bye for now.

Hello, I'm Oliver Conway from the Global News Podcast. We have the latest on the US Iran's

ceasefire and what happens next. Join us twice a day on weekdays and daily at weekends for all

the breaking news. Search for Global News Podcast wherever you get your BBC podcasts.