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00:00I know that a lot of people here are interested in a guy when you have people who don't specialize in that who are businessmen or in media. What's what are they most interested about in terms of potential for you. With me is kind of very similar to the agricultural revolution where we made machines that would replace and strengthen our muscles and tumors. I would seem to superhumans so that one farmer could of a sudden be a hundred times as efficient and to me as the same thing with a brain it's gonna make our brains super human which means Anything repetitive mindless. The stuff we do it day in day out will be supported by the machines and machines that make much much more effective so we can focus much more on creativity. Where are we in the cycle of that being the norm. Are we close to having a lot of A.I. in our lives where the last year has been crazy . We've seen the defeat of the world's best school player in the eye. I see the advent of self-driving cars planes fly themselves. Every week we have a piece of news where legal document discovery homework grading retail banking is taken over by and it's really fast moving. I want to say however these are all specialized things these are all things that are very repetitive. The ISE greater repetitive things. It's not great of creativity so the threat of the taking of all humanity is a bit premature. Okay we're not taking over all of humanity but there is a concern I imagine among those who say there are people in low skilled jobs who would likely lose them if we saw the amount of A.I. that you're describing here. Do you reckon with that as you think about all of this stuff what do we mean for the labor market. I see it as positive. I'm really happy that being back in the 16th century without electricity that cars that smartphones we build these things because it makes people better people gives us a chance to unfold our potential . Most of the jobs today didn't even exist. Hundred years ago if we go forward we're going to have new jobs that are even better now. I've owned a company called Udacity that helps people out of a job that skills them up teaches them tech skills. The universe of Silicon Valley so I really am dedicated to helping people stay on par with the I would by and large. I would make the world a better place. Is there much synchronicity there between Udacity and I. Are you. Are you teaching offering courses on ise. For instance we teach a we teach machine learning we teach deep learning. When the alpha go one against the best school player you already had the definitive course made by Google on the Udacity network. So people come to us by the millions actually to learn these skills and to find new jobs . You have a job guarantee if you would pay us tuition. We give the tuition back if you can't find them a job. So we are very serious educators at Udacity but at some point in my career I had to make a decision whether to side with the machines with the people I was building a system at Google I built a self-driving car and at some point I realized you know what . We'll see if some of us techies side with the people and help the people to stay up skilled in this ever growing race between machine intelligence and human intelligence. I won't ask you about self-driving cars. We've all been taken by the headlines about Tesla owner who died as a result of a semi autonomous vehicle crashing. You're a Tesla owner. What does that mean for the company in terms of trying to get more people to adopt electric vehicles more modern vehicles and what does it mean just for the evolution of self-driving cars. Generally the fact that we have you know something that probably won't save a lot of fear in people who look at it. Yeah I mean I'm a proud Tesla owner and I use the autopilot feature all the time. I use it differently actually keep my eyes on the road because to me it's a way to relieve my stress. Be to able run in like bumper to bumper traffic but I don't take my eyes off the road. So I would surmise the chances of me running into a truck at high speed of probably small and has been very clear about it. That is an incremental version it's in better and you better keep your eyes on the road now going forward is of course extremely tragic that a person must live life and be personally saddened that an autopilot feature was involved. At Google I can tell you we put safety for absolutely no one. Everything we did and the Google track record which has driven a huge number of miles now is video speaks for itself. We should be in safer than human drivers in terms of of mine safety driven. Take us back to that a natural is a philosophical decision. There you have Tesla looking at semi-autonomous driving. Google is fully autonomous correct driving. Why did you decide that that was the route to take. Well we always wanted to get to the point where we can get rid of all traffic accidents every single one and that's very ambitious but there was our goal and to us it felt having a person in the loop is tricky. If you really want to get to the point where we could push a button at some point near the cargo somebody ise to pretty accident free. So we pushed at Google a metric that was called meantime between critical interventions and we say interventions where human safe stop had to intervene and we got this to be something like three four five and a thousand miles before some glitch would happen . You said this is going to be a big year for AA when you look at it compared to VR which is more advanced or more ready for a mainstream market. Of those two technologies I think both are exciting technologies. We are obviously very different views in entertainment technologies and experiential technology. I love VR and the which gives kids the ability to go somewhere and figure the places of poster just flipped to beaches and a book is very very different. I actually get to the core of human effectiveness. I can make our brains super brains. We can remember everything we can recognize everybody you can live every experience we ever miss through artificial intelligence is going to turn us into better human beings and the tasks we do . So for me ise productivity enhancing things that we do to make humans more efficient the same way. I don't know. Farming equipment made farmers more equipment more efficient VIX v ise an entertainment industry that we might use to get rid of. If we take we now have in Silicon Valley what is the landscape like when it comes to A.I.. Are there a lot of startups approaching it right now. It's huge. So every single day I see a new startup popping up and sending me an email about something and you know every time you produce too many ideas and some way make it some won't make you since suddenly consumer space. Some in the commercial enterprise space. But what I find remarkable is that there's a unified element behind this and the element is really really interesting and can be easily understood by everybody. In the past in the AI we used to programming. We used to write on the walls we'd sit down and say if this happens to that end the big shift that happened in the last year or two has been we shifted to training machines. We don't instruct them. Rule by rule be instructive example the same will raise a child. We don't give a child a big bag of rules and see if this happens to do exactly this. We give them examples and give them experience and that core of human learning of learning from data from experience has now been transformed into artificial intelligence and that makes us so incredibly powerful. If there's so much in common among all of these startups do you foresee there'll be more consolidation in this space this year going forward. I would think it's a little bit early to say because at this point most startups are looking for their markets to whether verticals and understand how they can make money how to gain business traction. And I bet you're going to see a Google like company emerge in the ISE space at some point someone is going to figure it out and then when the companies solidify and maybe the economy goes down then there's going to be a chance for I guess commercialization Udacity celebrating its fifth birthday. Happy birthday. Thank you. Founder of course a less Anna Edwards. I wonder sort of where we are in the lifespan of online education. So you started that company there is incredible demand for the first courses online that you offered. What does the space look like now. And as you look out five 10 15 years what is online education look like. So first of all education is there to stay. Absolutely yes. It's effective and it has really good success rates now as people evolved and is still in the infancy. Five years ago we started with the very first massive or minor cost. We took a stand for class online. Peter Novick and I and that's classy really got a hundred sixty thousand students which is going to open people's eyes to say well to something interesting and others followed Coursera RTX fantastic companies. Today we've learned so much more. One indication I'll be able to get the finishing rate up to 90 percent as opposed to 3 percent. We will find the concept and we actually quite frankly adopt a lot of things that are well known in the educational field but what it really means is today's youth access open up access of education to everybody . So colleges top notch universities are very restrictive to young people. We have to be have excellent high school grades is expensive which everybody Udacity which is everybody the planet in India and China people of all ages. We have lots of women who raise children when we enter the workforce. We have soldiers coming back trying to get a new job. We have lots of career shifters who are unhappy with their career going to get a tech job. So we really I think assuring that education is a much bigger market than college has led us to believe before . And what becomes of the thousands of colleges and universities in the US today do they develop an online complement or well many of them go away. So I talked to any college president is why don't you open up your college to 100 million students and look how much impact you have to find your college president has yet done this. They all tend to love the kind of exclusivity of their of their brand and so on. But when that happens I think we can basically take education not just into this small sliver of like 17 to 20 fields you can bring it to everybody in all ages. And the reason I think that really matters is technology is moving so much faster than ever before. And jobs are transforming so much faster than ever before. There's an increased need for people to stay educated and they come to catastrophe by the tens of thousands at this point. And we find that the job tenure is going down. I have lived. We have overview of companies that employ and fire you in a button press their a computer home can fire you effectively with you over and maybe like a month two months for all of us. Now I think the pressure to stay educated through our entire life is massively increasing. Last question here. Returning to the conference there is so much conversation about content the commoditization of content. Who is going to be producing content. I imagine that extends to the education space as well. Yes I find it fascinating how content has evolved. When I was a child only a very few privileged people like myself actually talented people they're allowed to do content deliver content their distribution is very limited. Now we live in an age where everybody can do it which means we have enormous amount of content. So sorting finding high quality content is important and the race to the bottom is on the content is becoming cheaper and cheaper to consumer. Education is no exception here. So we make Dax makes all its content available free of charge that everybody can just consumed and the leisure we actually pay for students to do it because we pay all the back and fees to administer the content while we charge voice only certification and services so we can have a mentor to even have like feedback on your project come to us. You pay a modest amount of money 20 bucks a month they even give you all your tuition make it when you can't find a job afterwards. If you can't find a job. But I think this future of content is going to be interesting because you're gonna have a race to the bottom and it's gonna get cheaper and cheaper at some point. This is a company is still a private company. Do you think about taking it public and what else would you have to achieve before that happens. I'm actually very happy we are private. It takes away the quality stress stressful my brain of Matt Miller publicly traded colleagues and at this point we're still in rapid growth mode and what I like to achieve is obviously grow the company a bit more and as I get more stability in our finances we learn something new like last month we'd launched Android. We had this huge spike and we've got Shery Ahn if they don't do anything we have a flat period. So I like to understand this better before the public .

Sebastian Thrun on Future of A.I., Self-Driving Cars

Sebastian Thrun, founder of Udacity and Google X, comments on the future of self-driving cars and artificial intelligence in the classroom. He speaks with Bloomberg's David Gura at the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho on "Bloomberg West." (Source: Bloomberg)

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