0:00Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
0:04Yeah, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today.
0:07You know, you need no introduction in terms of how much you represent all of us being that honest hope in the world of AI. When everyone's painting this this image and conjuring this image, Andrew, of doom and gloom in terms of AI, the job apocalypse, as some people are calling it, I know and now everyone in this hall soon will know that there is a counter theory. Andrew, you're not a believer in the job apocalypse.
0:34Yeah, so I want to speak directly to anyone worried about their job prospects. The student worried if there will be a job for you in the future when you graduate.
0:42I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will. Um number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse but to try to make themselves look more powerful or to um gain PR attention. But the data that's coming out is that AI seems to be leading to more jobs created than destroyed and so if you keep on learning new skills, um the jobs will be there. Frankly, I wish AI worked better but it just doesn't work that well yet and it's just not
1:12good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs.
1:15But is that a concern then, Andrew, that a lot of big tech companies, now let's say big AI companies, are sort of using this narrative to fuel this whole fear about AI? So when the larger public consumes this on social media and all of this uh you know, all of this doom and gloom theory about how AI is going to uh AGI and ASI are going to come in and probably systems that we have delegated to will take over one day, a Terminator sort of a scenario, that is not very
1:42likely. In fact, your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that.
1:51You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI has affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Suddenly in the United States, the number of software engineering job postings is up because when we make software engineers much more productive, we want to hire a lot more of them. So, as AI starts to enter other job sectors, I think we'll see a similar effect as well in most, maybe not all, but in many different types of jobs. But the challenge, and there is a big challenge, is people do need new skills to work in
2:19this new AI-enabled economy. And so, having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So, we're ready them not for the jobs of 2026, or even, heaven forbid, the jobs of 2024, but for the jobs of 2028 and beyond. So, that's the challenge ahead of us.
2:35That's a key point, Andrew, because, you know, everyone's going to Coursera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
2:43Newsrooms are trying to transform themselves with AI transformation courses. Young influencers are teaching us what what to do and what not to do in the world of AI. So, you think that we are prepping for a 2026 scenario with 2024 skills, probably, but we should be looking at 2028 and beyond to make sure that our workforce here in India, a lot of software engineers that you spoke of, are genuinely armed and equipped to take on whatever's coming their way.
3:09Yeah, so frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. I'm worried about two things. First, even though we hope AI will help learning in the future, I'm going to say something that sounds controversial, but it's well supported by growing body of evidence, which is that AI chatbots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming up that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI does the work for you. But the final closed-book exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of
3:37Pennsylvania, Wharton, showed 17% lower grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime, over many years of a student in school, I think if we don't change that, we will be on a trajectory to graduate students that know much less. Um the good news is though, I think we can build much better things. It's just not the current generation of chatbots. My second worry is that um many university systems and
4:06educational system is slow to change. So all around the world, I still see universities teaching curricula from, you know, a few years ago. And so it's unfortunate that today it's still possible in many places to get a bachelor's degree in computer science without ever having used a AI coding assistance uh or ever made a call over the internet, called API call to a leading frontier AI model. And today, I will not hire a software engineer that, you know, doesn't know how to use a AI coding
4:35agent. But changing the educational system is hard. We do need to change it though to make sure that we help our students ready themselves for the jobs of today and the future.
4:45You know, when the ChatGPT moment happened in the world of AI, they called it actually the iPhone moment because everyone thought AI is all about speaking to a chatbot. We were told then, Jensen and top AI leaders around the world said that this is a pyramid and it will build and the next piece will be on agentic. 2026 was the year of agentic. Now everyone's caught up with agentic already. You have news, you have ChatGPT dots, you have Instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
5:12they should know this is not widely known but uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. And so uh so early 2024 uh when I thought that that this wave of AI that doesn't just blurt out an answer, but take multiple steps in order to reach a conclusion. And I remember searching on Google for the word agentic and the term was not used. I thought, you know what? I want to I think we should call this agentic AI. A- And it turns out my team actually said, "Andrew, the AI world does not need another term." But I felt this is
5:42different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started writing a newsletter called a bash, started to talk about why we should call it gentic and it was controversial back then. But what I was not expecting was that shortly after I was pushing for the use of this term, a number of marketers would get a hold of this term and slap it like a sticker on almost everything in sight and that caused the hype to take off, you know, very rapidly. But the good news is the business applications of a gentic AI while not as
6:11fast as the hype is also taking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on. Okay, so since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well, we barely caught up over lunch, but since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term a gentic or AI agents and the way we know them, let's do let's have a simple exercise of a quick show of hands everyone. Who knows about AI agents?
6:34Have you guys heard of Muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
6:40All right, so then I have to translate the term AI agents around for a long time. That's why I called the new thing a gentic AI. I'm guessing that it has its roots in agency as well, but but but tell so everyone that isn't accustomed or acclimatized to the term a gentic, Andrew, we're going to do a simple chat GPT exercise, which is one, we will explain a gentic to this audience like we're explaining it to a 7-year-old and then we'll explain it to them like we're explaining it to a CEO of a top manufacturing company who wants to
7:10transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a 7-year-old?
7:15You know, I I I maybe uh um Before the rise of a gentic AI, AI used to be something that you prompt and immediately get an answer back to, but with modern AI applications, we don't want AI to just input your prompt and blurt out an answer. We want it to maybe do some more research, maybe look at some data, maybe think for a while and even reflect and edit itself and do a sequence of steps before giving you a vastly superior answer. So, this type of
7:43technology is instrumental to large number of businesses use of AI today.
7:48But, the maybe good news and bad news and why I think there will be no AI job apocalypse is that it's frankly a lot of work to look through your business and identify where agentic AI workflows can help. And then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually AI smart my business partner Chris and I, we see we work with many businesses are implementing this very successful in getting business ROI, but it is hard work and I think that even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and maybe AI will do it all,
8:18the reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them.
8:27And if we had to explain this to a CEO telling him he needs to hire the both of us to do the AI transformation for him.
8:33Um well, but I I I find it I don't know.
8:35I'm I'm realizing that I you know, I actually have a 7-year-old and I actually do speak with CEOs and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to CEOs. I I find that maybe it's just a smart 7-year-old. But but you know, one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transformation, I'll share one one maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of CEOs still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know, make people more productive, save money.
9:02That's fine. Let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But, the opportunity is to use AI to serve customers better, to invent new products and services to drive business growth. That's so much bigger and so much more interesting than merely cost savings. But, I actually see one other problem which is in the public markets if you say you're going to you know, we know how to estimate cost savings since we can largely control costs, but we can't control our revenue growth. And so, what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me
9:31they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they were talked mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to manage the cost. And I think this has created a little bit of an echo chamber with tons of CEOs, even those that are actually pursuing growth, instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So, to CEOs working on industry transformation, when when at AI's path, when you talk to businesses,
9:59cost savings is fine, let's absolutely do that, but I think putting equal or greater attention on how can we use AI to invent ways to serve customers better to drive growth, I find that even more exciting.
10:11Before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely the kick that Jensen talks about, let's go back, dial down a little, dial back because the audience clearly hadn't heard of agents. Now we know, so we can say thank you to Andrew, a huge round of applause, please, for that explanation.
10:26Better than any AI agent could do, any chatbot. And speaking of chatbots, how many of you all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
10:37Okay, so we have a full house there, but they've used it I mean as well, right?
10:41Andrew, but they've used it in its traditional form or sense, which is a chatbot. You give a prompt and you expect some sort of hallucinated biased output which gets better every time when when every new model comes around. But but tell me, Andrew, you don't believe that chatbots are actually any good and I'm going to break the news to you for upskilling or learning, especially for the younger ones in society.
11:05More and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, it's good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary and secondary school, K-12, and universities is appearing, showing this result, I I the thing people often underestimate is how much chatbots are likely damaging adult
11:35learning as well. So, maybe as a working professional, I use AI to help me get work done all the time. I think it's great. We should use it to get work done. But, let's not fool ourselves that just because it's getting work done for you, that it is helping you learn those things it's gotten done for you.
11:50Um, but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. Um, Coursera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era. And also at uh DeepLearning.AI and Learn Vector, um I'm working hard to see how we can invent the next generation of learning experiences, which unlike for for the last 15 years, I think a lot of online learning has been one-to-many, where everyone, you know, kind of takes the same online course. And there's nothing wrong with that. It works well. Let's
12:18continue to do it. But, um I think there's also an opportunity to invent a new set of technologies, not AI chatbot, but something very different, where we can deliver much more one-to-one, much more personalized and customized learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
12:35You know, that's the beauty of the of the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone, and drinks in the house, and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of you all. I would request someone to keep a mic on standby. There are a few question marks I see in the audience. We will come to you shortly. Keep a mic on standby, please. Andrew, we see these conversations coming out of Cerebral Valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore, because it's happening in downtown San Francisco.
13:02And the conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI. Dario Amodei, Sam Sam Altman, maybe the guys at Google or Microsoft, everyone isn't really seeing eye-to-eye when it comes to the future of AI. Then, there's you know, there's obviously geopolitics involved, and then everyone sort of toes a certain line. Is it worrying that these guys have gotten so ubiquitous, so omnipotent, so powerful, but they're not necessarily on the same page.
13:31So, I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know this can be can be concerning when you hear worries about AI fears. But when I hear these range of opinions, what I prefer to do is to look at the technology fundamentals and look at what the technology actually can and cannot do and form my own assessment on that basis. So, first, um it turns out that there have been strong incentives from a variety of businesses to hype up
13:59AI fears. It's been great PR because people will talk about it when they say AI could end the world or lead to job loss or all these fears. So, it's been good PR. Um it's also helped companies fundraise because it turns out when you make a ridiculous statement that you could wipe out humanity, you know, which is a ridiculous statement for any business to make uh cuz technology just doesn't work that way like that, it turns out to be an effective tactic to convince investors that maybe your technology is really powerful. Um and also, stoke up fears have been a tactic
14:29for regulatory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models, it's really annoying if some other group, maybe a research group, maybe another company, wants to publish an AI model free on the internet for anyone to use. That's a huge competitive threat. So, companies are stoking up AI fears to try to get regulators around the world to crush competition and not let others release these cheaper, more free models through what's called regulatory capture. So, these are some of the incentives for
14:58stoking up AI fears. But instead of just commenting on the incentives, if I look at It turns out in the last few months, one event spiked up AI fears, which is when OpenAI's agents uh accidentally hacked into a huggingface. But when you look at what actually happened, these are engineering problems resolved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI huggingface hack is widely publicized, OpenAI, to their credit, and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more
15:26seriously, and so that type of security incidents is now much less likely to happen again. And as this goes on, we will repeatedly reduce security problems and make AI safer and safer.
15:37Okay, we have some time, Andrew. I'm going to open up right here. We have a gentleman Mike, very quickly. Usain Bolt run right here. All right, sir. Very quick question, please, and we'll try to get you an answer as soon as possible. Please introduce yourself.
15:51Hi, I'm Dr. Pawan Duggal, senior advocate, Supreme Court of India, and One of our fo- one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
15:57Thank you, and the the chairman of the global uh AI accountability forum. My quick question. Today, the biggest problem is got to do with accountability of AI. Now that AI has begun started causing harm to humans. So, January, I released the AI accountability framework, but in the agentic AI coming in, we released the Duggal global agentic AI liability framework in April.
16:18Showing the legal basis of how AI agents can be made legally liable. Now, still countries are sleeping. They have not started waking up to this entire issue.
16:26Your take. What advice do you want to give to these governments of the world on how they need to regulate these rogue AIs, which ultimately are acting against human interest?
16:35You know, um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Huttenlocher, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed that that put this very well as well, which is hold the humans that driving the AI responsible. Um because if I take a hammer and I wield a hammer and I accidentally hit a wall, gentle wall, is it my fault or is it the hammer's fault? Seems like it's my fault as a tool user. And if we think of AI as tools directed by humans rather than sentient things with their own free will, which they do not have in my opinion, then I think we'll come up with
17:05much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say, "I didn't do it. My rogue AI did it. Blame my AI." But that makes as much sense as my saying, "I didn't damage the wall. My hammer did it, so sue my hammer. That makes no sense to me.
17:19Very very quickly, we have maybe time for one quick question. Swamiji, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day. And for those of you who weren't there for Swamiji's session, he was one of the the leaders from around the world who were flown into the Anthropic headquarters in San Francisco to have a conversation about consciousness, sentience, how all of these things are coming into our datasets, Andrew.
17:46So, if you could very quickly give us your biggest takeaway from that, I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was, NDA allowing you, of course.
17:57Yeah, I think that's exactly the question what that was in my mind, and thank you for letting me ask the question. So, Andrew, what do you make of the efforts of these companies, especially Anthropic, um to focus on uh AI ethics, alignment, and you know, make a the big deal about the dangers of AI, uh Claude's moral constitution? How much of it is genuine and a way to go forward, a light for the rest of the
18:25industry to follow, or how much I was listening carefully to your take on uh how these companies want regulators to clamp down, how scaremongering can actually boost the AI investment? So, how would you evaluate Anthropic's efforts, and especially Claude's moral constitution?
18:44You know, so I I I know uh actually I I I think I might be the only person on the planet about to hire and Sam has worked for, so I know them well, but I don't want to speak about specific company. But I I think a lot of what you just said is true. Um there's strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation.
19:03There's strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineering work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just a touch on one thing. Um it turns out that one of the reasons people worry about AI is because we can't control them perfectly. But for many engineered things, we can't control them perfectly either. So, I flew on an airplane here, and yeah, we can't control airplanes perfectly, but by repeatedly engineering them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and
19:31over, we can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
19:35So, we are now in the middle of that process of AI, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts are still ascribing AI with a soul, but where the AI agents are really under the large control of a single corporate entity, that doesn't seem to make sense to me because we really have wonderful tools to control them not perfectly, but you know, decently well, and the tools will improve as we keep working on it.
20:00Andrew, thank you for that. We have a trillion-dollar, multi-trillion-dollar question that I have to ask you personally. Are you calling it Are you still calling it artificial intelligence, or have we moved on to superintelligence?
20:11You know, I I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay, but hey, I think people can people can call whatever they want to.
20:20Absolutely. And in the spirit of that candor and democracy and and all things AI and so much consciousness and sentience, we've covered a lot of ground. Thank you, Andrew, for making it to the NDTV World Summit, and thank you for being a fabulous audience.
20:38Thank you, Ayush. Thank you, Mr. Ng, for being here with us at the NDTV World Summit 2026.