0:00You have Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have Instinct, which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
0:07Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI actually. So it was around 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. And I thought, you know what? I want to I think we should call this agentic AI. A and turns out my team actually said, Andrew, the AI world does not need another term. But I felt this
0:36is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started to write in a newsletter called it badge, start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 slapped 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 Agentic AI
1:05while not as fast as the hype is also taking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
1:10Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well, we barely caught up over lunch.
1:15But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them let's do let's have a simple exercise over here a quick show of hands everyone who knows about AI agents have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents okay all right so then I have but to trans right the term AI agents around for a long time for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for it has it roots in agency as well but But but
1:45tell so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a seven-year-old? You know, I I I maybe uh um
2:13before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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 technology is instrumental to a large
2:40number of businesses um use of AI today.
2:43But 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 aentic AI workflows can help and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AIspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and maybe AI will do
3:12it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well, but I I find that I don't know. I'm I'm realizing that I, you know, I actually have a seven 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 CO. I I find that maybe
3:42it's just a smart seven-year-old, but but you know, one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer, I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve, which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know, make people more productive, save money.
3:57That's fine. Let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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 um 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 our cost, but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're
4:25actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this has created a little bit of an echo chamber with tons of cos even though they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost
4:54savings 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 before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
5:18A huge round of applause please for that explanation better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
5:31Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it some of them as well, right, Andrew? 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 chat bots are actually any good.
5:52And I'm going to break the news to you for upskilling or learning, especially for the younger ones in society.
6:00more 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, secondary school, K12 and universities is appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
6:27bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
6:55vector 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 continue 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 onetoone, much more personalized and customized
7:24learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
7:29You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
7:57conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
8:02Dario Armaday, 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?
8:26So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um, and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
8:54fears. It has been great PR because people 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 has also helped companies fund raise 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 because 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 Stokout
9:22fears have a tactic for rectory 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.
9:39So, companies are soaking 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 retry capture. So, these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
10:07But when we look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. And so that type of security incident 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.
10:31Okay, 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.
10:45Hi, I'm Dr. Dr. Pawand Dougal, senior advocate, Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
10:52Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agentic liability framework in April showing 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
11:20issue. Your 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?
11:30You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped 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 the wall and dent the 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 sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
11:58opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my row AI did blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer that makes no sense to me.
12:13Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets. Andrew. So if you could very
12:42quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you of course.
12:51Yeah, I think that's exactly a question but 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 the way to go forward a light for
13:19the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially cloud's moral constitution?
13:38Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario and Sam has work force. 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. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important injury work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns out
14:07that 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 you know, we can't control airplanes perfectly, but by repeatedly injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over. We can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
14:29So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ask to ascribe 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.
14:55Andrew, 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 super intelligence?
15:05You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few people few call it whatever they want to.
15:14Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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.
15:28[applause] Thank you.
15:36Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
15:46Yeah, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
16:14apocalypse. you know, to 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. I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will.
16:29Um, a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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.
16:53And it's just not good enough to destroy the vast majority of jobs. But 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
17:22sort of a scenario. That is not very likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly 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
17:50enter 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready 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.
18:16That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
18:25News rooms 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.
18:50Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
19:20showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
19:41It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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 use a AI coding assistance uh or ever made a call
20:08over 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 agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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. You know when the chat GPT 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
20:37Jensen 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 Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have Instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
20:54Did you know this is not widely known but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around 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.
21:12And 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 and turns out my team actually said the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started writing a newsletter called it badge.
21:31Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 Agentic AI while not as fast as the hype is also taking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
21:58Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well, we barely caught up over lunch.
22:03But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them, let's do let's have a simple exercise over a quick show of hands everyone. Who knows about AI agents?
22:16Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
22:22All right. So then I trans right the term AI agents around for a long time.
22:26for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for it has it has it roots in agency as well but but but so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we are 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a
22:57You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
23:25technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
23:30But 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 aentic AI workflows can help and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AIspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in
23:58a few years and maybe AI will do it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well, but I I find that I don't know.
24:17I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven-year-old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that nothing wrong with that but the
24:47opport opportunities 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.
24:57But I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our cost but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this has created a little bit of an echo chamber
25:27with tons of cos even though they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost savings is fine let's absolutely do that but I think putting equal greater attention on how can we use AI to invent ways to serve customers better to drive growth I find that even more exciting.
25:53Before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
26:06A huge round of applause please for that explanation better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
26:19Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it some as well, right, Andrew? 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 chat bots are actually any good.
26:40And I'm going to break the news to you for upskilling or learning especially for the younger ones in society. more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities
27:08is appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat bots are likely damaging adult learning as well.
27:18So 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn vector um I'm working hard to see how we can invent the next
27:47generation 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 continue 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 onetoone, 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.
28:16You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house, and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
28:44conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
28:50Dario Armade, 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 towes 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?
29:13So, I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
29:41fears. has 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 fund raise 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 because technology 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 Stokout
30:09fears have been a tactic for rectory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models is 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.
30:27So 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 open AI's agents um were accidentally hacked into a hugging face.
30:55But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. 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.
31:19Okay, we have some time. Andrew, I'm going to open up right here. We have a gentleman Mike very quickly. Usain Bolr 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.
31:32Hi I'm Dr. Pawand Dougal, senior advocate Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
31:39Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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 injury
32:07issue. Your 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?
32:17You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends Dan Hutton locker wrote a Wall Street Journal opeted 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 wheel a hammer and I accidentally hit the wall and dent the wall, is it my fault or is it the hammer's fault? Seems like it's my fault as a two user. And if we think of AI as tools directed by humans rather than sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
32:46opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it. My row AI did it. Blame my AI. But that makes as much sense. Am I saying I didn't damage the wall, my hammer did it so sue my hammer. That makes no sense to me. Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day. And for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G's session, he was one of the the leaders
33:14from 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 data sets. Andrew, so if you could very quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there, and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you, of course.
33:38Yeah, I think that's exactly a question but 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 Claude's moral constitution? How much of it is genuine and the way to go forward a light for
34:06the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially Claude's moral constitution?
34:25Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Darra 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 she just said is true. Um there are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns
34:54out 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over, we can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
35:17So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ascribe 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.
35:42Andrew, 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 super intelligence?
35:53You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few few call whatever they want to.
36:02Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you.
36:23Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
36:33No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today.
36:36You 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 and you're not a believer in the job apocalypse you so I want to speak directly to
37:05anyone worried about their job prospects the student worried if there will be a job for you in the future when you graduate I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will. Um, a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
37:34learning 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 good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs.
37:44But 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
38:12likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly 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,
38:41maybe 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're readying 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.
39:04That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
39:12News rooms 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.
39:38Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Whartalon,
40:08showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
40:28It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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
40:56over 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 an AI coding agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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.
41:14You know when the chat GPT 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.
41:33Now everyone's caught up with Agentic already. You have Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
41:42Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around 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.
41:59And 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 the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started to write in a newsletter called it badge.
42:19Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 Agentic AI, while not as fast as the hype, is also ticking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
42:45Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well. We barely caught up over lunch.
42:50But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them. Let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone. Who knows about AI agents? Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
43:09All right. So then by to be trust right the term AI agents around for a long time. for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for it has it has it roots in agency as well but but but so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we 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
43:39transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a seven-year-old?
43:44You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
44:13technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
44:18But 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 hope and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AI inspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and
44:46maybe AI will do it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well but I I find that I don't know I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven year old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is
45:15no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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
45:43savings. But I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our cost, but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this
46:12has created a little bit of an echo chamber with tons of CEOs even those they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seal working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost 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. Before we move on to another
46:42arcane term in that lovely uh the cake that Jensen talks about let's go back dial down a little dial back because the audience clearly hadn't heard of agents.
46:51Now we know. So we can say thank you to Andrew. A huge round of applause please for that explanation. Better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude?
47:04Now raise your hands.
47:06Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it some as well. Right, Andrew? 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 chat bots 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.
47:34more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is uh appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
48:02bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
48:30vector 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 continue to do it but um I think there's also an opportunity to invent a new set of techn technologies, not AI chatbot, but something very different where we can deliver much more onetoone, much more personalized and customized
48:59learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
49:04You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings 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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco and the
49:32conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
49:37Dario Armade, Sam Sam Alman, 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 got, 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?
50:00So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
50:29fears. has 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 fund raise 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 because technology 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 stoking up
50:57fears have been a tactic for rectory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models is 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.
51:14So 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
51:42But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, open AI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. 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.
52:06Okay, 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.
52:20Hi I'm Dr. Pawand Dougal, senior advocate Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
52:26Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agentic AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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
52:55issue. Your 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?
53:05You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton Locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped that that put this very well as well, which is hold the humans that are driving the AI responsible. Um, because if I take a hammer and I wheel a hammer and I accidentally hit the wall and dent the 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 sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my opinion then I think we'll come up with
53:35much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my AI did blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer that makes no sense to me.
53:48Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets. Andrew, so if you could very
54:16quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you, of course.
54:26Yeah, I think that's exactly a question 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 Claude's moral constitution? How much of it is genuine and the way to go forward a light for
54:54the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially cloud's moral constitution?
55:13Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario and Sam has worked for. 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 are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um it turns
55:42out that one of the reasons people worry about AI is because we can't control them perfectly. But for many engineer things we can't control them perfectly either. So I flew on an airplane here and you know we can't control airplanes perfectly but by repeatedly injuring them to be safer and safer. Finding problems fixing them finding problems fixing them and doing that over and over. We can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
56:04So we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ascribe 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.
56:30Andrew, thank you for that. We have a trillion dollar, multi-t 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 super intelligence?
56:40You know I uh I I don't know I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few feel free to call it whatever they want to.
56:49Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you.
57:04[applause] Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
57:21No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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 and you're not a believer in the job
57:49apocalypse. you know to 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 I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will um a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
58:19than 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.
58:28And it's just not good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs. But 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
58:57sort of a scenario. That is not very likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly in the United States, the number of software engineering job postings is up.
59:20Because 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready not for the jobs of 2026 or even heaven forbid the jobs of 2024 but for the jobs of 2028 and
59:49beyond. So that's the challenge ahead of us.
59:51That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
1:00:00News rooms 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.
1:00:25Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
1:00:55showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
1:01:16It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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
1:01:43over 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 agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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.
1:02:02You know when the chat GPT 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.
1:02:20Now everyone's caught up with Agentic already. You have Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have Instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
1:02:29Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around 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.
1:02:46And 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 the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started writing a newsletter called it badge start to talk about why we should call it agentic 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
1:03:16would get a hold of this term and slap it like a sticker on almost everything in site and that caused the hype to tick off you know very rapidly but the good news is the business applications of agentic AI while not as fast as the hype is also ticking 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.
1:03:38But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them. Let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone who knows about AI agents. Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
1:03:57All right. So then I trust right the term AI agents has been around for a long time. for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for it has it roots in agency as well but but but so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we 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
1:04:26to transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a seven-year-old?
1:04:32You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
1:05:00technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
1:05:05But 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 at AI inspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and
1:05:34maybe AI will do it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well but I I find that I don't know I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven year old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is
1:06:02no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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
1:06:31savings. But I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our cost, but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this has created a little bit of an echo
1:07:01chamber with tons of cos even though they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost 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 before we move on to another
1:07:29arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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. Better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used Chad GPT or Gemini or Claude?
1:07:52Now raise your hands. Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it as well, right, Andrew? 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 with when every new model comes around. But but tell me Andrew, you don't believe that chat bots are actually any good.
1:08:15And I'm going to break the news to you for upskilling or learning especially for the younger ones in society.
1:08:22more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
1:08:50bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
1:09:18vector 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 continue to do it but um I think there's also an opportunity to invent a new set of techn technologies, not AI chatbot, but something very different where we can deliver much more onetoone, much more personalized and customized
1:09:46learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
1:09:51You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of Cerebral Valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
1:10:19conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
1:10:25Dario Armade, 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?
1:10:48So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um, and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
1:11:16fears. It's been great PR because people 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 has also helped companies fund raise 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 because 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 fears have
1:11:45a tactic for victory 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 soaking 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 retry capture. So, these
1:12:14are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
1:12:30But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, open AI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. And so that type of security incident 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.
1:12:53Okay, 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.
1:13:07Hi, I'm Dr. Pawan Dougal, senior advocate, Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
1:13:14Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agenti liability framework in April showing 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
1:13:42issue. Your 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?
1:13:51Sure sir you know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Huttonlocker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped 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 the wall and dent the 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 sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
1:14:21opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There's an incentive for business to say I didn't do it, my row AI did. Blame my AI. But that makes as much sense. Am I saying I didn't damage the wall, my hammer did it, so sue my hammer. That makes no sense to me.
1:14:36Very very quickly, we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day. And for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G 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 data sets. Andrew, so if you could very quickly give us your
1:15:05biggest takeaway from there, and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you, of course.
1:15:13Yeah, I think that's exactly a question both 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 Claude's moral constitution. How much of it is genuine and the way to go forward, a light for
1:15:41the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially cloud's moral constitution?
1:16:00Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario 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 are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns
1:16:29out 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 you know, we can't control airplanes perfectly, but by repeatedly injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over. We can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
1:16:52So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ask us to ascribe 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.
1:17:17Andrew, thank you for that. We have a trillion dollar, multi-t 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 super intelligence?
1:17:28You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh people feel free to call it whatever they want to.
1:17:37Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you.
1:17:51[applause] Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
1:18:08No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
1:18:37apocalypse. you know to 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 I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will um a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
1:19:06than 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 good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs. But 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
1:19:36theory 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 likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering. Because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what?
1:20:03Certainly 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready not for
1:20:30the 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.
1:20:39That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
1:20:47News rooms 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.
1:21:13Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
1:21:43showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
1:22:03It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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
1:22:31over 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 an AI coding agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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. You know when the chat GPT 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
1:22:59Jensen 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 Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have Instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
1:23:17Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI actually. So it was around 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
1:23:46different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started writing a newsletter called it badge start to talk about why we should call it agentic 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 mockers 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 agentic AI
1:24:14while not as fast 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.
1:24:25But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them, let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone who knows about AI agents. Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
1:24:44All right. So then I have but to be trans right the term AI agents is around for a long time. for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI forget it has it has it roots in agency as well but but but so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we are 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
1:25:14to transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a seven-year-old?
1:25:19You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
1:25:47technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
1:25:53But 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 aentic AI workflows can help and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AIspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and maybe AI will do
1:26:22it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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.
1:26:38Um well but I I find it I don't know.
1:26:40I'm I'm realizing that I, you know, I actually have a seven-year-old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that nothing wrong with that but the
1:27:09opportunity unities 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 um 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 our cost but we can't control our revenue growth and so what I do see is I've had cos tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth
1:27:37using AI but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost and I think this has created a little bit of an echo chamber with tons of cos even though they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spire when you talk to businesses cost savings is fine let's absolutely do that
1:28:06but 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 before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
1:28:28A huge round of applause please for that explanation better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
1:28:41Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it as well, right, Andrew? 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 chat bots are actually any good.
1:29:02And I'm going to break the news to you for upskilling or learning, especially for the younger ones in society.
1:29:09more 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, secondary school, K12 and universities is uh appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
1:29:37bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
1:30:05vector 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 continue 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 onetoone, much more personalized and customized
1:30:34learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
1:30:39You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
1:31:07conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
1:31:12Dario Armaday, Sam Sam Alman, 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?
1:31:35So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um, and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
1:32:04fears. It has been great PR because people 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 has also helped companies fund raise 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 because 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 so fears
1:32:32have a tactic for recur 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.
1:32:47That's a huge competitive threat. So, companies are still 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 retry capture. So, these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into a hugging face.
1:33:17But when we look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. 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.
1:33:41Okay, 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.
1:33:55Hi, I'm Dr. Pawand Dougal, senior advocate, Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
1:34:01Thank you. And the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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
1:34:30issue. Your 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?
1:34:40You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped 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 the wall and dent the wall, is it my fault or is it the hammer's fault? Seems like it's my fault as a two user. And if we think of AI as tools directed by humans rather than sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
1:35:08opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my row AI did it. Blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer. That makes no sense to me.
1:35:23Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets. Andrew. So if you could very
1:35:51quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you of course.
1:36:01Yeah, I think that's exactly a question but 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 the way to go forward a light for
1:36:29the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially Claude's moral constitution?
1:36:48Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Daru 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 are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns
1:37:17out 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over. We can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
1:37:39So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ask us to ascribe 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.
1:38:04Andrew, 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 super intelligence?
1:38:15You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few few call it whatever they want to.
1:38:24Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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.
1:38:46Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
1:38:56Yeah, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
1:39:24apocalypse. you know, to 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. I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will.
1:39:39Um, a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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 good enough to destroy the vast majority of jobs. But is that a concern then, Andrew, that a lot of big
1:40:09tech 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 likely. In fact your theory is that it
1:40:37will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly 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
1:41:05types of jobs. But the challenge and there is a big challenge is people do need new skills to work in this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're readying 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.
1:41:26That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
1:41:35News rooms 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.
1:42:00Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
1:42:30showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
1:42:51It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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 use a AI coding assistance uh or ever made a call
1:43:18over 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 agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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. You know when the chat GPT 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
1:43:46Jensen 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 Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
1:44:04Did you know this is not widely known but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around 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.
1:44:21And 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 turns out my team actually said the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started to write in a newsletter called it badge. Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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
1:44:51would 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 agentic AI while not as fast as the hype is also taking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
1:45:07Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well, we barely caught up over lunch.
1:45:12But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them, let's do let's have a simple exercise over a quick show of hands everyone. Who knows about AI agents?
1:45:26Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
1:45:32All right. So then I trans right the term AI agents around for a long time.
1:45:36for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for it has it has it roots in agency as well but but but so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we are 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a
1:46:06You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
1:46:35technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
1:46:40But 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 aentic AI workflows can help and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AI inspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and
1:47:09maybe AI will do it all the even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well but I I find that [laughter] I don't know I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven year old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to cos I I find
1:47:39that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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.
1:48:07But I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our costs but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this has created a little bit of an echo chamber
1:48:36with tons of cos even though they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost 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.
1:49:02Before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
1:49:16A huge round of applause please for that explanation. Better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
1:49:29Okay. So we have a full house there. But they've used it some of them as well, right?
1:49:33Andrew, 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 chat bots 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.
1:49:57more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is uh appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
1:50:24bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
1:50:53vector 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 continue 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 onetoone, much more personalized and customized
1:51:21learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
1:51:26You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
1:51:54conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
1:52:00Dario Armade, 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 got, 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?
1:52:23So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
1:52:51fears. has 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 fund raise 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 because technology 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 Stokout
1:53:19fears have an a tactic for rectory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models is 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.
1:53:37So 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally [snorts] hacked into a hugging face. But when you look at what
1:54:05actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, open AAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. 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.
1:54:28Okay, we have some time. Andrew, I'm going to open up right here. We have a gentleman Mike very quickly. Usain bold 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.
1:54:42Hi I'm Dr. Pawand Dougal, senior advocate supreme court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
1:54:49Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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 injury
1:55:17issue. Your 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?
1:55:27You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton Locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal opeted 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 wheel a hammer and I accidentally hit the wall and dent the wall, is it my fault or is it the hammer's fault? Seems like it's my fault as a two user. And if we think of AI as tools directed by humans rather than sent in things with wrong free will which they do not have in my opinion
1:55:56then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my AI did blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer. That makes no sense to me.
1:56:11Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets. Andrew, so if you could very
1:56:39quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you, of course.
1:56:48Yeah, I think that's exactly a question 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 the way to go forward a light for
1:57:16the rest of the industry to follow or how much I was listening carefully to your take on uh how these companies want regulators is to clamp down how scaremongering can actually boost the AI investment. So how would you evaluate anthropics efforts and especially Claude's moral constitution?
1:57:36Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Darra 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 she just said is true. Um there are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um it turns out that
1:58:04one 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over, we can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
1:58:27So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts asked to ascribe 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.
1:58:52Andrew, 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 super intelligence?
1:59:03You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few few call whatever they want to.
1:59:12Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you. [applause]
1:59:33Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
1:59:43No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
2:00:12apocalypse. you know, to 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. I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will.
2:00:27Um, a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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.
2:00:50And it's just not good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs. But 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
2:01:19sort of a scenario. That is not very likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly in the United States, the number of software engineing job postings is up.
2:01:42Because 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're readying them not for the jobs of 2026 or even heaven forbid the jobs of 2024 but for the jobs of 2028
2:02:11and beyond. So that's the challenge ahead of us.
2:02:14That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
2:02:22News rooms 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.
2:02:48Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Whartalon,
2:03:18showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
2:03:38It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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
2:04:06over 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 an AI coding agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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.
2:04:24You know when the chat GPT 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.
2:04:43Now everyone's caught up with Agentic already. You have Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have Instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
2:04:52Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around 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.
2:05:09And 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 the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started to write in a newsletter called the badge.
2:05:28Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 Agentic AI, while not as fast as the hype, is also ticking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
2:05:55Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well. We barely caught up over lunch.
2:06:00But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them. Let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone. Who knows about AI agents? Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
2:06:19All right. So then I to be trust right the term AI agents has been around for a long time.
2:06:23For a long time a the new thing agentic AI for it has it has it roots in agency as well but but but so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a
2:06:53seven-year-old? You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
2:07:22technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
2:07:28But 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 at AI inspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and
2:07:56maybe AI will do it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well, but I I find that I don't know I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven-year-old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to cos I I find
2:08:26that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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.
2:08:54But I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our costs, but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this has created a little bit of an echo chamber
2:09:24with tons of CEOs even those they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seal working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost 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.
2:09:50Before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
2:10:03A huge round of applause please for that explanation. Better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
2:10:16Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it some as well, right, Andrew? 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 chat bots 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.
2:10:44more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is uh appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
2:11:12bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
2:11:40vector 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 continue to do it but um I think there's also an opportunity to invent a new set of techn technologies, not AI chatbot, but something very different where we can deliver much more onetoone, much more personalized and customized
2:12:09learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
2:12:14You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings 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, you see these conversations coming out of Cerebral Valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco and the
2:12:42conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
2:12:47Dario Armade, Sam Sam Alman, 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?
2:13:10So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
2:13:39fears. 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 fund raise 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 because technology 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 soaking up
2:14:06fears have an a tactic for rectory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models is 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.
2:14:24So 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
2:14:52But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, open AI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. 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.
2:15:16Okay, 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.
2:15:30Hi I'm Dr. Pawand Dougal senior advocate supreme court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
2:15:36Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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
2:16:04issue your 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.
2:16:14Sure sir you know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Huttonlocker, wrote a Wall Street Journal OpEd that that put this very well as well, which is hold the humans that are driving the AI responsible. Um, because if I take a hammer and I wheel a hammer and I accidentally hit a wall and dent the 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 sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
2:16:43opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my AI did blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer that makes no sense to me.
2:16:58Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets. Andrew, so if you could very
2:17:26quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you of course.
2:17:36Yeah, I think that's exactly a question 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 Claude's moral constitution? How much of it is genuine and the way to go forward a light for
2:18:04the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially cloud's moral constitution?
2:18:23Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario and Sam has worked for. 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 are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns
2:18:51out that one of the reasons people worry about AI is because we can't control them perfectly. But for many engineer 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over, we can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
2:19:14So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ascribe 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.
2:19:39Andrew, thank you for that. We have a trillion dollar, multi-t 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 super intelligence?
2:19:50You know I uh I I don't know I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh feel free to call it whatever they want to.
2:19:59Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you.
2:20:20Thanks Vidica. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
2:20:31No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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 and you're not a believer in the job
2:20:59apocalypse. you know to 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 I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will um a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
2:21:29than 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 good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs. But 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
2:21:59theory 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 likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly in the United States, the number of
2:22:27software 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready not for the jobs of 2026 or even heaven forbid the jobs of
2:22:562024 but for the jobs of 2028 and beyond. So that's the challenge ahead of us.
2:23:01That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
2:23:10News rooms 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.
2:23:35Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
2:24:05showed 17% lower grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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 chat bots.
2:24:29My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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
2:24:56leading frontier AI model. And today I will not hire a software engineer that you know doesn't know how to use a AI coding agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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.
2:25:12You know when the chat GPT 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.
2:25:30Now everyone's caught up with Agentic already. You have Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have Instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
2:25:39Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI actually. So it was around 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 turns out my team actually said the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is
2:26:09different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started to write in a newsletter called a badge. Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 mockers would get a hold of this term and slap it like a sticker on almost everything in sight.
2:26:30And that caused the hype to tick off, you know, very rapidly. But the good news is the business applications of Agentic AI, while not as fast as the hype, is also ticking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
2:26:42Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well. We barely caught up over lunch.
2:26:47But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them. Let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone who knows about AI agents. Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
2:27:07All right. So then I have Oh to be trans right the term AI agents has been around for a long time. for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for it has it roots in agency as well but but but tell so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we 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
2:27:36transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a seven-year-old?
2:27:41You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
2:28:10technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
2:28:15But 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 at AI inspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and
2:28:44maybe AI will do it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well, but I I find that I don't know. I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven-year-old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to cos I I find
2:29:14that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that nothing wrong with that but the opport opportunities 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
2:29:42I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our cost but we can't control our revenue growth and so what I do see is I've had cos tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost and I think this has created a little
2:30:10bit of an echo chamber with tons of cos even those they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis so cos working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost savings is fine let's absolutely do that but I think putting equal greater attention on how can We use AI to invent ways to serve customers better, to drive growth. I find that even more exciting.
2:30:37Before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
2:30:51A huge round of applause, please, for that explanation. Better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used Chad GPT or Gemini or Claude?
2:31:01Now raise your hands. Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it some of them as well, right, Andrew? 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 with when every new model comes around.
2:31:20But but tell me, Andrew, you don't believe that chat bots 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.
2:31:32More 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, secondary school, K12 and universities is uh appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chatbots
2:32:00are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
2:32:27vector 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 continue to do it but um I think there's also an opportunity to invent a new set of technology technologies, not AI chatbot, but something very different where we can deliver much more onetoone, much more personalized and customized
2:32:56learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
2:33:01You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of Cerebral Valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
2:33:29conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
2:33:35Dario Armade, Sam Sam Alultman, 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?
2:33:58So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um, and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
2:34:26fears. It's been great PR because people 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 has also helped companies fund raise 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 because 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 so fears
2:34:54have a tactic for rectory 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.
2:35:10That's a huge competitive threat. So companies are soaking 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
2:35:39But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. And so that type of security incident 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.
2:36:03Okay, 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.
2:36:17Hi, I'm Dr. Pawan Dougal, senior advocate, Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
2:36:24Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent liability framework in April showing 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
2:36:52issue. Your 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?
2:37:02You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped 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 the wall and dent the 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 sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
2:37:30opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my row AI did blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer that makes no sense to me.
2:37:46Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G we had your session earlier probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets.
2:38:13So if you could very quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you of course.
2:38:23Yeah, I think that's exactly a question but 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 Claude's moral constitution? How much of it is genuine and the way to go forward a light for
2:38:51the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially cloud's moral constitution?
2:39:10Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario 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. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns
2:39:39out 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over. We can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
2:40:01So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ask to ascribe 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.
2:40:27Andrew, thank you for that. We have a trillion dollar, multi-t 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 super intelligence?
2:40:38You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh people feel free to call it whatever they want to.
2:40:47Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you.
2:41:08Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
2:41:18No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
2:41:47apocalypse. you know 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 I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will um a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
2:42:16than 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 good enough to destroy the vast majority of jobs. But 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
2:42:46theory 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 likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering. Because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what?
2:43:13Certainly 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready not for
2:43:40the 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.
2:43:49That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
2:43:57News rooms 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.
2:44:23Yeah. So frankly we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
2:44:52showed 17% lower grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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 chat bots.
2:45:16My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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 use a AI coding assistance uh or ever made a call over the internet called API call to a
2:45:43leading frontier AI model. And today I will not hire a software engineer that you know doesn't know how to use an AI coding agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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. You know when the chat GPT 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
2:46:13will 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 Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
2:46:26Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI actually. So it was around early 2024 uh when I thought that that this wave of AI that doesn't just blurt out an answer but will 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 turns out my team actually said the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is
2:46:56different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started writing a newsletter called it badge. Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 mockers would get a hold of this term and slap it like a sticker on almost everything in sight. And that caused the hype to tick off, you know, very rapidly. But the good news is the business applications of Agentic AI, while not as
2:47:25fast as the hype is also taking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
2:47:30Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well. We barely caught up over lunch.
2:47:35But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them. Let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone who knows about AI agents. Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
2:47:54All right. So then I have but to be trans right the term AI agents has been around for a long time.
2:47:58For a long time a call the new thing agentic AI forget it has it roots in agency as well but but but tell so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we are 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence let's go with the first one how do I explain it to a
2:48:28seven-year-old you I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
2:48:57technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
2:49:02But 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 aentic AI workflows can help and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AIspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and maybe AI will do
2:49:32it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well, but I I find it I don't know. I'm I'm realizing that I, you know, I actually have a seven-year-old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to cos I I find
2:50:01that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that nothing wrong with that but the opportunity unities 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
2:50:29I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our cost but we can't control our revenue growth and so what I do see is I've had cos tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost and I think this has created a little
2:50:57bit of an echo chamber with tons of cos even though they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost 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 before we move on to another arcane term
2:51:27in that lovely uh the cake 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 better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
2:51:51Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it as well, right, Andrew? 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 chat bots are actually any good.
2:52:12And I'm going to break the news to you for upskilling or learning, especially for the younger ones in society.
2:52:19more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is uh appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
2:52:47bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
2:53:15vector 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 continue 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 onetoone, much more personalized and customized
2:53:44learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
2:53:49You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
2:54:17conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
2:54:22Dario Armaday, Sam Sam Alman, 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?
2:54:45So, I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
2:55:14fears. has 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 has also helped companies fund raise 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 because 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 Stokout
2:55:41fears have an a tactic for rectory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models is 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.
2:55:59So 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 open AI's agents um were accidentally hacked into a hugging face.
2:56:27But when we look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. 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.
2:56:51Okay, we have some time. Andrew, I'm going to open up right here. We have a gentleman Mike very quickly. Usain Bolr 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.
2:57:05Hi I'm Dr. Pawan Dougal, senior advocate supreme court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
2:57:11Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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 injury
2:57:39issue. Your 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?
2:57:49You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal opet 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 wheel a hammer and I accidentally hit the wall and dent the 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 sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
2:58:18opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my AI did it. Blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer. That makes no sense to me.
2:58:33Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets. Andrew. So if you could very
2:59:01quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you of course.
2:59:11Yeah, I think that's exactly a question but 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 the way to go forward a light for
2:59:39the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially Claude's moral constitution?
2:59:58Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario 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 she just said is true. Um there are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns
3:00:26out 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 you know, we can't control airplanes perfectly, but by repeatedly injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over, we can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
3:00:49So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ask us to ascribe 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.
3:01:14Andrew, 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 super intelligence?
3:01:25You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few people few call it whatever they want to.
3:01:34Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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.
3:01:47Thank [applause] you.
3:01:55Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
3:02:06No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
3:02:34apocalypse. you know to 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 I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will um a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
3:03:04than 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 good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs. But 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
3:03:33theory 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 likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly in the United States, the number of
3:04:02software 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready not for the jobs of 2026 or even heaven forbid the jobs of
3:04:312024 but for the jobs of 2028 and beyond. So that's the challenge ahead of us.
3:04:36That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
3:04:44News rooms 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.
3:05:10Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
3:05:40showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
3:06:01It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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 use a AI coding assistance uh or ever made a call
3:06:28over 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 agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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. You know when the chat GPT 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
3:06:56Jensen 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 Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have Instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
3:07:14Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around 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.
3:07:31And 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 turns out my team actually said the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started to write in a newsletter called it badge. Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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
3:08:00would 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 Agentic AI, while not as fast as the hype is also ticking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
3:08:17Okay. So, since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well, we barely caught up over lunch.
3:08:22But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coin of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them, let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone. Who knows about AI agents? Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
3:08:42All right. So then I trans right the term AI agents around for a long time.
3:08:46for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for it has it has it roots in agency as well but but but so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we are 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a
3:09:16You know, I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
3:09:45technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
3:09:50But 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 at Aspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and maybe AI will do it all.
3:10:20The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well but I I find that I don't know I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven year old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's just a smart
3:10:50seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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.
3:11:17But I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our cost but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this has created a little bit of an echo chamber
3:11:46with tons of cos even those they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost 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.
3:12:12Before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
3:12:26A huge round of applause please for that explanation. Better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
3:12:39Okay. So we have a full house there. But they've used it some as well. Right Andrew. 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 chat bots 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.
3:13:07more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is uh appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
3:13:34bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
3:14:02vector 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 continue 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 onetoone, much more personalized and customized
3:14:31learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
3:14:36You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco and the
3:15:04conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
3:15:10Dario Armade, Sam Sam Alman, 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 got, 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?
3:15:33So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
3:16:01fears. has 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 fund raise 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 because 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 Stokout
3:16:29fears have an a tactic for rectory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models is 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.
3:16:47So 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
3:17:14But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. And so that type of security incident 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.
3:17:38Okay, 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.
3:17:51Please introduce yourself.
3:17:52Hi, I'm Dr. Dr. Pawand Dougal, senior advocate, Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
3:17:59Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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 injury
3:18:27issue your 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.
3:18:37You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton Locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal opeted 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 wheel a hammer and I accidentally hit the wall and dent the wall, is it my fault or is it the hammer's fault? Seems like it's my fault as a two user. And if we think of AI as tools directed by humans rather than sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
3:19:05opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my AI did blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer that makes no sense to me.
3:19:20Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets. Andrew, so if you could very
3:19:49quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you, of course.
3:19:58Yeah, I think that's exactly a question 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 the way to go forward a light for
3:20:26the rest of the industry to follow or how much I was listening carefully to your take on uh how these companies want regulators is to clamp down how scaremongering can actually boost the AI investment. So how would you evaluate anthropics efforts and especially Claude's moral constitution?
3:20:46Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario and Sam has worked for. 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 are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um it turns out that
3:21:14one 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over, we can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
3:21:36So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts asked to ascribe 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.
3:22:02Andrew, 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 super intelligence?
3:22:13You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few few call whatever they want to.
3:22:22Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you. [applause]
3:22:43Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
3:22:53No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
3:23:22apocalypse. you know to 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 I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will um a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
3:23:51than 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.
3:24:00And it's just not good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs. But 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
3:24:29sort of a scenario. That is not very likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly in the United States, the number of software engineering job postings is up.
3:24:52Because 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready not for the jobs of 2026 or even heaven forbid the jobs of 2024 but for the jobs of 2028 and
3:25:21beyond. So that's the challenge ahead of us.
3:25:24That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
3:25:32News rooms 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.
3:25:58Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Whartalon,
3:26:27showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
3:26:48It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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
3:27:16over 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 an AI coding agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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. You know when the chat GPT 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
3:27:44Jensen 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 Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
3:28:01Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI actually. So it was around 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 the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is
3:28:31different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started to write in a newsletter called the badge. Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 Agentic AI, while not as
3:29:00fast as the hype, is also ticking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
3:29:05Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well. We barely caught up over lunch.
3:29:10But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them. Let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone. Who knows about AI agents? Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
3:29:29All right. So then by trust right the term AI agents has been around for a long time.
3:29:33For a long time a the new thing agentic AI for it has it has it roots in agency as well but but but del so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a
3:30:03seven-year-old? You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
3:30:32technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
3:30:37But 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 at AI inspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and
3:31:06maybe AI will do it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well, but I I find that I don't know I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven year old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is
3:31:34no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine. fine, let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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
3:32:03cost savings. But I actually see one other problem, which is um 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 our costs, but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this
3:32:32has created a little bit of an echo chamber with tons of CEOs even those they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seal working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost 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. Before we move on to another
3:33:01arcane term in that lovely uh the cake that Jensen talks about let's go back dial down a little dial back because the audience clearly hadn't heard of agents.
3:33:11Now we know. So we can say thank you to Andrew. A huge round of applause please for that explanation. Better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude?
3:33:24Now raise your hands.
3:33:26Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it some as well, right, Andrew? 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 chat bots 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.
3:33:54more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is uh appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chatbots
3:34:22are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
3:34:50vector 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 continue to do it but um I think there's also an opportunity to invent a new set of techn technologies, not AI chatbot, but something very different where we can deliver much more onetoone, much more personalized and customized
3:35:18learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
3:35:24You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings 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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
3:35:52conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
3:35:57Dario Armade, Sam Sam Alman, 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?
3:36:20So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
3:36:49fears. has 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 fund raise 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 because technology 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 stoking up
3:37:16fears have an a tactic for rectory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models is 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.
3:37:34So 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
3:38:02But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. 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.
3:38:26Okay, 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.
3:38:40Hi, I'm Dr. Pawand Dougal, senior advocate Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
3:38:46Thank you. And the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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
3:39:14issue your 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.
3:39:24You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Huttonlocker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped 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 wheel a hammer and I accidentally hit the wall and dent the wall, is it my fault or is it the hammer's fault? Seems like it's my fault as a two user. And if we think of AI as tools directed by humans rather than sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my opinion then I think we'll come up with
3:39:54much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business say I didn't do it my AI did blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer that makes no sense to me. Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G's session. He was one of the the leaders from around the world who were
3:40:23flown into the anthropic headquarters in San Francisco to have a conversation about consciousness, sentience, how all of these things are coming into our data sets. Andrew, so if you could very quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you, of course.
3:40:46Yeah, I think that's exactly a question 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 Claude's moral constitution? How much of it is genuine and the way to go forward a light for
3:41:14the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially cloud's moral constitution?
3:41:32Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario 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 are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns
3:42:01out that one of the reasons people worry about AI is because we can't control them perfectly. But for many engineer things, we can't control them perfectly either. So, I flew on an airplane here and you know, we can't control airplanes perfectly, but by repeatedly injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over. We can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
3:42:24So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ascribe 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.
3:42:49Andrew, thank you for that. We have a trillion dollar, multi-t 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 super intelligence?
3:43:00You know I uh I I don't know I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh feel free to call it whatever they want to.
3:43:09Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank [applause] you.
3:43:30Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
3:43:40Yeah, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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 and you're not a believer in the job
3:44:09apocalypse. you know, 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. I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will.
3:44:24Um, a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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 good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs. But is that a concern then, Andrew, that a lot
3:44:53of 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 likely. In fact your theory is that it
3:45:22will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly 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
3:45:50types of jobs. But the challenge and there is a big challenge is people do need new skills to work in this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready 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.
3:46:11That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
3:46:19News rooms 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.
3:46:45Yeah. So frankly we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
3:47:15showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
3:47:36It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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
3:48:03over 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 agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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.
3:48:21You know when the chat GPT 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.
3:48:40Now everyone's caught up with Agentic already. You have Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have Instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
3:48:49Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI actually. So it was around 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 turns out my team said the AI world does not need another term
3:49:18but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started to write in a newsletter called it badge.
3:49:26Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 mockers would get a hold of this term and slap it like a sticker on almost everything in sight. And that caused the hype to tick off, you know, very rapidly. But the good news is the business applications of agentic AI while not as fast as the hype is also taking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
3:49:52Okay. 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 agentic or AI agents and the way we know them, let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone who knows about AI agents. Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
3:50:17All right. So then I trust right the term AI agents has been around for a long time.
3:50:21For a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for getting it has it roots in agency as well but but but tell so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a
3:50:50seven-year-old? You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
3:51:20technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
3:51:25But 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 aentic AI workflows can help and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AIspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and maybe AI will do
3:51:54it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well, but I I find that I don't know. I'm I'm realizing that I you know, I actually have a seven-year-old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both, which is no insult to cos. I I find that maybe it's
3:52:24just a smart seven-year-old, but but you know, one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer, I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve, which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know, make people more productive, save money.
3:52:39That's fine. Let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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 um 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 our cost, but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're
3:53:07actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this has created a little bit of an echo chamber with tons of cos even though they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost
3:53:36savings 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 before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
3:54:01A huge round of applause please for that explanation better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used Chad GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
3:54:14Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it as well, right, Andrew? 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 chat bots are actually any good.
3:54:34And I'm going to break the news to you for upskilling or learning especially for the younger ones in society.
3:54:42more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
3:55:09bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
3:55:37vector 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 continue 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 onetoone, much more personalized and customized
3:56:06learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
3:56:11You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of Cerebral Valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
3:56:39conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
3:56:45Dario Armade, Sam Sam Alman, 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?
3:57:08So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um, and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
3:57:36fears. It has been great PR because people 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 has also helped companies fund raise 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 because 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 so fears
3:58:04have a tactic for rectory 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.
3:58:19That's a huge competitive threat. So, companies are soaking 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 retry capture. So, these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
3:58:49But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. And so that type of security incident 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.
3:59:13Okay, 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.
3:59:27Hi, I'm Dr. Pawan Dougal, senior advocate, Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
3:59:34Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agentic liability framework in April showing 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
4:00:02issue. Your 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?
4:00:12You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped 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 the wall and dent the 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 sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my opinion then I think we'll come up with
4:00:42much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my AI did blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer that makes no sense to me.
4:00:55Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G we had your session earlier probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets.
4:01:23So if you could very quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you of course.
4:01:33Yeah, I think that's exactly a question but 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 the way to go forward a light for
4:02:01the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially cloud's moral constitution?
4:02:20Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario 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. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important injury work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns out
4:02:49that 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over. We can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
4:03:11So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ask to ascribe 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.
4:03:37Andrew, thank you for that. We have a trillion dollar, multi-t 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 super intelligence?
4:03:48You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh people feel free to call it whatever they want to.
4:03:56Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you.
4:04:11[applause] Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
4:04:28No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
4:04:56apocalypse. you know to 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 I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will um a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
4:05:26than 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 good enough to destroy the vast majority of jobs. But 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
4:05:56theory 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 likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly in the United States, the number of
4:06:24software 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready not for the jobs of 2026 or even heaven forbid the jobs of
4:06:532024 but for the jobs of 2028 and beyond. So that's the challenge ahead of us.
4:06:58That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
4:07:07News rooms 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.
4:07:32Yeah. So frankly we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
4:08:02showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
4:08:23It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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 use a AI coding assistance uh or ever made a call
4:08:51over 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 an AI coding agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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. You know when the chat GPT 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
4:09:19Jensen 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 Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
4:09:36Did you know this is not widely known but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around 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.
4:09:54And 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 turns out my team actually said the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started writing a newsletter called it badge. Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 mockers
4:10:23would 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 Agentic AI while not as fast as the hype is also taking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
4:10:40Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well. We barely caught up over lunch.
4:10:45But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them. Let's do let's have a simple exercise over a quick show of hands everyone. Who knows about AI agents?
4:10:58Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
4:11:04All right. So then I have but to trans right the term AI agents has been around for a long time.
4:11:08For a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for it has it has it roots in agency as well but but but tell so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we are 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a
4:11:38seven-year-old? You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
4:12:07technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
4:12:12But 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 aentic AI workflows can help and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AIspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in
4:12:40a few years and maybe AI will do it all.
4:12:42The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well, but I I find it I don't know. I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven-year-old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's just a smart
4:13:12seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that nothing wrong with that but the opportunity unities 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
4:13:41is um 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 our cost but we can't control our revenue growth and so what I do see is I've had cos tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost and I think this has created a little bit of an echo chamber with tons of cos
4:14:10even though they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost savings is fine let's absolutely do that but I think putting equal greater attention on how can we use AI to invent ways to serve customers better to drive growth I find that even more exciting.
4:14:35Before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
4:14:48A huge round of applause please for that explanation better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
4:15:01Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it as well, right, Andrew? 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 chat bots are actually any good.
4:15:22And I'm going to break the news to you for upskilling or learning, especially for the younger ones in society.
4:15:29more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is uh appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
4:15:57bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
4:16:25vector 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 continue 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 onetoone, much more personalized and customized
4:16:53learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
4:16:59You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
4:17:26conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
4:17:32Dario Armade, 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?
4:17:55So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
4:18:23fears. has 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, has also helped companies fund raise 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 because technology 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 Stokout
4:18:51fears have an a tactic for rectory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models is 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.
4:19:09So 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 open AI's agents um were accidentally hacked into a hugging face.
4:19:37But when we look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. 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.
4:20:01Okay, 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.
4:20:14Hi, I'm Dr. Pawan Dougal, senior advocate supreme court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
4:20:21Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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
4:20:49issue. Your 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?
4:20:59You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Huten Locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal opet 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 wheel a hammer and I accidentally hit the wall and dent the wall, is it my fault or is it the hammer's fault? Seems like it's my fault as a two user. And if we think of AI as tools directed by humans rather than sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
4:21:28opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my AI did it. Blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer. That makes no sense to me.
4:21:43Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets. Andrew. So if you could very
4:22:11quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you of course.
4:22:21Yeah, I think that's exactly a question but 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 the way to go forward a light for
4:22:48the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially Claude's moral constitution?
4:23:08Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Daru and Sam has worked for. I know them well, but I don't want to speak about specific company, but I I think a lot of what she just said is true. Um there are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um it turns out that
4:23:37one 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over, we can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
4:23:59So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ascribe 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.
4:24:24Andrew, 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 super intelligence?
4:24:35You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few few call it whatever they want to.
4:24:44Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you.
4:25:05Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
4:25:15No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
4:25:44apocalypse. you know, to 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. I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will.
4:25:59Um, a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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.
4:26:23And it's just not good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs. But 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
4:26:51sort of a scenario. That is not very likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly 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
4:27:20enter 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready 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.
4:27:46That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
4:27:54News rooms 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.
4:28:20Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Whartalon,
4:28:50showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
4:29:10It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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 use a AI coding assistance uh or ever made a call
4:29:38over 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 agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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.
4:29:56You know when the chat GPT 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.
4:30:15Now everyone's caught up with Agentic already. You have Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
4:30:24Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around 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.
4:30:41And 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 turns out my team actually said Andrew the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started to write in a newsletter called it badge. Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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
4:31:10would 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 Agentic AI while not as fast as the hype is also taking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
4:31:27Okay. So, since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well, we barely caught up over lunch.
4:31:32But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them, let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone who knows about AI agents. Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
4:31:52All right. So then I have but to be trans right the term AI agents has been around for a long time. for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for it has it has it roots in agency as well but but but so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we are 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
4:32:21to transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a seven-year-old?
4:32:26You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
4:32:55technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
4:33:00But 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 aentic AI workflows can help and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AI inspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and
4:33:28maybe AI will do it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well but I I find that I don't know I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven year old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is
4:33:57no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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
4:34:26savings. But I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our cost but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this
4:34:54has created a little bit of an echo chamber with tons of CEOs even those they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seal working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost savings is fine let's absolutely do that but I think putting equal greater attention on how can we use AI to invent ways to serve customers better to drive growth I find that even more exciting
4:35:22before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
4:35:36A huge round of applause please for that explanation. Better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
4:35:48Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it as well, right?
4:35:52Andrew, 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 chat bots 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.
4:36:16more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
4:36:44bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
4:37:12vector 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 continue 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 onetoone, much more personalized and customized
4:37:41learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
4:37:46You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruinings 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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco and the
4:38:14conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
4:38:19Dario Armade, Sam Sam Alman, 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 got, 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?
4:38:43So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
4:39:11fears. has been great PR because people 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 fund raise 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 because technology 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 Stokout
4:39:39fears have been a tactic for rectory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models is 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.
4:39:56So 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
4:40:24But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the open AI hugging face hackers widely publicized, open AI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. And so that type of security incidents is now much less likely to happen again.
4:40:42And as this goes on, we will repeatedly reduce security problems and make AI safer and safer.
4:40:48Okay, 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.
4:41:02Hi I'm Dr. Pawand Dougal, senior advocate Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
4:41:09Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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 injury
4:41:37issue your 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.
4:41:47You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton Locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped 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 wheel a hammer and I accidentally hit the wall and dent the wall, is it my fault or is it the hammer's fault? Seems like it's my fault as a two user. And if we think of AI as tools directed by humans rather than sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
4:42:15opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it. My row AI did it. Blame my AI. But that makes as much sense. Am I saying I didn't damage the wall, my hammer did it so sue my hammer. That makes no sense to me. Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day. And for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G's session, he was one of the the leaders
4:42:44from 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 data sets. Andrew, so if you could very quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there, and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you, of course.
4:43:08Yeah, I think that's exactly a question word 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 the way to go forward alone uh how
4:43:36these companies want regulators to clamp down how scaremongering can actually boost the AI investment.
4:43:44So how would you evaluate anthropics efforts and especially Claude's moral constitution?
4:43:51Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario and Sam as workforce. 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 are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns out that one of the reasons people worry
4:44:20about 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 you know we can't control airplanes perfectly but by repeatedly injuring them to be safer and safer finding problems fixing them finding problems fixing them and doing that over and over we can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe. So we are now in the middle of that process with AI um and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts
4:44:49to ask us to ascribe 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.
4:45:07Andrew, 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 super intelligence?
4:45:17You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few people few call it whatever they want to.
4:45:26Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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.
4:45:40Thank you. [applause] Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
4:45:58Yeah, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
4:46:26apocalypse. you know, to 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. I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will.
4:46:41Um, a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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.
4:47:05And it's just not good enough to destroy the vast majority of jobs. But 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
4:47:34sort of a scenario. That is not very likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly 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
4:48:02enter 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready 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.
4:48:28That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
4:48:37News rooms 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.
4:49:02Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
4:49:32showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
4:49:53It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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 use a AI coding assistance uh or ever made a call
4:50:20over 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 agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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. You know when the chat GPT 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
4:50:50world 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 Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
4:51:06Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around 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.
4:51:24And 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 the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started writing a newsletter called it badge.
4:51:43Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 Agentic AI while not as sass as the hype is also taking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
4:52:10Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well, we barely caught up over lunch.
4:52:14But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them. Let's do let's have a simple exercise over a quick show of hands everyone. Who knows about AI agents?
4:52:28Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
4:52:34All right. So then I trans right the term AI agents around for a long time.
4:52:38for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for it has it has it roots in agency as well but but but so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we are 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a
4:53:09You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
4:53:37technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
4:53:42But 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 aentic AI workflows can help and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AIspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success and getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and maybe AI will do
4:54:12it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well, but I I find it I don't know. I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven-year-old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's
4:54:42just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that nothing wrong with that but the opport opportunities 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
4:55:10problem which is um 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 our cost but we can't control our revenue growth and so what I do see is I've had cos tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost and I think this has created a little bit of an echo
4:55:38chamber with tons of cos even though they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost savings is fine let's absolutely do that but I think putting equal greater attention on how can we use AI to invent ways to serve customers better to drive growth I find that even more exciting.
4:56:05Before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
4:56:18A huge round of applause please for that explanation better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
4:56:31Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it some of them as well, right?
4:56:35Andrew, 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 chat bots are actually any good.
4:56:52And I'm going to break the news to you for upskilling or learning especially for the younger ones in society. more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities
4:57:20is appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat bots are likely damaging adult learning as well.
4:57:30So 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn vector um I'm working hard to see how we can invent the next
4:57:59generation 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 continue 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 onetoone, 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.
4:58:28You know, that's the beauty of the at the ending 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.
4:58:41Keep a mic on standby, please. Andrew, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San San Francisco and the conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI. Dario Armade, Sam Sam Alultman, 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
4:59:08everyone 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? So, I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um, and I know it's can be cons can feel 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
4:59:37the 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 AI fears. It has been great PR because people 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 was also helped companies fund raise 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 because technology just doesn't
5:00:07work 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 stoking up fears a tactic for rectory 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.
5:00:32That's a huge competitive threat. So, companies are soaking 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 retry capture. So, these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
5:01:02But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. And so that type of security incident 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.
5:01:26Okay, 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.
5:01:39Hi, I'm Dr. Pawan Dougal, senior advocate, Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
5:01:46Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent liability framework in April showing 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
5:02:14issue your 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.
5:02:23Sure sir you know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped 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 the wall and dent the 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 sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
5:02:53opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my row AI did blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer that makes no sense to me.
5:03:08Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G we had your session earlier probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets.
5:03:35So if you could very quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you of course.
5:03:46Yeah, I think that's exactly a question but 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 Claude's moral constitution? How much of it is genuine and the way to go forward a light for
5:04:13the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially cloud's moral constitution?
5:04:32Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario and Sam has workforce. 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. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important injury work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns out
5:05:01that 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over. We can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
5:05:24So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ask us to ascribe 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.
5:05:49Andrew, thank you for that. We have a trillion dollar, multi-t 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 super intelligence?
5:06:00You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh people feel free to call it whatever they want to.
5:06:09Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you.
5:06:30Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
5:06:40Yeah, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
5:07:09apocalypse. you know to 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 I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will um a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
5:07:38than 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 good enough to destroy the vast majority of jobs. But 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
5:08:08theory 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 likely in fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering. Because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what?
5:08:35Certainly 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready not for
5:09:02the 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.
5:09:11That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
5:09:19News rooms 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.
5:09:45Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
5:10:15showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
5:10:35It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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 use a AI coding assistance uh or ever made a call
5:11:03over 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 an AI coding agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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. You know when the chat GPT 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
5:11:31Jensen 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 Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
5:11:49Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around early 2024 uh when I thought that that this wave of AI that doesn't just blurt out an answer but will 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 turns out my team actually said the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is
5:12:19different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started writing a newsletter called it badge. Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 mockers 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 Agentic AI while not as
5:12:47sass as the hype is also taking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
5:12:52Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well. We barely caught up over lunch.
5:12:57But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them. Let's do let's have a simple exercise over a quick show of hands everyone. Who knows about AI agents?
5:13:10Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
5:13:16All right. So then I have but to trans right the term AI agents has been around for a long time.
5:13:21For a long time a called the new thing agentic AI for it has it has it roots in agents to the term agentic andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a seven-year-old? You know, I I I maybe uh um
5:13:50before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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 technology is instrumental to a large
5:14:17number of businesses um use of AI today.
5:14:20But 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 at AI inspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and
5:14:48maybe AI will do it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well, but I I find that I don't know I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven-year-old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to cos I I find
5:15:18that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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.
5:15:46But I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our cost but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this has created a little bit of an echo chamber
5:16:16with tons of CEOs even those they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seal working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost 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.
5:16:42Before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
5:16:55A huge round of applause please for that explanation. Better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
5:17:08Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it some as well, right?
5:17:12Andrew, 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 chat bots 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.
5:17:36more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
5:18:04bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
5:18:32vector 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 continue 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 onetoone, much more personalized and customized
5:19:01learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
5:19:06You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, 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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
5:19:34conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
5:19:39Dario Armade, Sam Sam Alman, 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 got, 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?
5:20:02So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
5:20:31fears. has 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 fund raise 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 because technology 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 Stokout
5:20:59fears have been a tactic for rectory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models is 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.
5:21:16So 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
5:21:44But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, open AI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. 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.
5:22:08Okay, 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.
5:22:22Hi I'm Dr. Pawand Dougal, senior advocate Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
5:22:28Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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 injury
5:22:57issue your 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.
5:23:07You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton Locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped that that put this very well as well, which is hold the humans that are driving the AI responsible. Um, because if I take a hammer and I wheel a hammer and I accidentally hit the wall and dent the wall, is it my fault or is it the hammer's fault? Seems like it's my fault as a two user. And if we think of AI as tools directed by humans rather than sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
5:23:35opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks.
5:23:38There's an incentive for business to say I didn't do it. My row AI did it. Blame my AI. But that makes as much sense. Am I saying I didn't damage the wall, my hammer did it, so sue my hammer. That makes no sense to me. Very very quickly, we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day. And for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G's session, he was one of the the leaders from around the world who were flown into the anthropic headquarters in San
5:24:08Francisco to have a conversation about consciousness, sentience, how all of these things are coming into our data sets. Andrew, so if you could very quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there, and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you, of course.
5:24:28Yeah, I think that's exactly a question both 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 the way to go forward a light for
5:24:56the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially cloud's moral constitution?
5:25:15Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario 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 are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um it turns
5:25:44out that one of the reasons people worry about AI is because we can't control them perfectly. But for many engineer 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 injuring them to be safer and safer. Finding problems fixing them finding problems fixing them and doing that over and over. We can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
5:26:06So we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ascribe 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.
5:26:32Andrew, thank you for that. We have a trillion dollar, multi-t 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 super intelligence?
5:26:42You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few feel free to call it whatever they want to.
5:26:51Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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.
5:27:05Thank you. [applause] Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
5:27:23No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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 and you're not a believer in the job
5:27:51apocalypse. you know to 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 I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will um a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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 will be
5:28:21there frankly I wish AI worked better, but it just doesn't work that well yet and it's just not good enough to destroy the vast majority of jobs.
5:28:29But 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
5:28:56likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly 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
5:29:26maybe 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready 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.
5:29:48That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
5:29:57News rooms 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.
5:30:22Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
5:30:52showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
5:31:13It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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 use a AI coding assistance uh or ever made a call
5:31:40over 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 agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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. You know when the chat GPT 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
5:32:08Jensen 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 Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
5:32:26Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around 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.
5:32:44And 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.
5:32:51A and it turns out my team actually said Andrew the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started writing a newsletter called it badge. Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 [clears throat] caused the hype to take off, you know,
5:33:20very rapidly. But the good news is the business applications of Agentic AI while not as sass as the hype is also taking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
5:33:30Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well, we barely caught up over lunch.
5:33:34But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them. Let's do let's have a simple exercise over a quick show of hands everyone. Who knows about AI agents?
5:33:48Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
5:33:54All right. So then I trans right the term AI agents around for a long time.
5:33:58for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI very forget it has it has it roots in agency as well but but but so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we are 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a
5:34:28You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
5:34:57technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
5:35:02But 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 aentic AI workflows can help and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AIspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in
5:35:30a few years and maybe AI will do it all.
5:35:32The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well but I I find that I don't know I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven year old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's just a smart
5:36:02seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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.
5:36:29But I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our cost but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this has created a little bit of an echo chamber
5:36:58with tons of cos even though they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost savings is fine let's absolutely do that but I think putting equal greater attention on how can we use AI to invent ways to serve customers better to drive growth I find that even more exciting.
5:37:25Before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
5:37:38A huge round of applause please for that explanation better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
5:37:51Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it some as well, right?
5:37:55Andrew, 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 chat bots are actually any good.
5:38:12And I'm going to break the news to you for upskilling or learning especially for the younger ones in society. more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities
5:38:40is appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat bots are likely damaging adult learning as well.
5:38:50So 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn vector um I'm working hard to see how we can invent the next
5:39:19generation 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 continue 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 onetoone, 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.
5:39:48You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
5:40:16conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
5:40:22Dario Armade, 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 got, 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?
5:40:45So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
5:41:13fears. has 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 fund raise 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 because 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 Stokout
5:41:41fears have been a tactic for rectory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models is 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.
5:41:59So 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into a hugging face.
5:42:26But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, open AAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. 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.
5:42:50Okay, we have some time. Andrew, I'm going to open up right here. We have a gentleman Mike very quickly. Usain Bolr 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.
5:43:04Hi I'm Dr. Pawand Dougal, senior advocate supreme court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
5:43:11Thank you and the the chairman of the global AI accountability forum. My quick question has begun started causing harm to humans. So January I released the AI accountability framework but the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agentic liability framework in April showing 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. Your take what advice do you want to give to these governments of the world on how they need to regulate these
5:43:40rogue AIs which ultimately are acting against human interest?
5:43:44You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped 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 the wall and dent the 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 sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
5:44:13opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my row AI did blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer that makes no sense to me.
5:44:28Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G we had your session earlier probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets.
5:44:55So if you could very quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you of course.
5:45:05Yeah, I think that's exactly a question but 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 the way to go forward a light for the rest of the industry to follow or
5:45:35how 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 anthropics efforts and especially cloud's moral constitution?
5:45:52Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario 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. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important injury work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns out
5:46:21that 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over. We can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
5:46:44So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ask to ascribe 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.
5:47:09Andrew, thank you for that. We have a trillion dollar, multi-t 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 super intelligence?
5:47:20You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh people feel free to call it whatever they want to.
5:47:29Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you.
5:47:50Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
5:48:00No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
5:48:29apocalypse. you know to 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 I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will um a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
5:48:58than 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.
5:49:07And it's just not good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs. But 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
5:49:36sort of a scenario. That is not very likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering. Because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what?
5:49:55Certainly 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready not for
5:50:22the 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.
5:50:31That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
5:50:39News rooms 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.
5:51:05Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
5:51:35showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
5:51:55It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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
5:52:23over 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 an AI coding agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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.
5:52:41You know when the chat GPT 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.
5:53:00Now everyone's caught up with Agentic already. You have Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have Instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
5:53:09Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI actually. So it was around 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 turns out my team said the AI world does not need another term
5:53:38but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started to write in a newsletter called it badge.
5:53:45Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 mockers would get a hold of this term and slap it like a sticker on almost everything in sight. And that caused the hype to tick off, you know, very rapidly. But the good news is the business applications of Agentic AI, while not as fast as the hype, is also taking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
5:54:12Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well. We barely caught up over lunch.
5:54:17But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them. Let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone who knows about AI agents. Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
5:54:36All right. So then by chance right the term AI agents has been around for a long time.
5:54:41For a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for getting it has it roots in agency as well but but but tell so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a
5:55:10seven-year-old? You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
5:55:39technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
5:55:45But 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 at AIspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and maybe AI will do
5:56:14it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well, but I I find that I don't know. I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven year old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's
5:56:44just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that nothing wrong with that but the opport opportunities 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
5:57:13problem which is um 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 our cost but we can't control our revenue growth and so what I do see is I've had cos tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI but when they talked to the stock market they were talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost and I think this has created a little bit of an echo chamber with tons of cos
5:57:42even those they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis so cos working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost savings is fine let's absolutely do that but I think putting equal greater attention on how Can we use AI to invent ways to serve customers better to drive growth?
5:58:05I find that even more exciting.
5:58:07Before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
5:58:20A huge round of applause please for that explanation. Better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
5:58:33Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it some of them as well, right, Andrew? 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.
5:58:49But but tell me, Andrew, you don't believe that chat bots 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.
5:59:01More 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, secondary school, K12 and universities is uh appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chatbots
5:59:29are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
5:59:57vector 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 continue to do it but um I think there's also an opportunity to invent a new set of technology technologies, not AI chatbot, but something very different where we can deliver much more onetoone, much more personalized and customized
6:00:26learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
6:00:31You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
6:00:59conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
6:01:04Dario Armaday, Sam Sam Alman, 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?
6:01:27So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um, and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
6:01:56fears. It has been great PR because people 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 has also helped companies fund raise 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 because 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 fears have
6:02:24a tactic for rectory 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 retry capture. So, these
6:02:53are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
6:03:09But when we look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. And so that type of security incident 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.
6:03:33Okay, 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.
6:03:47Hi, I'm Dr. Pawan Dougal, senior advocate, Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
6:03:53Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agentic liability framework in April showing 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
6:04:22issue. Your 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?
6:04:32You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped 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 the wall and dent the 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 sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
6:05:00opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my row AI did blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer that makes no sense to me.
6:05:15Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets. Andrew, so if you could very
6:05:43quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you, of course.
6:05:53Yeah, I think that's exactly a question 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 the way to go forward a light for
6:06:21the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially cloud's moral constitution?
6:06:40Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario and Sam has work force. 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. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important injury work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns out
6:07:09that 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over. We can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
6:07:31So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ask us to ascribe 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.
6:07:56Andrew, thank you for that. We have a trillion dollar, multi-t 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 super intelligence?
6:08:07You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few people few call it whatever they want to.
6:08:16Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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.
6:08:30Thank you. [applause] Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
6:08:48Yeah, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
6:09:16apocalypse. you know to 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 I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will um a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
6:09:46than 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 good enough to destroy the vast majority of jobs. But 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
6:10:16theory 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 likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly the United States, the number of
6:10:44software 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready not for the jobs of 2026 or even heaven forbid the jobs of
6:11:132024 but for the jobs of 2028 and beyond. So that's the challenge ahead of us.
6:11:18That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
6:11:27News rooms 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.
6:11:52Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI does the work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
6:12:22showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
6:12:43It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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 use a AI coding assistance uh or ever made a call
6:13:10over 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 agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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. You know when the chat GPT 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
6:13:38Jensen 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 Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
6:13:56Did you know this is not widely known but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around 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.
6:14:13And 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 the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started writing a newsletter called it badge.
6:14:33Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 Agentic AI while not as fast as the hype is also taking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
6:14:59Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well, we barely caught up over lunch.
6:15:04But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them, let's do let's have a simple exercise over a quick show of hands everyone. Who knows about AI agents?
6:15:18Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
6:15:24All right. So then I have to trans right the term AI agents around for a long time. for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for it has it has it roots in agency as well but but but so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we are 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
6:15:53transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a seven-year-old?
6:15:58You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
6:16:27technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
6:16:32But 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 aentic AI workflows can help and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AI aspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and
6:17:01maybe AI will do it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well but I I find it I don't know I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven year old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is
6:17:29no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine Let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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
6:17:58savings. But I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our cost, but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this
6:18:26has created a little bit of an echo chamber with tons of cos even though they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost savings is fine let's absolutely do that but I think putting equal greater attention on how can we use AI to invent ways to serve customers better to drive growth I find that even more exciting.
6:18:54Before we move on to another arcane term in that lovely uh the cake 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.
6:19:08A huge round of applause please for that explanation better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
6:19:21Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it some of them as well, right, Andrew? 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 chat bots are actually any good.
6:19:41And I'm going to break the news to you for upskilling or learning especially for the younger ones in society.
6:19:49more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
6:20:16bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
6:20:45vector 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 continue 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 onetoone, much more personalized and customized
6:21:13learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
6:21:18You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
6:21:46conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
6:21:52Dario Armade, Sam Sam Alman, 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 got, 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?
6:22:15So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
6:22:43fears. has 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, has also helped companies fund raise 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 because 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 Stokout
6:23:11fears have been a tactic for rectory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models is 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.
6:23:29So 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 open AI's agents um were accidentally hacked into a hugging face.
6:23:56But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. 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.
6:24:20Okay, 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.
6:24:34Hi I'm Dr. Pawan Dougal, senior advocate Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
6:24:41Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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 injury
6:25:09issue. Your 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?
6:25:19You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Huten Lockacher, wrote a Wall Street Journal opeted 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 wave a hammer and I accidentally hit the wall and dent the wall, is it my fault or is it the hammer's fault? Seems like it's my fault as a two user. And if we think of AI as tools directed by humans rather than sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
6:25:48opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my AI did it. Blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer. That makes no sense to me.
6:26:03Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets. Andrew, so if you could very
6:26:31quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you, of course.
6:26:40Yeah, I think that's exactly a question 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 Claude's moral constitution? How much of it is genuine and the way to go forward a light for
6:27:08the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially Claude's moral constitution?
6:27:27Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Daru 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 she just said is true. Um there are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns
6:27:56out 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over, we can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
6:28:19So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ask us to ascribe 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.
6:28:44Andrew, 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 super intelligence?
6:28:55You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few few call whatever they want to.
6:29:04Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you. [applause]
6:29:25Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
6:29:35No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today.
6:29:38You 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 and you're not a believer in the job apocalypse you so I want to speak directly to
6:30:07anyone worried about their job prospects the student worried if there will be a job for you in the future when you graduate I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will. Um, a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
6:30:36learning 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 good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs.
6:30:46But 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
6:31:14likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly 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,
6:31:43maybe 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're readying 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.
6:32:06That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
6:32:14News rooms 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.
6:32:40Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Whartalon,
6:33:10showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
6:33:30It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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
6:33:58over 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 agent. But changing the educational system is hard but 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.
6:34:16You know when the chat GPT 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.
6:34:35Now everyone's caught up with Agentic already. You have Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have Instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
6:34:44Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around 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.
6:35:01And 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 the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started to write in a newsletter called it badge.
6:35:20Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 Agentic AI while not as fast as the hype is also ticking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
6:35:47Okay. 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 agentic or AI agents and the way we know them, let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone.
6:36:03Who knows about AI agents? Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
6:36:11All right. So then I have oh by to right the term AI agents has been around for a long time. for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI for it has it has it roots in agency as well but but but so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we 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
6:36:41transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a seven-year-old?
6:36:46You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
6:37:14technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
6:37:20But 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 aentic AI workflows can help and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AI inspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and
6:37:48maybe AI will do it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well, but I I find that I don't know I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven year old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is
6:38:16no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine Let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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
6:38:45savings. But I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our costs, but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this
6:39:14has created a little bit of an echo chamber with tons of CEOs even those they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seal working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost 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. Before we move on to another
6:39:44arcane term in that lovely uh the cake that Jensen talks about let's go back dial down a little dial back because the audience clearly hadn't heard of agents.
6:39:53Now we know. So we can say thank you to Andrew. A huge round of applause please for that explanation. Better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude?
6:40:06Now raise your hands.
6:40:08Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it as well, right, Andrew? 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 chat bots 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.
6:40:36more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
6:41:04bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
6:41:32vector 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 continue 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 onetoone, much more personalized and customized
6:42:01learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
6:42:06You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings 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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco and the
6:42:34conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
6:42:39Dario Armade, Sam Sam Alman, 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 got, 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?
6:43:02So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
6:43:31fears. 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 fund raise 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 because technology 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 Stokout
6:43:58fears have been a tactic for rectory capture. It turns out that if you've spent billions of dollars training AI models is 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.
6:44:16So 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 retry capture. So these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
6:44:44But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. And so that type of security incident 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.
6:45:08Okay, 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.
6:45:21Please introduce yourself.
6:45:22Hi, I'm Dr. Pawan Dougal, senior advocate, Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
6:45:28Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agentic AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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 injury
6:45:56issue your 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.
6:46:06You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton Locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped that that put this very well as well, which is hold the humans that are driving the AI responsible. Um, because if I take a hammer and I wheel a hammer and I accidentally hit the wall and dent the wall, is it my fault or is it the hammer's fault? Seems like it's my fault as a two user. And if we think of AI as tools directed by humans rather than sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
6:46:35opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my AI did blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer that makes no sense to me.
6:46:50Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets. Andrew, so if you could very
6:47:18quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you, of course.
6:47:28Yeah, I think that's exactly a question 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 the way to go forward a light for
6:47:56the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially cloud's moral constitution?
6:48:15Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario and Sam has worked for. 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 are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns
6:48:43out that one of the reasons people worry about AI is because we can't control them perfectly. But for many engineer 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over, we cannot control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe. So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then,
6:49:13these attempts to ascribe 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.
6:49:31Andrew, thank you for that. We have a trillion dollar, multi-t 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 super intelligence?
6:49:42You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few feel free to call whatever they want to.
6:49:51Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you. [applause]
6:50:12Thanks Vika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
6:50:23Thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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 and you're not a believer in the job
6:50:51apocalypse. you know to 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 I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will um a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
6:51:21than 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.
6:51:30And it's just not good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs. But 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
6:51:59sort of a scenario. That is not very likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly in the United States, the number of software engineering job postings is up.
6:52:21Because 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready not for the jobs of 2026 or even heaven forbid the jobs of 2024 but for the jobs of 2028 and
6:52:51beyond. So that's the challenge ahead of us.
6:52:53That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
6:53:02News rooms 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.
6:53:27Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
6:53:57showed 17% lower grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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 chat bots.
6:54:21My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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
6:54:48leading frontier AI model. And today I will not hire a software engineer that you know doesn't know how to use an AI coding agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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.
6:55:04You know when the chat GPT 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.
6:55:22Now everyone's caught up with Agentic already. You have Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have Instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
6:55:31Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI actually. So it was around 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 the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is
6:56:01different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started to write in a newsletter called a badge. Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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.
6:56:22And that caused the hype to tick off, you know, very rapidly. But the good news is the business applications of Agentic AI, while not as fast as the hype, is also ticking off rapidly. So I feel pretty good about the trajectory that the world is on.
6:56:34Okay. So since we haven't scripted any of this and Andrew's had a busy schedule as well. We barely caught up over lunch.
6:56:39But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them. Let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone. Who knows about AI agents? Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
6:56:59All right. So then by trust right the term AI agents has been around for a long time.
6:57:03For a long time a the new thing agentic AI for it has it roots in agency as well but but but tell so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we 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 transform his company using artificial intelligence with the first one. How do
6:57:32I explain it to a seven-year-old? You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up some data, maybe think for a while and even reflect and edit itself and do a sequence of steps before giving you a
6:57:59vastly superior answer. So this technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
6:58:07But 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 at AI inspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and
6:58:36maybe AI will do it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well but I I find that I don't know I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven year old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is
6:59:04no insult to cos I I find that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that. Nothing wrong with that. But the opportunities 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
6:59:33savings. But I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our cost but we can't control our revenue growth. And so what I do see is I've had CEOs tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI, but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost. And I think this has created a little bit of an echo
7:00:03chamber with tons of cos even those they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost 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. Before we move on to another
7:00:31arcane term in that lovely uh the cake that Jensen talks about let's go back dial down a little dial back because the audience clearly hadn't heard of agents.
7:00:40Now we know. So we can say thank you to Andrew. A huge round of applause please for that explanation. Better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used Chad GPT or Gemini or Claude?
7:00:53Now raise your hands.
7:00:56Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it as well, right, Andrew? 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 with when every new model comes around. But but tell me Andrew, you don't believe that chat bots 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.
7:01:24more and more data is showing up that when students engage in cognitive offloading to AI, meaning make AI do your thinking for you, is good at getting the task done, but it really hurts learning. And while a lot of rigorous studies in formal education, kind of primary, secondary school, K12 and universities is appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
7:01:51bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
7:02:19vector 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 continue to do it but um I think there's also an opportunity to invent a new set of techn technologies, not AI chatbot, but something very different where we can deliver much more onetoone, much more personalized and customized
7:02:48learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
7:02:53You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of Cerebral Valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San Francisco. And the
7:03:21conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
7:03:27Dario Armade, Sam Sam Alman, 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?
7:03:50So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um, and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
7:04:18fears. It's been great PR because people 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 has also helped companies fund raise 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 because 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 stoking up
7:04:46fears a tactic for rectory 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.
7:05:02That's a huge competitive threat. So, companies are soaking 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 retry capture. So, these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
7:05:31But when you look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, open AI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. And so that type of security incident 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.
7:05:55Okay, 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.
7:06:09Hi, I'm Dr. Pawan Dougal, senior advocate, Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
7:06:16Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agenti liability framework in April showing 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
7:06:44issue your 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.
7:06:53Sure sir you know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Huttonlocker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped 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 wheel a hammer and I accidentally hit the wall and dent the 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 sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
7:07:22opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks.
7:07:26There's an incentive for business to say I didn't do it. My row AI did. Blame my AI. But that makes as much sense. Am I saying I didn't damage the wall, my hammer did it, so sue my hammer. That makes no sense to me. Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G, we had your session earlier, probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day. And for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G session, he was one of the the leaders from around the world who were flown into the anthropic headquarters in San
7:07:56Francisco to have a conversation about consciousness, sentience, how all of these things are coming into our data sets. Andrew, so if you could very quickly give us your biggest takeaway from there, and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you, of course.
7:08:15Yeah, I think that's exactly a question both 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 Claude's moral constitution. How much of it is genuine and the way to go forward a light for
7:08:43the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially cloud's moral constitution?
7:09:02Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario 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 are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns
7:09:31out 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 you know, we can't control airplanes perfectly, but by repeatedly injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over. We can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
7:09:54So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ask to ascribe 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.
7:10:19Andrew, thank you for that. We have a trillion dollar, multi-t 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 super intelligence?
7:10:30You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh people feel free to call it whatever they want to.
7:10:39Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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. Thank you.
7:11:00Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
7:11:10No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today. You 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
7:11:39apocalypse. you know 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 I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will um a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
7:12:08than 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 good enough to destroy the vast majority of your jobs. But 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
7:12:38theory 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 likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering. Because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what?
7:13:05Certainly 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready not for
7:13:32the 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.
7:13:41That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
7:13:49News rooms 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.
7:14:15Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
7:14:44showed 17% lower grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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 chat bots.
7:15:08My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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
7:15:35leading frontier AI model. And today I will not hire a software engineer that you know doesn't know how to use an AI coding agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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. You know when the chat GPT 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
7:16:05will 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 Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
7:16:18Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI actually. So it was around 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 turns out my team actually said the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is
7:16:48different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started writing a newsletter called it badge start to talk about why we should call it agentic 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 agentic AI while not as fast as the hype is also
7:17:18taking 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.
7:17:27But since you do have you've played an instrumental role in the coining of the term agentic or AI agents and the way we know them, let's do let's have a simple exercise over here. A quick show of hands everyone who knows about AI agents. Have you guys heard of muse and dots and do you use AI agents? Okay.
7:17:46All right. So then I but to be trans right the term AI agents has been around for a long time. for a long time a call the new thing agentic AI forget it has it roots in agency as well but but but so everyone that isn't accustomed or clamatized to the term agentic Andrew we're going to do a simple chat GPD exercise which is one we will explain agentic to this audience like we 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
7:18:16transform his company using artificial intelligence. Let's go with the first one. How do I explain it to a seven-year-old?
7:18:21You know, I I I maybe uh um before the rise of agentic 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 wanted to maybe do some web research, maybe look up 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
7:18:49technology is instrumental to a large number of businesses um use of AI today.
7:18:54But 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 aentic AI workflows can help and then to get the skilled engineers to go and implement them. Um actually at AIspire my business partner Kirsty Tan and I we see ton we work with many businesses that are implementing this very success in getting business ROI but it is hard work and I think that uh even though there's hype that we have AGI in a few years and maybe AI will do
7:19:24it all. The reality is I think even a decade from now we'll still be identifying important business process workflows and working hard to implement them. And 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. Um well, but I I find that I don't I'm I'm realizing that I you know I actually have a seven year old and I actually do speak with cos and I find that um uh I probably say really similar things to both which is no insult to cos
7:19:53I I find that maybe it's just a smart seven-year-old but but you know one actually I want to share just in terms of AI transfer I share one one uh maybe slight pet peeve which is a lot of cos still think of AI as a tool for cost savings and you know make people more productive save money that's fine let's do that nothing wrong with that but the opport opportunities 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
7:20:21I actually see one other problem which is um 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 our cost but we can't control our revenue growth and so what I do see is I've had cos tell me they're actually have huge ambitions for growth using AI but when they talk to the stock market, they will talk mostly about cost savings because they don't want to set expectations they can't deliver to and they know how to better manage the cost and I think this has created a little
7:20:49bit of an echo chamber with tons of cos even though they're actually pursuing growth instead talking about cost savings and this has led to overemphasis. So to seals working on um industry transformation when when at AI spy when you talk to businesses cost 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 before we move on to another arcane term
7:21:19in that lovely uh the cake 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 better than any AI agent could do or any chatbot. And speaking of chat bots, how many of y'all have used chat GPT or Gemini or Claude? Now raise your hands.
7:21:43Okay, so we have a full house there. But they've used it as well, right, Andrew? 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 chat bots are actually any good.
7:22:04And I'm going to break the news to you for upskilling or learning, especially for the younger ones in society.
7:22:11more 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, secondary school, K12 and universities is appearing showing this result. I think the thing people often underestimate is how much chat
7:22:39bots are likely damaging adult learning 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. Um but to be clear, I think there is a better way forward. um Corsera and Udemy are working hard to help people gain skills in this era and also at uh deep learn
7:23:07vector 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 continue 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 onetoone, much more personalized and customized
7:23:36learning experiences. Um, but that's still some of the important work that needs to be done ahead of us.
7:23:41You know, that's the beauty of the at the NDTV World Summit. We've had a plethora of conversations, a heavy lunch for everyone and ruings in the house and we have a full house. So, a huge round of applause for all of y'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, you see these conversations coming out of cerebral valley. I won't call it Silicon Valley anymore because it's happening in downtown San San Francisco. And the
7:24:09conversations are varying in terms of ideology, in terms of the future of AI.
7:24:14Dario Armaday, Sam Sam Alman, 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?
7:24:37So I think throughout society, people have disagreed about all sorts of things. Um, and I know it's can be cons can feel 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 AI
7:25:06fears. It has been great PR because people 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 has also helped companies fund raise 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 because 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 so fears
7:25:34have a tactic for rectory 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.
7:25:49That'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 retry capture. So, these are some of the incentives for stoking up AI fears. But instead of um 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 um were accidentally hacked into hugging face.
7:26:19But when we look at what actually happened, these are engine problems to be solved. And the good news is now that the OpenAI hugging face hackers widely publicized, OpenAI to their credit and many others are taking the security of these AI agents much more seriously. And so that type of security incident 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.
7:26:43Okay, 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.
7:26:57Hi, I'm Dr. Dr. Pawand Dougal, senior advocate, Supreme Court of India and one of our one of our foremost cyber lawyers in the country.
7:27:03Thank you and the the chairman of the global 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 the agent AI coming in we released the Google global agent AI liability framework in April showing 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
7:27:31issue. Your 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?
7:27:41You know um I have a strong point of view on this. One of my friends, Dan Hutton locker, wrote a Wall Street Journal oped 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 the wall and dent the 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 sent in things with their own free will which they do not have in my
7:28:10opinion then I think we'll come up with much better liability frameworks. There is an incentive for business to say I didn't do it my row AI did blame my AI but that makes as much sense am I saying I didn't damage the wall my hammer did it so sue my hammer. That makes no sense to me.
7:28:25Very very quickly we have maybe time for one quick question. Swami G we had your session earlier probably one of the blockbuster sessions of the day and for those of you who weren't there for uh Swami G'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 data sets so if you could very quickly give
7:28:54us your biggest takeaway from there and I'd love Andrew to be able to respond respond to what your biggest takeaway was. NDA allowing you of course.
7:29:02[laughter] Yeah, I think that's exactly a question both 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 the way to go forward a light for
7:29:31the rest of the industry 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 anthropics efforts and especially Claude's moral constitution?
7:29:50Thank you. Well, you know, but so I I I know uh actually I think I might be the only person on the planet that both Dario and Sam has work force. 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 are strong financial incentives from multiple businesses to try to get governments to pass anti-competitive regulation. There are strong incentives to hype up AI fears. At the same time, there's important engineing work to be done to corral the AI systems. Maybe just to touch on one thing. Um, it turns
7:30:18out 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 injuring them to be safer and safer, finding problems, fixing them, finding problems, fixing them, and doing that over and over. We can now control airplanes pretty well to make sure they are safe.
7:30:41So, we are now in the middle of that process with AI. Um, and I'm confident we'll make a lot of progress. Until then, these attempts to ask to ascribe 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.
7:31:06Andrew, 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 super intelligence?
7:31:17You know I uh I I don't know. I think the term AI is here to stay but uh hey I think uh few people few call it whatever they want to.
7:31:26Absolutely. And in the spirit of that cander 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.
7:31:39Thank you. [applause] Thanks Vidika. Now I know how it feels being on this seat when someone else is doing the announcements. But Andrew, what a pleasure to have you here in New Delhi with us at the NDTV World Summit. Thank you for joining us.
7:31:58No, thank you. I'm really happy to be here in India today.
7:32:00You 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 and you're not a believer in the job apocalypse you so I want to speak directly to
7:32:30anyone worried about their job prospects the student worried if there will be a job for you in the future when you graduate I want to tell you there will be hope and it's not nearly as bad as the hype says it will. Um, a number of businesses have hyped up AI job loss or AI job apocalypse for 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
7:32:58learning 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 good enough to destroy the vast majority of jobs.
7:33:08But 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
7:33:36likely. In fact your theory is that it will augment the existing workforce. It might add jobs in certain sectors. We've already seen that. You know, of all the different job sectors, the one that AI is affected the most is software engineering because AI is really good at writing code. And guess what? Certainly 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
7:34:05maybe 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 this new AI enabled economy. And so having ways to help people gain the new skills they need. So we're ready 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.
7:34:28That's a key point Andrew because you know everyone's going to Corsera and a lot of other platforms where they're trying to upskill when it comes to AI.
7:34:36News rooms 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.
7:35:02Yeah. So frankly, we have a lot of work to do there around the world. Um, 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 is well supported by a growing body of evidence, which is that AI chat bots are terrible for learning. More and more data is coming out that when students use AI, their homework scores goes up. No surprise, AI doesn't work for you, but the final closebook exam scores goes down. One recent study from the University of Pennsylvania, Walton,
7:35:32showed 17% lowered grades by students that use AI. And if you take this 17% chatbot learning loss and compound it over the lifetime or 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.
7:35:53It's just not the current generation of chat bots. My second worry is that um many university systems and educational system is slow to change. So all around the world I still see universities teaching curricular 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 use a AI coding assistance uh or ever made a call
7:36:20over 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 agent. But changing the educational system is hard. But 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. You know when the chat GPT 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
7:36:48Jensen 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 Muse, you have Chad GPT dots, you have instinct which I use all the time. Andrew, you're going to tell us what you're using as well.
7:37:06Did you know this is not widely known, but uh uh I'm actually the person that coined the term agentic AI. So it was around 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.
7:37:23And 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 the AI world does not need another term but I felt this is different. So I kind of ran a secret campaign to get people to call this agentic AI. I started writing a newsletter called it badge.
7:37:43Start to talk about why we should call it agentic. 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 tick off, you know, very rapidly. But the good news is the business applications of Agentic AI while not as sass as the hype