Okay, we are back. And we have Mr. Kosla on the call now. Vinod, namaste. Great to have you here. Thank you so much for making time. I know you have a flight to catch soon.
It's great to be here. Talk to everybody.
Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to quickly introduce your moderator Matthew Soule who is a partner at a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. He'll introduce Mr. Vinod Kosla and then we'll get started with the session. We are running a little behind so let's get started.
Okay. Thank you and nice to meet you all. So my name is Matthew. I'm one of the partners at Cathay Innovation. We are a large venture capital firm managing 2.5 billion euros and I'm based in San Francisco. As you can guess from my accent, I'm originally French. So it's a pleasure today to do the fireside chat with Vinod. Maybe as a quick setup, today we'll discuss three domains with Vinod. We'll start on AI and its impact on the world. The second domain will be around health and how health, also with AI, is changing right now as we are speaking. And the last topic we'll address will be around energy and sustainability and how we are looking at both existential risk and also like trillion-dollar opportunities. So the idea today for the fireside chat is to have good ideas for the audience, so founders, investors who have a few diplomats in the room, and how we can make it better for the future. So thank you Vinod for participating. I guess I will start discussing on AI. Vinod, on artificial intelligence, you are an investor in OpenAI, Replit, and many others. AI is often framed as a productivity tool but increasingly we are seeing it as an accelerator in many other areas. AI is also multiplying what we call human minds. I guess you use the terminology of multiplying human minds much like the steam engine was multiplying human muscle in the past. So again, the first question I would like for you Vinod is: are we underestimating or overestimating AI right now, and in this domain specifically, what would be the next frontier for you around AI?
Well, we are definitely, I think as a society, underestimating what AI can do for us. Having said that, AI is much further along than what is used by most people. So I would say most people today on average are using 10% of the capability that is in AI today. So that's sort of a simple answer. We're not using it. What's even more interesting is the rate at which AI is advancing is huge. So my bet, a year from now we will see AI more different from today than today is from 3 years ago. So we'll see more incremental progress in AI than we've seen in the last 3 years. So not only are we underutilizing it, we are underestimating what the increase in performance will be. And everybody would benefit from getting to know it better and staying at the leading edge.
Okay. And as a follow-up question maybe Vinod, which industries do people think are safe from AI right now that actually could be in deep trouble?
Well, how AI is deployed will depend on AI but it'll also depend on politics. The American Medical Association, you mentioned health, will prevent AI from practicing medicine. They will for sure try. Kaiser nurses are on strike today because AI does mental health therapy better than most therapists. And there was just a Nature Medicine paper two weeks ago that 75% of AI therapy sessions were rated as if they were done by the top 10% of human therapists. So there will be many forces trying to slow down AI, many incumbents. Having said that, there's hardly an area where AI couldn't have a large impact. Maybe in housing and construction, that's a tough area. Energy is a complex area, but even there in the slightly longer term, AI will help us design better materials, better fusion, better magnets, lots of different AI science areas. In fact, I'm very excited about the work in plasma fusion control being done with AI. So almost all areas are impacted. Simple services like outsourced services, customer support, business process outsourcing, those things will be gone in two or three years. Literally gone. There are many other areas and for this audience I'd say I suspect over the next four years the most exciting new area will be AI scientists, AI able to do hypothesis, run physical experiments itself and then analyze the results and then do a new hypothesis. So iterative science will become much much better and faster and it'll leverage the best scientists.
Okay. And maybe as a quick follow-up, if we're looking at AI impact on humanity, what will be the different impact, how will it differ I would say from the developed world maybe versus emerging markets? Will you have specific examples?
Well, so it's relatively simple technologically to imagine why every person in the world shouldn't have free primary care. It shouldn't cost more than a couple of dollars per month to have primary care and that's less than the health budgets of even the poorest governments. So everybody on the planet, seven and a half or eight billion people, can have primary care. Every child on the planet can have an AI personal tutor for free. Those are benefits that'll be global. Whether you're in the west or the developing world, you're going to see those benefits, if politically they're allowed to do it. And then there's many other areas in the developing world where you could have huge help. An AI agronomist available to every small farmer in the less developed countries is a trivially easy thing to imagine. AI legal services for every human being. Pretty easy to imagine and most people never have access to their legal rights even though technically they have it. So at almost all or at the level of most services, they will be relatively inexpensive and declining in cost and become broadly accessible. There's other areas of course, entertainment will expand dramatically and get much cheaper. You won't have to rely on Hollywood and Hollywood is mostly prone to bury its head in the sand like an ostrich as the tsunami comes. So I could talk to any area. The area I haven't mentioned, in the next couple of years robotics will also have its ChatGPT moment. You'll see essentially all human expertise reduced to I'll call it a dollar an hour or a dollar two an hour. All human labor through robotics will be a dollar or two an hour and that'll have the same impact wherever in the world you are.
Thank you. As we are looking at transformative AI companies and I guess we are sitting right now in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View in Silicon Valley. Do you think the most transformative AI companies will be built here in Silicon Valley or maybe somewhere closer to the unmet needs where actually it could have a bigger impact?
I think there will be companies built everywhere. But Silicon Valley has a culture and it has nothing to do with the place. It is the culture it engenders where people tend to think more ambitiously and hence build more ambitious companies. I like to say most people are limited not by what they can do but by what they think they can do. And Silicon Valley encourages you to think bigger and bolder and better and that's very exciting. So a disproportionate number of large companies will be built in Silicon Valley, but there will be exciting companies in every part of the world.
Okay. So thank you Vinod for the AI section. We are moving now to global healthcare. So global healthcare historically is estimated to be like a 10 trillion dollar system globally but is mostly concentrated in a few countries. Maybe the first question regarding AI and the impact actually on healthcare. Do you think actually it will be deflationary, potential of a few hundred billion of dollars on that? And I think you wrote in 2012 that AI would replace 80% of what doctors do. Where do you think we are standing right now on primary care to mental health? Could you help us to figure out like how healthcare is changing right now thanks to AI?
Well, what I wrote in 2012, I think I was too conservative. 80% is too low a number. And in 2016 I wrote a 100-page document called '20% Doctor Included' and that was by 2040. And today I would say 10% doctor included by 2030. So I was wrong on two fronts. And we've just submitted a paper to JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, suggesting that AI doctors already are superior to human doctors. Let's see if it gets accepted. Most of your audience probably knows the process of acceptance. But that's where we are today. In mental health, as I just mentioned, there was a paper in Nature Medicine about two or three weeks ago where we essentially proved that AI doing mental health therapy sessions are superior in almost all respects to human therapists doing mental health therapy. In this particular paper, AI therapy sessions and human therapy sessions were judged by human AI therapists and the human AI therapists classified 75% of the AI therapy sessions done by an AI therapist as at the level of quality of the top 10% of human therapists. So everybody can get top 10% quality of therapy in mental health. That's just the peer provision. Today we have AI oncologists in process, AI physical therapists in process, AI you name it, AI primary care in process. And we are seeing concordance between AI therapists and human therapists at 97%. Even the inter-human concordance doesn't get that high. So these are examples of the way therapy should be judged. How is it relative to human performance? That'll be true in most areas. AI will be superior to the median therapist, the median doctor, the median oncologist, the median gastroenterologist. So that is definitely true. Healthcare is four major categories. It's provision of labor services like an oncologist. That's a quarter of the spend in the US at least. A quarter of the spend is drugs. The number of drugs will explode. AI-designed drugs will have lower failure rates so easier to design. And we'll see many more of them get through FDA trials successfully. So we'll see all that. We'll see drugs designed for one patient. Every cancer we know is different. You could design a drug for one patient with AI. You wouldn't even have to run a trial because you only have a population of one. Another quarter of the spend is imaging and testing and that's going to be impacted by AI. Of course, AI radiologists are far superior to humans. So let me stop there. I can keep going.
Yeah, sure. Maybe one or two examples if you want illustration, where are the biggest opportunities according to you for underserved populations? Do you have one or two examples of how it changes for underserved populations?
