CGTN Europe interviewed Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Neil Lawrence is DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge.
00:05Thanks for coming on Global Business Europe.
00:07We've got lots to talk about, but let's start with this.
00:09Why did China's AI startup DeepSeek send such shockwaves through global tech?
00:16It's an interesting question.
00:18And my main answer was because tech has swallowed its own hype in terms of what I think of as AGI vaporware.
00:25And the moat around this AGI vaporware was enormous investment in compute.
00:30And what DeepSeek showed is that through agility and clever engineering and good organization,
00:36you could compete with the very best without spending enormous amounts of money.
00:41Goldman Sachs expects Chinese stocks to attract $200 billion and rise by as much as 19% this year
00:49because of the country's adoption of AI technologies, including DeepSeek.
00:54Where is China in the global AI race?
00:59So I always find this term funny race.
01:02What are we actually racing for?
01:04And, you know, this is part of the AGI vaporware sort of mantra that we're somehow racing to achieve this state of AGI.
01:13Look, each country has to decide where it wants to be.
01:16Now, undoubtedly, China is a leading force in this technology, but different countries are doing different things.
01:23Singapore is one of the leading countries in deploying the technology.
01:26So I think there's a real danger across the world in this obsession with the notion of race,
01:31rather than stepping back and saying this is a transformative technology.
01:34There's no such thing as artificial general intelligence, but this is a transformative technology,
01:39and it can take our societies to some extraordinarily good places or some extraordinarily bad places.
01:44And by not focusing on that question, we're in danger of the race leading to somewhere that none of us want to be.
01:51But do you think that DeepSeek maybe opened things up a little bit?
01:54And I wonder which other countries you expect might now dip their toe or enter the AI world with gusto?
02:01No, I think it's been a tremendous restorative to what was an appallingly polluted debate,
02:07that a smaller company has been able to show such performance.
02:10It's given an enormous amount of encouragement to companies in Europe or even smaller companies in the U.S.
02:16that they can also compete against this narrative, which is basically a Silicon Valley, Wall Street combined narrative,
02:22that you have to be enormous to succeed.
02:24So I think it's tremendously exciting.
02:26Now, I think where the next one comes from, well, I hope they're coming from a diversity of places.
02:31We've seen France has made great investments.
02:34Germany also has a lot of startups.
02:36And I'd love something to come from the U.K.
02:39What about Africa?
02:40What about India?
02:43So that's a great question.
02:44And actually, I've spent the last 10 years working with colleagues in Africa, an organization called Data Science Africa,
02:50which is building technologies developed on the continent.
02:54Now, there's lots of diversity of applications that can be used there.
02:58But what we really want is a world where people who have the problems can solve their own problems,
03:02rather than the world we're being sold on, which is one where a few companies deploy these solutions for the benefit of everyone.
03:09That has not worked.
03:10We are already in a difficult position with a concentration of power, with very few digital companies.
03:16And what this technology does offer is the possibility that everyone can interact with their machines in the ways that in the past,
03:23only software engineers were able to do.
03:25OK, so you're saying this could make it much more universal.
03:28But then I'm thinking that we're going to have to have some global AI governance.
03:31We're going to have to have some regulation.
03:33What can we expect?
03:35Yeah, I think that's the really tough bit.
03:38We've seen this enormous swing from the summits to one with this sort of almost bizarre,
03:43paranoid creation of what I think of as sort of the AI bogeyman at the UK AI Safety Summit,
03:49to sort of enormous AI boosterism in France.
03:52And perhaps that's understandable.
03:54Perhaps as politicians get to grips with the technology that they themselves don't understand,
03:58they're going to swing between these two extremes.
04:00But what I hope is more rapidly we can get to an understanding of, look, this technology is transformative.
04:05It has great potential.
04:06And there are great pitfalls associated with it.
04:09But unfortunately, a lot of those debates are not going to happen under the glare of an international spotlight.
04:14They're going to happen in the background.
04:16And one of the things I'm nervous about is more division within the research community,
04:20less access to these technologies for universities and other civil society groups,
04:24because it's those groups that will develop these technologies in the beneficial directions.
04:29Neil Lawrence, the University of Cambridge.
04:31Thank you very much.