Peter Thiel: The AI Crisis, Europe’s Decline & the Battle for America
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Peter, you have discussed a lot over the last years the problem that, in your view, the West did not deliver enough progress, enough change in technology. You even spoke about stagnation. That is a topic and a term that almost nobody would use these days. It's pretty much the opposite. People are discussing, is there too much acceleration? Is AI progressing too fast? So what's what's your take? Did you change your mind, or is it still not enough?
I've changed my mind to some extent. Let me first articulate the stagnation thesis, which I started articulating twenty years ago or so, and is is that it's always very hard to measure these things because there's so so many different dimensions of progress, so many different areas of technology and science. And the basic thesis was was that since the nineteen seventies, there had been a slowdown. There had been progress in the world of bits, you know, computers, Internet, mobile Internet, software, but not so much in the world of atoms. Most of the most of the engineering fields that were rel
Yeah. It has been proven in retrospect, definitely. So these days, the perception of AI is swinging pretty much between euphoria and dystopia, and there was a lot of discussion over the last weeks about the collective warning that Dario Amadeus, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk presented, and that was the monster could get out of control. What's your take on that? Is it, as some people are saying, mainly a tactical move, a marketing move, or a move in order to drive the expectations down with regard to big multi trillion IPOs? Or is it truly the fear that AI could get out of control and could overrul
Well, many, many different dimensions to the AI debates and the problems. And yes, there are these scenarios that are maybe science fiction, science fiction fantasy. Maybe maybe they're somewhat more realistic where if you if you have a... If you have something that, in some sense, is way smarter than any any human being, you know, is there some way it can escape control? You know? And and we have, of course, all kinds of dystopian science fiction movies, you know, Matrix, Terminator, things like that. And I don't think the... And I don't even know how you speak about probabilities of things l
If it's about probabilities, there was recently an experiment to ask the six biggest LLMs, is there an extinction risk with regard to AI? And the predicted percentage was between one and ten percent. Do you think it's just because the LLMs are based on human fears, human pessimism, or is it
a real point? Let let us let us, for the sake of argument, say that it is a real point. You know, I'm not... I think it's hard to argue that probabilities are 0% of something. I do think... But you shouldn't... It it doesn't necessarily follow that you should always go slower and always go in the in the precautionary direction. Because if you do nothing, if there is no progress on any dimension, I don't think our societies work at all. And I've often said the middle class in The US, Europe, they're the people who expect their children to do better than themselves. The sort of intergenerational
So, but then slowing it down is just unrealistic, or how could it work? I mean, I don't get it. If America is slowing down and China is accelerating, we are just strengthening China, but it's not just solving anything. It's all
it's all... Yeah. In in theory, could slow it down if you had if you had genuine, you know, deep cooperation across the whole world. And and then I... But I think that would require like a, you know, one world government with real t
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