The Stanford Emerging Technology Review 2025: Frontier Tech For A New Geopolitical Era

[Music] hello I'm condalisa rice I'm the director of the Hoover institution and um I'm delighted to be here um on Capitol Hill to help launch our Stanford emerging technology review which I'll describe in just a moment but I really want to thank uh Senators young and Hickenlooper for hosting us here um I have a connection to both of their states because I uh did my Master's Degree at Notre Dame I'm a Domer and I spend most of my life in Colorado um and I actually am also a part owner of the Denver Broncos so uh the U delighted to have them here um we're going to talk a little bit about uh the role of government particularly Congress in thinking about our country's uh Innovation ecosystem about how we win the technological arm race that we're in with uh China which is uh integrated into the International System integrated into the technological ecosystem and yet adversarial in so many ways so this is a complication that we've actually never faced as a country uh the Soviet Union was a military giant but it was an economic and technological that is not the case with China and so we have a particular Challenge and um I think that most of us would say that running fast and running hard in these Frontier Technologies is our best way to uh assure our Economic Security and our national security at a time when these front Frontier Technologies are challenging every aspect of life uh a little later on after we have a conversation you're going to hear from um a set of uh folks who've been involved in the Stanford emerging technology review and what we've done is to go to people who are in the labs uh at the bench actually doing doing the Leading Edge work in these Technologies so we're not a group of political scientists talking about uh technologies that we don't understand and so we will be able to uh introduce to you uh people Faith a Lee from uh computer science uh an AI specialist one of the world's most renowned AI Specialists Alison akamura who is a roboticist and uh works on uh the most advanced aspects of Robotics um we will have with us Mark um are you there yes right Mark will is the uh the um chair of electrical engineering at uh Stanford University and we'll talk to you about uh chips and also maybe a little bit on Quantum as well and her Blen uh who is a physicist and a specialist on a number of Technologies including um cyber security and then uh Amy uh Amy is going to Amy zard is going to um she is a political scientist and she's going to uh bring together these these thoughts but the uh Stanford emerging technology review is for uh for us Science and Technology forward in other words we need to understand the Technologies before we uh begin to try to think about what policies we need as they change uh every aspect of our life um so Senators thank you very much and I'm going to just start with a question to each of you which is how do you think about the world that we find ourselves in with these emerging Technologies these transformative Technologies and how do you think about the role of uh Congress at this particular time so may I start with you Cel of course so um thank you coni for the question and uh it's it's great to visit with you again great to visit with all of you and congratulations uh to Stanford for uh producing this year's updated version of the emerging technology review I'll tell you i' I've consistently read it since its first publication and and um uh these sorts of issues uh are both top of mine and uh the center of focus uh for me and my office uh the convergence between geopolitics and and Technology they've always been important uh in fact uh you know one can trace GD p and and geopolitical power to uh uh out competing their adversaries out competing uh other nations uh to technological uh first Innovation and then adoption uh we don't talk as much about the ladder but I think increasingly that that is something we need to discuss here on the hill how we can drisk and encourage uh more adoption of these Technologies also um I I think uh we need to continue to nurture our ecosystem in various ways I think of artificial intelligence which uh is so Central uh already to our way of life and uh will'll find its way uh you know within uh seemingly every facet of our life and every area of our economy in in Fairly short order I believe um we we have a World's broadest deepest Capital markets uh we have an amazing uh system of of Education particularly higher education um we we have uh some of the world's best startup companies and and uh big tech companies alike we can't take these advantages for granted in fact uh now on account of of uh The Brute Force economics of of our adversaries uh we we really need to figure out how to optimize our existing system and uh account for its shortcomings too and and and and so in all those areas I mentioned those will be critical to AI uh emerging biotech is another area that uh it's it's a uh it's a platform or a general purpose technology um here in the United States most of us think of either bioag or biofarma both very important in my state of Indiana but we think less about bioindustrial Innovation and applications I'm chairing a National Security Commission on emerging emerging biotechnology right now and we'll in the next month or two produce our final report and uh within that report we we really emphasize that U the United States is about to be passed up uh by the Chinese because they have recognized the importance of of bioindustrial uh uh applications uh uh to biotech and and uh I think most of the changes we need to make there will be regulatory in nature and also uh enabling more biomanufacturing uh to uh uh occur in this country uh an another area where I've been quite active in in recent years as semiconductors um I think Congress has has done quite well in showing leadership and being attentive to our semiconductor needs uh in the last few years through the chips and science act we've had roughly $30 billion of taxpayer money flow that's real money uh however if you're unlocking roughly $450 billion in private sector investment getting access to new Innovations uh and and new talent that you didn't previously have and making more resilient your supply chains in the process um I I I think that uh establishes a decent model uh for some other Technologies uh where we need to increase our resilience and bake a National Security Premium into some of the things that uh we buy so um in short I think Congress has a very active role to play this is institutionally going to create some challenges for congress uh Congress needs to Act Congress needs to hold more hearings Congress needs to realize that in each of the areas and many others in uh uh Tech areas that I mentioned uh we need Upstream investment in research we don't need to be cutting research right now we actually need to be planning more Seed corn for Innovation and growth and and and and and so um it remains to be seen whether we step up and meet this moment as an institution but I believe we will we're our our minds are focusing it's recently become fashionable to work on what is now I think this is an accepted term to work on economic security a term that was not particularly embraced by many folks on my side of the aisle just a couple of years ago and um so I I I think that will incentivize more members of Congress to um uh activate their interest uh in this field what he said I don't I'm not there's little I can add uh I will recognize that Senator young has been a leader in the entire Senate but in entire Congress on this and really was raising issues around our investments in science scientific research and chips and the the the supply chains that are necessary for these things big complex creatures that if not nourished become weak and have points of of of of failure um so anyway I want to recognize him as my senior in the Senate which is very very important U and I love the fact that Indiana is is so well known as a place of innovation on so many different levels um I was just uh actually interviewing for a confirmation hearing the soon to be Secretary of the Air Force who is a technologist um really a sharp guy shouldn't be saying these things out of school um but he judged has been judging robotics competitions for 12 years and there are two points about that that I think are worth mentioning here one is that he never sees someone in the competitions who's a senior right in other words if if they don't patch kids at a younger age and get them involved in the robotics they're lost and they're not going to come join the team when they're a senior or pretty unlikely even as a junior and and the second part of that is that and I think we see this all over that kids coming out of rural backgrounds where they're still making things and fixing fixing things themselves you give them the the training the skills the mathematics the the engineering applications they're going to rise the occasion again and again and you're going to get them much higher probability of kids that are going to rise to that top level of research again that's a very rare person but we gota get a lot more input to be able to get those those real giants one of the great advantages we have over the our Chinese uh Rivals uh I'm not I don't like using the word adversaries yet but it's pretty real uh is we have a market system and and a system of research that is unmatched but we haven't done a great job of making sure everybody is committed to this we need a you know I'm old enough to remember when the was Sputnik you know the Russians launched put something in space and we weren't even close we weren't even thinking about it and yet this country came together with the business Community with government with our research capabilities and in five years had two million people working on getting someone into space and then uh to the Moon uh I think we need we've got a Sputnik moment right now and I think I think about things like the Agricultural Extension Services almost every county has a building or two and has some work that goes on where kids are making things and learning how to deal solve rural agricultural problems we should be ramping up Investments there to make sure that we get more kids when they're in sixth grade and seventh grade and eighth grade and getting them excited about about Space and Science and and technology and what that's going to look like uh because the the level of urgency that this country should feel isn't quite there and I think Todd and others in the Senate have done a great job of of of Fanning those fls we've got a strong way to go I look at AI I mean we've seen what happens if we let these really large companies and I'm thinking specifically of some of the social networks where we know that they are taking advantage of our kids and and in many ways damaging young young young women and young men uh with their self-image just by feeding them things that they know are harmful but but it's a business now of of attention attention's a product uh and I think AI has the potential to be even worse than that and we need to make sure that we you know I think and Todd's done a lot of work on this I shouldn't even speak for this but this notion that we can get some transparency make sure that people can tell what is generated by artificial intelligence what's not uh we need a data Privacy Law that's National right now we've got different states going out and deciding what is who does own your data and how do you control that uh one thing we don't talk about enough is alliances again to compete successfully uh uh whether we're talking about AI or uh Quantum Computing is a big you know I know that there's a big Hub in Indiana there's a big Hub in in in in Boulder Colorado these hubs are going to be very very successful and Powerful but they're they're only going to be successful at their alliances that they create as hubs with other hubs and with other countries uh and I you know uh the European Union some of the research that's going on in Europe is vital to our our successful or our ability to successfully address this issue uh and then we also need uh independent Val valuations of of all the as we go through these changes with AI and I think it's true of almost all the Technologies true with uh uh the microbiology and the uh the all the genetic work that's going on I mean so much is happening it is the most amazing time I sometimes I see people get depressed because they feel that the change is happening so fast and they feel that they're losing control this is the time when we have to redouble our optimism and our efforts to make sure that we that we don't let that happen and then we get more kids excited and really involved and and make it work for them uh in whatever way that takes and I also want just thank cona you know her it's a a funny story but she and mine and Albright both had essentially the same father in a funny way that's not not fair way to say it but they both studied at the University of Denver and learned their International diplomacy uh sharpened their skills in Colorado so we claim her proudly even pre football but thank you to cono here and and the Hoover institution obviously stand for one of the greatest schools on Earth thank you so very much and uh thank you for really I think uh sharpening now the issues that we need to address as a country and I will say I'm I'm very glad to say that uh a couple of years ago I think there wasn't as much attention here on Capitol Hill I do believe people are beginning to do that um I will say I agree with you about Senator young going all the way back to endless Frontier when we we talked about that uh so uh really having a cohort of U Senators Congress people who care about these issues because they very much are interwoven with education as you've mentioned uh C K Looper they're woven with the issues of our economic uh growth and they are woven into issues of National Security and so it's all the aspects of Our Lives not to mention health care and Agriculture and so forth and so um I I think this has been a wonderful opening uh for a session I just want to say that you're about to hear from um in addition to uh Amy and Herb three of Stanford's most eminent SCI scientist Engineers um I mentioned them before F Lee from computer science and Alison oore who works in robotics and Mark Horwitz who um also does double duty as the the uh the chair of electrical engineering but uh because we are going to bring them up I just want to make one other point which is that universities have been core to our Innovation infrastructure Innovation ecosystem it is why we are who we are in the Le leadership that we have um after World War uh 2 uh a man named vavar Bush came up with what would be an absolutely brilliant idea which was that you would leverage uh universities which um had uh students and it had faculty and the federal government would fund the very best ideas at the fundamental research level so these were not ideas that would necessarily be commercializable some of them would never uh pan out but an awful lot of them would lead to uh Innovation would lead to breakthroughs and some of them would lead to the founding of whole new Industries and the federal government I think has gotten uh the payback that it would have been looking for for that funding if you just look out there in the ecosystem particularly where I live in Silicon Valley or in your tech center or in your uh biomedical uh Center uh there's probably a university fingerprint on almost all of it and so let's not forget that um as we go forward to think about Federal funding so with that I'm going to call forward our uh scientific uh group plus Amy the political scientist uh so uh Amy Seager and fay F Lee and Allison Nakamura and Mark harwitz and her blin uh we will now call them forward thank you thank you glad a political scientist could could make this panel uh I'm Amy Zager I have the great pleasure of being the co-chair of the Sanford emerging technology review along with coni rice and our dean of engineering Jennifer whtm uh just a minute about uh what this effort is and what our mission is and then I want to uh have a conversation with our great experts here this is the first ever collaboration across the entire University the School of Engineering and the Hoover institution we have a 100 faculty across 40 different departments and institutes in engineering social science and policy experts working together in a multidisciplinary team to better understand what's happening in our Labs what's happening in our companies at the speed of relevance what are the policy implications and how can we better inform policy makers here in Washington policy makers in States across the country policy makers in the private sector about what these Technologies are what's hype what's not what's next uh and uh to do it in a way that can help policy makers make better decision decisions so this is our second uh Flagship report we encourage you to read it uh we're not done yet so there's a lot more to come we have a podcast that dropped last week in partnership with the Council on Foreign Relations called the interconnect you'll hear more from Mark Horowitz who's uh our first uh guest on that podcast so we are here to help I know in Washington people always ask what's your ask here's our ask how can we help how can we help you better understand what's happening so you can make better policies that anticipate what the opportunities are not just the risks and with that I want to start by kicking off with our panel discussion uh putting some news into some perspective so uh if you've been following the news and I'm sure you have uh you'll know there's a lot of deep freak about deep seek number one uh and Quantum has made the news a lot in the past couple of weeks with Microsoft's announcement of a Quantum breakthrough so I want to start by asking Fai and Mark put those events into some perspective what's actually a breakthrough how do you think about it what are the takeaways of deep seek and the quantum discovery that was announced by Microsoft fa well thank you it's uh quite an honor to be here with my uh colleagues and uh um yes there is a lot of news about Ai and uh Amy didn't miss a Beat Just start with deep seek um I think that the context of this is that there has been a lot of progress in AI I was at the Paris AI Summit last week um I share with the audience that AI is in my opinion a civilizational uh uh civilizational technology because it's the new compute and uh uh when we say it's the new compute is that wherever there's a chip which uh Mark can comment about whether it's as small as a light bulb as big as a airplane um there is compute compute basically takes data and then turn it into Insight information decision and action and AI is the new language of compute it will prevail uh across all Industries whether it's health care education agriculture manufacturing energy and all that so and and then what is really exciting in the past few years especially with the large language models is that this is the first coming of age of this technology that's about more than half a century old that is reaching to the hands of consumers and Industry large language model has taken the World by storm that um suddenly whether your software engineer or just uh just someone at home wanting to look up a a recipe can use this language and many many many businesses now are embracing um large language based uh uh products and services so in that context um there uh deep seek is a large language model that is was open sourced uh uh I think now a month or a month and a half ago uh coming from China what I think it's really interesting here Amy is actually the word open source op this has been a very interesting debate actually is uh should we open source models especially these critical models or not a lot of company have have taken the approach of uh of close models for good reasons because uh uh commercial worlds is competitive having uh good closed Source models are important for the business but an open-source model coming not from the US um um we have had open source model from from Europe as well but really speak of This Global moment of how incredibly competitive as well as um exciting this technology is and uh it really cuts across borders it uh it also reminds us of all the um you know not only commercial but geopolitical uh issues so I think that is really the the context of deep seek is the story of a open-source story great thanks Mark Quantum Quantum um so the thing about emerging Technologies and new technologies is there's often many hurdles you have to get to before you get to be really useful so Quantum Computing has an enormous promise um but manufacturing them and making them useful is actually a very difficult task so if you look at Microsoft's announcement that came out recently about the their topological cubid was an amazing Advance they've been trying to get this phenomenon demonstrated for many many years and haven't been able to do it so they published a a paper in nature saying oh we see it it's actually there and can manipulate it okay so it's in nature and I'm an engineer and you know we joke Engineers joke about papers in Natures about devices that don't really completely work yet um because you're just getting the basic physics to to to work and so it's an amazing advance truly impressive don't take that to mean that tomorrow they'll have this amazing quantum computer because from getting a device device and the phenomenon located there's a lot of work that you have to do to basically build that up right now there are many different possible base Technologies in which to build quantum computers there's neutral atom sometimes called code atoms there's super conducting and there's trapped ions and then there's another group trying to do photonic Quantum Computing right at this point it's not clear which of those based Technologies is really going to be the most uccessful okay topological cubits are another way of doing it in theory they have much better properties if you can make them reliable and they Microsoft just made this major advance but they still have to demonstrate the reliability and the other part of engineering which is still stuff to go so like be careful about taking a scientific advance in one step and extrapolating to where it's going to be because often times there are other hurdles that happen along the way so I want to pick up on something that Kandi said at the end which is let's not forget the Innovation model from the 1940s that made the United States and Innovation superpower so Allison if you could comment on this so oftentimes we don't even realize the fundamental research on which the things we use every day relied from decades ago the seed corn that was planted decades ago giving rise to commercial innovations that we use today so one example is the cryptography that secures data for better for worse on the internet relied on Decades of academic research funded by the federal government in pure math that's the story of cbats it's the story of artificial intelligence it's the story of the covid-19 vaccine Decades of academic research funded by the federal government then giving rise to commercial investment and innovation in the private sector so Allison you're in a you run a really interesting lab and you're involved in really interesting robotics projects at the Forefront of your field can you give us a sense of what is this thing called fundamental research um how does Federal funding actually work in your life yeah sure thanks so much Amy and uh it's really an honor to be here so yes I run a robotics lab and a lot of the work that we do is in the field of of medical Robotics and uh we have funding from a combination of sources uh a little bit of funding from industry but often that funding is very shortterm it maybe lasts one year and as as soon as you get such a grant you're thinking about where where does the next year of funding come uh most of my lab is sponsored by the National Science Foundation of the National Institutes of Health which would give us multi-year projects uh sometimes up to four or five years uh to allow graduate students and and even undergraduates to engage engage in research that is a little more long-term and forward thinking so one example I can give of a project that is uh a large collaboration within different faculty and it's very interdisiplinary at Stanford is an arpa H sponsored project to 3D print a human heart now an interesting story behind this is that a heart seems like a complicated thing to 3D print but that's actually where you begin because it's one of the easiest organs in terms of the number of different types of cells that you have to have and uh the structure that you need to create but that still is a is a big Challenge and so what faculty and institutions like like Stanford and around the world do is We Gather interdisiplinary expertise which you can do across universities um and across departments and schools so that you can bring people in different fields together in ways that might be very hard to do at at companies or in other uh types of environments and so for example for 3D printing a heart we need uh to produce millions of cells and have new technology and bioreactors that actually generate the cells that you need to print you need mechanical engineers like myself where the role is to actually create multiple print heads that can very quickly within an hour print out all of these cells extrude those cells out and put them in the correct structure so that they can form a beating heart before those cells die and then you need uh doctors actually uh surgeons and other clinicians who understand how do you actually uh how does this affect the human body how can you actually uh move forward to clinical applications and um all of this takes this interdisciplinary expertise that you can find within universities and the ability to do uh longer term work we're not going to have a commercial product within four years but we are what we are doing is is planting these these seeds that uh Dr Zer referred to that uh are creating innovative solutions to these kinds of problems so that further on down the line we have these outcomes that will get commercialized and will get used by people uh and one last thing I'll mention is that not every project uh is going to be successful sometimes you have to take risks in order to uh create break throughs and so some of these projects will fail uh you'll read about projects that maybe at universities weren't successful but that's part of the model we have to actually take risks and invest in creative ideas and those are the things that academics can do and eventually uh even if it's a small percentage of them if they come true fruition uh that original funding can help and I'll leave with one last example that everyone has uh hopefully encountered uh there was a government sponsored digital libraries project many years ago uh and you may not have heard of this but everyone has heard of Google which uh used those search Technologies developed search and indexing Technologies developed under digital libraries uh to eventually become something that has really improved the lives and and touched uh Americans of every type thanks so herb I want to I want to turn to you next so if you pick up a copy of the report and we have a lot of them so encourage you to take one with you on your way out the door if you haven't already you'll see that our report covers 10 major emerging technology areas now you can draw the lines in different ways and we anticipate that those 10 will change over time because science never sleeps right but there are 10 and one of the as a starting point and one of the key things in this report and her really wrote this section was that you can't look at individual Technologies in isolation we have to think about how they fit together this is a moment of convergence there are approaches to technological innovation we need to understand across these Technologies we call that chapter creatively crosscutting themes so herb talk about some of the most important insights that you got in looking across all these 10 technologies that folks here should be thinking about as they're thinking about what kinds of policies to make thanks um Professor Aur uh mentioned the already teed that one up the interdisciplinary nature of the work that that that she that that she does to do a heart you need to draw on expertise from a large number of fields we see this in as we look at the different emerging Technologies in the in the report one of the most striking things is how they all interact with each other not everyone for everyone but so for example um if you look at um uh Energy Technologies for example uh AI is an important thing Material Science is an important thing space Technologies are you know feed that um if you look at robotics we just heard a Spiel on how different Technologies uh and scientific expertise uh play into that so the idea that you can focus on one area and say this is the important area and neglect the rest that's not a that's not a way of uh of winning uh of winning the any any any kind of race I think a second thing that we uh looked at um was how to sustain Innovation across all of these fields and the overwhelmingly the thing that comes out from talking to our our faculty and and others on it um is the importance of talent talent can't be produced on demand okay it takes a long time to develop Talent um for the United States to to obtain Talent it comes from two places it comes from domestic you know sources and it comes from foreign sources right those are the only two places that that they that they come from and we're failing on both of those on the uh domestic side um we have uh stem education uh that doesn't do a great job of producing people that are uh fit to advance the that are capable of advancing the Frontiers um in the future very far we are I think the number that you you've provided was 3 the US is 34th in the world 34th in the world um in uh on the various uh stem uh proficiency indicators um Massachusetts is the number one state in the country uh if it were a country it would be number 16 so if everybody were as good as the best state in the United States we would still be just number 16 that's not a position of leadership so that's that's one and in terms of foreign Talent we make a practice of importing graduate students we get graduate students from all over the world and when they get their phds we kick them out we go out of their way to kick them out they want to stay and even worse are um uh are the attractiveness of the United States as a place to come study Science and Technology uh is still high but it's diminishing you have been talking you you had a student uh Dr Zer about this so I have a researcher who just compiled exhaustive data on every author of The Deep seek paper and what she did is she also looked at the authors of all five papers released by Deep seek and she tracked how many authors were on how many ERS and what their backgrounds were where did they study where did they work what countries were the were they in and what she found was in looking this is all unclassified data what she found in looking at them is there is a homegrown Talent story here to deep seek which is over a 100 of the 200 authors on that last deep seek paper studied and worked only in China nowhere else so the myth is that foreign Talent comes to United States gets trained up and then leaves and takes that knowledge with them homegrown talent in China because students in China do not need to come to the United States there are first class universities technical universities in China that can train them there's a lot of other interesting data in there the ones that Got Away how many of them actually came to the United States and then left how many of them came to the United States and then stayed to Dr Lind point about we kick them out once they come here but one of the myths of innovation is that the world's best talent will always come here they get a voice and they get a vote and they have options so we shouldn't assume we're always going to get the world's best and uh the the last thing I wanted to to talk about is is that as we um think about investment strategies and how to promote Innovation and and and the like we see a what we call in the report a frontier bias now it is absolutely important to try on to to keep on funding and supporting research at the Frontiers uh on Science and Technology but we also want to note that there are many examples of important world changing Innovation that can come out with technologies that are not on the frontier let me just give three examples what you're looking at in the uh Russian Ukraine war right now is both sides using commercial drones for their Weaponry the Russians are even using chips that you can find in dishwashers to power their droves okay to power their their missiles that is you know it's not state-of-the-art technology but their drones are effective just ask the ukrainians okay um in the history of the United States and in and in the world the assembly line was probably one of the most important inventions of uh the Industrial Age enabling mass production but the in but assembly lines didn't use any new technology at all what it did was it used technology that was already around and rearrange it change processes to create a whole new way of manufacturing andless you think that this is all just you know in in in the past um look at SpaceX SpaceX has a good chance of being able to deliver on its promise of reducing launch costs to outer space by fold why is it able to do that because they have quote figured out unquote that if you throw if you don't throw away the rocket that launches the stuff and you bring it back down to earth safely you can reuse it and you can reduce costs that way well but they didn't invent that idea that idea has been known for 50 years everyone has known that so what is SpaceX done it's adopted a variety of incrementally improved Technologies on from a variety of different fields to enable rocket to come back down and and and land itself Dr Horwitz has a great story about some of the technology in there well a colleague of mine Steven Boyd has been working on sort of more mathematical aspects of electrical engineering and many a couple decades ago he got very interested in a in a particular kind of optimization that's convex optimization that was based on math done by some Russians you know a couple decades earlier right and he showed how many kinds of problems that you need to solve could be formulated as a convex optimization problem and if you can formulate it that way you can build a very efficient solver so that was stuff done a while ago more recently he showed that if you have to solve the same problem over and over again he used that mathematical knowledge and some compiler technology to be able to build very efficient solvers for that particular problem and so what lands the SpaceX rocket when it comes back and has uh you know align to the Lander is his that software being run inside to control the gimb of all the engines to basically get back with the minimum amount of fuel because you don't have very much fuel at the end of the flight to basically land so it's some technology that was dented you know 50 years ago that was kind of made engineering ready 20 years ago that got tuned up about 10 years ago that's now part of that PO system and none of that technology that essential enabling technology ever made it to the front page of the New York Times transformational but not on the frontier right right so I want to make sure we leave time for questions from all of you so let me end by asking each of you we talked about we promised to look at sort of what's next so if you're thinking of preview of coming attractions in your technological areas in 2025 what should we be looking for fa why we start with you um I think AI will continue to be very exciting especially the application of uh of AI models especially the language models will will start to Blossom in many many areas and we see it to to uh be argumentative to so much work that is out there uh Beyond language um I think we're going to see uh very interesting technology coming in uh spatial intelligence uh for everything that is complementary to to um words and sentences it's those uh models that could uh understand and reason and and generate pixels videos 3D worlds and and that will Empower so many applications in um in robot itics in manufacturing in entertainment and and all that so I will still a young field but it's already coming of age and showing so much application and we'll continue to see that uh growth great and um I'll pick up that thread and and mention some things about robotics both on the the brain side and the body side uh one way you can think about robots is their their physical intelligence they're they're building on the type of AI that fa spoke of in order to do useful work in the physical world uh some of the questions are what what should the nature of those robots be so a very popular topic and there's a lot of investment going on right now are are a body of robot that is in a humanoid form and that's very interesting and will be impactful in the long term because it addresses some really difficult technical problems but I think what we'll also see is the growth of robots that are not not anthropomorphic they are designed to do more uh a narrower set of tasks uh ones that uh people are specifically looking for and uh ones that ultimately do tasks that uh that no human can do currently like the 3D heart printing example um the goal there is to use robots as uh as augmentation or assistance or uh to do novel tasks that have never done before uh as opposed to replacement and we think we'll see more and more growth in and those types of robotic activities in the coming years so I think on the summary conductor front you'll see continued um Evolution and Improvement in the base um Computing platforms I think much of the push in the next couple years is going to be on communication because there's a lot of issue of how you get the data back and forth there's a looming or there's a present energy problem that the solutions we're doing are consuming too much energy I think that's going to be a joint application Hardware co-optimization that's going to move to try to push those energy costs down um so I think we're going to likely see a bunch of sort of Cooperative work between the software and Hardware designers to try to build more efficient systems that we need for the future herb did you want to add anything I did want to add one thing just because the person who should be up here doing it isn't here it's Drew Wendy um uh Drew Wendy is the the um creator of the biology content of the report um and there's a uh there's a I urge you to read it um the argument there is that the uh promise of biology uh now for the future is a sort of you know where semiconductors uh were in 1960 or so okay and so if you can if you can imagine that uh there's a huge opport Unity to be exploited uh by taking advantage of uh biology uh synthetic biology and biotechnology um only if we take advantage of that only if we take take take the opportunity we heard earlier from a senatorial panel that that um uh the Chinese are are are making that bet uh investing huge amounts in biotechnology uh as a uh as not not just for um uh for health uh but or or agriculture but across the board uh significant investment in in in biotechnology and uh our investments on that kind of building that kind of biological infrastructure uh for progress in the future is you know sort of pales by comparison uh so there's a lot there there are many number of studies which suggest that over 50% of the GDP could be affected by biotechn te ology and this is a big deal um and but it's aspirational that we could get there but if we blow it we won't and from a geopolitical perspective just to end on a political science note before we open up for questions from a geopolitical perspective what this means is you can have localized Supply chains if you can bio manufacture something you don't have to have a factory someplace else as Drew likes to point out when we walk across campus he's like aren't trees amazing they can grow anywhere we can WR the leaf development system of a tree is unique to a particular place now imagine you can biom manufacture anything anywhere we're not talking about supply chain vulnerabilities to China anymore that's the kind of Forward Thinking opportunity that the bioeconomy could have I think I channeled Drew Indy appropriately there okay so with that let's open it up for questions if you have a question I think there are microphones running around okay Malaysia has a microphone so and we have some other and Jack has a microphone too so why don't we start with this gentleman in the front and then we'll we'll I'll try to alternate over on this side too one of you must have an answer um I've been annoyed with electric cars coming out and they don't recharge themselves how do we how did we do that we had cars that had alternators to recharge batteries you have the drive end of the motor the other end could be using being used to generate free electricity to power the other side it it has to have applications um across everything besides electric cars that we now have the ility with batteries or storage and Spar energy to actually have the same motor provide the power for the motor um yeah so basically electric cars do do regenerative braking which means that when you're trying to slow down you use the same Motors to regenerate energy back into the pack but the laws of physics are kind of obnoxious and they basically say you can't build a perpetual motion machine because there's always losses in the system so by starting the motor up you actually regain the momentum you put in when you slow down but you've lost energy along the way and so you could say great but why don't we just put solar panels on the top of the car because you know the sun's coming down and we could do it that way but if you do a calculation of the energy that's coming from the Sun on the size of this top of the car you'll quickly realize that that you can't recoup the energy so for now we end up having something that the energy that you do in a trip is somewhat consumable um until we come up with a better idea there was a hand over here yes woman in the front we just we wait for the microphone uh this for Dr Horwitz about Quantum computed I understand that Finland is one of the countries at the top in terms of quantum Computing but also here in the United States I read that Google already reached the level of 1,000 cubits and they did it because they were you know initially the problem of getting those cubits is because the lack of stability and once you reach the best probably lowest temperature temperature they already going minus 40 something so they have been able to stabilize the Cubit and therefore they reach already 1,000 so so I would like you to comment on that in terms of whether we can get more of course more cubits uh in the system and what you can do with one cubits so far in terms of quantum Computing thanks it's a great question so in Quantum Computing basically the measure of sort of the complexity of the machine you have is something called a cuit it's kind of analogous to a bit in a computer but but different it's Quantum and that makes it way more more powerful so today many people talk about different siiz quantum computers um and people have talked about and IBM has built machines that have very large number of quantum bits and other people have advertised this but there's another issue that in addition to the number of bits you have to care about which is what's the Fidelity of the operations you can do on those bits and you need the combination like if I have a thousand bits but every time I an operation has a 1% error I can't do more than a 100 operations before I've kind of got 100% error well it doesn't like for people who do math it doesn't work that way but I just don't but but well so so it it turns out that I've been tracking kind of the best quantum computers that have been announced by various people so announced I don't know what's going on secret so right now the highest Fidel operations that have been reported are 99.9% and they're in computers that have about 30 cubits okay the Google has announced and demonstrated chips that have on the order of a 100 cubits and their Fidelity are 99 point I think five or seven something I I don't yeah I don't have the data in front of me um people have demonstrated trapped no people have demonstrated um cold or neutral at configurations that have a thousand cubits so I don't think that was Google I I could be wrong but I don't think so um but they haven't been able to do operations on those cubits yet so there is been advances and i' I've been tracking this since 2018 I can show you a little plot of the progress right it it's it is up and to the right we're making progress it's not quite as fast as some of the Advocates have said we're going right but there is steady progress um but we're still at the point where the machines are relatively small um and it's not like those machines can do anything useful yet so that's kind of where we are today so our experts are going to stick around for drinks and food so you can ask them your Cubit and other questions at our reception I just want to end by saying one thing which we didn't talk about yet which is if we're think about what is the most important thing to power all of the scientific advances that these and other experts are working on today that other than Talent it's compute computational power and I'll leave you with two numbers 300 and 350,000 Princeton last year had to go into its endowment to buy 300 of the most advanced Nvidia chips which power scientific discovery the same year last year meta announced they were buying 350,000 of the same chips you want to know what the national infrastructure is for National Security and economic development today it's compute it's what the highway system was in the 1950s that Eisenhower developed National Security and economics it's what the Strategic petroleum Reserve was in the 1970s economics and National Security the national infrastructure to guarantee both our security and our economic competitiveness through scientific discovery today is National compute and if you want to know what Congress can do to ensure that the United States stays at the Forefront of leadership in science and technology in the world it's compute I'm going to end there and thank you all so much for coming and all you're doing [Music]

2025-03-13 09:28

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