The way this disease [COVID-19] will play out: We had the most acute phase where we were worried about overloading our hospitals; we now have the poor leadership phase where we know roughly what to do—I'll call it the mask phase; then, we're going to have the getting it under control phase, which I hope occurs very soon, but that phase is going to take quite a bit of work.

For the life of me, I do not understand why people run around denying the existence of COVID-19 or the seriousness of it ... On the other hand, I also never understood the Holocaust deniers, and I also never understood The Flat Earth Society, and I never understood the people who denied the moon landing. I never understood the anti-vaxxers.

This disease [COVID-19] is spread by aerosol and airborne mechanisms—literally in your breath. You want to avoid confined areas with a lot of virus...

50 years ago, reality was television and normal life. Today, reality is this online world that is constantly demanding attention, constantly full of stressors of one kind or another, constantly demanding your engagement—because that's the way it's built.

The longer-term concerns about AI are largely based on movies that people have watched. The reality is that AI is going to make us smarter [and] more productive. It will help with education; it'll help us reach people who've not been reached; it'll make our businesses more efficient...

I think a fair reading of these AGIs is that, in the most extreme form, they're going to be so powerful that they're going to have to be protected. We don't want them broadly used; they're going to have to be used in specialized scenarios.

I'd much rather have the computer look at my skin rash or my retina in my eye because we now know from many, many tests that humans make observational mistakes (even the best) but computers, when properly trained, don't.

The simplest explanation for AI is it's a system that gets better through learning.

What AI really is is a system of knowledge that is implemented inside the cloud ... It's very good at looking at large data sets and predicting things. It's very good at looking and finding patterns that humans can't see.

If you ask GPT-3 who it is, GPT-3 will say 'I'm a computer,' but it won't give you a philosophical basis for its existence, its purpose, and how its determining where it goes. That is the distinction between AI and AGI, in my view.

My goal is a measurable goal. I want the [COVID-19] infection rate to be below one, I want the disease to die out in America, and I want that to happen as quickly as possible—not just in the United States, but in the rest of the world.

China is a couple generations ahead in surveillance. They can actually spot you in your gait now, the way you walk, not just your face recognition.

I am convinced that the secret to longevity is being a workaholic.

We didn't understand, when we invented social media 15 years ago or so, the extraordinary and compound benefits and costs of social media to our society—in particular, our political discourse.

When you talk to people in my world, most people think the singularity will occur 20 years from whenever you ask them that question.

Pretty much every national security issue will be tainted or controlled by AI in the future.

If you think about 200 years from now, to pick a random number, it's probable that we'll know the complete details of the human brain—how it's wired, how it works.