So, Larry, normally we talk about what's happened during the week, particularly
what the Fed might make of it, what might happen with rates.
But it strikes me that there isn't a lot of that this week.
Let's talk about larger issues that really you are focused on.
David, I think it's important for us always to remember that ultimately
trends are more important than events and trends.
Most of the time are positive events. Most of the time are negative.
So we have to step back and look at things that may be markers of trends.
And I saw two such things this week, China's huge evolution away from the
zero Covid strategy. And what happened with Jack G.P.S.
from Open A I, which may be a marker of a profound change in what it means to be
a machine and what it means to be human. So let's take each of those up and turn
if we could learn. Let's start with China, because as you
say, they really are backing off of their strict policy on Covid and
isolation and that they've been pursuing and also a lot of the testing.
But do we know yet whether that's very positive or negative?
It could be positive for the economy. But now, if they have a real spike in
cases and really overload their medical system when they have a problem.
Look, I think we know two things. We know that a big change in China
happened because of an expression of popular will and protests.
That's a profound thing for the governance of that superpower with one
point four billion people. You're quite right.
We don't yet know how this is going to work out.
Is this going to be a successful rejoining of the reality of the rest of
the world, or is this going to lead to catastrophic delegitimizing performance
of the Chinese health care system? And we don't know.
But either way, there's a big chance that China's going to be a quite
different country six months from now than it is today.
And so I think all of us are always watching China carefully.
But we need to be watching China much more carefully over the next ISE, over
the next six months when you're going to be seeing leadership change at the same
below the level of Xi Jinping. Of course, at the same time that we're
going to be seeing probably the biggest set of policy experiments that we've
seen in China in decades. So let's turn to that second figure.
They open a creation of chat G.P.S.. I won't pretend that I understand this,
but I have read about it again. Is this a positive thing or potentially
negative thing? Because we already have a lot on the
Internet. We don't know where it comes from or its
origins. Now we're gonna have something that we
can't even tell whether a person created it.
Look, when I went to graduate school, we used to estimate statistical models with
five parameters. Now they're going to be one hundred and
seventy five billion parameters that go into one of these systems.
The great computer scientist Alan Turing 70 years ago said that it was going to
be a threshold for humanity when a machine could sep could it could imitate
human beings, answers to questions in a way where another human being wouldn't
be able to tell the difference. We're somewhere in the territory of that
right now, and that is a profound thing for humanity.
It points to a profound change in the way we're all going to be working.
We're all going to have a kind of caddy that or many of us are going to have a
kind of caddy that is going to augment our creativity, augment our capacities
to bring knowledge to bear on what we do, augment our accuracy.
But just as the printing press or electricity was a huge change because it
was a general purpose technology. This could be the most important general
for this technology since the wheel or fire.
And that is something we are all going to be changed by.
My hope is that the very transcendence of these kinds of events can bring a
kind of unity, can bring a kind of unity because they are so large relative to
the differences between Democrats and Republicans or even the difference
between the West and China, that these opportunities and threats, because they
are both whether it's microbes, whether it's artificial intelligence, whether
it's climate change, that the very transcendence of these global events can
become a source of cohesion and progress.
But there is no assurance at all of that.
We are living in truly historic times. I want to talk about a different sort of
threshold that I came across this week and I was a little bit surprised.
I was reading Barno, the leader of YouTube.
His new memoir called Surrender is a fascinating book.
I find it very, very compelling. And who do I find in there?
But one, Larry Summers, when you were, according to Barno, originally new
treasury secretary, and he came in to meet with you and Sheryl Sandberg and
Stephanie Flanders to talk about debt forgiveness for the poorest countries.
And according to his rendition of it, it really started.
You started with President Clinton, a real process that led to really historic
changes in the debt. Some of the poorest countries in the
world. What about that?
We've still got a long way to go, don't we?
David Barno, is it unlikely, but very close friend.
I will confess it. I'd never heard of him before.
We had our meeting and Sheryl Sandberg had to force me to take the meeting
because I thought secretaries of the Treasury should only meet with people
who had a first name and a last name. But he was mesmerizing, both in his
charisma and his knowledge. And he drove that debt relief program
forward. We had an unlikely coalition, Pat
Robertson, Senator Jesse Helms, and we were able to do something that I think
was hugely important for the African continent at that time.
Sad to say, right now the world needs comprehensive debt relief for the
poorest countries. And what the world is getting is
grudging, incremental, partial, limited, small efforts.
And we've got to find a way to do that, or I hope Borrow is going to get the
band together again. I'm certainly willing to do my part to
help. This time it's going to be different
because a lot of that debt is owed to China and finding a way, even when
things are vexed with China, to involve them in helping these countries move
forward based on an understanding of how they see.
The issue is going to be necessary and profoundly important for a large number
of human lives. Finally, give us a moment, if you would,
on what we normally do on this program, which is talk about what happens this
week and specifically the question of the likelihood of recession, we saw
developments in the marketplace, oil price coming down.
Bond yields coming down. Stocks coming down.
Most people think that has to do with real anticipation of a significant
recession. Where are you on that?
I've been I've been saying soft landing, very unlikely for a while, and I think
it's looking even more unlikely right now.
I noticed that the consensus, as reflected by the FTSE University Chicago
survey of a group of 50 economists is now moving closer to where I've been.
They're saying that we're going to have a recession and that the unemployment
rate will peak at five and a half percent.
That's up from where they were way ahead of where the Fed is.
I've been saying 6 percent. So I think there's a growing coming
together that we probably are going to make more progress on inflation than
many people expected. But it's because the Fed is going to do
what's necessary. But there's likely to be some adverse
aspect of that. But, you know, David, next week, I hope
we can talk about what's happening globally because we tend to focus here
just on the American picture. But the two other major polls of the
economy, China and Europe, are both going to have a huge impact on how this
all plays out globally.