Ex-Google CEO says the US and China's most powerful AI systems may one day be stored in military bases and surrounded by machine guns

• Powerful AI systems could become heavily guarded in the future, says ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

• Schmidt expects the systems to be "surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns" in army bases.

• The US and China have been competing fiercely to maintain their lead in the AI race.

Former Google CEO and chairman, Eric Schmidt thinks that "extremely powerful" AI systems will be heavily guarded by governments in the future.

"Eventually, in both the U.S. and China, I suspect there will be a small number of extremely powerful computers with the capability for autonomous invention that will exceed what we want to give either to our own citizens without permission or to our competitors," Schmidt told Noema Magazine in an interview published Tuesday.

"They will be housed in an army base, powered by some nuclear power source and surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns," he added.

Schmidt was Google's CEO and chairman from 2001 to 2011 before he handed the reins back to the company's co-founder Larry Page. Thereafter, he served as the search giant's executive chairman and technical advisor before finally departing the company in early 2020.

Since then, the 69-year-old has taken a strong interest in AI and studying its impact on society.

Besides investing in AI upstarts like Amazon-backed Anthropic, he co-authored "The Age of AI" with the late diplomat Henry Kissinger and MIT's dean of computer science Daniel Huttenlocher. The book details some of the risks and opportunities that AI will bring.

Representatives for Schmidt didn't immediately respond to requests for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

Though it may seem far-fetched today, Schmidt's prediction could materialize given how competitive countries already are when it comes to maintaining their lead in the AI race.

For instance, the US has exerted a tighter grip on its technology exports to China, limiting the sales of AI chips made by companies like Nvidia.

Likewise for China, which has been working to minimize its reliance on US-made chips. Chinese officials have asked domestic tech giants like Alibaba and TikTok parent company ByteDance to buy locally-made AI chips instead, per The Information.

"We are rapidly approaching what we call a 'two tech stack divide,' where in essence, each country, the US and China, are effectively walling off or ring-fencing their tech stacks from each other," TPW Advisory founder, Jay Pelosky told BI.

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