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Jeetu Patel: commitment

26 Feb 2026 Lenny's Podcast AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel

“I have data all over and I'm going to be able to make sure that language can be used to compose the data in a way that I can give you, Lenny, the answer to the question that you're looking for that I think is the 0.”

— Jeetu Patel

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Speaker
Jeetu Patel
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
commitment
Recorded
26 Feb 2026
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…So, being on the inside of this massive investment that is happening across the world, what do you think isn't being priced in into where things are heading into how much life will change, or just the scale of this build out? Years ago I'd had a chance to meet with Ray Kurzweil. He's the chief scientist at Google for a while, and I think he still is. And he had talked about, he was writing this book called Live Long Enough to Live Forever. And so I was talking to him, I'm like, "What is the impact to human population if all of a sudden you can have 15 generations living simultaneously, because we have an indefinite span of life? Because now all of a sudden everything has to change. How does housing work, housing work? How does agriculture work? How does transportation work? How does ... Everything changes?" And he looked at me and he had the most profound answer and he said, "Most people can't think exponentially, because they always think exponentially maybe on a single dimension." But what ends up happening in these things is you can sometimes you have to keep in mind that exponentiality happens across multiple dimensions all at once. So, if you do have an indefinite span of life, you have to assume that humans are creative enough that they're going to find a way to have a three-day crop cycle. And they probably will have 5,000 story skyscrapers, and there will be a bunch of things in society that we have assumed are not solvable that'll now be solvable. So, when you go back to your question and say, what changes in this entire equation that has not been factored in well? I think today AI is looked at largely as a productivity tool and an aggregation mechanism. I have data all over and I'm going to be able to make sure that language can be used to compose the data in a way that I can give you, Lenny, the answer to the question that you're looking for that I think is the 0. 0001% of the tip of the iceberg. The reality is, is we will have original insights generated that don't exist in the human corpus of knowledge, and we will have the physical world get augmented to language where capacity is augmented to humans. And what we have to be careful of is that that capacity is working on behalf of humans, but if that capacity is augmented to humans, you can now do things that you really care to do, and not do things that you don't care to do. And so our biggest realization that we had when we were using Codex, for example, when we were writing a code with OpenAI's kind of model and development tool, was the first three months we were screwing around with this. And then there was this light bulb that runoffs. In fact, there was a former deployed engineer from OpenAI that told us about this, which is, "Hey, stop trying to think of this as a tool. Think of this as a teammate that got added to your team, and your framing will change, and the way in which you actually use the technology will change." And that essentially, if you compound that to how society operates, that's going to be pretty profound as an implication, while keeping in mind that these safety and security risks are non-trivial and they're real. tially, if you compound that to how society operates, that's going to be pretty profound as an implication, while keeping in mind that these safety and security risks are non-trivial and they're real. And you can't be completely flippant about them, because how an AI identifies its own success and its own ambition will really matter. And we have to make sure that we actually keep guardrails around that, because it is in service of humans, it is not to go out and build a society by itself. And I do think that those are important kind of checks and balances you have to keep in mind. But the thing that people sometimes miss out in this very polarized narrative, which is we are either going to have nothing to do in society, or this is going to be completely useless as a piece of technology. I think that's not a helpful narrative. In fact, what is helpful is saying, "As we reconstruct society for the next phase, how can we make sure that life gets infinitely better? How can we make sure that diseases get solved? How can we make sure that poverty gets eradicated? How can we make sure that how people learn and find excitement and joy out of life gets compounded meaningfully?" If that happens, I think there's goodness that comes out of this.…

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