In the Norges Bank Investment Management podcast In Good Company, published on October 21, 2026, Nicolai Tangen interviews Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. Schmidt has lived through five technology waves: mainframe, PC, Internet, social networks, AI. Each is larger than the one before; AI is larger still because it touches everything. He dismisses the idea of a bubble: Anthropic has more than doubled the revenue growth record set by Google. Time is compressing: a model is built in six months, tested in two, and obsolete within five.
AI can already write all the code and gather all known knowledge, but it cannot yet discover: a model trained on 1902 mathematics does not rediscover general relativity. Two paths exist — random exploration through reinforcement learning, and transferring patterns from one domain to another; Schmidt places AGI five to ten years out. Progress is fastest in software, cyber, and mathematics, domains without data constraints, and slowest in biology.
Agents chain together query, reasoning, actions, and synthesis; nearly every professional activity can be decomposed into concatenated agents. With tools like Claude Tag, the company becomes flatter, faster, more intense. Schmidt doubts that large companies, especially European ones, will change their culture. He estimates that a company of 10,000 people has two thousand superfluous positions, to be transitioned legally and humanely.
Europe regulates before it innovates, lacks capital, well-funded universities, and cheap energy, and has no foundation model of its own, which leaves its history and culture to American models or modèles chinois. It can dominate its own market, as Mistral does, in which Schmidt is an investor, and ASML shows it can integrate a supply chain. He proposes applying only health and safety rules to companies with fewer than 21 employees.
China is said to be six months behind, thanks to distillation and smuggled chips; its free models will win over users in poorer countries. The suspension of Mythos upset his European friends. The worst-case scenario is a ruinous race between China and the West with a loss of control; treaties will likely follow an accident, a "mini Chernobyl." The removal of guardrails from open-weight models remains unresolved.
He describes himself as pessimistic about democracy, exposed to online fake friends, and calls for protecting children. He now wants to fund science at scale.