Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt (born 1955) was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 — the adult supervision who scaled it from startup to colossus — then its executive chairman. After leaving Alphabet he became one of Washington’s most influential technologists, chairing the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence and investing heavily in AI startups and defense technology.

From “Age of AI” to “underhyped”

With Henry Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher he co-wrote The Age of AI (2021), an early mainstream treatment of AI as an epochal shift; the collaboration continued in Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit (2024, with Kissinger and Craig Mundie), completed after Kissinger’s death. At TED in April 2025 he made his signature argument: while the public fixates on chatbots, reinforcement learning and autonomous agents mean the revolution is underhyped, not overhyped.

Schmidt’s optimism is strategic rather than utopian. He testified that American data centers will need some 90 additional gigawatts of power, frames the U.S.–China contest as the defining competition of the field, and warns that open-source proliferation carries cyber and bio risks — positions that sit uneasily beside his pro-acceleration instincts, and that critics call self-interested given his defense-tech investments and government entanglements. He has also warned about AI companions and teenage isolation.

Still, his bottom line has never wavered: adopt the technology or be left behind, as a person, a company, and a country.