“Recursive self improvement is when it's learning on its own. This is not true today. Today, when you set up one of these huge data centers, you have to tell it to learn. But the belief is that this is coming — within four years.”
Former CEO of Google; chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project and CEO of Relativity Space
Said Dec 1, 2025Deadline Dec 31, 2029Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics forum, Dec. 1, 2025; reported by The Harvard Crimson, Dec. 2, 2025
Deadline is end of 2029. The Crimson reports the timeline as four years; other write-ups of the same talk render it as 'two to four years,' so four years is the generous reading. Schmidt added that AI generating medical conjectures and discovering new facts 'looks like it's very close.'