Speaking last week at an event hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project – a think tank he founded – Eric Schmidt described how AI systems were beginning to operate independently, learning, improving, and even planning without input from humans.
“The computers are now doing self-improvement. They’re learning how to plan, and they don’t have to listen to us anymore”, he said.
Schmidt referred to this process as “recursive self-improvement” – where AI generated hypotheses, tested them using robotic labs, and used the results to further improve, all without human intervention.
Schmidt, who led Google from 2001 to 2011, and remained executive chairman until 2017, also predicted a major shift in the jobs market.
He said that within a year, AI would likely replace “most “the vast majority of programmers” and surpass top human talent in fields like mathematics.
“We believed AI was under-hyped, not over-hyped”, he added, pointing to tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Deepseek already being widely used for tasks like coding, despite not being trained for those purposes.
Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, says AI may soon ignore human control and will need much more power than today
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