 Welcome to the ITU headquarters here in Geneva, which is of course hosting the AI for Good Global Summit. And I'm really pleased as our first guest is the CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation, and it's Marcus Schingles who's with me right now. Hello Marcus. Hi. So tell me, why is XPRIZE part of this international dialogue on AI? Yeah, so artificial intelligence is important to the work that XPRIZE does. We're a non-profit organization that tries to use very progressive and contemporary means for solving problems. We align with the 17 SDGs of the UN. We have a very similar mission in mind. But our model is such that we crowdsource solutions from teams around the world. We essentially gamify the innovation process by leveraging a $10, $20 million purse, making a competition, and then asking the whole world to compete. And the reason why AI is particularly relevant is because moving forward, we can envision a really many problems that the teams that compete on the XPRIZE are going to be solved without having AI in their tool set. We're talking a lot about AI right now. I mean, it's such a hot topic right now. What would you say is the most exciting about it at the moment? Well it's been around for a while of course, but the most exciting thing that kind of makes it not your father's AI is the progress of deep learning and machine learning, AI, which is kind of the next generation of artificial intelligence, which is computers essentially being modeled off of the brain, off of neural networks that is propagating a learning capacity, the capability to learn. And that's what deep learning does. That's why you see the progress right now combined with tremendous computing power and the exponential trends in computing power fueling more sophisticated AI. So in general, it's not only an exciting field now, but it's going to be a field that is going to completely transform the landscape of business, of culture, of politics, and for XPRIZE of how we solve problems. Now of course, this is going to be a three day discussion. How can in your opinion AI accelerate the solutions to the UN sustainable development goals? Do you see XPRIZE contributing to these solutions? You know the thing that's interesting is the UN itself is not going to solve the SDGs of course, and the traditional problem solvers, industry, government, the traditional problem solvers that society has grown accustomed to are essentially very linear in their methodology for solving problems. It's just how they're intuitively wired. It's meant to be consistent and process driven. The world is exponential. It needs much more agility and it means much more experimentation. You're only going to get critical massive experimentation if you can get individuals to participate. If you can start to tap into seven billion to eight billion people on the planet to solve problems, to solve the SDGs, statistically speaking, you're going to find those needles in the haystack that can solve problems. Fortunately, AI is a democratized technology. It's a technology that used to only be afforded to governments or big business. But now it's something that my son who's in college is using today off the cloud. He's using AI and the type of work that he's doing. It's just a phenomenal progress of the technology and it's going to be applicable to solving problems, particularly the SDGs. So there's a final question. Would you say that AI then is actually probably, it's an easier breakthrough technology than other ones were because it's so user friendly? I don't know if it's necessarily easier. It's riding the computing power wave that is a doubling, that's an exponential trend. And so the more powerful computing gets, especially as we go to new forms of computing, AI will really take advantage of quantum computers and new types of computers that evolve beyond the integrated circuit that we have today. And that's all happening as a convergence of trends that are going to result in AI. And then when you combine AI with robotics or 3D printing or biotechnology or cognitive analytics or advanced medical tech, it's just a transformational technology. And it truly is something that we're experiencing today. It's a totally relevant discussion for us to be having. It's particularly important for the United Nations to be having this as part of the ITU because there's a dialogue that people will use to understand exponential trends versus linear trends, AI being one of the significant forces as a result. And this will be totally transformed in five years anyway from what we're thinking now? It really will be because you can't look back at the history of artificial intelligence. You can't say, well, my linear brain says AI beat a chess player X number of years ago. So I'm expecting another 30 years before it does something of that magnitude in terms of its growth rate. That's a very linear perception. It's the way humans evolve and human intelligence evolves. AI intelligence doesn't evolve that way. It evolves exponentially. So what we see in the next few years could very well represent what we've seen in the last 50 years in terms of the progress of AI. And that's really legitimately what's happening right now. Well, stay tuned. We'll be back in touch in a few years and work out what's changed since this conversation today. Well, you never know. We might be in a virtual environment right now. This might not be real. It's an AI simulation, perhaps. OK, you never know. We'll see what happens. Yes, thanks again. Thanks, Marcus. Thanks, Marcus Schingles, who is, of course, the CEO of the X Prize Foundation.