The Only Trait for Success in the AI Era—How to Build It | Carnegie Mellon University Po-Shen Loh

1. 0:00 – 1:28

   Intro

   1. PLPo-Shen Loh0:00

      Soon after ChatGPT came out, I started traveling around the country telling people, "Oh, no, there's this new thing. People are going to need to learn to be more creative because that's the only thing that the AI can't do." I don't say that anymore because now I've seen that the AI can actually come up with lots and lots of ideas. Last year, the International Math Olympiad problems, four of them were solved by Google's artificial intelligence. The International Math Olympiad has six questions, and all six of the questions are very, very original. They are so original that when the national coaches meet, they all look at the problems and they all try to make sure nothing too similar to those problems has ever appeared in any contest or anywhere in the world before. The questions are supposed to be really original. But nevertheless, the artificial intelligence was able to come up with solutions to four out of six, which is more than I can do. The creativity in the AI can probably surpass what we can do too. The only unique thing about human intelligence is that we hopefully care that humans still exist. I'm Po-Shen Loh. I'm a mathematician who likes to solve real-world problems. In real life, I'm a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University, but I'm also a social entrepreneur, where I've been running my own educational solution which tries to make the world a more thoughtful place.

2. 1:28 – 3:28

   AI’s #1 Target in Schoolwork

   1. PLPo-Shen Loh1:31

      In schools, one of the biggest places where students are using AI to cheat on their homework is for their writing. This, unfortunately, could make a huge problem for human civilization because you just have to think, what is that AI anyway? It's a large language model. How is that AI so good? It's because it's good at language. It's good at looking at the patterns of words that often appear. If many kids lose this ability, we'll get many kids who grow up and aren't able to think logically. All they're able to do is just take whatever anyone else gives them. They'll just be dependent. If you're already grown up and you already have that skill, and you're using the AI to achieve that task because that's for your job, great. Okay, you're using it to do a job. But if you're in school, why are you doing that writing? It's not because the writing you make is going to make money directly. No, no. That writing is actually part of your own learning. Using AI to do your writing homework in school is like saying, "I'm not gonna run a mile for exercise. I'm gonna drive my car one mile for exercise." How much exercise you get? You get none. You're gonna grow up and you're not gonna be able to be as physically fit. Similar thing here with mentally fit. And just this observation that the power of the large language model is the L, the language. That's why we need to really make sure that all of our kids, if, and if you're watching this and you're students, this is why you need to be really, really good with language. For the next generation, all of these skills, like reading and writing, communication, logic, these are all going to be very important because these are how you develop a, a good way to think. I was explaining to people the reason why we do this math is not because eventually we have to do algebra, but the reason is because eventually this just makes you smarter, so you're able to go and think through situations you haven't seen before and figure

3. 3:28 – 4:25

   How a Carnegie Mellon Professor Tests Creativity

   1. PLPo-Shen Loh3:28

      them out. I interview lots and lots of high school students who want to work with me. And during the interview, the way that I interview for intelligence is I ask them questions, usually math questions, because those are analytical, and I ask them questions until it's very clear from their body language that they have never seen this question before. Because usually if you're doing math questions and you've seen it before, you have a certain look of confidence in your eyes. But I wait until it's really clear that they've never seen this before. And then I wanna see how you think. Actually, because you've never seen that question before, the expectation is that you won't solve it. And so then I start to give hints. Those hints are usually ideas that they wouldn't have encountered before in school. And then I wanna see how quickly can you synthesize these new hints, these new ways of thinking, synthesize them into a solution for a problem you have never seen before. Actually, that's also creativity. So that's one particular piece.

4. 4:25 – 5:54

   What Matters More Than Creativity

   1. PLPo-Shen Loh4:25

      But going forward, I think that one of the skills that people will really need is that aspect of actually wanting to create value and delight in other people. Why do I say this? I say this because for many, many years, humans were the top species, the most capable things on this planet. Soon it will not be that case. Soon you're gonna have to work together to survive. The only way to get other people to want to team up with you is for you to authentically and deeply be a person who is motivated by creating value in the other. If you are not that way, you are a bad partner and people will not want to go and team with you. If they don't team with you, you will die. You will lose opportunity. Because eventually all of these kinds of jobs you can use AIs to do, then why would anyone want to employ you? Why would anyone want to have you as, as someone on their team? Presumably only because they somehow felt like you are going to create some value and they, they like that vibe. They like you. I think what we really need is to get more and more people who are figuring out what the real problem to solve is. But unfortunately, sometimes when kids just think about problems, they don't realize that the way that you solve a problem is through empathy and through relating to other people. Why? Because you can't solve a problem unless you can visualize it through their

5. 5:54 – 7:28

   Simulating the World

   1. PLPo-Shen Loh5:54

      eyes. I do spend a significant amount of my life working towards the goal of being better at simulating the world. I also use AI for that I think, well, I'll give one exact example. I was just in Nashville, Tennessee last week, and I just saw a really, I thought, very, very talented singer in one of the bars there. Wow, she's good. And I just got curious, how hard is it to be able to get a performing spot on Broadway in Nashville? So I asked AI, and I was actually not just interested in AI telling me about the design. I wanna see the links, you know. Tell me more. What is the background of this particular place who she's performing at, right? I, I will make my own conclusions based on knowing, oh, oh, oh, I see. So there's all of these different people who would want to do this thing. Right. So if you're one of the people who got picked to do it at this prime time, oh, this makes logical sense. See, I'm using the AI to build the logic inside my brain for understanding country music performance. And why was I trying to understand? Honestly, it's because these days I also work with professional entertainers, so I'm also myself always scouting. The big heart of this is I wasn't using the AI to write the report for me. I was using AI to make myself better at that particular goal. Being able to simulate the world is the superpower that makes someone able to be a successful entrepreneur. Simulating the world allows you to imagine a product or imagine a strategy and then play it forward in your head. What would happen if I did this?

6. 7:28 – 8:13

   Why School Makes You Depressed

   1. PLPo-Shen Loh7:29

      A long time ago when I started with education, I was actually just thinking about how to help people do math problems. Today, when I think back to that time, I think I was probably a solution looking for a problem, in the sense that, uh, somehow I thought it would be very important for people to be good at math. But then things that happened later in my life as I became the national coach of the US Olympic Math Team, I saw situations where there were so many so clever, so capable people who were still so depressed. And furthermore, after they graduated from high school, they even didn't really know what to do next because they thought that the point of life was to find ways to prove you're better than other people. That's when I realized we actually will do much better if we think about the philosophy to start with, right? The philosophy

7. 8:13 – 9:13

   A Life Goal That Truly Makes You Happy

   1. PLPo-Shen Loh8:13

      in life should not be, how do I outdo everyone else? If you do that, you will, you'll probably never be satisfied. But if your philosophy in life is, hey, it is actually addictive to make a bunch of other people happy. Ooh, now I can do it for five people. Oh, now I can do it for 500 people. Oh, wow, now I can get 1,000 people to come to this thing. The more that you do, the more you wanna do, and the fun part is that correlates also with traditional success. Then I realized, ah, I should be trying to push this worldwide, and if I don't do it, who will? With the things I've done in my life, I now have an opportunity to go and say, "You know, I've seen what happens if you go all the way in pure competition. I've seen what happens if you go all the way and just practice problems to do the best on tests. Actually, that's not the right target." And I realized that because of my background, I would be able to shift mindsets. Then I said, "Okay, this is what I have to do."

8. 9:13 – 11:16

   Scaling Critical Thinking

   1. PLPo-Shen Loh9:13

      I am a math professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Uh, the way I teach every single one of my classes is that I just go up to the chalkboard with a piece of chalk, and I write, "Today we're gonna do this. But I forgot exactly how to do this, so I need all of you to suggest ideas." And then the whole class experience becomes one where the students are suggesting ideas, and I'm giving them feedback on their ideas. And what I've been working on as a social entrepreneur to make it possible for everybody to be able to experience education in this way is we run an online program. It's, it's called Live. We found a way to scale up the education of critical thinking. You see, the limiting factor is to have enough coaches to lead all of this critical thinking and brainstorming, and we scale it up by making a win-win situation by just observing that, uh, one of the greatest ages to learn critical thinking is when you're 10 to 13 years old. And it turns out that some of the best people to lead 10 to 13-year-old kids into the joy of being thoughtful are high school kids who are about 15 to 18 years old. But what I observed is that there were plenty of kids who were 15 to 18 years old who were already very clever academically, especially in math. Their limiting factor in life eventually was not gonna be their science, technology, engineering, or math. It would be communication skills, confidence, and the ability to win over anybody and lead a team. So I created a program where we find kind and mathematically clever high schoolers, and then I hire professional comedians and actors to teach them how to be charismatic and how to be able to win over anybody. Because if you can convince anybody to love math, you can convince anybody to do anything. And so this, this exchange, they're trained by the actors. They coach math. Uh, while they're coaching math, we pay for an actor to watch them for every hour that they're coaching math. The actor gives them real-time feedback to help them become more enthusiastic, emphatic, and, uh, a more winning personality. Win-win situation now. The high schoolers directly benefit. Their life becomes much better. In return, they're producing all of these critical thinking

9. 11:16 – 12:35

   Building Networks for the AI Era

   1. PLPo-Shen Loh11:16

      classes for kids all around the country. The architecture of this is that it just connects people. We are introducing kind and thoughtful high school students to middle school students to help them see, hey, you could become these great people who are ha- having fun and also having a very fulfilling life. But also the way we execute the whole thing, the high schoolers all teach in pairs. That not only makes the experience more fun for the people who are learning math, but it makes it so that these kind and really mathematically clever people get to know each other. Because I don't know what kind of challenges we're gonna face in the future. I think they're gonna be quite big, and technology will make it so that whatever the challenges we face are, they're big. So we also need to have a big network of kind people who are clever, who know each other, and who have trust, so that if there are some civilization-threatening challenges that arise... Well then maybe there will be some people who will stand up, work together, and do something about it. This is what I pay attention to as I travel around the entire country and the world. I'm actually thinking about the robustness of human society, whether or not if there was some challenge that faced the world due to technology, are we as human civilization equipped to rise up and face that challenge? To me, it all starts from thoughtfulness. [instrumental music]

10. 12:35 – 13:40

    Taste: AI’s First Theft

    1. PLPo-Shen Loh12:38

       The work I do is really focused on building up autonomous human thinking. That's why the core word I use for the philosophy is thoughtful. I've watched over many years as people are becoming less and less interested in thinking. I think that actually happened because people found out that they can entertain themselves with iPads, and this unfortunately makes people also not have as much interest in concentrating and thinking about something. AI could make that much worse. The fun part of life is having your own contribution to the life that you live. Actually, I think that's why people actually like creativity. It's fun. People like to draw. People like to put their own flavor. People like to wear their own fashion. It expresses themself. This expression of yourself, it would be lost if everything you do is efficient but just reliant on the AI which told you how to dress today. That's why I want more and more people to discover it's fun to think. It's fun to have your own twist on things, your own, your own idea that you inject inside.

11. 13:40 – 14:44

    Truth: AI’s Second Theft

    1. PLPo-Shen Loh13:40

       The other dangerous thing that happens if people lose the ability to, to think and reason is that it makes it far easier to deceive people. The world is so complicated that if you look at any situation in the world, sometimes depending on how you tell the story of what happened, you can say statements that are all true which make you come up with a different feeling. I think it's really important for people to be critical and to be-- for people to be able to understand what's really going on. Because sometimes when someone's talking to you, they have an agenda. Like, I'll be frank, I have an agenda. I'm trying to build a more thoughtful world, and I'm gonna be very, very upfront with you on that. Anyone who's watching this video, I think it's really important that we have as many people as possible find out how much fun it is to delight other people and to have the ability to think and figure that out. That's my agenda. But you see, everyone has an agenda, and if you can't think for yourself and you just listen to some authority, what if that agenda is actually to your detriment? You have no way

12. 14:44 – 16:40

    5 Perspectives vs. 7.5 Billion

    1. PLPo-Shen Loh14:44

       of knowing. The technology revolution really made all of us start to realize how much of an impact bias has, in the sense that whoever makes some technology tool has some bias. What does bias really mean? Well, I guess as a mathematician, the way I would say it is two plus two is always four. That's right. What's the point of life? Oh, I don't know. Like, there's no clear definition what's the point of life. I think the point of life is, is to delight as many other people as you can. But I know that you might not necessarily agree, and it's not a problem. I think it's, it's healthy that we may have different starting points. The part that becomes unhealthy is where there is only a very short menu of options, each of which is followed by a huge number of people. That's actually where bias comes in, because we just, we just mentioned so far in this, in this video a couple of different, uh, sources of AI providers, right? We have, we have Claude, we have OpenAI, there's also Gemini. If you're in China, there's DeepSeek. There are all of these, but that's relatively few. If you think about it, that's-- that would be sort of like saying, "Well, the world has lots of different viewpoints. It has five of them." Really? No, no. The world has seven and a half billion different viewpoints. There are seven and a half billion people. One of the beautiful things about, I guess, humanity is the fact that there are so many different ideas all out there, and let's be frank, some of the ideas are bad. Some of the people are unfortunately in prison because they decided to kill someone else. Hopefully, we all understand that is a bad idea. But the point is, there are lots of different people who are trying different kinds of ideas, lots of different philosophies, and in this great big marketplace of ideas that is the world, we see some ideas come out, and the, the variety also allows us to have more creativity perhaps. And when I look at the different AI tools, well, it's actually well known that they have certain biases. This is also why, for me, when I try

13. 16:40 – 17:43

    How to Avoid One-Sided Thinking

    1. PLPo-Shen Loh16:40

       to get the news, I don't only go to CNN.com. I also go to Fox News. I tune my social media so that my X is all tracking Republican, uh, right-leaning viewpoints, and my Facebook is all tracking left-leaning viewpoints. And I look at both of them every day because I want to see what's going on. And my expectation is, yes, you're gonna be biased. You have a certain view on the world, and you think you're right, and you're biased too. You have a way of thinking of the world, and my job as I simulate the world is to try to figure out, where do you disagree? Ah, you disagree perhaps on a few values of how people should live their life, and then that causes you to have different ways of reporting on the story. I think it's all the more important now that there's AI out here, which sounds like a very convincing, reasonable person. It's even more important that people look at things and say, "All right. Is that really the story?" Because I think that the AI is gonna be so good at looking complete that you may think you have the entire story on a controversial situation, but you don't. [instrumental music]

14. 17:43 – 18:40

    How to Stay Hopeful Despite It All

    1. PLPo-Shen Loh17:47

       I am an optimist, as you can probably tell from the way I'm talking. I'm optimistic because I can see that thoughtful people stick together. I've been working on my work with this whole group of high school students and so on for three years, and I can just see there are so many kids, who are not kids anymore, who are growing up, who are really clever but so kind. And they also know each other. They make me optimistic about the future, not only the ones that I work with, but the fact that if I'm working with these people, that means there are other people out there too. I'm basically seeing with my own eyes the power of what can be done if you bring together people who have in common this idea that they actually like people and they want to make the world brighter. See, one reason I'm building this whole community of really kind and clever people is because I'm also

15. 18:40 – 21:10

    Making Money While Solving Real Problems

    1. PLPo-Shen Loh18:40

       hoping to eventually build a whole lot of social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneur is someone who makes a conscious decision to not necessarily become that rich. You're doing it for a different purpose. It's not because you want tons of money. It's because what makes you happy is seeing lots of delighted people. Social entrepreneurship is hard. The hard part is that sometimes at the beginning you feel this is an important problem that needs to be solved. Why won't people pay me to do it? I, I need to... A donation or an investment or something. That's how I started off. Today, when I do my social entrepreneurship, I think very carefully, how much does that problem actually cost? You know? The... If it's a problem, there's a real cost. In fact, it should be possible to make money. That word entrepreneur hopefully also includes something about sustainability through business type form. A good social enterprise should make a net profit on every single person that they help. Right? The problem that happens with social entrepreneurship sometimes is that people are doing something which would be nice to solve, but they haven't found a way to tie that together with solving a problem that has real monetary value that you can find someone to pay for. You should hopefully be able to figure out how it costs the world something, that the problem is there. Aha, now try to figure out who is paying that cost right now, and see if maybe they would be interested in paying you for you to go and solve that problem. You just have to go and hunt around. How can I figure out how the positive that's created on average is spread apart across everyone who's playing, and then you also get a little bit too? That's actually what we do. For example, we provide all this education. Since we make the best after-school math classes for middle school students who want enrichment in the world, we have lots of customers. They pay for it, so we have the profit. But because I'm a social entrepreneur, we subsidize students from different parts of the country and different parts of the world. How come nobody else ever thought of putting professional actors to live coach high school math stars, who are kind, while they live stream math classes to middle school kids? And that whole thing builds an ecosystem that builds a more thoughtful world that can hopefully help to sustain our human ci- civilization. It's actually an obvious idea. There are actors. There are math people. We can all win. It took 11 years to really build up to the stage that I am right now. It took eight years to come up with that idea. You can imagine how many

16. 21:10 – 22:28

    Destroy Your Ideas

    1. PLPo-Shen Loh21:10

       other weird ideas came about along the way. Anytime I see anything in the world or something I need to do, I try to keep coming up with a weird, new way to do it. For fun, I like to constantly be thinking, "Is there another way? Is there another way? Is there another way?" When I do this, most of the time I come up with a way, and then the next question becomes, "All right, what could be wrong with it?" So I first generate like this, I want to generate new idea, and after the new idea is there, I say, "Now I want to destroy the new idea. I want to shoot it down. How could it possibly be wrong?" Because 99% of the ideas that I generate that are new are fundamentally flawed, but 1% are good. You have to just be constantly, for its own sake, saying, "Could there be another way of doing this? Could there be another way of doing this?" So this combination of generate with excitement, destroy with lots and lots of effort, and then after a while, one diamond appears. Then push it. [outro music]

Episode duration: 22:30