Thrun is one of the most influential computer scientists and technology entrepreneurs in artificial intelligence and self-driving cars. He was a professor at Stanford University in the U.S. before joining Google, where he led pioneering self-driving car projects and later co-founded Google X.

He is also the founder of Udacity, an online education platform aimed at bringing technology skills to millions of people.

On the sidelines of South Summit 2026, a technology and startup conference held in Madrid, Spain, from June 3-5, Thrun spoke with VnExpress and several international media outlets about AI's impact on society.

- What will AI look like in 10 years?

- We are in a very special period.

If you had asked me this two years ago, I would have said AI was basically a mirror. It just reflected what had already been written, and was very good at summarizing and presenting information.

Now we can see authentic new things being created by AI, things we were not able to do before. If we fast-forward, the idea of AI that effectively does 99% of what we do today better than people is no longer far away.

People can take this as scary news because what we are doing right now might become obsolete. But AI will also empower us to communicate much better, be much more informed, and have a much better understanding of truth and the world. We will never have a situation like this again.

Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of Google's research lab Google X. Photo courtesy of the South Summit 2026

- Have we reached AGI?

- In many ways, AGI is quite close.

If you look at what a typical college graduate does after graduation, AI can ace the exams and do a pretty good job in many entry-level jobs. Normal people might work at Starbucks or Staples, or even as psychologists to some extent.

Even in smart things like playing chess, playing Go, or driving cars, AI is now better than people.

At that level, we already have many characteristics of AGI. Does that threaten us? Not really. I would say it empowers us more than anything else.

Some people think AGI is the day when you are never going to ask a person again and machines just do everything. But to me, that is an entire step beyond this period. It means that in addition to understanding that machines are smart, we have to relinquish control, and that would scare me.

- What consequence of technology still worries you?

- Every technology has a good-news case and a bad-news case. A kitchen knife can be used for good things and bad things.

AI is a very, very powerful tool. Imagine the day when, just before an election, someone puts fake news on all social networks about some grand event in Washington, and it sends the election in a different direction before people can recover and realize it is fake news.

Or imagine the day when someone on death row in America gets executed because video evidence presented to jurors was completely fake.

We have to relearn what authenticity means, what truth means and what trust means in a world that is flooded with artificial content. We no longer know for sure what is real.

- How close or far are we from AI self-awareness?

- I am a big proponent of not mystifying these words, but taking simple words in a simple way.

For example, my dishwasher can tell me whether the door is open or whether it is out of detergent. My car can detect problems and send alerts. In that sense, that is also a form of awareness.

When we think about human self-awareness, we obviously think of more: creativity, originality and free will. Should my dishwasher have free will? I hope not. I would hate it if my dishwasher had free will and said it had fallen in love with the refrigerator and would not work anymore. I just want it to be reliable.

Somewhere between the simple notion of awareness in a dishwasher and the more complicated human version, the spectrum is quite fuzzy.

We already have machines that can reason to themselves. Generative AI can look at its own reasoning, criticize itself, improve itself and give a better argument. That feels and looks quite similar to self-awareness.

- In education, many people worry AI has become a shortcut that weakens critical thinking. Do we need to redesign teaching and learning?

- Absolutely. Colleges right now are struggling with this.

Most homework assignments, if you put them into ChatGPT, will get a perfect answer. Teachers have not yet found the correct way to turn this into more interesting learning situations.

Machines can solve these problems, so there is not really a reason to teach the same problem to students in the same way. No one taught me how to hunt my own lunch because I can just go to the supermarket and buy food.

It is similar here. I think critical thinking will not go away. It may increase.

If you look back 500 years, none of us here would be doing what we do today. Most people were farming. Children worked in the fields. There was no childhood, no education, no vacation and no weekend. There was much less room for critical thinking.

The more leverage we have as people with tools, the more we will be asked to make impactful decisions.

The way of teaching is going to be interesting. Right now, everyone in this room can write an app, maybe an app that keeps track of how often your kids do chores at home. So everybody is a software engineer. That was not possible a few years ago.

- What should young people do when AI can do so many things?

- The generation coming out of college right now has a problem. You will see it in labor statistics.

My advice to young people is to be on top of AI. Be the best in your class at using AI for whatever you need. Play with it. Try it out. Write six apps with AI just to see it do smart stuff. Do not be against it. Do not be afraid of it.

I am optimistic that this is a transient thing and it is going to shift back to employment. If people actually use AI correctly, they can be so much more productive at any job. It does not make jobs go away. It might end up that we work less, and that has historically been the case.

Go back 150 years. There was no childhood, no weekend, no vacation. Today, we live in a world where we have pleasure, and many of us spend time on things we care about outside pure work. I believe very deeply that the rate of invention has exploded. For hundreds of thousands of years, it was slow, then it exploded around the 1800s, definitely in the 1900s, and now in the 2000s.

I also believe only 1% of interesting things have been invented yet. Why would I say this? Go back five years. None of us saw the invention of large language models, and then they appeared and were so radical. None of us saw self-driving cars reaching this level, flying taxis, or things like Neuralink (technology that directly connects the human brain to a computer).

The remaining 99% has not been invented yet. If you take that attitude and combine it with the current curve of progress, every day, every week and every month is going to be amazing.

You are in the middle of it, and you are lucky to be alive in this period.