Moonshots EP 150: AI Leaders Reveal the Next Wave of AI Breakthroughs (FII Miami 2025)

Summary

A rapid-fire panel moderated by Diamandis at the FII (Future Investment Initiative) Miami 2025 summit, featuring Prem Akkaraju (CEO, Stability AI), Ramin Hasani (CEO, Liquid AI), Jack Hidary (CEO, Sandbox AQ), Jim Keller (CTO, Tenstorrent), and Alexander Sukharevsky (head of QuantumBlack/McKinsey). Each panelist gets compressed time to pitch their position in the AI landscape.

Key positions: Prem Akkaraju frames Stability AI’s pivot from general image generation (270M+ downloads of Stable Diffusion) to “ultra-narrow AI” for professional film/TV workflows — decomposing content creation into individual shot elements (rig removal, rotoscope, camera match) rather than text-to-video. Claims photorealistic on-demand video generation within 6-12 months. Notes Avatar 3/4/5 and Jim Cameron’s board involvement. Ramin Hasani positions Liquid AI’s non-Transformer architecture (liquid neural networks from MIT) as enabling on-device AI at zero hosting cost — no GPU or cloud required. The US Air Force trusted their architecture for autonomous fighter jet navigation. Jack Hidary distinguishes Sandbox AQ’s “large quantitative models” (LQMs) from LLMs: trained on molecules and atoms rather than text, running quantum equations on GPUs for drug discovery and materials science. Practical example: an 11-person team solved GPS-denied navigation for the Air Force using quantum sensors and AI. Jim Keller pitches Tenstorrent’s native tensor processors as simpler to program than GPUs, with fully open-sourced software stack. Alexander Sukharevsky delivers the soberest take: only 11% of enterprise AI use cases reach production, and with generative AI it may be as low as 7%. McKinsey’s QuantumBlack (5,000 engineers in 50 countries) is trying to close that gap.

The panel’s most useful signal is the convergence on edge/on-device AI and open source as the dominant future direction, with every hardware and model company racing to democratize access.

Bias/Sponsor Notes

Diamandis discloses investments in Stability AI and Liquid AI. The panel format at a sponsor-heavy summit (Aramco mentioned as Sandbox AQ customer) means each speaker is essentially pitching. Short format prevents any real pushback on claims.