The US cannot let Intel fail. It’s our one and only Chip Fab company that’s truly domestic. >> This does remind me a bit of the 1997 investment by Microsoft. I would love to see a success story in the style of what happened with Apple after the 97 Microsoft investment. >> It’s almost identical. You know, everyone’s lost faith in Apple was almost bankrupt. Everyone forgets that. And Bill Gates decides to make an investment and it reestablished its credibility. And then Apple went on to become the most valuable company in the world after that. TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. T for Taiwan, has 66% market share in the chips that drive AI. China is only 90 mi away from Taiwan and thinks it’s part of their country. >> Where would you invest your capital knowing what you know about the massive growth we’re seeing? Um, who wants to go first? Now that’s a moonshot ladies and gentlemen.
[00:01:00] >> Everybody welcome to Moonshots. Another episode of WTF just happened in tech. I’m here with my moonshot mates Sel ismail Dave Blondon and AWG Alex Weezner Gross. Hey guys. Uh so we got on uh text this morning and said, “Oh my god, there’s so much news going on. We just need to spin up a WTF episode because there’s breaking news that we want to share uh with our subscriber base. Uh and and Dave, um I don’t know. I want to just say thank you for everybody here rearranging your day so we can hop on this conversation. I mean, it was pretty extraordinary and and Gian Luca and Nick and uh and Dana just getting all the slides together. just uh I feel like we’re going to be doing an episode of this every day at the speed at which things are happening. >> Hey, Peter, it’s my absolute favorite thing in the world to do. And I I uh postponed meetings with JP Morgan and a couple public company CEOs to to do this. So, it’s a pure win for me. Things
[00:02:01] I wasn’t eager to do have been moved off and things I’m loving doing are in right in front of me. So, >> I was talking to Alex. Super super cool to be here. >> I was talking to Alex a few days ago and I said, “How do you spend your time?” He goes, “Preparing for the pod. So sad sad but true. Yeah, it’s a black hole in a wonderful way. >> Uh well, you know, >> today in particular is a really really big news day. So we just have to do it. So yeah, we’ll cover it. >> And I just, you know, again, as I say to everybody listening and watching, uh this is a chance where I get to upgrade my IQ points by 20. I hope you do as well. Uh the only way to stay on top of this exponential growth because we are such local and linear thinkers is to constantly being upgrading or updating your you know belief of what is possible and where things are going. Um we think of our episodes here as really the news that’s worth listening to. So if you want to trade you know the Crisis News
[00:03:00] Network at night with uh with an hour of with us uh we welcome you to. All right, let’s let’s jump in. Uh, and the news here, Dave, that you know, you texted me this morning and say, “Did you did you see what’s happening with Intel on video and that sort of spun up the you know, sort of the watershed moment of,” okay, time to record again. >> So, buddy, why don’t you kick us off here? >> Yeah, rearrange your whole day. This is such huge huge news. And if you if you go back to our August 13th podcast uh which was called tech experts breakdown the incoming AI crypto collision uh that we did with Eric Pulier. If you go to minute 56 of that of that podcast you’ll see us calling this out and predicting it. Um including the fact that Liupold Dashenbrunner our guy that we’ve the genius we’ve been clo closely following through his hedge fund had a half billion dollar position in options that he’d put on Intel. And so our our best simulation today is that he’s up about two 300% on those options in today only as am I by the way. Uh so big big day
[00:04:01] big day for me and big day for him and a big day for us following these brain brainiacs who you know that’s why Alex is here. Uh the world is changing so quickly and opportunities are are changing so quickly. So what happened here? Exactly as we had thought. Uh the US cannot let Intel fail. It’s our one and only chip fab company that’s truly domestic. TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., T for Taiwan, has 66% market share in the chips that drive AI. Uh, China is only 90 miles away from Taiwan and thinks it’s part of their country. And so there was no way the US government was going to let Intel fail. And then after the US government invested and bought 10% of Intel, uh Nvidia has followed suit. And I’m sure there’s some uh some White House pressure behind this deal. But Nvidia needs chip manufacturing. It’s essentially sold out for infinite future. Uh and the constraint to all
[00:05:01] chip creation is the fabs. Intel has fabs and they’re actually starting to work really well, too. So the stock’s up 25 30% today alone based on this news. More importantly, it gives Intel the capital to finish building out their 1.8 uh nanometer process, their antrom they call it process uh which is you know absolute cutting edge front of the queue kind of process and it takes the risk of complete failure kind of off the table in terms of of Intel. I >> I can’t believe we’re talking about 1.8 nanometer processes. I mean we’re getting down to >> atomic level precision here. It’s insane. I mean it’s it’s nanotechnology. >> It’s nanotech. Yeah. It’s it’s fun to talk about, isn’t it? Because it’s one of the many things we learned at MIT that were impossible. >> Yes. >> Including, you know, anything past a gigahertz and clock speed. Uh, you know, there’s a whole litany of them. So, you know, these barriers just keep falling one at a time. But yes, >> well, as Richard Fineman said, there’s
[00:06:00] plenty of room at the bottom. So, Peter, if if you’re a little bit anxious at night worrying that we’re going to to run out of nanometers or angstroms, there’s always pot and phento after that. >> Yeah. You know, I I love I love Feman’s paper. I think it was 1957 or 1958 when he wrote basically the first treatise that would become uh the thought experiment around nanotechnology. And and do you remember Alex the uh the prize that he put up at that time? >> Well, so I I think maybe you’re you’re gesturing at the uh the Fineman Prize hosted by the foresight institute. >> Yes. >> Well, no, no, no. This was no this was not this was back in the original 1950 I think it was 1958. Uh he basically said I I will award a prize I going to guess here at the numbers like $1,000 for the first team that can create like a working motor within a one uh you know some cub some very small cubic uh dimension uh and he expected it to be driving nanotechnology. He didn’t expect
[00:07:00] it to be one so quickly. And you know very quickly a graduate student comes to him with a microscope and on the microscope uh objective is this very small motor that he had he had he had created with fine uh you know tweezers and fine tools to win the Fineman prize. uh not the intention and so writing rules the correct way but we’re getting to the point now where nanotechnology and this is the manip manipulation of atoms one at a time going to unlock so many different things on the back end of AGI and ASI but back to this one Alex how do you think about this move I mean history does rhyme uh at the corporate level this this does remind me a bit of the 1997 investment by Microsoft where Microsoft uh in exchange for an investment. Apple obviously wasn’t doing well at the time. There >> this image here, here’s uh Steve Jobs at
[00:08:00] the podium in his classic this classic look and classic stature and up on this giant screen is Bill Gates, a very young Bill Gates and and what is Stephen what is Steve and Bill talking about here, Alex? >> They they were at the time announcing uh to the audience I think a very surprising partnership. Microsoft Internet Explorer would get bundled with every new version of uh Mac OS as the default internet browser. There were several other parts of the agreement including Microsoft Office uh being refreshed or renewed for for Apple devices. But this was also in some sense a turning point for for Apple. So having a a long history myself with uh with Intel in high school I did the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. >> I was a winner. I I was a winner of of the ISF. I was a winner of the Intel science talent search. I was a winner of the uh Intel undergraduate research award. I have a lot of history and and and amazing amazing feelings for for Intel and I would love to see it uh love to see a success story in the style of
[00:09:01] what happened with Apple after the 97 Microsoft investment. >> Sel, are you jealous here? >> No, just um I’m always in awe of the intellectual um kind of fortress we have with us. So, love it. Well, this this analogy was actually very brilliant. Um, but it’s uh it’s exactly 10%. It’s almost it’s almost identical. So, you have you have a company that, you know, everyone’s lost faith in. Apple was almost bankrupt. Everyone forgets that. Uh, everyone’s lost faith in it. Nobody wants to buy. And Bill Gates decides to make an investment. I think it was what was it 1 billion or 10 billion, very similar, but it was 10% uh of the company. and it reestablished its credibility and also gave them the cash they needed to do the turnaround. And then Apple went on to become the most valuable company in the world after that. And so really cool to dig that out of the archives because the deal structure and the whole dynamic is virtually identical to what you’re seeing today with Intel Nvidia. Also, you know, a challenge for the audience, if you want to go back and pull up
[00:10:00] ancient stock data, look at Apple’s stock prior to that investment from Microsoft, uh, and then compare it to Intel’s stock prior to this investment from Nvidia. And I think you’ll see some incredible parallels. Uh, you know, this this is related. This is me. >> Yeah. What what are we seeing here in this image for those listening, not watching? Uh so in the image I’m teaching class at MIT foundations of AI ventures. Lex Freriedman who guest lectured that day is in the front row which is really cool. And one of the things I’m telling the class is that Nvidia is going to become an AI company and not a graphics chip company. So this is back in 2023 February uh semester fall semester 2023 or sorry spring semester 2023. Uh Nvidia’s stock at that point according to this chart is worth half a trillion dollars. So it’s now what four four to four and a half trillion. So up maybe 8x since that day. And yeah and on that particular day Nvidia still had the majority of its revenue from graphics
[00:11:02] chips going into Xboxes and things like that. Uh and not from AI but this is an AI class. So I’m telling everybody in the class AI is going to be so much bigger of a use case for Nvidia. And so I showed the stock ticker to the class and and and the best thing about this picture is that kid in the front row, that student in the front row who happens to be wearing a suit, which is really unusual, is on his iPhone. And I’m guessing that he’s buying Nvidia stock during during the lecture. So I’m hoping he is actually. >> Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity, and more. There’s no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters, that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these meta trends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends 10 years before anyone else, this
[00:12:00] report’s for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world’s most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world’s most disruptive tech. It’s not for you if you don’t want to be informed about what’s coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmmandis.com/tatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode. I have a question for you guys and we’ve talked about this in the past which is you’re not going to give investment advice and this is not investment advice but if you were going to pick uh a a stock or a field to invest in right now okay I you know you can tell me listen I’m going to continue to go double down on Nvidia and Intel that’s fine we’ve seen some incredible growth there where would you invest your capital knowing what you know about the massive growth we’re seeing Um, who wants to go first? >> If I only have a very small amount of money, uh, I’m going after seed stage startups, very smart people building AI
[00:13:01] companies that do something useful for the world, something that changes, and you know, there’s so many use cases, tens of thousands of untouched use cases. So, you can’t go wrong with those startup teams, uh, if they’re smart people. Uh, then if I have a lot of money and I’m trying to put it to work, it’s the data center buildout. >> Uh, this this whole everything we’re talking about here with with Intel, the t Yeah, I love Alex’s quote on this. the tiling of the entire earth with compute which is inevitable. Uh there’s no limit for the appetite of AI. There’s no constraint. It will just keep improving humanity as you build more of it. But it requires massive amounts of data centers. That includes real estate, includes power, includes all of the >> But if you’re going for public companies, uh who are what the public companies building out data centers today? >> Well, Cororeweave, Cruso Cruso is not public yet, but it will be. Um uh coreweave was the one you wanted obviously. Uh you’ll see that on the next slide actually. Um uh and there’ll be many more. Uh you know we have a couple that are here in the incubator
[00:14:01] that hopefully will become public investable within a year or two. Uh so but you saw with coreweave when it came out it was it was overlooked for you know a month maybe and you had a great opportunity to get in. Leopold got in uh and uh then it skyrocketed as people realized the demand is is you know basically infinite. >> Nice. Um, Salem, do you have any any favorites that you would, >> you know? Yeah, the obvious ones would be say Microsoft or Nvidia, but I think that just plays to the narrative. Uh, well, I would go with um next era, which is uh exponential clean energy. >> If we’re tiling the world with chips, we need uh alternative energy to power those chips in a decentralized way. And they’re the biggest renewables utility with decent dividends, etc., etc. Uh there are two inflection points I just want to point out here. In 2016, if you were building an energy generation facility, it became cheaper to build a solar farm than to build a fossil fuel plant. That was back almost 10 years ago. >> Amazing stat. So true.
[00:15:00] >> But 2019, we hit a second inflection point that’s even more important, which is since 2019, it’s been it’s cheaper to build and operate a solar than just to operate a fossil fuel plant. So the capex and opex of fossil of solar is now cheaper than the opex of fossil fuels. So now we know we need government policy will naturally deprecate fossil fuels over time. All of that renewable energy is marshal perfect for data center power uh etc. So lowcost power uh generating in all sorts of weird and wonderful places is going to be the future. So that’s where I’d put a bit of a long-term play but that’s where I’d put it. >> Yeah. How about you Alex? any bets? >> Oh, the problem is I think this is a trick question. If if if we believe if if we’re drinking our own Kool-Aid and and we believe any of our forecasts about the imminence of super intelligence, recognize that most of the volume on US equities markets is algorithmic in nature. The markets are already dominated by AI. AI knows
[00:16:01] substantially all of what we’re discussing here. the the market algos, the trading algos have already priced in all of the headlines that we’re discussing here. So really for me to indicate any sort of preference is implicitly an assertion that I know better than the the collective intelligence of all human traders and all AI traders, which in some sense would be contradictory to the underlying thesis that we’re on the verge of super intelligence. So I choose >> that’s a lovely and elegant that’s a lovely and elegant copout, but I still call it a copout. I I I I choose the the market overall uh the super intelligence that it is >> amazing. Uh you know, if I’m thinking about big companies right now, I’m still believing that Google is the dominant player in this and is while it’s been priced in uh knowing what Google has coming, uh I think it and seeing what the prediction markets are, Google’s
[00:17:00] going to dominate. At the same time, I think uh you know Elon with XAI is going to is going to at least claim AGI first. We’ll see how that moves things, but X is not a public company yet, but Tesla is uh I believe is basic we’ll talk about this in a little bit. You know, he said for Tesla, Optimus is 80% of their future value. I mean, I think the interesting trade would have been uh to have gotten back into Tesla when Elon dropped out of the government and started focusing uh once again. >> I have I have a I have a Google question though >> and this is for the three of you which I it’s not easy to get a good answer out in the world on this. Why is Google not selling the tensor chips? Because they would they would make so much money if they put those >> Oh, yeah. No, and I totally know the answer to that. Yeah, you know the the rate at which Gemini is growing and V3 is growing uh they can’t this comes back to can’t you can’t get enough fab capacity to keep up with the demand >> so completely consuming the entire
[00:18:02] supply. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I also think there’s an interesting play to be done in uranium. >> Um you know we’re going to be heading towards a fision uh future. I mean I’d love to go solar but I I don’t think we’re going to be building solar rapidly enough. If I look at the fusion timelines today, you know, Helion’s coming on with a small fusion plant 2028, 2029. Commonwealth fusion’s coming on in 2031. Uh, we have a real problem in the United States. You know, Eric Schmidt called this. He said, “We’re not chip limited. We’re not intelligence limited. We’re electron limited.” And so, we need to build as quickly as we can SMRs and Gen Gen 4 nuclear reactors. and we need uranium uh for that. So I might be making a bet on uranium related ETFs. Uh Alex, do you not completely so two two two points one
[00:19:00] completely disagree with the the premise of particular bets again commodities are relatively efficient markets as well. If if you subscribe to any variant any approximation of the EMH the question doesn’t even make sense. And then to Salem’s point, there have been headlines over the past couple of months that Google is exploring potentially selling TPUs outside of of its own cloud offerings for what that’s worth. >> Dave, you were going to say before before Alex was able >> before Alex was able to tell us how silly we were in such a beautiful and gentle fashion. >> Yeah. Yeah. I know when Bill Gross was on our podcast, he uh he pointed out that uh you know this power supply issue, you know, hydro pumped hydro is a huge way to store solar. Every piece of land on the planet that has a lake with a mountain next to it has already been purchased for this. I was like, what? Like we just it this this stuff reacts
[00:20:00] so quickly. But the opportunity to make money on that actually came and went, you know, in 2024, early 2025. So, so this stuff, you know, the other the real estate, Alex was the first to point this out actually, the real estate that surrounds nuclear power plants, which normally nobody wants, right? You don’t want to live right next to a nuke. Uh, it’s gone way up in value. Uh, so, you know, because that’s the best place to put the data center, you know, right? Because of power transmission costs and whatever other reason. >> I have a nuclear trends are coming really, really quickly. >> I have a nuclear question. Why aren’t we looking more at thorium which is safe and and a decent alternative? Worrying about uranium seems redundant to me. >> Thorium as a you know the work the work that that Gates is back in that in the thorium reactors. >> Yeah. >> They are they are >> to to first order I think a good mental model is everyone is looking at everything at this point. >> Yeah. So, Alex, your investment advice, by the way, just to repeat it once
[00:21:01] again, this is not investment advice. We’re just sharing what we think is sort of hot areas that are going to have value creation in the world. Whether you invest or not is up to you. Uh, but Alex, so you’re just saying buy the uh uh buy QQQ, what I’m I’m not saying do anything or don’t do anything. Uh I I am saying that my own outlook is if uh if if you as I think that the market is collectively super intelligent, it’s difficult to rationalize trying to think that you have a better insight into the market unless you have insider information than the collective intelligence of the market. >> This is a shing your cat approach to investment advice, >> basically. >> All right, let’s move on. Dave, we we ended this uh live on Leopold, Ashen Brener’s holdings. >> Yeah, let’s just close this out real quick because I don’t don’t want to dwell on Leopold forever, but um but you can check this out at 13f.info. Uh all
[00:22:02] hedge funds need to disclose their holdings every quarter. Uh and so this comes right from that website. You can see a quarter ago he had a billion dollars. You see in the middle of the slide there. Now it’s 2.1 billion. That’s some of that is inflows, some of that is gains. When you look at his holdings under the covers, you can see his core investment went from about a $50 million investment to probably 150 plus million dollar value. So he roughly tripled his money, made a hund00 million plus gain on core alone. And then on the right, I asked Perplexity to try and simulate as best it could what he might own in Intel because his biggest holding, you remember when we looked at this in August, his biggest holding was Intel and it was listed as 500 million, which is half the fund, but it was options. So that’s the, you know, that’s the if converted shares times the price is that. So what does he actually own? And it came back with this options ladder on the bottom right. So you know, these high-risk call options, which at the time were trading for under a
[00:23:00] dollar. Uh, and so I just went out and bought exactly what Perplexity said he must have. Uh, and so now today I have the biggest one day gain in my entire life. Actually, I’m partying today. >> You’re buying dinner next time. >> Sure. Uh but you can see on the bottom right corner just today uh those call options are up 255 250%. Uh that was earlier this morning. So it’s up a little a little bit more from from there. >> So brilliant. I mean he saw it coming. He executed on it and uh congratulations to him. We got to get him on the pod. >> Fantastic. >> Well, more importantly, you called it out in July, Dave. So that’s huge. >> Yeah. >> All right. >> All right. uh you can’t sit back and uh and sort of just be watching today. It’s taking action. MIT grads help build neoclouds. >> Yeah. >> Back to you, Dave. >> Yeah. So, I just wanted to throw this in there because I think it’s cooler than cool. You have Kush Bavaria on the bottom right there who’s here at Link Ventures has decided to co-found this company working closely with Chase
[00:24:00] Lockmiller who we had on stage last week in PaloAlto. Chase is on the on the top right in that chair. Uh Chase is building out Stargate, remember the 500 billion dollar data center in Abalene, Texas. And uh Peter, I think you committed for us to fly out there and uh podcast. >> We’ll do an episode of Moonshots from Stargate, sit down uh with with Chase and talk about, you know, again, one of the most critical assets we have, which is which is power and data generation together. >> Alex, are you going to come for that? >> Absolutely. I wouldn’t miss it for the world. >> Yeah. Oh, that’s so cool because I’ve I’ve seen some big data centers recently, but this thing is bigger than big. And when you see things of that scale, it’s kind of like a SpaceX launch. It’s just you you can’t get it out of your mind ever again. Just the >> I noticed you didn’t you didn’t you only asked Alex. You didn’t invite Salem. >> See, you’re going to be there for sure. I don’t have no doubt about that. Although you’re always boopping around India these days. >> No, no, I’m back for a bit, but my schedule is a bit crazy.
[00:25:01] >> So, what’s a NeoCloud, buddy? >> Yeah. Yeah. So, Neocloud is a it’s a new age data center built entirely for AI, you know, from the ground up for AI and um you know, some of them are local so that you have low latency for things like voice AI and some of them are central for like training and that’s what Abalene is just massive training data center and these things are just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger as quickly as we can create the the chips and the power supplies. Um, so they’ve decided the the thing I really wanted to say about this story is that Wayne Kush’s co-founder there is leaving his quant trading job where he’s probably printing money >> to do this because he absolutely hates quant trading. You don’t talk to anybody. You’re not changing the world and everything around you, all your classmates and everybody are doing something world changing. you know, it’s curing a disease, saving lives, building things that make the world smooth and seamless and entertaining, and you’re just trading all day. And I love that because uh no, no offense to the quant traders out there. It’s they’re they’re
[00:26:00] great, but I like the builders, and I’m passionate about the builders. So, I’m so glad that Kush was able to pull one of them away and put them into build mode. So, they’re going to uh they’re going to build a basically a Neocloud um it’s a company that will use a combination of crypto and options uh CBOE listed options to help Neoclouds fund massive buildouts to create more and more of these things. And that’s that’s all I can say about the plan so far because it’s it’s still in stealth. >> It’s fascinating. We’re living in a world where we are tiling the world both in energy and in uh in data and in intelligence. And ultimately we’re literally I think about this. We’re literally turning electrons into cash with Bitcoin and crypto. We’re turning electrons into intelligence with our data centers. Um and it’s accelerating. I mean I cannot even imagine where we’re going to be a year from now, let alone 5 years from now. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software
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[00:28:01] >> Let’s jump into the AI wars. Uh, okay. Here we go. Deep Mind and OpenAI achieve gold at the coding Olympics. Over to you, Alex. Gosh, this is such an exciting development. If if you look at the past six or so months of developments from the frontier labs on the international math olympiad IMO golds which several American and Chinese labs claimed uh credit for with with their models with the the international Olympiad and informatics III. I was on once upon a time I was on the the US Olympic team for for the IOI and now for the ICPC uh which is a collegiate coding Olympics. It’s absolutely incredible to see if if you remember think back to uh the original >> Qstar model. This was this uh reasoning model from OpenAI that was then renamed project strawberry and renamed from project strawberry to the O class of
[00:29:01] models 01 and 03. >> That was like the in some sense the last major overhang to collapse the the last major jump in capability from the Frontier Labs. The jump from models that couldn’t reason to models that could reason. And this smells to me like the next major leap after reasoning models. Uh which is to say models that are able to reason without the ability without having been trained on easy to verify problems. If you’re solving a math problem on the IMO, you don’t have the luxury of being able to take a partial result, a partial solution and go up and ask a judge, am I correct? And similarly here in these coding Olympics, we’re starting to see AIs that are strictly superhuman that do better than all of the humans in the competition on problems on tasks that are difficult to verify in in the middle of the contest.
[00:30:00] So I I my prediction here is sometime perhaps by the end of this calendar year we’re going to see the next major strawberry QS star uh oer moment when some of these models start to get broadly deployed generally available and you know Peter my my modal hypothesis regarding the future is first we solve super intelligence and then we use super intelligence to solve math science and engineering. I I think this is >> solve everything. I I think this is like the key building block war cry. That’s humanity war cry >> or AI war cry. >> So Alex, a question for you. So Dario LA, I don’t know 6 months ago went on record saying he expected we’d be at 90% everything being coded by AI and in 2026 we’d reach 100% of all coding being done by AI. Uh your thoughts on that? depending on which rumors you believe coming out of the frontier model uh developers the frontier labs it seems
[00:31:00] like we’re very much on trajectory for that you you read stories of uh now that almost every frontier lab has its own agentic code generator you read stories about people uh in these frontier labs yelling at their agentic code generators to to do their work for them rather than writing code at this point themselves I I think we more or less found our way into that part of Daario’s future. >> Incredible. >> Can I throw out an a metaphor here, Alex, and tell me if you agree with this or not? >> Sure. >> Um, when we started um having AIS create art, they were kind of very much poo pooed at the beginning and then over time they if if they were anonymous, they started winning art competitions, right? And and art is really kind of generative at its core. Uh when you’re a high functioning software developer, you’re essentially an artist. you’re kind of pulling together libraries. You’re trying to figure out how you’re going to solve particular problems. It feels to me like that same tipping point
[00:32:00] has been achieved in coding where they’re using kind of constructs that most human beings wouldn’t kind of consider, but they’re bringing it to bear on a particular problem and solving it very very elegantly. Would you agree with that metaphor? It >> it’s it’s an interesting question that I want to construe as a question about benchmarking. So with the early generative art arguably other than sort of binary taste tests between competing models on various arenas there to my knowledge there wasn’t really a benchmark for superhuman art generation. Whereas for coding, for math, for some of these other relatively straightforward to verify problems and and tasks, there very much is a goalpost, a benchmark that that one can uh a waterline if you will, that one can say, “Oh, this is superhuman versus subhuman.” Which is why, you know, we’ve talked in the past about how we just zoomed right by the touring test. Uh even though the Loner Prize, you know, rest in peace, isn’t even active anymore. We just zoomed right by
[00:33:00] superhuman conversational agents. Why did we do that? Arguably because we didn’t have a a strict rigorous benchmark in place to to be the the the red flag sign that we’ve just passed it. Same >> goes to our earlier conversation. We’re like, well, the benchmarks are all gone now, so now what do we do? >> Yeah, right. >> We need harder benchmarks >> and we’ll talk about that. I think uh benchmarks give us targets to shoot for and they allow us to measure our progress and we humans do our best work when we’re competing against each other. Uh, I’m going to say perhaps uh future agendic AIs are going to do good work when they’re inspired to motivate motivated to compete against each other too. We’ll see. All right, other breaking news uh just in the last 48 hours, new Meta Rayband powered display glasses and a neural band. So, this is the first ever private in lens display controlled by a wristband where you’re using basically finger movements and you’re picking up the EMG electro uh myioraphic signals coming out of your
[00:34:01] forearm to be able to type silently, right? So, you’re talking to your wife or girlfriend or boyfriend and you’re having an in-depth conversation and you’re responding your text at the same time. What could possibly go wrong? Let’s take a look at this video. One moment. So, we can see here the uh the graphic. You see the person’s hand basically manipulating the display. So, you’re looking off into the distance and you’re typing at the same time. Uh thoughts? Uh first of all, let’s talk about, you know, how’s what’s the fashion statement here? What do you think of the glasses? A little bit too thick on the rim. >> Good enough. >> People are going to wear them. They’re close enough. I mean, the the prior, you know, look through goggles. No, was
[00:35:00] never going to happen. These are close enough. >> Actually, you know, if you think about how your phone got smaller and smaller and smaller and then somebody said, you know what? actually want more screen space and now they’re they’re getting bigger. I think the glasses will do the same thing because as people get used to them, you’re like, well, I want a little more battery life and they’re actually gonna they they’ll be fine. >> At uh at the Abundance Summit, I don’t know, 5 years ago, I had a company called Mojo Vision there that had basically created a a display on contact lenses uh which I think would be super cool and I think we’ll probably get there eventually. But Zuck is predicting, you know, that these glasses will replace phones. Um, the challenge I have is I lose so many my sunglasses all the time. I’m concerned about losing a thousand piece of equipment. >> You know, really eye opening for me is if you want to grab a picture, I didn’t quite get this until somebody showed me. If you want to grab a picture, you just hold your fingers like that and that takes the picture instantaneously and then it files it. Yeah, >> I was like, “Oh my god, these gesture
[00:36:01] controls are going to get really ornate.” You’ll see people at the airport kind of waving their hands around like, “What is going on there?” But it’s like, “Take that picture, file that picture, whatever.” But it’s a great way to control the machine. It’s so it’s like, “Wow, I now I suddenly see where this is going.” >> Uh, so I love your glasses, buddy. >> These are the Meta AI glasses you handed out a few years ago at Abundance, Peter. The first generation of which I was surprisingly useful. Uh, really great to have conversations with and walk around, etc. as long as you’re in the sun. If you’re in the dark, it gets a little harder. Um, I’ve got a prediction that this is a very temporary thing. I think we’ll get so many more efficient ways of getting signals from noise out of the body like those that recent development where you could mouth um mouth what you’re trying to say and it would just speak it for you that I think this becomes irrelevant before it gets trapped. >> You’re saying that the the EMG on your wrist, the the neural band is going to become relevant. Yeah, I think we’ll find much more elegant ways of getting straight from the brain to what you’re trying to do rather than go through
[00:37:01] physical manipulation, etc. >> Alex, what are you thinking about these glasses? >> Yeah, I I tend to think that the glasses are lovely, but they’re also a bit of a red herring. The input methods, I think, are are far more interesting. So it it may start with uh with these neural meta neural bands uh uh wrist band that that looks like a smartwatch that is effectively directly interfacing albeit non-invasively with the peripheral nervous system. But this here in plain sight is the beginnings of I think a brain computer interface. You start with the peripheral nervous system interface around the wrist. It’s going to work its way up to some sort of extension of smart glasses probably or a headband that does a non-invasive brain computer interface. And the the future, Verer Vinci wrote about this extensively in Rainbows and uh and and other novels. We’re finally living in the future where silent messaging that results from non-invasive peripheral nervous system
[00:38:00] computer interfaces is a reality. And th this probably ends up being the first mass market effectively BCI. >> Yep. You know what I find exciting? >> I just there’s a visual in my head of it slowly crawling up closer and closer to your brain as as it gets smarter. It’s a great horror movie waiting >> injecting nanites through the ear to connect to your temporal lobe. Um what I find fascinating here is a future in which we are constantly uploading our visual input right so you know imagine that we have enough memory enough bandwidth which we do where we’re dribbling bits all the time and whatever we’ve seen whatever we’ve heard every interaction we’ve had is available to your AI and available for for a full recall on the cloud Um, you know, how many times have you had a conversation with your spouse in which you said, you said, “No, no, no. I didn’t say that. I
[00:39:00] said this.” Well, you’re never going to have that argument again. It’s all going to be on record. Um, >> but Peter, also, I I think even putting aside the the the various sort of Black Mirroresque scenarios enabled by that, this is going to be amazing amazing for fleet learning and training of humanoid robots. Imagine a world Yeah. risk. >> Yeah. Imagine a world where where a billion of these plus are are deployed and now you can do fleet learning at scale of every sort of longtail uh occupation manual labor task just off of first person video data coming out of these smart glasses. >> And that’s what Elon said about, you know, training up Optimus 3. We’re no longer going to do it in, you know, full body suits where we’re we’re tracking uh the movements and 3D position of the fingers and hands. We’re going to be doing it from just visual learning. In the same way that uh you know self-driving was picked up from visual learning. Uh this is also going to be a massive value to the elder population,
[00:40:00] people who have degrading memory. Um I simply want it so that when someone’s approaching me, uh my AI does facial recognition and calls up the last conversation and reminds me to ask, you know, how’s your son or daughter’s birthday? I mean it it’s going to create a very rich social interaction level >> independent of the gesture stuff the broader implications of this are so huge right it’s like to all the stuff that you talked about Peter the cognitive enhancement the memory enhancement I think the the it’s just the interface that needs to be solved just a a humorous memory here I remember coming back from you were talking about marriage Peter and trying to recollect conversations I remember coming up from one of my business trips and I was a bit disheveled and a bit jetlagged and literally looks at me goes, “The user interface around you right now is really bad. I’ve never forgotten that.” Oh, I love that. So, this is a I mean, this for those listening, this is a window into what’s coming rapidly. We’ve
[00:41:00] been saying for some time that the form factor of the phone is going to disappear. It’s going to come into headwear. It’s going to become >> Yeah. Go on. >> Just occurred to me. Well, based on what Alex just said, I always wonder why. Why do I look forward to this podcast so much and canceling all my meetings to to do it? But what Alex just said just made me realize something that I hadn’t realized before, which is you know how when the laptop first came out, everybody wanted to attach a mouse to it because you’re used to using a mouse. And then the trackpad, you know, on all the iPhones came out and everyone’s used to swiping. So then they backported the trackpad to the laptop. Now everything works the way it does on your phone. You swipe left, swipe up, down, whatever. So now the new interface is going to be waving your hands in the air because that’s the only way to control the glasses and then people are going to fall in love with that and then the keyboard and the trackpad will go away because like well why can’t I use my gestures on my laptop? It’s got a camera and so I totally didn’t dawn on me till just now based on what Alex said that that’s how it’s going to evolve. >> Yeah. Well and it’s going to be this will be a driver for increases in BCI.
[00:42:02] So, at the Abundance Summit this year, I’ve got two of the top brain computer interface companies coming. Uh, one is invasive and one is non-invasive. But I think our ability to get this the signal out of the noise is going to enable us to think and to, you know, say click picture or, you know, pull up my my schedule for the day. Um, I I think that this this form of of of user interface is what’s going to ultimately drive a need for rapid BCI capabilities cuz I don’t think you’re going to want to use your hands for the long run. I think you’re going to want to think and Google. >> It’s only a phase in and to to the extent that you’re a technological determinist and and you think there’s sort of a pre-ordained sequence of of technologies that’s likely to to happen. I I think the the consensus among the perhaps futurist community is we go from smartphones to smart glasses to BCIS to
[00:43:00] some sort of human machine symbiosis or or uploads in in roughly that order. So if if you believe in that sequence then this is right on the money for where we’re supposed to be. >> Yeah. >> And let’s note that the other eye opener >> let’s note this is a long progression that’s been going on for you know hundreds of years right? Um Dave, you sometimes wear glasses like we would call you a transhumanist because you’re augmenting yourself with technology. >> Um the minute you get a vaccination, you’re a cyborg technically. So this has been a a long thing. We’re just accelerating the pace of it very rapidly >> and we’re allowing ourselves to utilize more and more extreme uh you know variations of this. >> Yeah. The other the other insight, you know, comes out of this this brainstorming we do together as well is a lot of people that I talk to say, “Look, I don’t need my computer right in front of my eyes all day, and I don’t need I I need to disconnect from it.” And that’s true, but as soon as it’s super intelligent, and it’s giving you
[00:44:00] crazy great advice about where to stop and eat, where to drive, what to do next, how to live your life. Then you you get addicted to it so quickly because right now, you know, anyone under the age of 20 has iPhone separation anxiety or or phone separation anxiety. If you try and take away their phone for a weekend and they go camping in the woods without it, >> it’s there’s they’re just like in shock. >> But once the thing is super intelligent, having being disconnected from it will basically make you naked. >> And so people are going to wear your symbiote is gone. >> You know, we we made a decision in our family uh to not get our kids who are 14 now phones um until at least age 16. Uh, and you know, it’s so strange because when I go to a birthday party of uh of their classmates, you know, at age 14, they’re all heads down in their phones, ignoring everything else that’s going on. And I just I just hate that. So, it’s been tough. But, you know, it’s harder than not giving your kids phones.
[00:45:01] It’s taking it away after you’ve given it to them. >> Mhm. >> So, I’m I’m hoping the kids will jump instead of a phone, they’ll go directly to a BCI. We’ll see. We I think this is so wise, Peter, because at this age, their brains are just finalizing their fi final kind of construction of the neoortex and to have it diverted away is just very very damaging. >> I mean, they just to be clear, they’re not saints, right? They’re on Roblox and Minecraft and all the games on their they they do have MacBooks, uh, which they like, but I it just you’re not carrying the MacBook around during social interactions during a baseball game or or during a birthday party. So, there’s some level. So, to other parents out there, if you’re kids don’t have a phone yet, uh, consider not giving it to them. The data is so strong uh, about mental health. >> I think that’s the key point. There’s so much strong evidence, right? And I think one of the things we are really deep on in this podcast is evidentiary based
[00:46:01] framing of discussions. >> Yeah. All right. Uh let’s move on to our our next topic here. And this was a a tweet that went out uh this morning that I flagged. Uh it’s the US risks losing to China in chip wars. This comes from our US AI and cryptos are David Saxs. Let me just read it. Huawei just launched a new AI chip and China has ordered firms to stop buying certain NVIDIA chips. China is not desperate for our chips. It’s producing its own and intends to compete globally in the semiconductor marketplace. If US firms are blocked by excessive controls, we risk forfeiting the AI race to China. the hawk position uh to help American companies win, not help Huawei build a digital silk road is so critically important. So uh we’ve talked about this. As soon as you make anything illegal or you stop trade, you’re
[00:47:01] incentivizing the other side, in this case, China, to develop the capabilities and then compete directly with you. And this is about who’s going to buy, you know, throughout Europe, through Africa, throughout the rest of Southeast Asia. What chips are these companies gonna buy? Is it Intel and Nvidia or is it from Huawei? Uh, Alex, your thoughts here? I >> I think it’s instructive to look at what happened to computing during the cold war and in particular there was so much siloization in the Soviet Union of their computing stack. They were inventing all sorts of exotic architectures like turnary computers and uh in the west and and ultimately the world we settled on a binary architecture zeros and ones for computers. The the Soviet Union because in part of of the iron curtain was experimenting uh deep deep in in their tech stack with all sorts of exotic architectural options that the the west wasn’t considering. If if the situation
[00:48:03] does play out in a way where there is effectively competition deep into the tech stack between great powers, then I I would expect based on history that we’re going to see, ironically greater diversity deeper in the stack. Maybe maybe not quite at the the level of binary versus turnary computing systems, but certainly I would expect to see more experimentation deep in the stack. Does this ultimately help America by having a great uh capable uh sort of competitor out there? >> Well, I I think I there there are different sides one can take uh in in the broader discussion. I I I know Peter, you’re a fan of uh the alternative reality television television series For all mankind that explores what would have perhaps happened if the Soviet Union had been the first to to land a person on the moon rather than the United States and
[00:49:00] all of the follow-on consequences as that original event ripples throughout the decades. It’s difficult to have a crystal ball to to know what happens uh decades from now depending on how the the great power competition over the semiconductor tech stack plays out. It’s difficult to to to know for sure without a crystal ball. >> Yeah, it’s hard to predict the future. I get that. But what I’m just saying here is, you know, if the US was so overdocant uh that it was the only player, the incentive to continue innovating is there, but still somewhat slows down. When you’ve got Huawei sort of leveling up uh to that of Nvidia, I think you’re going to see the White House, you’re going to see capital in the United States really tripling down. So is this another uh in some way is this move is this uh sort of reality about Huawei and China going to become additional fuel uh for the US government and the US industries to align. I mean again
[00:50:03] we’re in a in a war footing here. This is a war cry that we just heard from David Saxs. >> Yeah. And I think I think what is new and interesting to me about what David’s saying here is the digital silk road. We’re not going to lose to China if it’s like the US versus the Soviet Union. But if the whole world ends up partnering with China and it’s the US versus the world and you know See when he got back from India and you said hey what’s the attitude like in India and Salem says it’s like America like what where’s that coming from? So, you know, if if Huawei becomes the open and friendly partner to the world and the US gets isolationist, that’s what I think David is warning us against here. And so, you know, what is Europe going to do? What is a India going to do in that 1.4 billion people? >> I have I I think this is more about the politics rather than a innovation race. uh just because the there’s so much
[00:51:01] incentive in the world to turn away from the US right now given the tariffs and other things that uh this is a for that’s the forcing function rather than the chip wars themselves. It’s it’s a pretty bad situation right now. It’s it’s you know 40 years of US diplomacy tried to was trying to keep India and China apart and and now that’s gone. And so I think there’s a bigger game at play here. There’s also and I will love your comment on this Alex the whole open- source uh movement right so when you look at different countries everybody wants their sovereign AI everyone wants data centers uh who are they going to use whose AI you know engines whose chipsets are going to use I mean the world is going to split between Huawei and Chinese open- source models and Nvidia and US models we see in last few WTF episodes we’ve talked about open eye going aggressively into India into the
[00:52:02] UK into Greece into other places right because if you embed yourself there and people grow up with your models they’re likely to stick with them I think this is a land grab in a lot of different ways at a very critical time over the next two or three years Alex is uh you going to tell me I’m wrong or do you agree >> I I’ll half agree the the world is is hungry for int intelligence in general and maybe super intelligence in particular. But I I also think there’s a sense in which this this being accelerated compute is the geopolitically significant scarce resource of the moment. If we were having this discussion 10 years from now, maybe we’ll be bellyachching over, oh, you know, Mars colony is is running out of resources or lunar colony has a lot of competition on the moon. So I I think in in some sense it’s important to jump up a few levels and abstract out the principle that as long as we’re in a pre-geneneral abundance world in
[00:53:01] civilization, there will always by power law statistics alone tend to be a one maximally geopolitically important and scarce resource at any given time. And at the moment it’s accelerated computing. Everybody, there’s not a week that goes by when I don’t get the strangest of compliments. Someone will stop me and say, “Peter, you’ve got such nice skin.” Honestly, I never thought, especially at age 64, I’d be hearing anyone say that I have great skin. And honestly, I can’t take any credit. I use an amazing product called One Skin OS01 twice a day, every day. The company was built by four brilliant PhD women who have identified a 10 amino acid peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it and like I say, I use it everyday, twice a day. There you have it. That’s my secret. You go to onskin.co and write peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. Okay, now back to the episode. I hope you guys all appreciate uh these conversations. Uh I want to take a
[00:54:02] moment and just say to our subscribers, thank you uh for subscribing. If you want to hear about our WTF episodes when they come out because the speed at which we’re putting them out has increased. Take a moment to subscribe to this channel. lets us know you love what we do uh and allows us to really keep you up to date because we’re starting to record these WTIP episodes when there is breaking news rather than just once a week. Sometimes we’ll have this twice a week. So, and again, thank you for that. Our our goal here is to make my two boys proud, which they’ve said will happen when we reach a million subscribers. So, what the hell? All right, here’s our next piece of news. Uh and uh it’s uh it’s fascinating. It’s part of our solved everything. Uh, Alex, I’m going to ask you. So, AI discovers new solution to century old fluid dynamics problem. How critical is this? How valuable is this? Why should people care? Oh, it’s incredible. Uh, so we’ve
[00:55:01] spoken in the past, Peter, about this notion of AI solving everything in math, science, and engineering. And there are million-dollar prizes for solving particular problems in math, science, and engineering. And this development which was launched literally a few hours before we recorded this episode by Google DeepMind is is one such task. So this is progress towards a a general solution to uh a million-doll problem. It’s it’s one of the so-called clay millennium prize problems. It’s referred to in uh math and mathematical physics as the the Navier Stokes problem. And and the problem is is basically if you have a fluid it does the fluid ever have infinite densities or or other unnatural properties. Is it possible to stir a fluid in just the right way that a singularity appears in it? And the approach that that Google deep mind has taken is really really interesting. So
[00:56:02] for those who haven’t followed the Navier Stokes problem which I would say parathetically uh this is a key signpost I think that we’re on the verge of solving math when AI is taking these grand challenges in math and just knocking them out it’s a constructive approach so mathematicians like Terry Tao and others have been knocking on the door of this problem for a decade plus and and the proposed solution to this problem wi-i which it appears is going to be a construction of a way to create singularities out of out of fluids could, as Terry and others have pointed out, enable us to build nano machines and computers out of just pure fluids. Imagine imagine if you could stir a glass of water in just the right way such that it formed circuits and those circuits performed general computations. And e even more exotically, imagine you could stir a glass of water in just the right way such that the it created nanom machines
[00:57:02] out of fluid flow patterns of turbulence in in that in that glass of water that created copies of themselves. So imagine creating self-replicating fluid nano machines out of a given fluid if you could just position the initial velocities and densities of the fluid in just the right way. If if there’s a constructive solution for Navier Stokes that results in singularities as as Terry and and others have studied this, it could literally unlock our ability and and granted this is on the more exotic end of applications to to build self-replicating fluid nano machines. >> Wow. >> I know that sounds farfetched, but this is, >> you know, if you go to alexw.org, or there are a whole bunch of essays that Alex has has written on computing substrates and people used to think about this a lot and you Alex mentioned back in the Soviet era you know when computing was new people thought about this all the time now everyone takes for granted that it’s all going to run on Nvidia chips but the neural algorithms
[00:58:00] the new algorithms that matter are just a couple hundred lines of code they’re very simple and all the complexity is in the parameter file and the self-organization so the idea of computing substrates that are self-organized is very viable with these new algorithms. So, it’s it’s a it’s not as far-fetched as as it sounds at all. >> And and to to Dave’s point, maybe just to to build on that, at the moment, we build our our GPUs based on silicon camos. Maybe at some point in the future if if if Navier Stokes and and other problems uh related problems have constructive solutions. Maybe we’ll be building our future accelerated compute out of plasmas or out of fluids. even you know cup of coffee might be more powerful computationally than an offtheshelf Nvidia RTX >> visual terminatorium here >> um and it reminds me of the exact the Hitchhocker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the whole world is essentially one big organic computer
[00:59:00] >> key is asking the right questions >> yes I love it all right next item here on our docket today study shows AI model can forecast a thousand plus diseases. Researchers built Deli-2M that can predict how a person’s health changes over time based on medical history. AI models can forecast risks for over a thousand different diseases and simulate what someone’s health might look like in 10 to 20 years, shaping how doctors and health care systems plan to treat and prevent illness. You know, so we’re reaching this singularity in health. We’ve seen Demis predict the end of all disease uh within the next 10 years. We’ve seen Dario Amade talk about doubling the human lifespan. And again, all of this is happening not because we humans are becoming smarter or that our biology is getting simpler. It’s just that we’re able to use, you know, advancing AI and soon ASI to understand
[01:00:02] what’s going on in your 40 trillion cells running 2 to 5 billion chemical reactions per second per cell. Uh, who wants to jump in on this? Alex, you want to jump in again? >> Yeah, I I’ll take this one. I mean, this was a a lovely paper in in this week’s Nature from a German team that I I think underlines that these foundation models that we’re training aren’t just about text. It’s not just text models or image generation with nano banana as we’ve discussed previously or even video or or audio. Now this paper is widely popularizing the notion of literally disease as its own modality for foundation models that can be trained with disease token sequences. Just like a sentence is tokenized into a sequence of almost word length tokens and then fed to uh frontier model like chat GPT. This is a model that tokenizes the electronic medical record history of many many patients into disease tokens
[01:01:01] and then can reason over a person’s entire history of health and illness as as if it were a sentence in in some language. And the the upshot of all of this is you can as with a conventional frontier model that does next token prediction in text. It can predict the next disease token that a person is likely to incur. And at some point you get sort of a medical time machine that’s able to extrapolate out entire contingencies contingency trees of a patient’s future medical history. And as they say, if if if you tell me where I’m going to die, I’ll make sure I’ll never go there. If if you can if you can extrapolate out a contingency tree of a person’s entire future history of health, you can make sure to avoid branches that you’d rather not spend time on. >> That’s incredible. you know the just the sequence of words you put forward here uh if you went back in history 5 years and spoke them like you know disease token sequence uh people go what in the world are you smoking >> you know what there were two things that struck me here one was the tokenization
[01:02:01] of not just text but the dis medical history what what Alex is referencing the second thing that struck me was this was done on a population of like close to 1.9 pe million people this is a big number and It it suggests that um uh diseases can be modeled across large populations in a really powerful way. This is incredible >> as baby. >> Yeah. >> And it did take >> that’s incredible and I encourage people not to be intimidated by it either. We’re seeing more and more business plans of people that are building uh topic specific foundation models and you know the funding is there uh and the people who jump in are succeeding wildly because what you know it it sounds really intimidating because it sounds ultra complex but the AI is such an incredible assistant uh and and the underlying algorithms are just very understandable if you if you’re willing to jump in and study. So this this seemed to me this seemed to me one of the those kind of things like if you look at the previous conversation about you know computational structures in a glass if we solve that problem it’s a
[01:03:01] little bit down the line this seemed to me like immediately usable because any single person could take their medical history throw it into this thing and say okay project out where I’m going to be right is does am I wrong on that? No, you’re not. Can I encourage folks, uh, one thing that you can do is if you want these slides from this episode, uh, we make them accessible. If you go to diamandis.comwtf, you can download the slides from this episode or other episodes and you know go to your Gemini 2.5 voice uh uh AI or go to you know open AI’s you know GPD5 voice AI and have a conversation and say you know on the WTF episode there was this this notion of deli2m um about forecasting disease is and then have a conversation with the AI and go deep. Uh it has this data in it and ask
[01:04:00] what does that mean and what’s the implications for me. I think uh your ability to have follow-on conversations after this podcast to dive in deep on a particular element. Um, you know, Alex is our own personal AI on this on this podcast, but you can imagine. >> Yeah, for sure. >> You could also use it to say, “Hey, watch that episode and tell me where I should invest.” >> Yeah, not investment advice. I’m going to say that again. Um, yeah. I I think that’s this is really exciting. So at at Fountain Life, you know, when I do my upload, I got 200 gigabytes of data and I have that data on my phone upload uploaded into our Zori AI, uh, which allows me to interpolate on my current medical information. I think what this is saying is it’s going to enable me to extrapolate beyond my current medical information. >> If you take that data from Found Life, Peter, and map it onto this, I mean, right there, you can get instant usage
[01:05:01] out of it, instant value, right? Yeah, for sure. >> At some point with these the the ability to extrapolate contingency trees for health, my expectation is healthcare becomes almost like a game of chess where you’re you’re playing against an opponent biology or at least un uh uninterrupted biology and the goal is to win. And if you can map out to high confidence the contingency tree of interventions, those would be like game actions and the underlying course of biology without that interaction, the the goal of winning is longevity. >> Yep. Uh absolutely. I’d like to move to our next uh category which is robotics. A lot of news in the robotics world this week as well. Uh let’s jump in. Uh the first piece is a friend of the pod uh Brett Adcock who’s been with us a couple of times. He was on my stage at the Abundance Summit last year. This year our theme at Abundance Summit 2026 is uh
[01:06:03] the rise of digital super intelligence and humanoid robots. So, I think if successful, I’ll have five different humanoid robot companies there with their robots where you can play and touch and feel them uh and see what it’s like. Well, Brett just announced this week that he raised over a billion dollars in a series C at an extraordinary valuation. Good on Brett, $93 billion. Full disclosure uh I am an investor in uh figure through my my bold capital partners venture fund. The investors include Nvidia, Intel Capital, Brookfield, Parkway Ventures. Uh and thus far figure has raised 2 billion over the last two years making one of the fastest growing startups. And what’s interesting enough is that Brett is investing this money really into manufacturing, right? Uh we’ll see that another company we did a podcast Dave
[01:07:00] and I were up in Palo Alto with Burnt Borick, the CEO of 1X Technologies that makes the Neo Gamma. Uh they’re in the midst of their raise right now and wish them the very best of luck. an incredible company and they’re going to be investing their capital once again in uh building out manufacturing and we’re not at the point yet where it’s going to be robots building robots but we’ll be there in the near future. But Dave, do you remember the conversation we had with Burnt about sort of the iPhone scaling goal that he had? >> Of course. Of course I do. Yeah, he had it all mapped out brilliantly in his mind actually. Uh, and he was he’s a phenomenal guy. And actually, um, Brett Adcock is too. Brett Adcock is the most down to the down to earth, salt of the earth, Midwestern, you know, snow shoveling guy made good. So, really really cheering for both of these guys. Yeah. And they’re both wrestling with the supply chain of parts. You know, there the the supply chain for robotics
[01:08:01] parts is terrible. China’s way ahead of us on that front, by the way. But, um, but that has got to get figured out really fast. And it just takes capital and focus. and now they have capital. So, so I think it’ll get built out very very quickly now. Humanoids first and then, you know, as Selena has been saying, it’ll branch out from humanoids very very quickly. >> Think I thought it was kind of funny, you know, uh, Burnt made a big big deal about the soft skin and the friendly. You remember the shirts they gave us or they’re they make their own fabric, super comfortable. >> Yeah, I love it. >> Yeah, your robot is better dressed than you are. Um, and so, so Brett is going down the, uh, Terminator look here, which kind of I I don’t know what the difference in philosophy is driven by, but if you look underneath, you know, the 1X robots that we saw in PaloAlto, they look just like this. They’re very Terminator looking under the under the soft >> XOS. It really is, it’s built to, you know, 1X’s robots are built to be soft and approachable. I would say almost huggable in that regard. But you know
[01:09:00] what I found so impressive about uh about Brett Adcock, he’s a consumate engineer founder. You know, he was uh he was running Archer Aviation, which is one of the flying car companies that went public for multiple billions. And when when Brett left Archer to start this, he committed a couple hundred million of his own capital to get it going. And that ballsy move enabled him to hire extraordinary talent from around the world and really uplevel in, you know, level after level. And I was lucky we got uh bold capital in uh very early. >> It’s so cool to see people like this succeed, too, cuz I had a great conversation yesterday with two MIT sophomores that are course 65, which is chips and software meshed together, and they’re so excited about the physical world. But for the longest time uh there was no way for people who like physical things to become this successful. You
[01:10:00] had to do software. You had to do software. And that was fine. You know, America was the only one. >> He was the only one. Now actually Elon has inspired a whole generation. These sophomores are wicked excited to build physical things using all this AI technology. >> I think there’s something else here though that’s worth pointing out, right? Which is that um these folks Brett and others are not interested in the money. They’re interested in making a massive difference and transforming the world. >> Yes. Exactly. >> And when you have that purpose and then you can have a success and you can deploy that capital back in the the positive feedback loop and flywheel that creates inspiring as Elon has done inspiring the next generation and Brett will inspire another several sets of generations. It’s incredible to see and and it’s hard to become pessimistic about the world when you see this. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Totally totally agree. I mean, there’s this feeling. You see it in the posts actually on the podcast of just fear and fear and fear and fear and and a lot of the people that rose to the top, you know, we’re kind of whack jobs. There’s no doubt about it. But but then you meet these guys that are the new
[01:11:01] generation >> and they’re so focused on world good and they’re so it’s so inspiring. So it does make you feel confident that >> that good things are coming. >> I have a funny story. I have a funny story here. I remember meeting one of the founders of one of these level two blockchains and I said to him, you know, um he’s like 18 or 19, this kid, and I go, you know, why why would you do this on Ethereum when you could build your own layer 1 blockchain? And he goes, well, according to your own book, um a new innovation has to be 10 times better than market, otherwise the market ignores them. So, you know, and I’m like, holy crap, this little 18-year-old guy is quoting my own book back at me. It was so impressive. and this whole new generation are all like that. So, they’re so with it. It’s incredible. It’s very It’s very annoying that I wasn’t that alive now at 18 to do take on this kind of crazy risk. >> Don’t worry, buddy. You’re going to We’re going to give you an extra 50 plus years of extra lifespan here. >> Oh, yeah. I have to get myself to find life.
[01:12:00] >> One thing one thing that’s important here is people are hungry for optimism. People are hungry for a positive, optimistic, hopeful future because they’re so decimated. You know, I had two tweets uh go viral and get like 5 8,000 uh likes like within two days and they were both about optimism. It didn’t it helped that you know Elon retweeted both of them but uh it’s people want optimism. They really do because we had so much negative news on the planet. So >> Elon you said you said in your tweet that the only time more exciting to be alive than today is tomorrow which I thought was great. And Elon said, “Better to live life as as a retweet of yours saying, “Better be wrong, optimistic and wrong, than pessimistic and right.” Which I thought was >> I I would go go further and say even beyond optimism. It’s difficult for me at least to imagine a future where real growth, real economic growth and and wealth of our planet grow significantly without passing through a humanoid robot
[01:13:01] or or some other substantially similar robotic stage where manual labor is scaled up by orders of magnitude. It’s almost an instrumentally convergent goal, I think, for achieving some of the the more ambitious futures. >> And I want to remind people, you know, your mindset is your neuronet, right? your the way what you see, what you hear, who you speak to, the way you see the world, uh, is constantly shaping the way you react, opportunities and challenges. And you need to be surrounding yourself with people who see the world in a positive, can do, optimistic, abundance-minded future, which is why we do this podcast, why we spend the time, why I love, you know, my moonshot mates so much. So hopefully this is helping you shape your purpose-driven abundance exponential mindset as well. All right, you can’t talk about robots without talking about uh what Elon is doing. So he has teased Optimus 3 provides some uh predictions.
[01:14:00] So, in this image, if you’re watching this on YouTube, which I hope you are, there’s an image of Optimus 2 Gen 2 or Gen 2 and a vision of uh Generation 3, much sleeker. Uh looks like uh Optimus went on a a little bit of a diet and were in sort of a a trimming uh >> sticking GLP ones. >> Uh but here’s some of the details. the first ever OLED face display for expression uh and with in having stronger hands. And I I think one of the things we talked about this Dave with Burnt about the whole element of the face and how close to the uh uncanny valley we allow it to go. Walking speeds are closer to humans with better balance and navigation. Um prototypes by the end of 2025. mass production in 26 with a goal of 1 million robots per year. I’m
[01:15:00] not sure if that’s for 26 or 27, but a $25 trillion market. And as Elon has said publicly, he expects this to be the reason that he gets his pay package. Remember, uh, he’s got a trillion dollar pay package if he can grow Tesla to $8 trillion, which is a order of 8 to 12x of where it is today. Thoughts on this, gentlemen? Well, I I think colonizing the colonizing and developing the solar system is going to entail lots of dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs. So I I for one will be delighted to to live in a near future where the solar system is populated by lots of humanoid robotics of of general AI capacity. I I think on the other hand going back to the discussion we had last time at some point I I would predict the personhood discussion is inevitably going to happen. This is we’re we’re we’re we’re just trotting into various
[01:16:00] sci-fi futures. At some point, if we reach some threshold of AGI personhood, and AGI is embodied in human form factors or humanlike form factors, someone somewhere will surely want to to to push on the the personhood question. And uh if if the the sort of the the mature embodiment of uh of these vision language action VLA models ends up becoming more and more humanlike, I I think that will push the discussion even more. So I have a question for the three of you. Um the best uh kind of conversation around personhood in this that I’ve seen was Star Trek Next Generation with data. We had several episodes talking about what rights and humanity emotions. He had a chip, an emotional chip embedded in him. Has anyone of you seen a better treatment of the personhood question? >> This bent bsentennial man did a good job. >> Oh, in in sci-fi. >> Yeah. >> Huh. Oh, data. Data’s got to be the best
[01:17:02] though, right? >> Yeah, >> that’s what I thought. I I would say acceler. [Music] >> Yeah. So So, Alex, by the way, >> I know everyone should read that. And you also me mentioned Verer Vinci, Rainbow’s End >> uh and anything else that comes to mind. You know, the the vision and the terminology from those books, please read the book or at least skim through it to get on the same page with Alex. It’s absolutely worth making the investment. >> We should put a list of those in the show notes. And just to be just to give credit here, Veruji was the first person that coined the term the technological singularity. >> Actually, he popularized it. Uh the the >> god damn it. So, so the the notion goes all the way back to to IG good and intelligence explosion uh as a mathematical singularity but he he Verer was the one who first like popularized the technological singularity as such. >> Yeah. >> So my prediction my prediction was uh boots on Mars by 2030 except they’re
[01:18:02] going to be robot boots, right? I mean >> I hope they have wheels. I hope they >> No, they’re not going to have wheels for God’s sakes. They’re climbing on rocks and across, you know, Martian Martian. >> Have them have both. Have them have both. Uh, you could have the optionality for God’s sakes. >> Nope. Nope. They’re going to do they’re going to help us do what humans do best, explore. But here’s what’s interesting, right? So, you send the robot fleets there first and they build the habitats. They get everything ready. They, you know, us squishy carbon life forms don’t want to end up in a harsh environment. let the robots go set it up for us. Um, and then we’ll we’ll go we’ll go join them. But this is >> or hybrid or hybrid solutions. Teller robotics. The problem is of course latency, but there are there are various compensations for that. >> Yeah. You know what I what I totally uh the one thing I totally don’t get and you can explain it to me if you can and Peter touched on this a second ago. So, I I had this feeling in my chest the
[01:19:00] other day of just this raw enthusiasm that I I don’t think I’ve had that actual feeling since I was playing high school soccer and you’re about to win a game like this. It’s like this this physical enthusiasm vibe and it was I was working on a neural net and it’s it’s a neural net that’s designed to build neural other neural nets and it just freaking worked. It it just flat out, you know, cracked the code and worked. And this is all part of this new quantum company that I’m working on with Alex. And so, so you take that same thought process and you say, well, within robotics, all three of these companies are working on these humanoid robots, but wouldn’t the first thing they want to build be what Peter said a second ago, the robot that’s manufacturing the robot is far more important than the robot itself because of the self-improvement effect. And I don’t know if they’re doing it just doing it very quietly and not showing anybody or if that thought has because you know when you talk about 1x figure and Tesla I haven’t seen them talk about that at all but that’s the first thing I would do is build the robot that’s manufacturing the robot. Well, for for
[01:20:00] what it’s worth, I mean, I I I think Elon has has made several comments about the importance of the machine that makes the machine and ha has said on several occasions that some of the earliest deployments of of Optimus will be in Tesla factories. So, to the extent that Tesla factories are turning out not just cars, but also robots, I I think that sort of uh self-licking ice cream cone or recursive self-improvement cycle is is either already started or about to start. >> Yeah. Well, for everybody listening, the important thing here is to realize that uh recursive self-improvement is now happening in AI and will accelerate and will soon be happening in mechanical systems and will accelerate. Uh and this is where uh we have this intelligence and exponential explosion uh that I I still feel like Rey has it wrong on the singularity. I think he’s too far out there. Uh I don’t know. It’s like I feel a singularity every moment of the day. It depends how you define it. I’d like to throw in the following comment that
[01:21:00] when you think about recursive self-improvement, that’s actually the fundamental basis of evolution. So, we’re just continuing a trajectory that’s been happening for billions of years, >> just a billion times faster. >> Yeah. And accelerating. >> To me, to me, the singularity is like a it’s a nuclear reaction. It’s it’s pretty much happening or not happening. It’s it’s not like, you know, you know, strong AI needs a definition and a AGI needs a definition, but the singularity it’s obvious when that’s happening. But there are >> because because the rate of self-improvement is just crazy. It spirals, you know, it’s feeding itself and >> h it’s it’s amazing. >> I don’t think it’s going to be that obvious. >> Now, righting remember exponential. It looks vertical in the future and it looks horizontal behind you. And we’re kind of there now >> I think I think what we’re going to see the singularity is very soon and you’re going to see a an immediate 1000x step up in performance of neural network software and the results of that are going to be unmistakable. Instant solving of diseases, instant solving of
[01:22:02] impossible math pro math problems. It’s all going to happen within say a 30-day window from self-improvement to the other side of that with no no change in the chips, just purely software advances. But then you have a distribution problem, right? This is where the William Whips Gibson quote, the future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed. We talk often about Mad Max and and uh Star Trek as two framings for the future. And in an ideal world, you end up with one rather than the other. But we can see them both happening. Ukraine and Gaza are Mad Max and we have Star Trek in many other parts of the world. And so I think we’ll end up with that uneven distribution which was going to cause a lot of stress and chaos. >> I don’t want to end on a negative note like that. No, no. I just I’m just I’m just fundamentally optimistic because the positive will drag along the negative, right? We talk a lot about the fact that the if you can lift the bottom billion and now most of that has smartphones with AI built into it. I mean, the potential for humanity is like incredible. >> I think the important the important note
[01:23:00] here is that in a world in which every mom knows her children have access to all the food, water, energy, healthcare, education, right? you have more to lose by, you know, by waring than you have to gain if you’re if you’re No, seriously, if you’re a population that has nothing to lose, um I think that’s where we get this this negative. Well, >> so everybody listen, if you’d like these slides again, uh, please go to WT, go to dmandis.comwtf, pull up your favorite LLM, have a conversation with it, drill down deep into any of these. Uh, we spend a good 20 hours a week prepping for this episode. I love my moonshot mates. I hope that this helped you see the extraordinary world and the pace of change. uh and that you walk away with a hopeful, compelling, and abundant vision of your future. For our subscribers, thank you. For those who haven’t yet,
[01:24:00] join us. Get the news as it comes out. >> I But just to echo Dave’s comments, I always feel so much smarter after this hour and a quarter that we spend conversing about this than before. So, it’s great. >> Yeah. >> All right, guys. See you very soon. Big hug. Take care, everybody. >> Big hugs. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and quantum computing to transport, energy, longevity, and more. There’s no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these meta trends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short two-minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important metat trends 10 years before anyone else, this report’s for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world’s most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world’s most disruptive tech. It’s not for you if you don’t want to be informed about what’s coming, why
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