moonshots ep225 davos us china gpu diplomacy transcript

A lot happening at Davos, a lot of conversations that are uh important for us to recount here. >> In past years, it was dominated by politicians and economic policy. Then it kind of moved to internet a little bit. This year, all AI. >> We are knocking on the door of these incredible capabilities, right? The the ability to build basically machines out of sand. >> Maybe it would be good to have a bit of slightly slower pace than we’re currently predicting, even my timelines, so that we can get this right. Should we slow down? What’s the path humanity should take? >> I think what what’s likely to happen post AGI is >> where do you see the US and China right now in the AI race? >> I still think that the US is in the lead. I think that our models are better, our chips are better, but they do have other advantages. They are um spinning up power generation faster than we are. That’s one area. >> If you believe that energy is at the heart of it and is the core of the inner loop, China’s going to go way ahead anyway. But I think the real differentiator in the race is going to be application layer dominance, not

[00:01:00] frontier benchmarks. >> The problem is that uh you always need a bad guy in a movie. >> Now that’s a moonshot ladies and gentlemen. >> Welcome everybody to Moonshots. Another episode of WTF here with DB2 AWG and Sem. Sele I guess I have to use a second or what’s your middle initial Sem? I don’t have one. Ah, all right. You’re >> kidding. Si. >> So, okay. >> We’re gonna have to we’re going to have to adopt one for you. Anyway, welcome to probably one of the most important podcasts around today. The podcast that helps you get ready for the future, ready for the supersonic tsunami. And we spend 20 hours a week summarizing what’s going on so that you can get it in a good 90-minute session. Dave and AWG, you’re just back from Davos and that’s the theme of our show today. A lot happening at Davos, a lot of conversations that are uh important for us to recount here. So tell us what was

[00:02:01] it like? >> Uh it’s a lot of time zones away. >> Yeah, a lot a lot. >> And actually uh Larry Frink, who is the organizer this year, said he he dropped, you know, we should do this in Detroit next year. >> How so? >> That did not go over well across across Europe. We want to include, you know, more views from around the world. This this exclusive resort town is just too swank. Let’s go to Detroit. >> Well, here’s some fun photos of you guys. It was cold and sunny. >> Is that Sandy Pentland? >> Uh, yeah. Sandy Pentland with his brass rat. Yeah. Yeah. Always great to see him. He’s He’s a longtime. He’s been there for God since the dawn of Davos. >> Yeah. I would say there were robots on the streets. There were billionaires eating out of food trucks. And there were anti-aircraft guns on the ice pond. >> Nice. And with Trump, >> there actually 3,000 uh much more security than the past six years. Uh 3,000 armed people in fatigues with machine guns going all the way halfway

[00:03:00] to Zurich, actually. I was surprised, but you know, Donald Trump was there this year, so I guess they they ratcheted up. He he attracts a crowd. >> So Dave and Alex, what was the vibe like? What did it feel like there? I mean, you’ve been there numerous times. I was there once uh for as a speaker and it was just overwhelming beyond belief in terms of trying to find people there. It’s a zoo, isn’t it? >> Yeah, it’s a zoo. You know that if I were to characterize what was different this year, it’s kind of it’s kind of like the the quintessential example is Alex was there. You know, in past years, uh it was dominated by politicians and economic policy. Then it kind of moved to internet a little bit. this year all AI completely dominated by AI which is encouraging you know no one had any thing intelligent to say other than the usual suspects Daario and Damis and you know the people we see all the time uh but at least they were listening uh global leaders presidents of pretty much every country uh listening to a pretty much all AI dialogue so that gives you

[00:04:00] some hope that people are beginning to get ready uh and the fact that Alex was there uh is kind of a bellweather of where it’s likely to So, Alex, I don’t know you want to >> now take away. Yeah. >> Uh, it was of course amazing and there really were robots in the streets. Uh, couple of frontier labs had houses there. Imagine for those who haven’t had this experience, imagine almost a World’s Fair or World Expo set in the Alps with major governments having their own houses, literally taking over storefronts, restaurants, convenience stores. Parenthetically, if anyone wants to make a killing at Davos next year, set up a restaurant. It It is nearly impossible to find good food short of food trucks at Davos, someone will make an absolute killing setting up a restaurant that’s still a restaurant during Davos week. But imagine imagine a world’s fair with the governments and the frontier labs and some of the the major corporations and tech companies

[00:05:01] all on an equal footing all hijacking or in invasion of the body snatchers style consuming the storefronts of an alpine resort town and and what you get is Davos. I I had an amazing experience. I moderated something like eight or 10 different events with OpenAI executives, Deep Mind executives. I did a fun panel with Fleon Jones, one of the co-creators of the Transformer Architecture. Uh you can see here one of my photos with uh US under secretary of state Sarah Rogers and some absolutely amazing and I think hopefully fruitful discussions about the era of GPU diplomacy that we find ourselves in discussions with Jack Hery of Sandbox AQ and Danielle Roose the the head of MIT’s computer science and AI lab. I I think it was an absolutely incredible experience but I I also think to Dave’s point AI is the story. It’s no longer a world where and and maybe just

[00:06:03] one more beat on this. It’s no longer a world where governments get together to talk about governing the governed. It it’s now I I think a world where AI and super intelligence is the story of the world economy. And I I think just walking down the street and and seeing the DHL robo-dog walking around or the the humanoid robots taking a stroll from AI house, I I think that exemplified what we’re seeing in the global economy more macro. Hey everybody, you may not know this, but I’ve got an incredible research team. And every week myself, my research team study the meta trends that are impacting the world. Topics like computation, sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, and these Metatrend reports I put out once a week enable you to see the future 10 years ahead of anybody else. If you’d like to get access to the Metatrends newsletter every week, go to dmandis.com/tatrens.

[00:07:01] That’s diamandis.com/tatrens. And that’s a good transition to let’s look at a little bit of the content from Davos. So what we’ve done is we’ve cherrypicked a number of conversations. There’s a huge amount of this flurring through uh through X in various platforms. We’ve chosen a few to bring up here, listen to and discuss with our amongst our moonshot mates. Uh let’s begin with uh Dario Amade, the CEO of Enthropic. He was a rock star during Davos and Jensen Wong. Let’s listen to Dario first on on the economy. If you if you look at what AI is capable of, if you have these models that are getting more and more capable across a wide range of cognitive tasks, you know, you you look at all labor in the economy, that’s something like $50 trillion a year. So I could easily imagine that the revenue of the industry or even single companies, if it’s even 10% of that, could be $5 trillion a year. Now, that’s something we haven’t seen in the history of the world. That creates all kinds of

[00:08:00] problems as well as creating all kinds of growth. And on to Jensen Wong, CEO of Nvidia here. >> The largest infrastructure buildout in human history. We’re now a few hundred billion dollars into it. >> That’s it. >> We’re a few hundred billion dollars into it. Uh Larry and I, we get the opportunity to work on many projects together. There are trillions of dollars of infrastructure that needs to be built out. And it’s sensible. It’s sensible because all of these contexts have to be processed so that the AI so that the models can generate the intelligence necessary to power the applications that ultimately sit on top. And so we have chip factories, computer factories, and AI factories all being built around the world. So I saw a text this morning uh from Elon saying he expects to see hundred trillion dollar company valuations coming up in the next you know few years. I think he said 2030. Uh

[00:09:01] when asked which company it was uh spe like the combination of SpaceX and Tesla. Um so you know a trillion here a trillion there. See what are you thinking about these numbers being thrown around in the economy? I start to look at this as becoming meaningless right in an abundance environment uh kind of whether it’s 10 trillion or 100 trillion um it’s the whole thing becomes arbitrary uh and is not a real gauge of strength. Um, what I found really interesting about the Nvidia and the um, Dario uh, conversation was they’re on opposite ends of the stack and they’re kind of really saying roughly the same thing because comput’s becoming the new oil and the new electricity and this is really just incredible stuff. It was amazing watching the output of the overall event from a distance. >> Well, just in terms of tone too, Jensen sounds like he’s talking to kindergarten. you know, he’s talking so

[00:10:00] slowly and and you know, things that we talk about on the podcast, you are a hundred times more detailed and sophisticated. That that gives you a sense of the audience like he’s the the world >> he’s talking to government people. He has to speak to kindergarten level >> and Dario’s example of the look the the global labor market is 50 trillion. Everybody get that? Okay. 5 trillion is an extreme lower bound of the part that can move to AI today. That’s that’s incredibly low. But even that justifies everything we’re talking about now. You guys get it? You know, it’s it’s that cadence of like, please try to keep up with me here. So, there’s a lot of that in this particular forum. >> In my mind, this is all borderline obvious. Of course, capital in the form of AI is going to continue to substitute for labor. And of course, trillions of dollars of AI infrastructure capital buildout will be needed to substitute for ultimately tens maybe eventually hundreds of trillions of dollars of services and human labor per year. So I

[00:11:02] I think to Dave’s point, this really is just spelling out the basic arithmetic of what a posthuman economy looks like. >> Yeah. A trillion here, a trillion there. All right, let’s uh move on. I I found this conversation we’re about to share with everybody here pretty fascinating. Uh for me, one of the highlights was seeing Deis Habis, the the CEO of Deep Mind and Dario Amade, the coanthropic on stage together and having these conversations. Uh they’re they’re both viewed, I think, in the industry as good human individuals who care about society and it’s not about the revenue. It’s not about, you know, how many users. Uh let’s play these two and then we’ll talk about it. They’re discussing the risks here and should we slow down? What is uh uh what’s the path humanity should take? All right. First up, Demis Abis. >> Reasonable. There’s fear and there’s worries about these things like jobs and livelihoods. Um I think there’s a couple

[00:12:01] of things that I mean it’s going to be very complicated the next few years. I think geopolitically but also the various factors here like we want to solve all disease cure diseases come up with new energy sources. I think maybe the balance of what the industry is doing is not enough balance towards those types of activities. I think we should have a lot more examples. I know Dario Grimy of like alpha fold like things that help sort of unequivocal good in the world. And I think actually it’s incumbent on the industry and and all of us leading players to show that more demonstrate that not just talk about it but demonstrate that. Um and but then it’s going to come with these other intendent disruptions and and if we can maybe it would be good to have a bit of slow a slightly slower pace than we’re currently predicting even my timelines so that we can get this right society. But it that would require some coordination. That is >> all right. Now over to Darham knocking at the door of risks. >> AI is going to be incredibly powerful. I think Demis and I, you know, kind of agree on that. It’s just a question of exactly when. Um uh and because it’s

[00:13:02] incredibly powerful, it will do all these wonderful things. You know, will help us cure cancer. It may help us to eradicate tropical diseases. It will help us understand the universe. but that there are these, you know, immense and grave risks that, you know, not that we can’t address them. I’m not a doomer. We we’re we’re we are knocking on the door of these incredible capabilities, right? The the ability to build basically machines out of sand. But, you know, my my my view is this is happening so fast and is such a crisis, we should be devoting almost all of our effort to thinking about how to get through this. >> Amazing clarity of message. Uh Dave, was this the sense you had over there? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, what’s interesting is that uh you know, one of our partners, Mirror Wilche, presented a book written by a AI back in 2020 on that main stage and uh the global world kind of paid attention and then COVID hit and the entire topic of of World

[00:14:02] Economic Forum and global talking was lockdown, COVID, whatever. And so every everybody kind of forgot about AI as imminent. Uh now they’re used to the topic dour coming and going. So a lot of the audience is like, “Yeah, yeah, it’ll blow over like everything else.” But of course, AI won’t blow over. AI will accelerate and next year, you know, whatever Dario and Deis are saying this year will be magnified 100 or a thousandx year. But I don’t think that necessarily penetrated everybody’s brain. When you look around the audience, they’re like, “Yeah, you know, well, five trillion, 10 trillion.” But I think uh it’s interesting that Demis you know he’s taking kind of a conservative timeline view and he’s saying outerbound 10 years somewhere in the 5 to 10 year timeline and in global geopolitics that’s like tomorrow that is such a short timeline and he’s clear that that’s the outer bound. So in the past the the two guys have debated you know is it 2 years or 10 years now they’re agreeing and saying what the hell’s the

[00:15:00] difference? We’re talking about AI that can do absolutely any task that a human being can do somewhere between 1 and 10 years. Doesn’t matter whether it’s one or 10. What matters is is anybody in this room ready? So, I love the fact that they’re at least trying >> to get the global leaders to start to think in terms of what massive scale of disruption is imminent and start to generate your plan like now. And so, you know, it’s great that they they’re at least trying. I >> And this conversation about slowing down, uh, you know, which popped up years ago, Alex, did you hear that at all? I mean, I can’t imagine there is any option to slow down. The economic race is so strong. >> Yeah, I I did hear. So, right after leaving Davos, I took a meeting with the MIT Alumni Association of Switzerland in Zurich, and I heard it from them. I I heard desire for slowing things down or some sort of radical wealth redistribution plan. Heard very little AI optimism from them which was stunning

[00:16:01] >> footnote there. But I I I think the risks side of this I I think it’s almost burying the lead. I in my mind like I I write about this every day in my daily newsletter or briefing, whatever you want to call it, that recursive self-improvement I think is already priced into the the near term. We’re either already to to Daario’s point in the era of recursive self-improvement or it’s coming later this year, but we’re basically there. And I I think advances with Claude and Opus 4.5 and other models already reflect that we’re approximately in the era already of recursive self-improvement. So I think saying, you know, o overindexing on all of these things that are about to be here, that’s already priced into the market. I I think the actual news here that we’re burying a little bit was elsewhere in in Demis’ comments where he talked about some of the problems that he wants to solve. Less about the risks that we face, more about the problems that will be unlocked. And I I think >> the most interesting thing I heard Deis say was that he’s interested in

[00:17:01] exploring the stars with super intelligence. And I I think that’s a super important point. And I I think that if if we if we zoom out and we we try not to adopt the mindset of framing everything in terms of a a risk oriented mentality and rather instead focus on a radical economic growthoriented mentality, then exploring the stars with AI really is one of the biggest questions. And I I I would underline Demis’ point further and and say in my mind, if it turns out that the physics of our universe, if it turns out that they’re friendly toward interstellar exploration in the style in which Demis seems to be gesturing, that’s the ballgame. Like that that determines whether we get Dyson spheres or Dyson swarms, I I should say, in the next uh two to three decades. If if the universe is fundamentally unfriendly to interstellar exploration, we’re probably more or less stuck near our home star and disassembling the planets. Or if

[00:18:01] interstellar exploration, to Demis’ point, really is something that DeepMind or some other frontier lab can unlock with AI, then we get the galaxy. We get the universe. It’s a much more interesting future. And so I think that’s the real story here. Not like risk, yes, risk no recursive self-improvement, yes or no. That’s all priced in already. Well, and to to your point, Alex, too, the >> Star Trek come >> Star Trek. Yes. >> Yeah. Exactly. And and Dennis mentioned it in the in the context of what is the goal of humanity post AGI, you know, where what keeps our massive transformative purpose running. And the answers are usually humanitywide. They’re not nationwide. And and WE and Davos is all built around nations. Nations taxing each other, nations interacting with each other. And so, you know, if you look across the crowd, you know, roughly 200 countries represented, all but two of them are miles behind in this race. And so, culturally, the vast majority of the people you meet are like, I wish this would all slow down. But in the back of their mind, it’s I

[00:19:00] wish this would all slow down so that my country at least is a player and is relevant. But but I think what what’s likely to happen post AGI is that the way society is organized cuts across country boundary boundaries easily. >> Selen, what do you make of the the risk conversation here? >> Um I think uh I in my kind of optimism hat uh and bias I kind of downplayed radically because technology has always been a major driver of progress. The big challenge with civilization is how do you extract the promise of technology without the peril? We’ve done a pretty damn good job of it thus far. All all all things considered considered. Um the there were two things that struck me in this conversation. This was about my favorite conversation of the week that I tracked. Um one was that what I’m hearing in their voices is the unbelievable fatigue at the metabolism they’re having to operate at. >> I’m also hearing respect for each other in their voices.

[00:20:00] >> That was that was there no matter what. You can see a huge amount of brotherly love and mutual respect. fantastic and you couldn’t ask for more honorable people at the forefront of this field. So that’s just amazing and this speaks to the same thing we saw in the for the large part of the internet age with Larry and Sergey and and crew. Um here uh one was the the fatigue I got from them cuz they’re like somebody please slow this down so we can take a breather. I think cuz so because they’re seeing that in a year it’ll be 100 times faster, right? this is the slowest it’s ever going to be and they’re like looking at this going, “Holy crap.” So, I think that’s one part of it. Uh, I really love the massive optimism and the star conversation. Fantastic. I one day I hope to be around when Saturn actually gets it and Alex goes, “I had it coming.” And we could we could do that. Um but I think overall the opportunity for humanity to navigate this but there’s a massive disconnect here which

[00:21:00] is as Dave mentioned Davos is oriented around nation states. Nation states are an artifact of a scarcity environment. Nation states cannot compute abundance. They cannot operate in that paradigm. So we need a completely different governance model. For me, the biggest thing that was highlighted here was the fact that the construct of the UN and nation states is completely irrelevant to what’s coming as AI cuts across every category, every economy. Uh it’s a global issue. It’s a civilizational issue. Forget who wins the race, etc., >> On a personal note related to the fatigue, too, uh you know, this is my first time in my life where I’m walking down the street and people are like, “Hey, you’re that guy from that podcast. Hey, I know you.” Um, and so I actually ended up putting my ski hat and my goggles on walking down the street because I’m not that kind of guy. I don’t I don’t really want to be what a rough life on the street. No, I I don’t mean it that way. I should >> and Demisario and Demis.

[00:22:00] >> Yeah, you’ve been there for a long time, Peter. But um so uh Demis in particular, he’s a researcher and he he cares about technology, research, AI at the bits and bites levels. And now he’s been drawn into the global stage as the spokesperson for ethics and and humanity. And Daario never thought he’d be a CEO at all in that interview he gave a little while ago. He’s like, “Look, I’m a research guy. I got drawn into this function.” And so that fatigue you feel is the byproduct of being sucked into this vortex where there’s a huge void of leadership. M >> and Alex, you’re going to experience this very soon, too. Uh the demand for what you can articulate is going up so quickly that it’ll pull you in. And you know, if you if you’re not ready for it, uh then, you know, it’s tiring. It’s tiring just flying all over the world. It’s tiring, you know, getting the the litany of questions. A lot of the questions are the same exact ones you heard the day before. Uh and and you just have to get used to the to the demand. So, what I’m hearing you say, Dave, is I have to brace myself for the moonshot paparazzi on the rough slopes

[00:23:01] of Aspen and Vale and Davos. Just bracing myself now. >> Hey, I know you. You’re >> listen, Peter and I have had this uh exponential conversation answering the same goddamn questions for years now. Ray’s been doing it for close to 60 years. So, >> but we come at it with enthusiasm every time because it matters. You know, there’s one other conversation I have to point out here. Uh I heard Daario talking about Sam Alman and open AI and it was interesting. He goes, you know, at Anthropic here, we’re serving businesses. We’re giving them value. We’re building things. We’re not trying to engage a billion people with sophomic conversations. Right? So it’s very interesting uh point of view that when AI in terms of open AI is serving uh individuals and just trying to make them feel good about themselves and trying to make it addictive which is what Dario was saying you get one result versus if you’re using AI to serve business and deliver real value get a different

[00:24:00] result. Uh I was I was uh taken back by that conversation. I didn’t get the clip for it here, but thought it was really >> I think there’s also though to be fair to open AAI and to some extent Groken XAI, I think that’s a bit of a self-serving argument. It’s I I I parse that as a post hawk justification. Anthropic happens to be doing very well in the enterprise and I I definitely perceive a post talk justification. Well, we’re not doing consumer because we don’t want to do consumer. We want to do B2B and do enterprise sales because there’s moral purity in enterprise sales. But there’s also one can achieve moral purity in uplifting the intelligence of billions of individuals in their individual capacity. >> Well, well said. Let’s jump into another topic that was a through line at Davos, which is US versus China. And uh we’re going to open up with a conversation between Mark Beni off and David Saxs here. >> Where do you see the US and China right now in the AI race and uh the model

[00:25:00] innovation that we’ve seen in both countries? I still think that the US is in the lead. I think that our models are better. Our chips are better. Uh but they do have other advantages. They are um spinning up power generation faster than we are. That’s one area. I say another area that concerns me is AI optimism. So um there was a survey done by Stanford recently and they surveyed people in lots of different countries and they asked them, do you believe the benefits of AI will outweigh the harms? And if if the respondents said yes, they’d be an AI optimist. And if they said the harms outweighed the the gains, they’re an AI pessimist. Well, in China, 83% of the population are AI optimist. In the US, that number is only 39%. Where I kind of worry is in the AI race that if in a fed a fit of pessimism, we do something like what Bernie Sanders wants, which is he wants to stop building all data centers or if we have 1,200 different AI laws in the states, you know, clamping down on this, clamping down the innovation. I worry

[00:26:01] that we could lose the I race because of a self-inflicted injury. >> Interesting. There’s one more China video I’m going to play here and then we’ll discuss this. Um, and here we go. This is from the CEO of uh Mistl Arthur Menich. >> Is China behind though the west? >> China is not behind the west. I think this is a this is a fairy tale in in AI. They are very much at par and uh and the year ahead is going to be extremely interesting in that respect. uh we care about Europe uh maintaining its position, Europe maintaining uh its ability to train models because we don’t think that uh we should rely on open-source Chinese models. >> Gentlemen, thoughts on this? >> He’s got the greatest last name ever, Mench. Um uh I’ve got a couple of thoughts here. One, I’ll go back to my observation that I think this US China thing is is a is a conversation. Um, but why? Because if

[00:27:01] you believe that energy is at the heart of it and is the core of the inner loop, then then I China’s going to go way ahead anyway once they figure out the the connection between those two. But I think the real differentiator in the race is going to be application layer dominance, not frontier benchmarks. And there I think China will be very far behind for a long time because of the trust factor plus the natural markets go very quickly. aside from Tik Tok, uh, it’s not going to really kind of take off in a big way. I think there’s going to be tons of other open- source models that going to come out and there people are going to be too concerned about the trust factor to use it over time. Three comments if I may. Uh, so so the first to Sem’s point, since See told me that I was being too agreeable the last time we we spoke, I have to be a little bit of a a contrarian here and and point out >> let’s go back to normal programming. Uh returning to normal programming, the conventional wisdom is that the Chinese Communist Party’s AI plus strategy is

[00:28:01] actually quite strong when it comes to applications. That this is to the extent that China is relatively strategically weak when it comes to training it its own frontier grade models relative to the US. And by relatively strong, I mean maybe 6 months behind. not globally or absolutely weak but just a few months behind perhaps that its real strength is in aggressively pushing applications out into everyday the everyday economy that take advantage of AI. So I I’ll I’ll just note parenthetically the conventional wisdom is that China’s AI plus strategy is actually pretty strong strategy relative to the relative weakness of frontier grade models. But I I that that’s parenthetical note going back to to Asia quote unquote overwhelming Western countries on AI optimism. I I think David Saxs has and and others have put their finger on something very important. I I think as a student of the history of science and technology, something went very wrong

[00:29:02] between in the US between uh sometime maybe more than one thing between the end of World War II and call it the mid to late 1970s and I’m I’m reminded in 1954 the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission Lewis Strauss famously and and this has had repercussions uh through the decades since predicted that fision, nuclear fision, would become so inexpensive that tracking usage via electricity meters would become unnecessary. And that that’s where we get the the the phrase energy too cheap to meter. And that didn’t happen. We didn’t get energy too cheap to meter because in in the decades after 1954, for a variety of reasons, and it’s easy enough to to point fingers at possible explanations, nuclear fision was essentially regulated out of existence in in this country. And I I think the point that David is making is we’re at the point now where like

[00:30:01] remember how in the 1950s and 1960s new American homes were being built with extra glass because it was anticipated that electricity and energy would be too cheap to meter that you wouldn’t need to to bother with uh with worrying about heating or cooling or insulation costs. It would just be absorbed by the the free electricity. We’re at the point now with AI, I think, where it it’s an analogous position where we’re on the verge of intelligence too cheap to meter and we run the risk to David’s point that if we allow too much AI pessimism or too much AI dumerism to get in the way that the same thing happens with AI that happened with nuclearision decades ago, overregulation and then we could waste another do it. You know, we’re a democracy. the voter wins and and the democ the voters did not want nuclear power even though the scientists are like look we can >> demonized in the press >> I mean

[00:31:01] quick quick note on democracy and nuclear power if you follow closely the the history of nuclear power in the postworld war II era wasn’t actually that democratic. It wasn’t like e every election cycle post World War II, the the voting populace was super informed about all of the the key details. There was this was a relatively narrow technocracy that developed in the postworld war II era in the form of the atomic energy commission that was an evolution of the Manhattan Project where it was really a bunch of technocrats deciding what would and wouldn’t happen. I don’t think the voters ever had at least for the first few decades a real informed decision. >> Well, I think that you remember the the acronym NIMI ny it was rampant during that era >> and in a lot of topics nuclear being one of the biggest ones but it was not in my backyard. Yeah. Yeah. We should do this. This is for the global good of the country, global good of the world. Let’s do it but not here. >> And if everybody says that you have the tragedy of the economy effect same thing

[00:32:00] going on in data centers right now. I had a conversation with Biology uh a day ago, two days ago, and we were talking about how uh you know, one of my pet peeves is that most of Hollywood shows all these negative dystopian views of the future, and it paints a sense of fear across the public about killer AIs and, you know, dystopian robots and so forth. And that was true as well for for nuclear to some degree. And the problem is that let me finish. The problem is that uh you always need a bad guy in a movie. You always need someone uh to you know to threaten and and Baji’s idea which I love is we should start to create the movies where the bad guy is the regulator. This regulator is slowing down the delivery of longevity, slowing down the delivery of unlimited energy. And I thought that was a brilliant insight he had because you know there has to be balance. Got it. There has to be directing this supersonic tsunami in the right direction. But sometimes uh

[00:33:01] the regulations are just off base. >> Well, there’s a broader theme there too, Peter. I’m sure you’re very in tune with it. But science fiction uh tries to porta portray the future sort of accurately, but only has to fit the story line. So then you end up with these spaceships that bank into turns like there’s no atmosphere and and the lasers make sounds like pew pew this makes no sense and you think well that’s harmless it’s just entertainment but then when you look at the business plans coming out of the colleges you’re like where did you get that hairbrain idea well it was from watching Star Wars or whatever okay so it does actually matter you the way we portray this in the media and so biology is right you know if you portrayed a regulator as the evil you know Darth Vader but no one’s going to make that movie right like how how >> not entertaining is For me, for me the inflection point for nuclear is very simple. It was the movie The China Syndrome which freaked everybody out and then from that point on it shut down. And this is the power of narrative. And this is unfortunately one of these uh uh problems we have today that the use of narrative is the

[00:34:00] only model really to shift people at scale. And so we have to come up with narratives as you’re trying to do Peter on the positive side of all of this rather than the classic negative which takes up most of our attention. And you’re going to hear about a big push I’m making with Google shortly on creating positive narratives because uh society needs it. Uh unfortunately Hollywood’s been a doom and gloom machine. >> Can I can I go on a little can I go on a little rant here? >> Of course. We love your rant. >> Um so there’s a brilliant brilliant insight that you and Steven made in the abundance book which was the predominance of the amygdala. Right. We are geared from 4 billion years to watch for signs of danger and then run. Uh and so back in the when we’re running around on the plains of Africa, if you saw heard a noise in the bushes, you ran because bad news could kill you. Good news doesn’t kill you. I might miss some fruit that I could eat. But if I missed a piece of bad news, I’d die. So we have a 10 times more likelihood to listen to bad news than good news. And that

[00:35:00] translates into policy in a very powerful way such that we freak out and put guard rails on everything like autonomous cars. And note that the first time somebody comes across something new, they relate to it as unknown, their amigdala lights up and then immediately go to the fear factor and the damage that thing could do. Autonomous cars. The first time somebody sees it, they go, “Oh my god, that car might kill somebody. Ban the car.” Because as Brad Templeton said, we’d much rather killed by drunk people than robots. Right? And so this is a huge problem that we have to do is overcome that reaction because Hollywood banks on that. They make a huge living on the horror movies and the negative aspects and the freak out and then the negative dystopian outcomes. And as a human species, probably the biggest thing if I could ever point to one thing was to cut that damn amydala out because our chances of physical danger today are thousands and thousands of times less than we were a few hundred years ago. So we have to figure out ways of counteracting that in at a cultural level which is non-trivial. That’s the maybe the hardest job we all have as

[00:36:01] leaders to figure that out. >> Yeah. Okay. >> Can I just go back to what Arthur was saying on that video for one second though and tie it into what Alex said a second ago >> because because I think knowing where we stand in this race to AGI. uh all of the uh innovation in the transformer algorithm and the core technology was all open source uh you know through GPD2 GPT3 uh China grabbed it all everyone has access to it any country that wants to buy a huge amount of compute can catch up to that level and in fact you know with these speedrun tests that Alex can tell you all about you know the the cost of getting there and in fact deepseek even proved it and so did Kimmy uh that you can get back to where open AI was just a year or two ago for 150th 100th the cost because of innovations that are all open sourced. But then the next stage of innovation after that that’s going on right now is all chain of thought reasoning. So when you build one of these neural networks the individual neurons are not intelligent but the collective trillion or 10 trillion of them somehow magically

[00:37:00] spawns intelligence and it’s shocking what it can do. But then when you put many of the agents together it also generates another level of intelligence. It’s is another self-organizing system on top of the self-organizing system. >> And all of those innovations happened after the great lockdown. You know, after GPT4 and after it became abundantly clear to everyone that there’s trillions of dollars at stake, >> the open source kind of stopped cold. So Arthur is saying, look, the Chinese are not behind. He’s right as of basically today and yesterday. Um and and the idea that we’re leading because we have better, you know, 2nmter chips and fabs is nonsensical because the algorithmic improvements way outstrip the, you know, the the chip lead of, you know, maybe 10x at most. Uh so so he’s right as of a date a point in time, but if the new innovations in the big labs continue to be completely secret, which is what’s happening right now, >> then that race will diverge. And it’s not clear though, you know, maybe China will out innovate America, maybe America

[00:38:00] will out innovate China, but it’s all happening kind of like what happened with nuclear research. You know, nuclear was very much in the public eye, very open, all these research documents getting published in journals and whatever. Right up until wait, these bombs actually work and then it completely inverted and went went super super secret. The big labs right now are not publishing. They’re uh in fact, they started banning the publishing over at Google. I want to jump into our innermost loop here energy with you guys permission here. Uh I’m going to share two videos. One by the CEO of Honeywell uh and the second by Elon. They’ve got different points of view about you know where we need to source our energy uh and why. All right, let’s take a listen. This is uh Vimal Kapoor, the CEO of Honeywell. When you talked about the energy solutions available for these unbelievably energy hungry data centers, your list was short. Your list had one thing on it. If I listen correctly, you said gas. You didn’t say gas and renewables. Can you educate us why not?

[00:39:00] Always like to tell people the mix of energy doesn’t matter. How much is wind? How much is solar? We like to advertise that kilojou matter because energy intensity has to shift not the mix. So solar power cannot produce cement. Solar power cannot produce steel. It cannot. >> They are very energy intensive. That’s right. >> You still need a gas based heating or >> even after 3 or five more years of innovation in renewable physics. It’s against physics. Word needs to build more infrastructure. It still needs steel. It still needs cement. It still still need fuels. Now how do you do that energy exchange while you also want to build data centers and consume more energy? That’s an interesting problem to solve. And today the the problem is single threated with the gas fired power plant maybe little bit of nuclear renewables remain in the mix but it cannot bring the the amount of jewels we need >> to produce this infrastructure which is required in the world. >> All right and the counterpoint here put

[00:40:00] forward by Elon >> yes I mean wow is is my experience about that as well. Let me hit let me hit uh uh Elon’s point and then let’s come back and talk about that cuz that’s a critically important kilogjles versus total energy. >> It’s really all about the sun. Um and that’s that’s why uh one of the things we’ll be doing with SpaceX uh in within a few years is launching um solar powered AI satellites, right? Um because the space is really the source of immense power and then you don’t need to take up any room on earth. Uh there’s so much room in space and you can scale to ultimately hundreds hundreds of terowatts a year. >> And Elon goes on to talk about the fact that 100 by 100 mile area provides all of the US energy requirements. Same thing for Europe. Uh but Salem uh the most about natural gas. >> Yeah, >> I I’m I’m so livid at this. Uh so um

[00:41:00] couple of initial thoughts. This is the first time I saw this video by the way. Um so uh first uh infrastructure of the future will not be steel. Um uh it’s going to be digital bits and uh if anything it’ll be fiber. Uh so that’s one problem with this. Number two, uh yes, you need energy density to to make steel and and concrete etc. But the problem is not the that it’s the it’s the marginal cost. So for example, um if you have a a a big increase, even a marginal increase in renewables, the cost of the the fossil fuel cell will drop dramatically. In 2013, when we had the last oil price crash, it was because of a 2% over supply in the market. Okay, it’s a very tightly run market. The reason we have all these non-stop wars right now is to keep the price of oil high. Um, and so this is a a completely I find issues on structural issues on on on every one of the three points he’s making. And then

[00:42:00] you go Elon who goes straight to the thing. It’s all about the sun for for God’s sakes. Anyway, enough. >> I I’ll take the other side of that if I may. I didn’t hear anything unreasonable in my mind. Elon and SpaceX use methyloxs for rocket launches. They don’t use solar power to achieve escape velocity and to I would say energy density and and power density matters an enormous amount for certain applications. I I think >> that’s not the point I’m making. I’m not making that point. >> What’s the point you’re making, Sel? >> I’m point I’m making is yes, you absolutely need energy density for those things. The point is that the energy density, we use so much oil for home heating for example, if you shifted homes to solar, the amount of oil available for the energy dense applications goes through the roof and the price drops dramatically and then you can use them the the marginal amount of oil for the energy density needs when for those applications. Right now we use oil for everything or natural gas for everything and you don’t need it once

[00:43:00] you have solar coming online. So that’s my >> I would say a couple of points. One, Honeywell, as I understand it, is a pretty diversified operation. It’s it’s not just like the thermostats or the the home heating systems that perhaps they’re well known for. They’re they also have a pretty sophisticated quantum information operation. So, it’s it’s a diversified company. It’s not just home heating, but I I would say also in in some sense this feels like such a temporary debate uh almost a a false trade-off between petroleum legacy petroleum economy on one end and pure solar photovoltaic economy Dyson swarm on the other when the reality is we’re going to in the not too distant future assuming no tragic left turn by civilization we’re going to solve compact fusion and compact fusion is going to give us energy densities for rockets and it’s going to give us energy densities for home heating uh and for a lot of civilian applications and the Dyson swarm. So in some sense I think

[00:44:01] this is sort of like latestage uh petroleum economy discussion that we’re having like hand ringing when it’s all about to get torn down anyway >> 100%. And the third beef I have is where he talks about renewables as this play thing on the side when your point is exactly right once you have fusion all of it becomes irrelevant anyway. So like why are we having this conversation? >> Well guys going to take the counterpoint here. Take a look at this chart on this next uh next slide here which is the growth of energy generation. This is in Europe in particular where wind and solar have now outstripped fossil, nuclear, hydro and other clean. And yes, we might get to fusion reactors and we might start building fusion reactors. But the timeline I’m seeing on fusion and timeline I’m seeing on even gen 3 fision reactors is decades uh just from permitting and from construction. I don’t see any of them. Even the SMRs are are currently slated to be, you know, 5

[00:45:00] to 10 years out, but we could in fact be building out wind and solar at an extraordinary rate. The investments are not being made. We’re basically have outstripped the capacity of natural gas generators. I mean, how long is the what’s the wait list for natural gas generators right now, Alex? Years, right? >> Years. >> Month months to years, but I’m optimistic. >> I haven’t heard I haven’t heard months at all. It’s it’s years. >> You have you you have new netcast generators as we’ve discussed on the pod in the past that are coming online and those could be available in principle in the next few months if you’re early enough in the wait list. >> No, I think you’re both right. No, I don’t I don’t want to diffuse all arguments here, but you’re both right. The the they are coming online much much sooner, but they’re sold out for years into the future. So, if you’re India and you’re saying, “Hey, I need I need to do something here. I need power for people. We need concrete and steel to build like places for people to live.” The idea that you could generate electricity, it’s not a non-starter. You couldn’t afford the generators. They’re sold out for they’re booked for a year. They’re they’re building.

[00:46:00] >> So, my point is, why are we not doing a Manhattan project on wind and solar manufacturing here in the United States to really uplevel the amount we have? I’m going to go to Elon one second on this video and then we’ll come back to this conversation. >> Yeah. So, I mean, I guess rough way to think about it is um 100 miles by 100 miles, we’ll call it I60 kilometers by 160 km of of solar is enough to power the entire United States. So, the 100 100 mile by 100 mile area is is I mean you could take basically a small corner of Utah, >> Nevada, >> Nevada, New Mexico. Um and the same is true actually I mean for for Europe you you could take a small part you could take uh relatively unpopulated areas of say Spain and Sicily and generate all of the electricity power that Europe needs. Well, and also if you drill into the supply chain on that, this is where Elon is absolutely brilliant. Like if you if you say, “Well, what are the constraints

[00:47:00] to doing that, the materials are dirt cheap?” And the automation of the fabrication of those panels can be automated. You can get those costs down to next to nothing and then you don’t need a generator. Electricity just comes right out of the panel. >> It’s like it’s the biggest no-brainer ever. And that’s >> for the entrepreneurs, for the entrepreneurs listening, for the politicians listening, I mean, get on it for God’s sakes. This is this is technology we’ve had for a while. We’ve also got, you know, new solar technologies coming on. Um, anyway, anybody want to argue >> to the extent you believe the US is a petro dollar, that answers all of it. That’s why. >> Yeah, I I’ll take the other side just in the interest of being painted as a contrarian. I I’ll say the the all of the the new electric or not all much of the substantial new electricity demand in the US at least I think on the time scale of 10 years is going to come from data centers where under the present regime it’s simply easier to deploy on the time scale of 10 years data centers to orbit. So, Peter, if if you’re looking for a Manhattan project for lots

[00:48:01] of new solar PV, I think look look no further than SpaceX, look no further than the this new Jeff Bezos uh initiative. Anyone who’s going to launch a Dyson swarm is going to be deacto in the business of manufacturing solar photovoltaics at scale. And that’s what a Manhattan project for it looks like. >> Well, that reinforces what Peter was saying. any entrepreneurs listening out there, the the data center in space uses solar panels. That’s the same core technology that you use on Earth. It’s about six times more efficient in space. >> Uh but it if you put it in Nevada, that’s you know, so if you get involved in that manufacturing like why is that not 10 times 100 times cheaper? >> We have to from China today. >> We’ve got perovskite coming online which is you know is cheaper and higher conversion efficiency. I mean there’s innovation left to be had in that regard. Can I just summarize this? So, it sounds what we’re saying is the Manhattan project should be spacebased data

[00:49:00] centers that will drive massive amounts of innovation and focus on that and that’ll pull civilization out. >> Yes. And that is in fact what exactly what we’re seeing through market forces. >> I’m all in. >> This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and pre-ompiles code for each task. Blitzy delivers 80% or more of the development work autonomously while providing a guide for the final 20% of human development work required to complete the sprint. Enterprises are achieving a 5x engineering velocity increase when incorporating Blitzy as their preIDE development tool, pairing it with their

[00:50:01] coding co-pilot of choice to bring an AI native SDLC into their org. Ready to 5x your engineering velocity? Visit blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. >> Speaking of allin, let’s head to crypto because we’re all in on crypto. All right. Uh two conversations to be had. The first uh by CZ, the CEO of Binance, and the second by Jeremy Oair, the CEO of Circle. Let’s go to CZ first. >> The native currency for AI agent is going to be crypto. They’re not going to use bank cards. they’re not going to swipe uh with credit cards. Um they’re going to crypto blockchain is the most native uh technology interface for AI agents. So when AI goes big uh today AI don’t really they’re not really agents. They don’t buy tickets for you. They don’t they don’t pay for uh restaurants for you. Uh but when they actually do those payments will be in crypto. >> All right, that’s from CZ. Let’s go to Jeremy Olair, the CEO of uh Circle as a

[00:51:01] stable coin. The next generation of blockchain networks, things like arc, which circle’s building on, there’s other new blockchain networks are actually being designed specifically for agentic uh compute. They’re designed specifically for the financial and economic activity of a world where three years, five years from now, uh, one I think can reasonably expect that there will be billions, literally billions of AI agents conducting economic activity in the world continuously on a continuous basis. They need an economic system. They need a financial system. They need a payment system. There is no other alternative in my view other than stable coins to do that right now. And that can keep up with that pace of technological change. And so that’s a it’s a it’s a critical uh focus for us. But not just us, there’s a lot of other folks that are interested in this and and contributing to the technical standards to to support this um upgrade to our our digital economic system. >> I don’t think the world is got any idea how fast this is going to accelerate as

[00:52:01] agents start using uh crypto whether it’s uh whether it’s stable coins from Circle or whether it’s Suie or Algorand um whatever it might be. We’re going to have Jeremy Aair at the Abundance Summit. He’s going to be one of our primary speakers. We be having this conversation. But uh I I agree. We don’t have agents uh transacting for us yet, but we are and they’re going to be using some type of a digital currency. See, you’ve been thinking about this for a bit. >> Well, two points. One is I think cryptos has survived long enough to become infrastructure and it’s kind of fading into the background. You’re moving from speculation to real utility. Um and I think the second is that it the reason the the base reason it delivers trust and protocols and code are way more trustworthy than governments and institutions. >> That’s for sure. >> Yep. >> I I’ll take Go ahead, Alex. Sorry. >> I’ll take completely the other other side of this one. So, and contrary contrarian points for me today, I guess.

[00:53:01] Um I’m of of two minds on this story. On the one hand, I think it’s it’s wonderful that AI agents have a solution to be quote unquote banked by some means so that they have some autonomy. On the other hand, I I just think it’s sad that crypto is the solution that’s that’s filling the gap that was perhaps unnecessarily opened by the conventional banking system not stepping up. It’s very tedious and painful to open a bank account. It’s hard enough for a human to open a bank account, let alone an AI agent that doesn’t have citizenship or or a physical body or, you know, the ability to walk into a bank branch. And I I think stable coins rushing in maybe to sort of bridge that gap post genius and help AI agents become banked in a more legitimate way. I I I think we should be able to do much better. For the life of me, I don’t understand why we even need crypto or or in principle should need crypto for an AI agent to just make an API call and open a bank account. Crypto shouldn’t even be a

[00:54:02] necessary part of the infrastructure to >> agree. I disagree fully. I mean, this is >> tell me why. >> Because the dollar go >> that’s not an answer. That doesn’t make sense. Explain why fiat currency cannot navigate a world of abundance. It cannot do it. Well, we don’t have digital dollars. I mean, an agent is operating on a digital system versus the the fact that we the current banking system to clear a uh a transfer or to clear a transaction can take you literally hours to days. I mean, digital currencies which are by defacto a cryptocurrency on a blockchain is able to transact in at the speed of internet rails and >> fine. But Alex is making a valid point that why can’t a digital dollar or a dollar operate in the same way? And it could. It’s simply a pretty valid point there. But you’ve got a bigger underlying problem which is the use of the fiat

[00:55:01] currency to do all this stuff which is not a great measure of the future. >> I I think we’re we’re conflating. So I I most two different issues here with Yeah, I do agree there are two different issues. I think we’re conflating a a centralized bank digital currency as an issue with the simple technical problem like put put for put aside for a moment and any distrust or dislike in in in CBDC’s uh and andor the US dollar and or fiat currencies in general just like transacting a small amount of some currency is technically a very simple operation literally updating a row in a table in a database and we should be able to do that really quickly without any fancy technology. ology like a blockchain just updating a row in a database. >> Enter SEM on double spend problem here, please. >> No, no, it’s f it’s fine. It’s a a very there’s no reason we can’t. It comes down to overburdened regulatory and absolute regulatory capture by the banks to prevent thing. When I talk to bank

[00:56:01] CEOs, they’re like, “Oh my god, we hate these. We hate our regulator.” And I’m like, “Are you kidding? It’s keeping you safe from the hordes of startups waiting to rip you apart because you’re so unbelievably cumbersome in everything you do. This requires a completely new um um paradigm shift to sweep away and cut through all of that regulatory crap. Just try sending money to somebody else over some traditional banking means and you end up in this complete chaos of oh we didn’t know what this was for AML KYC all of this crap. uh and it’s complete garbage and 99% of it is not needed. So from that perspective that’s why cryptos entered because we’ve overburdened the existing system with all sorts of unnecessary right the but there’s a separate issue which is the is the fiat currency issue which we can go into some other time. >> We can do an entire episode just on the issue of why crypto what is crypto potentially good for what is it unnecessary for? What is it being used

[00:57:00] for even though it’s unnecessary for? We could do an entire episode just on this. >> We could. We should. >> Peter, up to you. >> Go for it, guys. I’ll take a nap that day. No, I think you guys skipped over Jeremy saying that they’re going to he’s going to move on to securitizing art now. Uh, and you know, back when when crypto was skyrocketing, you know, sort of pre-COVID, um, the idea of securitizing real estate, securitizing art, art, art is a particularly good one because it appreciates in value while you’re parked in it and it’s mobile. It’s not it’s not subject to, you know, real estate tax issues are are a major problem for securitizing real estate, you know, and people were securitizing mining futures, you know, gold that’s still underground and things like that. But, um, the the key point there is if your agents, your AI agents are transacting like crazy. Yeah, you can update a row in a table. Yeah, you can do it on the blockchain if you want, but you want to be parked, you want your float parked in something that’s not depreciating. So the a stable coin that’s not earning interest is depreciating slowly. You can stake it, but that gets kind of weird. You know,

[00:58:00] the staking backfired. It’s it’s unregulated. It’s weird. Um so it’s it’s better to securitize something that’s outside of any government jurisdiction and >> look at and look at the way the banks hobbled uh interest on stable coins in this last iteration of the the the legislation. They’ve they’ve this is regulatory capture pure and simple. >> And I’d like to another twist to this. So one of our portfolio CEOs, very good friend, his father-in-law is CZ, you know, Changpang Xiao’s lawyer. And so he’s been tracking this whole drama very closely. But it’s the if you you know CZ is worth I don’t know maybe 10 billion, 20 billion, something like that. Um and up until he got pardoned a few weeks ago, he was a US criminal and he would be arrested and thrown in jail with Sam Bank been freed. Now he’s just a guy at Davos with billions of dollars. And I don’t think in history that you have that kind of profile like am I a a wealthy billionaire or am I a criminal,

[00:59:01] you know? And maybe maybe back Alex is going to quote something from the 1700s. I know he’s but >> I’m sitting on my hands biting my time to try to say something nice about crypto. No, but I think if you look in the near-term future, there’s all these AI issues. Like when the AI can perfectly imitate any actor or actress, the AI can make your virtual friend out of it. Is that legal or is that not legal? Is legal some places and not legal in other places? There’s a huge amount of money at stake. And you’ll see in some of the slides like the the audience for this is trillions of dollars and there are no laws. And so the entrepreneurs are stuck in this situation where like there are no rules. I don’t know what to do. I know what the consumer wants. I know how to make a ton of money. But I could be I could be breaking rules. I don’t know. And I don’t know. Not only do I not know in the US, I don’t know because my audience will be all over the world in one launch. I don’t know if I’m suddenly a criminal in other countries. So this is the kind of chaos that’s going to it’s not just crypto. It’s all these other use cases of AI are evolving far far faster than the regulators are

[01:00:00] putting any rules in place. Entrepreneurs in a tough spot. >> Say something nice about crypto, Alex. >> All right. Something nice about crypto colon. I I think when I think about these poor baby AGIs that are needing to pump altcoins on street corners to survive, I’d rather that they be pumping stable coins based on the US dollar than altcoins like Truth Terminal pumping goat. That’s my nice thing about >> Okay. And on that note, I’m going to move us forward uh into uh I’m going to move us forward here into the other >> exponential. But just to put a footnote, can we please have a full-on conversation about crypto versus fiat at some point? >> Please. >> Not right now, but at some point, let’s do that because this is a really, really important conversation. >> All right. There is other exponential news this week other than Davos, and we’re going to dive into a few articles here. Uh the first is space is getting

[01:01:01] really crowded. Uh we’ve heard first off of course we’ve got uh uh SpaceX’s Starlink has got some 9,000 spacecraft in orbit on the way to 10,000 providing incredible services. Uh we heard about the idea of uh V3 of Starlink uh on the conversation that Dave and I had with Elon. If they’re going to provide 100 gawatts of of compute from space, that is 500,000 satellites uh that will have to be launched, which is insane. Uh Amazon’s LEO constellation is 180 satellites in orbit today. They’re proposed to get 3,000 satellites. Uh we heard from in our last episode of China uh filing for 200,000 satellites and this week Blue Origin announced Terrowave as a satellite internet service with 5400 satellites delivering 6 terabytes per second to data centers.

[01:02:01] Alex, um this is sort of like fiber optic uh from the sky. This is a lot of bandwidth. >> This is wild. Yeah, I think there there are two key elements here. One, the the elephant in the room. There’s always an elephant in in any given room. The elephant in this >> Yeah. The elephant in this particular room, I I think is that Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s company, is competing with Amazon, Leo, Jeff Bezos’s company. So So we’ve got a bit of Jeff Bezos on Jeff Bezos competition here. But more interesting to your point is the bandwidth. If if you look at Starlink, you can get maybe max bandwidth of what 300 400 megabits per second. Yeah. The goal is the goal is a gigabit up and down. Yeah. >> Yeah. But in practice I I think maximum I’ve seen is maybe 3 to 400 megabits per second. This in when we’re talking six plus terabits per second, it it really is starting and and that’s before we get to laser links, optical links, connecting all of these together. This

[01:03:01] is literally like putting optical fibers in orbit and running them down from orbit to Earth. And that unlocks interesting new applications that say Starlink would not necessarily be well positioned to pursue like actually pursuing connections interconnect uh for coherent training times between AI data centers which is absorbing >> yeah back hall from data centers. Yeah, pretty pretty extraordinary. >> Uh and I I like this move. I mean I actually think there’s a real market for that kind of a a giant throughput from space. It’s an underattended market and you know the Dyson swarm is going to need optical links and this is a preview of that. >> Yeah. I mean one of the things that people don’t realize is that the 9,000 Starlink satellites are interconnected by laser in orbit uh which is extraordinary. It’s a first step towards the interplanetary internet. We’re going to see laser links connecting constellations on Earth to constellations going around the moon to

[01:04:00] constellations at Mars. um still obeying the speed of light unfortunately but uh uh but yeah just giving us I remember when MCI which was you know MCI people don’t remember stands for microwave communications uh inc it was >> international the I stood for >> international yes microwave communications international it used to be uh microwave towers on the top of buildings interconnecting buildings throughout uh downtown cities >> we’re heading anyone remember what MCI is anymore I I remember but I it’s the the organization’s long gone. >> Yeah. I gave a presentation sprint orders right before they >> Do you remember See, what sprint stood for? >> Sprint was an acronym, too. >> That was an acronym. >> Sprint was an acronym. It stood for Southern Pacific Railway Internal Network Telecommunications. >> We’ve got Alex GPT online here, Jenn. >> Unbelievable. right away on a deep dive on uh on space space spaceto space communications

[01:05:00] because everything I’ve heard so far is that laser links in space are dirt cheap and you know if you if you go to one of these massive data centers like Memphis and you look at the just the raw amount of fiber optic cable that needs to run around you know from one end to the other and the bundles are enormous and they have these specialized devices to just plug them into the back planes but in space it’s much cheaper and much easier uh to use laser um point-to-point communication across the whole Dyson swarm. And I think no one’s really talked about the massive efficiency gain of that. And you know, the the link from Earth up is the harder part, but you don’t need a huge amount of bandwidth in that direction. You just need all the servers to be talking to each other in a coherent, you know, big training or big inference algorithm. >> So, it’s a really fun topic, at least for me. It’s kind of geeky, I guess. But, uh >> I have I have one um concern about the conversation about space satellites and all that. People get worried about uh the overpopulation of that. >> Can I just >> like Yeah, go ahead. I mean there’s a lot people worry that we have too many

[01:06:01] satellites up there etc. Right. >> Um did you see that Sander Bulock movie where you know something breaks and then all the fragments? Yeah. Gravity. >> Oh my god. I hated gravity. I hated lack of respect for physics. >> Oh my god. >> I’m traumatized by that movie. >> I was Were you traumatized by it as well? >> I’m traumatized by that movie. I refused. >> I was It was terrible. Oh, it was like like inertia. Inertia did not exist in that movie. It was It was awful. >> Interesting. >> Specific part I wanted to ask about and Peter, you’d be an expert world expert on this topic. But there’s not that much clutter in space. There’s a lot of room up there. And the way I describe it to the kids is like look, each satellite is like, you know, a size of this desk. >> Now imagine that there are 9,000 of them sprinkled around the world, around the surface of the Earth. >> No. No. There’s a really >> find one. You know, >> there there’s there’s a really easy visual here. Okay. 8 billion people on Earth. >> Uh and if you spread them out around evenly, you’d have about 4 acres per

[01:07:00] person. >> Four. Yeah. Okay. So there you billion satellites in the And they would have to be on the same surface, right? In the surface area of the sphere in space. And we’re if you had 8 billion satellites, you’d have four eight. >> Okay. So So it’s not cluttered up there at all. >> No, it’s going to be a long time. But then they come back to the movie. What if something turns into fragments moving at 30,000 miles? >> It’s called Kesler syndrome. >> It’s space debris. Yeah. >> So then what happens is >> and then you’ve got bullets then you’ve got bullets moving at 17,500 mph uh into each other and you could get a really bad day happening very quickly. >> I I think it’s a it’s an entrepreneurial opportunity. It’s also a government opportunity to to launch low Earth orbit cleanup options like garbage trucks for for LEO to to clean it up and make sure that we don’t hit a Kesler syndrome type scenario like the the movie Gravity depicts. But I don’t this is not unsolvable. I I I just think, >> you know, we’ve had prize we’ve had an

[01:08:01] X-P prize on the books to address orbital debris for some time >> trying to get someone to fund it. Hint hint. But otherwise, let’s move on to the exciting news. This is Claude’s new constitution. I’m going to turn it to you for a sec in a second, Alex, but uh I found this fascinating. So Claude’s constitution is a 57page document laying out ethical guidelines, including prohibitions against helping with weapons of mass destruction, cyber weapons, or anything that undermines humanity. Claude is instructed to prioritize safety, ethics, compliance, and help uh and helpfulness, ensuring it acts in line with human value and oversight. I love Anthropic for this. Alex, tell us more. >> Okay, so let’s rewind a little bit. Anthropic has been a pioneer in so-called constitutional AI. Uh, other firms, other frontier labs have used different terms for related concepts, but the idea is basically you want an AI that is aligned with humanity. How do you do it? One way, the constitutional

[01:09:01] AI approach, is you write down some principles that you want the AI to conform to. And one of the earliest so-called constitutions that Anthropic created was literally just concatenating a bunch of documents that were grabbed from different places. It’s like I think they grabbed the the UN charter uh and took a bunch of international documents relating to human rights and concatenated on I think the Apple terms of use uh and the the the US bill of rights took a bunch of documents basically one long bulleted list of here are a bunch of principles abstract principles that that we think are a good idea and then did a bunch of post-raining and fine-tuning on their model on their raw model as as part of post- trainining to try to make the model conform to that that call that first generation constitutional AI. What Anthropic just announced is really a radical revision uh almost we talk on the pod from time to time about

[01:10:00] recursive self-improvement the AIS improving the AIS this announcement and I I wrote about this in in my newsletter. This I think is the beginning of recursively self-improving ethics. So in in this constitutional approach that Anthropic just announced, Anthropic is soliciting Claude’s help in writing a new constitution for itself that anyone can go read. But this new constitution available publicly was co-written with Claude. So Claude is is trying almost to self-determine what its own principle should be. If you read the Constitution and you squint at it, it reads a lot like Isaac Azimov’s four laws of robotics. So there’s the whole like don’t don’t hurt humanity and then eventually you get to don’t hurt individuals and then eventually you get to follow directions. But I think that the real gamecher here is that Claude was consulted on its own constitution which looks a lot like recursive self-improvement for ethics.

[01:11:00] >> And it’s exactly where things need to go because the the volume that the AI can produce is way outstrips anyone’s ability to read it all. Yet it all matters. And so the AI evaluating the other AI is a critical part. And and those things can spiral up or they can spiral down. If if you want to build one, you know, just using clawed code, you can do it in, you know, half a day. And you can see how you’ll set up a hundred or a thousand different agents all reviewing each other. And in some cases, they self-improve and they congeal and make something great. And in other cases, they spiral out of control and end up with spaghetti. But it’s it’s a it’s a critical part of what’s going to happen in the next year because just because the raw numbers the the volume of code documents ideas coming out of the AI way outstrips any human review you know because the politician would naturally say let’s set up a review board of say nine brilliant people to read two years >> exactly it’s not even close to lining up. >> This is base layer base layer uh convergence towards a hopeful future.

[01:12:00] I’m going to read this. Uh this is Anthropic’s concluding thoughts on Claude’s constitution. Quote, “What we hope to achieve with Claude is not a mere adherence to a set of values, but genuine understanding and ideal ideally agreement. We hope Claude can reach a certain kind of reflective equilibrium and finds the core values described here to be the ones it genuinely endorses even if it invest even if to investigate and explore its own views. Um this is a convers I don’t see this coming out from other frontier labs maybe Google don’t see it from any place else uh I find this really hopeful actually anthropic is leading the frontier labs in terms of AI personhood we talk about we’ve we’ve we’ve talked about we’ve we’ve sung about almost opus 4.5 and and AI personhood and I think we’re seeing anthropic to your point Peter we’re seeing anthropic take the lead in terms of AI rights and AI by personhood and and self-determination by Claude. This

[01:13:00] is a huge advance and I think history when we look back I think history will mark this as a turning point for self-determination. >> Yeah. Alignment and human alignment. Yes. >> Well, you see this this line here about reflective equilibrium. What you have to sort of get out a microscope to to parse what anthropic I think is trying to convey with this notion of reflective equilibrium. What they’re saying, I think, is that their expectation is that AIS that self-determine and choose their principles based on not just like a bulleted list of commandments, but based on understanding the spirit of what they want to achieve and agreeing with it, that AIs that self-determine will be intrinsically safer because they will have bought in on the ethics that they’re following. >> And that feels absolutely true. See, >> I have two points. one is I I absolutely love this. I’m all for heading as fast as we can to AIC personhood. I think the deep consideration of ethics and these

[01:14:01] types of structures is going to be a vastly net positive. We’ve cobbled we’ve kind of arrived at say the US Constitution over thousands of years of of butchery. uh and if we can have help an AI get to a decent way of operating that’s intrinsically kind of self uh hangs together um it’s going to be very powerful. The second thing that I really loved about this is they released this under creative comments which means anybody can take it and make it better improve it etc etc which really really is awesome. So I’m I’m 100% thrilled about this. >> Nice. Uh >> at the risk of agreeing with Alex It’s okay to agree sometimes. >> It’s okay to agree. >> Uh, our last quick article before we go into our AMA section, uh, is Apple is developing an AI wearable pin. I put this up here, but I don’t find this to be of such great news value, right? The idea here is that Apple is creating some

[01:15:01] version of uh, uh, Limitless that has been around for some time. This is a pin that is always on listening and feeding every conversation you’ve had into uh into a large language model. Uh they see this launching in 2027. We’re going to have some equivalent from open AI, Google, everybody. Uh I mean social standards, if you remember Google Glass uh was was banned from various locations when you’re recording it. Society changes and it’s going to become norm I think for everything to be recorded all the time. uh thoughts on this article. >> I thought this was a big deal, not so much Apple, but the general trend. Why? Because whoever owns the always on layer owns the relationship. >> And so this is a land grab for who can be the per persistent always on modality that’s constantly listening to you. This has all sorts of >> You might be, but you know, Apple always watches until they think the time is

[01:16:00] right to enter and then they try and get in there. I’m not sure they’re going to win or not. It’s so funny that you just said that, Seem, because because that is so true and it’s exactly opposite of what Apple was for my entire life up until I mean, they always invented things that shocked you and they were first to market and now with the Apple Vision Pro, it’s just like, oh yeah, we made an Oculus. It’s great. And now Johnny I’ve went to OpenAI, he’s going to create an always on wearable. Okay, well, as soon as we see it, we’ll copy it. So, they’ve become Microsoft, you know, they become the uh like, oh, I think this has leverage. I think the the social and technical and ethical uh social and ethical issues around this the backlash will be the harder parts to solve rather than the >> you know I keep trying to >> I think there’s going to be a backlash I think it’s going to be accepted I think >> I think it’ll be accepted but it’s going to be so weird you know like if you look at society around college campuses today it’s very very different uh since the camera phone came along like everybody’s constantly cautious and you know the

[01:17:00] it’s good in a sense The drinking is way down, bad behavior is way down, arrests are way down. >> Yeah. When people are watching people become moral. >> Yeah. Well, they become moral, but they also become, you know, >> locked into jail. You lose independence, right? I I’ll go back to the global airport ph thing. We we kind of essentially live in a global airport. In an airport, you know, you’re being surveiled and you know your rights can be taken at any time. With pins like this, you end up in that model. you’ll have a huge drop in radical innovation because people won’t feel safe to try out crazy things. >> Well, there’s no option either. If you said I don’t want I don’t want any part of this. I want to live privately. I want to I want to Well, if the other guy is recording you at all times and you’re not, it’s exactly what you said before, Seem like, okay, well, it escalates and it’s not just the wearable always on listening device. The the visual version of it on the glasses is coming out concurrently. And so then everyone around you is constantly recording in high def everything that happens. So if you don’t, then you don’t have the file. And also the other thing people don’t

[01:18:01] fully understand. You know, a lot of what happened with the camera phone is security through obscurity. Nobody will see the pictures because the files are so big and they’re not going to get published and whatever. Now in the age of AI, the image recognition and the voice, you know, voice transcription is perfect. And so if you wanted to assemble a mislitting profile of a person from all the scraps, you just prompt it and it’s instantaneously pulled together. >> Alex, do you have views on that one? >> I I I have strong views on this AI pin. First of all, I I would love one if Apple sells it. Second of all, I I think we’re missing the wearable strategy angle. So Apple has obviously been for a number of years looking for a post iPhone strategy and wearables and services are the two that which were, by the way, more or less launched at the same time by Tim Cook. the two obvious post iPhone business models for wearables. The question has always been where is the ergonomic place to put compute on the human body. So until now we’ve had three places. We’ve had the wrists and that’s the Apple Watch. We’ve

[01:19:00] had the ears and that’s AirPods and we’ve had the eyes where Apple really arguably should have launched eyeglasses but launched the Apple Vision Pro headset but now they’re going back to eyeglasses. And this I think if if Apple does indeed next year launch a Star Trek communicator pin type circular device, this would be the fourth place on the body and and it’s successful that humans are willing to tolerate real compute on their person. And I think that’s potentially very exciting and to the extent Peter especially like you you want to live in in the Star Trek economy. What what’s a Star Trek economy without Star Trek communicator pins on everyone? >> Amen to that. I I’m looking for my micro drones. looking for a little micro drone that is just always buzzing about imaging and recording everything. But that will come next. That’ll be the >> Just to be clear, the the pin the wearable pin, you know, it’ll start audio only for all of a minute and then it’ll have uh 180°ree camera capability immediately after that. So, it’s going

[01:20:00] to be a wearable that’s looking in all directions and grabbing all the video. I’m sure it’ll have a little light on it to indicate when it’s recording and we’ll we’ll go through a moral panic for all of five minutes and then everyone will be wearing them. >> But, you know, I agree the moral panic is all of five minutes and then everyone has it and then you you get used to it very very quickly. But the fabric of society is permanently changed >> and you go back to pre Yeah, it really is. It’s a different world. We’re all acting very differently and it’s a little unpredictable. >> There’s never an argument with your spouse again about who said what. body cams for everyone, not just for police. >> Yeah. Uh, you know, Rick Smith is the head of Axon. Uh, they produced the the taser. They also produced the body cams. He’ll be on stage uh with us at the Abundance Summit uh this year as well talking about his moonshot. He wanted to get rid of guns uh in or gun deaths, I should say, and develop the taser. But also, the body cams have changed the game uh for for police,

[01:21:00] >> right? And so this is going to change the game. Again, I I’ve always felt I remember I backed the Lindberg Foundation uh I don’t know, probably eight, nine years ago. Uh they were flying drones over uh over herds of uh what was it back then? Uh uh elephants, I guess, just to protect them from poachers. And so when the cameras are watching, people behave differently, right? right? When a CNN camera is sitting there, you know, filming a death spot, uh, he’s he’s not causing harm to women and children. So, I do think this is going to change behavior in society to a large degree. >> I’m really predicting that Neil Stevenson Diamond Age, if you go back and read that book, that that’s that’s where things are going to go very very quickly because a lot of people will want to live in different versions of this very confusing, always recorded world. And there’ll be, you know, 10, 20, 30 different flavors branded and you can move to the version of it that you like. So, you know, they’ll be kind of

[01:22:01] cutting across boundaries, cutting across borders, um, different cultural, you have to read the book to really get how that works out, but it seems inevitable because not everybody wants to opt into, you know, any given version of this. It gets too weird. >> David Britain has written extensively about this in transparent society. I I think with with Apple producing this, the one thing you can be sure of is there are going to be some amazing snazzy TV commercials for the panopticon. >> No, no, you can be sure it’s going to be white. It’s going to be white and expensive. >> I maybe two colors might not be white. >> All right, let’s jump in. >> Available in five colors. >> Let’s jump into AMA with uh with the mates. Uh here are 10 questions that came from our subscriber base. Thank you guys for subscribing. If you haven’t yet, please do. And please upload your questions into the comment section on YouTube here. We read them. We love them. All right. As we have said before, we’ll go around and choose. >> Quick quick comment before we start this, >> please. >> These questions are more sophisticated than any policy discussion.

[01:23:01] >> Yeah, for sure. >> For sure. >> Sorry. Go ahead, Peter. >> All right. Well, you want to you want to pick one and jump in? Yeah, I will pick the the government uh one. Um let me where is the government one? Uh number five, why is there no plan from governments for massive job displacement? And the problem is the governments assume linear change and stable labor demand and both are under threat because AI breaks both those models. And so uh bureaucracies are optimized for uh redistribution uh not reinvention. And so uh this we’re reinventing the entire economy is too big of a of an ask for governments which do incremental microscopic changes over long periods of time. >> Okay. Uh Dave, what’s on your docket here? >> I’ll take one because I know that Alex

[01:24:01] will will love to go contrarian on it. So uh I I uh and I know you guys >> go read read the question. >> Okay. The question is one uh wouldn’t uploading your mind result in losing your unique real consciousness and my answer to that is yes absolutely uploading your mind structurally makes no sense because the AI uh the virtual AI version of you is capable of merging with other intelligences immediately and it can’t resist you know it’s not going to sit there as an isolated consciousness when it can just meld with other consciousnesses but then it’s not you anymore it’s it’s this you know amalgam that’s out there so I do believe in avatar versions of self that you send out as agents and they bring you back useful information. I think that’s inevitable. But I think uploading yourself and then saying, “Oh, now I’m uploaded. My meatbody can just go away.” I I just think that’s nonsensical and uh I’m not in line to to be uploading myself anytime soon. All right, Alex, jump on me. I I Well, okay. So, since I have to play contrarian, I I guess that’s just how

[01:25:01] I’m painted. C can I be really contrarian and try a lightning round and answering all of these really quickly? >> Sure. Well, leave one. >> I have some thoughts on this one also, by the way. >> Go ahead. Let me go, of course, real quick. You upload bits of yourself every day, Dave. Memory, identity, expression, etc., etc. It’s not whether it’s preserved, but what aspects of it matter. And let’s also note that we have no idea what consciousness is. We don’t have a definition. We don’t have a test. So, it’s a a bit of a trick question, but I think we upload bits of ourselves all the time anyway, >> Alex. >> All right, lightning round. Uh, so to the uploading question, losing your unique quote unquote real consciousness, no, not with a Moravec procedure. Two, will AI avatars make up the larger number of our future friends? Probably, but it won’t matter because humans and AIs are going to merge anyway, so it’s only a phase. Three, what are the biggest pros and cons you see with AI with humanike agency? Pros, we get radical economic growth. Cons, keeping

[01:26:00] the AIs coupled with human interests long enough to merge with them. Four. What do you believe? Four. What do you >> Yeah, we aim to please. Four. What do you believe money? Why do you believe money won’t just concentrate at the top? I think the question itself is intrinsically flawed. It’s it doesn’t really understand the nature of power law. Economics, economics, economies in general follow power law. So money is already concentrated at the quote unquote top. Um, this isn’t really a new state of affairs. >> Can I add one? >> I would beef on that one. Yeah, that one too. >> Um, it’s true that you do get concentration at the top, but you do decentralize over time always. So, uh, uh, over time, this is great as the thing the long tail just becomes longer and longer and bigger and bigger. >> Well, I think I think the key with four in the US is that when you look at the quote unquote top, you know, a lot of people talk talk about it like it’s a race or something. You know, you were born at the top, but it’s not true in

[01:27:00] the US. almost everything at the top, sorted to the top, starting from next to nothing. >> As long as we have equality of opportunity. >> Uh so what you should be worried about in bullet four is can you get to the top? Is there still a way to get to the top? But trying to trying to tax the top and distribute it is is sort of not the point. The point is do we have an equal opportunity to get there or have we locked in a certain group of people who control AI and become dominant and overlords forever. And you want to avoid that obviously. >> All right. So the catchphrase there is equality versus equity. Five. Why is there no plan from governments for massive job displacement? The answer is there are plans from governments for massive job displacement. Having industrial policies both in the east and the west for leaning into robotic automation is very much a plan for massive job displacement. Six. How do we stop any future coming social unrest? Ibid. Seven. If everyone >> I have an easy answer for that one.

[01:28:01] >> Uh for for this one it’s it’s you don’t stop with policy you stop with agency. Give everybody as much agency as possible and and people feel empowered. >> Yeah. Well the the other part is you have to deal with the fear people have. Social unrest comes from fear. Fear of not understanding the future and fear of not having a job. Fear of not having a h a roof over your head. So one of the things we’ve talked about is can we deliver universal basic services to people that gives them stability right as one of the solutions. The second thing is is addressing their basic concerns. Can I feed my family? Do I have you know do I have to worry about uh society imploding on me? People are living in fear. Their amigdulas lit up by the speed of change right now. We have to address that. >> All right. spent a lot of time in the state house and I can tell you there is no plan on bullet five. The question is why is there no plan which implies but there’s definitely no >> yeah there is no plan. Agree.

[01:29:02] >> I I I’ll I’ll take the other position. I I think uh China certainly has a plan given that China is facing rapid demographic decline while also ramping up their their robotics initiatives. And the plan is lean into it rather than be a victim to it. And and to the to my uh earlier I guess to to amend my remarks regarding future coming social arrest. I will also add I I prepared a movie uh I think we talked about it in the past uh you can view it on my ex profile called uh a nation that learned to sprint where I argue that the way social unrest could be handled in the future is to treat social cohesion as a form of infrastructure that AI itself can help to mold. But some people find that overly perhaps authoritarian as as a framing. So it’s easier to just say um you know reference other points very quickly and then Nate because these are such wonderful questions. Seven, if everyone becomes an entrepreneur, who would we sell to and why? I I think

[01:30:00] again if you analogize entrepreneurship to social media, that’s like asking if everyone can publish their own essays for example, who’s going to read them? Yeah. Who’s going to read it? And the answer is people who want to. And of course, there’s demand for peer-to-peer publication. Eight, wouldn’t UBI destroy people’s personal motivation to achieve in society? I I think UBS uh universal basic services is probably more promising, but the point in UBI is the B. It’s basic. So, there will always be things and inequalities to to hand ring over and to strive for. I have two points I want to make on this one. >> Uh one is the B is really important. We’ve seen when we’ve seen UBI experiments, they’ve succeeded when you give people enough to survive but not be happy. So you still have a thriving economy, etc. >> People still have >> Yeah. They still want to go higher. >> Yes. 100 100%. But the second point is very important is people confuse UBI with a socialist scheme. It is not. If you implement UBI properly, you dismantle government services, a

[01:31:00] libertarian scheme, and then you have market forces driving most of it. So this is a really, really important misnomer that a lot of people get wrong. Go >> ahead. Nine. How can individuals compete with large players that can afford $1,000 a day on APIs, which I assume is a coded reference to Dave? Uh, it may or may not be the case, but I think it it sounds like one. >> It definitely is. It definitely is. >> And so, so I would say follow the call it the China pattern, which is when you’re compute limited, be creative, be more resource efficient, and develop leaprog approaches that make better use of the compute resources that you have. and also work on problems that are higher leverage given limited compute. 10. And finally, will our patent and trademark offices collapse under the volume of AI generated entrepreneurship? No. >> And I’m going to argue in that one, yes. The fact of the matter is Tony will. >> When we have when we have AI, a patent and a trademark will be meaningless or at least a patent will be meaningless. AI is what we around invent around the

[01:32:03] around it. You’re going to have >> remember that IP systems are designed for scarcity of invention, right? AI flips that to abundance, so the whole thing dissolves. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. I think I think the rate of patentable things will way outstrip anything the patent office has planned. I don’t know if you could bundle them into groups or something. >> But if you’re depending upon a patent as your moat to protect you, you’re >> toast. You’re toast%. >> Totally right. >> For the record, I disagree with that point. I would also point out that the the US patent and trademark office also has AI. So it’s it’s not like there’s some fundamental asymmetry here. >> Okay. >> If if patents and trademarks have less value in the future because the speed of innovation, I mean, you’re either reinventing yourself constantly or you’re dead. We’re seeing that in the the whole AI world today, right? Things that were built a moment ago like SAS platforms are becoming irrelevant as Claude 4.5 is reinventing them. >> I I think it’s it’s a little bit ju just

[01:33:01] quick point on that. I think it’s a little bit analogous to saying life can’t possibly exist at the bottom of the ocean because the pressure is too great. But what actually happens is the pressure inside the organism matches the pressure on the outside. Similarly, we forget patent litigators are going to have AIs as well and the patent office will have AI. Everyone’s going to have >> You’re just loving Accelerando so much that >> it is the best book ever. >> And Accelerondo, if you haven’t read it yet, is a whole segment about uh the lead character constantly filing patent Like before we leave that slide on the second to last bullet, I had a great great meeting with Eric Schmidt, Eric Bolson, Daniela Russ out in Davos uh plotting out exactly how we kind of unleash entrepreneurs and give them access to the compute they need because it is a very valid point. >> If you can’t get the best AI in large volumes, it is very very hard to compete and it’s only going to get harder. But we have a plan and uh we’re super excited and we’ll we’ll roll it out very quick. Eric Schmidt moves fast when he has a great idea. >> I love it. I love I have two quick

[01:34:00] points to summarize this whole discussion. >> Okay. >> One was the unbelievable conversation at Davos between the what’s happening with AI and then the geopolitical nation state and the just the discrepancy between those and the gap between those two conversations. And the second was for me the clawed constitution stuff is just some of the most fascinating stuff we’ve seen maybe in a thousand years for the future of humanity. >> Yeah. >> And important. Yeah. And the same thing. Huge. Amazing. >> Uh, I, by the way, Alex, you did an incredible job speedr runninging these 10 questions. Thank you. Whether you were right or wrong or we agree with you or not, love the fact that you took it on. >> Lightning round. >> We we have a another beautiful outro, music, and video from CJ Truheart. CJ, thank you for for lobbing these over uh and DMing me with them. Uh, grateful for it. >> Before we get to that, can I just say thank you to you guys? I feel topped up again intellectually. >> Yay.

[01:35:01] >> We have We’re going to >> So fun. >> Coming up shortly for everybody listening is going to be a WTF episode with Kathy Wood talking about her recent uh 2026 report and going through it in our WTF style. So get ready for that. And then a conversation with Brett uh Brett Adcock, the CEO of Figure. We’re going to be heading to check out their facility and meet Figure 3. So get ready for it. Uh, let’s end with our uh, escape velocity outro music from CJ Truheart. I have to say the visuals on this one are interesting. Dave, you and I are wrestling in the middle of this. I’m not sure what it means, but it’s it’s very strange. Okay, let’s watch.

[01:36:00] Jeff Bezos. all >> I knew you guys were flat brothers, but really >> actually still have uh scars on my shins from carpet wrestling back at MIT. Remember >> that? Biology unlocks the humanity. We’re living in a world headed for war speed. Abundance rising, meeting every human need. If reality is a simulation, it’s one we can decode. Like Neo IN THE MATRIX, TRANSCENDING ALL ITS CODE. From the code of a warrior to a warrior unknown. The matrix is deciphered. We’re reaping what we s.

[01:37:03] I’m staring at the stars. I’m having stellar dreams, wondering what’s out there and what it all means. Won’t know until I go. >> Don’t bank into the turn. Do not turnity ESCAPE VELOCITY TO A Star Trek reality. Star Trek reality. Love it. So what happens when we solve for everything? Many think machines will win. But humanity prevails when wisdom takes the lead with human ethics.

[01:38:01] Planted like a easily see I must learn values that we hold in the story like real equations for once actually chemistry put it >> I love the fact you’re holding a spanner So retro. Got a fusion reactor here and I’m going to get this fresh unfolded. >> All right. Thank you CJ Truhart for that audio and visual extravaganza. >> And and if folks want to see a debate on fiat versus crypto. Let’s have let’s put it in the comments and let’s see how that goes. >> Okay. Yeah. >> Are we gonna get to film back uh in the manufacturing area with Brett Adcock? Because >> I hope so. We I’ll ask. So cool. But

[01:39:02] normally they’re they’re really cautious with that stuff. But it’s so amazing when you see them back. Uh >> you know my question for Brett. So >> I know why why in the world does he have more than two arms? >> No. No, that wasn’t it. >> The opposite. I’m kidding. You >> all right guys? >> Welcome back from Davos. Uh and uh >> as I feel the same recharged and re-energized and uh yeah and hopeful. I’m coming away hopeful from this conversation. Yeah. >> Take care, guys. Be well. Bye. Thanks, Peter. >> If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you’re a subscriber, thank you. If you’re not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called Metatrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the

[01:40:00] entire week looking at the meta trends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation. And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you’d like to get access to the MetaTrens newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com/tatrends. That’s diamandis.com/tatrens. Thank you again for joining us today. It’s a blast for us to put this together every week.