Dennis Hassabis uh the CEO of Deep Mind uh says AGI may not need a major breakthrough. I've argued in the past that we achieved AGI in the summer of 2020. We know I would argue what AGI is and we know how. >> Please define it for me. >> Figure AI. They've increased production from one robot per day to one robot per hour. Their target is 100,000 robots between now and 2030. 1x Technologies production goal is 10,000 robots this year, 100,000 in 2027. The prediction that comes both from Elon and from Brad Adcock up to 10 billion humanoid robots by 2040. >> It's probably right. What I think is perhaps even more interesting is what does a posthumanoid robot form factor look like. These are the kinds of of conversations and imaginations that one can have in this, you know, exponential singularity that we're living in.
[00:01:02] >> Now, that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen. >> Everybody, welcome to a special episode of Moonshots here at MIT. Uh this is a conversation around all things happening to uplift humanity. You know, I want to read something I wrote this morning as an introduction to today's episode because it's important. So, welcome to Moonshots, where we distill the singularity. No politics, no [ __ ] just the technology that changes the world. The breakthroughs helping us uplift humanity. The news that matters most changing our world, impacting our companies and our families. Our mission to help you understand what it is, why it matters with a dose of optimism. So, any fans of Moonshots here in the audience today? Nice. Love it.
[00:02:03] It is an honor and a pleasure. One of the things, you know, last night as I was going to sleep, I just had this sense of absolute gratitude for the people in my life, uh, who I love and have a chance to work with. I like to bring them on stage. First up, uh, the man who is my guru on all things exponential investing. Let's give it up for DB2, Dave Brendan. Welcome back to MIT. >> Thank you. Thank you. My partner at Link Ventures um and uh an extraordinary friend. Dave and I go back I don't say how many decades but a while. >> Don't say it. Don't say it. >> We were roommates at MIT Delta up on the third and fourth floor. Uh, basically it was Dave, myself, Mike Sailor, uh, from Strategy and, uh, it's been a friendship that's lasted and thank you, pal. I love
[00:03:00] the lobster on your shirt, by the way. Yeah, of course. >> Yeah, the MIT gear. We actually buy it at the coupe. We don't steal the MIT logo and then we put the lobsters on afterwards. >> All right. >> Yeah. >> All right. Uh, let's turn the conversation next to another MIT alum, another member of the link exponential ventures team, our resident genius, Alex Quezer Gross. Give it up for AWG. Everybody, >> yes, he is real. >> Maybe, >> maybe, >> maybe. >> I mean, the hologram technologies got really, really good. >> Seemed real. >> Um, >> could be an android. >> Yeah. That's true. Let me just check. Uh very pli. Yes, that's how you really test. >> Yeah. >> Uh my fourth and final uh moonshot mate, someone who is the godfather to my two boys, a dear friend, co-conspirator, a
[00:04:03] co-author, and a co-founder of Singularity University. Give it up everybody for Salem Ismail. HUGSIES. HUGSIES. OH, I'm not doing that. >> Yay. Good to see you, buddy. >> Likewise. >> Looking looking good. And we have a special guest with us on the stage today. Uh he is three times a Pulitzer Prize nominated author. He's the author of 17 books. He's my co-author of Abundance, Bold, and The Future as Fast You Think. And now We Are Gods. Let's give it up for Steven Coller. NICE. >> AH. AH. YES. SO, UH, you know, it is so good to be back on campus. >> Uh, it's been uh too long. I mean, one of the things I love about being a, you
[00:05:01] know, a partner with you at at Link, Dave, is that I get to get back here, uh, on a a reasonable basis. Uh, and Alex, uh, you and I met, and I remember, uh, we met and we had this like intense high bandwidth connection instantly. And then went to dinner and continued it talking about everything from, you know, AI and ASI and aliens. And it just was like awesome. >> And it never stopped. It never stopped and I'm so grateful for that. And I have to say, you know, um I think probably Seem and Steve, not as MIT alumni, um we feel sorry for you, but >> I I went to Waterl in Canada and we call MIT the Waterlue of the South. Was that framing? >> Uh in all >> MIT is what again? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Center for Bad Spellers. >> Yes. My favorite joke was, you know, at the local supermarket, you know, a guy's in the line that says 10 items or less,
[00:06:00] and the guy has 20 items in his cart, and the woman at the cash register says, "So, is it you go to Harvard and can't count or MIT and can't read?" Yeah. Anyway, okay. I'll ask for better jokes next time. So, uh, uh, let's jump in. We have a lot on the docket today. Uh, and a lot happening. Uh, for those of you watching this podcast online and not live here, this is a special episode we announced back a few months ago, it's for everybody in the room here who's purchased over 100 copies of We Are Gods, uh, helping us get it as a national bestseller so far and a number of different uh, lists. Yeah, thank you. >> Um, and uh, hopefully soon a New York Times bestseller. So, thank you all for that. Uh, let's jump into the news. So, uh, first news item, uh, Elon's insane Marshot comp. I mean, talk about over-the-top exponential. Uh, you know,
[00:07:02] there's never been anything like this. So, the SpaceX board votes on a comp package that is worth someone somewhere in the neighborhood of half a trillion dollars when it pays out. So, here it is. He gets 200 million super voting shares 10 to one when he hits a Mars colony of a million people or more. I mean this is not a Mars landing, not you know a photo from Mars, not a mouse on Mars. It's like a million person, you know, setup and a 7.5 trillion uh dollar market valuation. It's like an all or nothing. And uh here's the number at 200 million uh 200 million uh shares at 7.5 trillion that pays out a half a trillion dollars. >> Have you seen any comp packages like that? >> Well, no one has because it never existed before. And the super voting situation is new in the world, too. You know, Mike Sailor pioneered that when Micro Strategy went. >> No, Larry. Larry and Sergey did in
[00:08:00] Google. >> Sailor was way before Larry and Sergey, though. So, dumb. What is super voting? Well, it's on the slide. >> I know it's on the slide, but what the hell does it mean? >> It means that your vote counts 10 times more than everybody else's vote. >> Actually, Mike Sailor copied it for from Snor Redstone. I think Sailor went public in '91 or '92 with super voting stock and Goldman Sachs said, "That's insane. No one will ever buy into that. We're out of the deal." And he said, "You know what? I'll live without you." And uh so now Sailor still has control of Micro Strategy all these years later. >> Then Sergey and Larry copied it and it became popular and all the rage. So then Facebook went public or Meta now public with super voting stocks. So it just locks in those founders and it's been interesting to observe from an investor point of view because you know they the governance you would say well look wouldn't a board be a better governing body more stable more reliable over time but then those founders are the ones actually going to Mars going to the moon sending up satellites like all the kind of really worldchanging crazy sounding stuff comes from that structure. it has
[00:09:01] to be a founder, you know, uh, entrepreneurial tech forward company. No one else I've rarely seen a uh, you know, a replacement CEO drive that level of of capability. >> Well, and you would know better than anyone that you read the book like a lot of things that are going to happen in the next few years sound crazy. If you walk out on the streets of Cambridge, Cambridge is unusual actually. Go streets of Omaha and and say we'll have a million people on Mars and they'd be like you're nuts. And so then if that was your board, they would block you from trying. Uh so you need that ability to just act for these like crazy sounding ideas. But you know, in exponential time where we are right now, everything sounds crazy yet it's going to happen. >> Yeah. Yeah. The second part of his pay package is 60.4 million restricted shares. when he brings online 100 terowatts of space comput right he's been talking about 100 gawatts of space compute and now he's looking at 100
[00:10:02] terowatts Alex what do you make of that one >> I think inevitable it's going to happen >> other than the obvious quips about the Dyson swarm blah blah blah I I do think there's the seed here of the future of corporate governance in an age of what we might historically have called moonshots right now we have traditional notions of Ccorporations that exist to maximize profit for shareholders or return for shareholders. We have various notions of BC corporations or public benefit corporations that exist to in addition to optimize public benefit. I think I can see here the nucleus of almost a third type of corporation that Elon and his board are pioneering which is corporations that exist to achieve moonshots and that compensate accordingly. But I would love to see every S&P 500 company have as ambitious outcomes and comp plans corresponding to these for their CEOs. >> Yeah. >> Unless we get the Dyson swarm. >> I got a SEM question on this. >> Um that's an exponential organization
[00:11:02] comp package. >> It seems like an exponential organization comp package. It seems like it's um but it's he doesn't run exponential companies at all. He runs top down monarchies. It's the command and control. >> Yeah. Command and control. So like >> Yeah. Yes and no. So you know in a in a classic EXO in this style, the founder holds the MTP and he holds the vision. >> Yep. >> Uh people buy into that vision and then he holds them to task. So if you say you're going to build a rocket engine, you're going to design that rocket engine to get you to Mars, uh people have to step up and go, I'm going to do that and make that happen. He delegates very well. uh Elon okay he may get involved with engineering decisions and go well how are you going to achieve this etc but once they've agreed they get it done >> so the the inspiration comes from the top flows directly down through the org structure with no mitigation and video is the same there's like five layers
[00:12:00] between CEO and the top individual contributors in the company um so the holder of purpose and I think Alex put it well these are all exponential organizations now where the pay package is a moonshot and if you achieve that. If I'm an investor and he achieves that, I'm laughing all the way to the bank. I'm thrilled to bits, right? Who gets upset about that in like unless you in retrospect you're you're an idiot. Um cuz you'd have signed up for that no matter what h what the pay package was if that was the ratio of uh overall capital creation and value creation to that. And I think the bigger picture here is that these are all trying to achieve the impossible. And if somebody's trying to achieve the impossible, you give them all the respect and support because it literally is insane what they're trying to do. >> And and by the way, I've had two conversations with CEOs for uh kind of moonshot companies that are like, "Okay, I have to set this kind of a goal." Uh and it's only possible in a founder company. It's it's rarely going to see
[00:13:00] it in a company with a board of directors and a CEO who's the third or fourth CEO in it. And by the way, if you're going to set a moonshot goal with a CEO, the board's got to be completely supportive of it. >> Mhm. >> Right. >> I've seen one exception. >> What's that? >> Um I got approached and asked to do a workshop with the seauite and this senior management of Gucci >> Gucci >> at an offsite and the CEO said, "I will turn this into an exo." And he did. They went completely nuts and they actually 10xed the company over the next 3 4 years. And I had this >> but did they but this is not a 10x. This is a thousand X a million X right let's at least like there the aspiration is there in certain people the ability to achieve it etc is there also this is a whole other level nobody's ever seen this we look at it and go the guy's nuts we know it's nuts anyway but still >> can I ask a geeky under the hood exponential organization question >> sure >> a lot of the conversations that I have when I'm working with people running
[00:14:01] companies these days is about dashboards and what information actually in an exo what information needs to go into a dashboard that people aren't looking at. So if you were trying to build a dashboard for this for the moon, right? What what's in that dashboard that other most people don't think about? >> Okay. So there's a u there's a very this is a great question because it becomes very difficult to navigate this. Uh if you're a true exo and you have an MTP, I'll give you the example of TED, right? When TED launched TED X, okay, I'll do a little thought experiment which we put in that first book. And Peter, by the way, you contributed massively to that original book. So, I just want to honor that. >> Um, if he'd have stood up and said, "We're going to do 20,000 TEDx events in 5 years." He would have lost the team. They would go, "You're barking mad. I'm quitting." Nobody. I can't sign up for that. Okay. Uh, if what he did do is said, "We're going to have a an MTP ideas spreading. We're going to let the community decide. We're going to have a set of clear rules and let's see where
[00:15:00] this goes." A classic linear approach would have been, "We're going to do five TEDx events this quarter and 10 the next quarter and 15 the next quarter and 20." If you added that up, you'd end up with about 2500 TEDx events over that period of time. Instead, by setting an MTP in a in a real-time operating plan where you're tracking metrics in real time. So that helps steer the ship. That's the rudder. You he end up with 20,000 10x events and nobody in the world would have guessed that that would have been the outcome. You go from a single environment to a global media brand at near zero cost. That's the amazing part of what's possible if you can orient that way. So, your dashboard uh probably with OKRs as the as the management structure and the performance structure. Uh the best models we've seen are a an MTP with a one-year operating plan that's instrumented in real time. You can't put the full 5-year vision in it because people will just freak out. They can't cognitively. >> All right. Keeping Elon in the news. Uh it's been going on this past week. It's Elon versus Sam. It's the trial of the
[00:16:00] decade. So Elon has accused OpenAI of breach of charitable trust in unjust enrichment. Uh he's seeking damages of 150 billion plus reversion of OpenAI to its full nonprofit status plus the removal of Sam Alman and Greg Brockman. Uh Judge Rogers blocked Musk's team from making a trial about AI extinction which came into the conversation over again. I don't know if you guys have been watching it. I've got a couple of points I want to make and then we can open it up for for discussion. Um the first is a bombshell in the last couple of days where uh Greg Brockman's diary was fully disclosed. So he kept a diary which seems kind of insane. >> Who does that? >> Uh I no longer keep diaries. >> Um >> so rare. >> So it's you know people have called this the smoking gun. Uh in his diary he goes on to say we truly want the BC Corp. The true answer is that we want Elon out. If three months later we're doing a BBC Corp, uh then it was a lie. Can't see us
[00:17:02] turning this into a forprofit without a nasty fight. So, he's basically, you know, communicating uh that they're navigating around Elon towards this for-profit plan. The flip side of this uh is four damaging facts uh that the trial brings out. On the other side, there was a 2017 uh equity email. Uh Elon's own team was negotiating to get equity in the for-profit on his behalf. Uh and Musk admitted that he didn't read the fine print of transitioning to a for-profit. He also admitted on stage that uh XAI has distilled its its large language models from OpenAI's models itself. And then Altman apparently did offer Musk equity in the new company, but Musk turned it down, calling it a bribe. All right. Um I I hate that we have this going on right now. Uh but it's front and center. Alex, do you want
[00:18:00] to kick it off? >> Yeah. A few thoughts. One, aside from the point that I've mentioned previously on the pod, which is that this is going to make for an absolutely amazing made for television someday made by Aaron Sorcin or or maybe straight to to cinema. I I think there's an interesting tea play playing out before us about the future of corporate governance. And I I think this connects naturally with the previous story about Elon's own comp packages, which is that in an era when it's possible to start a notfor-profit with a moonshot goal, OpenAI was originally crafted with the goal of essentially frontr running Google Deep Mind to AGI and counterbalancing Google Deep Mind, which Elon and others perceived as potentially creating a singleton, a single super intelligence. >> They were that far advanced. That was his concern. I I had discussions with him around the time also this was happening. So open AI was originally intended in part to be a counterbalance to create a competitive ecosystem. The
[00:19:00] problem is technology is advancing so quickly now that you can start a not for-p profofit with seemingly an idealistic long-term goal, but the dog catches the card these days. You if you set a moonshot goal for a nonprofit, what happens when it actually succeeds and the outcome is economically transformative? So the the teleplay that plays out is everyone actually after starting this not forprofit actually realized we're going to catch that car. We're the dog that catches the car. And this is probably better structured as a >> The other thing is nonprofits are not designed to attract sufficient capital and to maximize the return on capital obviously and capital is still underlying, you know, part of the innermost loop. >> Doubly so. And this is the same parable that also played out with Anthropic. When Anthropic underwent its great schism and a number of folks, senior leaders from OpenAI left OpenAI, they were initially just forming Anthropic to be a pure alignment lab. And then they discovered, well, actually, if we want enough funding for alignment, we need
[00:20:01] revenue. Well, if we need revenue, we need a model and we need capabilities. If we need a model and capabilities, we need to raise capital. Oh, wait. We need a a for-profit public benefit corporation. So I think that the history this sort of sad lesson we're learning over and over again that's now being litigated in in Elon vs. Sam that resulted in anthropics formation over and over again is it's actually possible to realize moonshots now and as a result don't do it as a not for-p profofit. Do it as a public benefit corporation from the start. Figure out the for-profit arrangement from the start rather than fighting it all out in federal court after the fact. >> Nice. Dave, do you have do you have a smart way? You know, our resident genius here always has the best takes. >> I disagree, by the way. >> Try I mean, try setting up a BC Corp. >> It's easy. >> We We set one up. We flipped Singularity University from a nonprofit to a BC Corp. It wasn't easy, but >> Friends don't let friends start nonprofits anymore. >> Yeah, I know. I will never start another
[00:21:00] nonprofit again. having a business model that enables you to earn capital uh so you're not begging for money. I mean the ratio of donation to investment is like 100 to1. 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 diamandis.com/tatrends. That's diamandis.com/tatrens. Sele, you disagree. What do you disagree about? >> So, uh, two points. One about the trial. I have no comments. I think it's a lose-lose lose situation. everybody loses. It would have been way better if they could have settled us in a in a separate way, but nobody wants to settle in that environment. But regarding for-profit nonprofit, we're entering a
[00:22:00] postc capitalist society over time. At some point, it won't money doesn't make sense. In which case, your moonshot can be a nonprofit and in fact, you should be a nonprofit. The chase for money will corrupt the the target in many, many cases. The ones that are succeeding, Elon, for example, really doesn't give a damn about money. It's just it's the cleanest structure that that gets you to what you need to achieve. If a nonprofit could get you there, you do it as a nonprofit, right? You'd also have less hassles about pay packages and all the rest of it. And maybe eventually >> you're you're assuming, hold on, hold on. If you haven't a true MTP, then you don't really care about the money and it's not a motivating factor. You're really interested in achieving the goal. In which case, whatever the cleanest structure that achieves that will get you there. In this case, for now, capitalism, uh, for-profit, fine. You can raise money on the public markets. You need that energy to get you going. But I think we're going to enter a point at some point, I'll say 2, 3 years, where it won't make sense anymore.
[00:23:00] >> Dave, this is the poly market um, from this morning. Uh, the poly market gives Elon a 33% chance of winning this. What do you make of that? Actually, the headline on this is that Elon has a very slim chance, but if you look just like a couple weeks ago, it's at 50/50. So, >> yeah, you can see it. There's the time horizon, right? >> Yeah, it's going to be like all these. It's going to bounce around a lot. But I I said on the podcast a week ago, too, that Elon doesn't need to win to win. He doesn't need to win a settlement to win. He just needs to slow down Open AI and their recruiting and their morale and their momentum. And all these documents coming out paint a really ugly kind of picture. And so >> how do you reverse $122 billion investment that was just made? >> Yeah, you you'd have to distribute it or something, but you he doesn't care about that, right? It's not in this for the money at all. When you look at this is, you know, the tri trial of the century. It's the trial of the millennium. Like the outcome of this trial could dictate a big part of the future of all of human endeavor. And all both of these guys know that AI is self-improving and it's
[00:24:03] on the cusp right now of exploding into this superhuman exponential capability and it all the control of it. These are super voting structures. So the control of all of that lands in just a few hands. Yeah. >> Now if you said well these are just business guys. Well Sam Alman actually had a governor run planned for himself for the governor of California. These are not apolitical people. >> Mhm. You saw Elon Mark Zuckerberg started putting assets into a trust so that he could get ready to run for something. He gave up on that after he was in front of of Congress. But these these are not apolitical people who are just sort of working on a startup. They're aware that this is the future of all of humanity that's at play here. >> It's a great point. >> Stephen, you're not playing in this field as closely as all of us are. Uh what do you think of this insanity? So, I have a rule. If I'm not actively working on a problem, then I don't like talking about it because then I'm just
[00:25:00] gossiping. All right. >> And as far as I can tell, this is just gossip. >> It is just gossip. >> And I also like But I got to push back on your statement. >> I like, you know, my feeling. I think most like I think comments like you just made about AI are absurd. Like are you working with a very different machine than I'm working with? Because the machine that I work with and I work with AI as a scientist and I work with AI as a writer and I do it on a daily basis. >> You should use a paid model. >> Nobody likes him. >> No, he doesn't have many friends in the room. >> Um uh yeah. So like I I can't like I I really I think AI is fake. I like I hear you guys comments and I'm like if you you know I'll give you an example. Alex the other day on your podcast >> made the comment that um and you think I don't listen.
[00:26:00] >> Um that uh you you went out and asked a bunch 10 CEOs how much how long until an AI is smarter than your best 10 employees and their answer was oh it's there now. And I listened to that and went, "Well, them their 10 best employees are must be [ ] morons." Because my experience working with AI in a daily basis is this machine doesn't know [ ] I spend more time trying to teach it how to write than watching it write. I spend more time fixing the AI. And as a scientist, I think it's absurd as well. I'm doing neuroscience with it. And I'm watching the AI, which is supposed to know every [ __ ] thing there is about neuroscience. miss huge gaps in huge fields. This is what it's a convergent thinking engine. It doesn't do divergence and most of the so like I think this is I mean it's the future of humanity. >> I'll take the high road on this one. >> By the way, I'm opinion and nobody much likes me.
[00:27:00] >> I I would say taking the high road. I would say if that's your experience, you have almost an obligation to humanity to create benchmarks to encode this knowledge that you have that you think isn't being accurately or fully or effectively reflected right now in AI. If if you were to create a Cutotler bench that encodes all of your wisdom, all of your writing, >> it's not my wisdom. Let me take a quick just basic writing. >> Let me take a quick poll here in the room. How many people are in the camp of oh my god this AI is not impressing me it's got challenges and so forth versus AW raise your hand if you can we've got and how many people here in the camp like oh my god this is amazing technology and it's extraordinary >> oh I'm not tell just saying it's limited >> just just for those watching us it was about 96% in favor of >> AW forgot we had a live audience sorry >> and 4% Yes. Okay, I'm going to move us on. Uh,
[00:28:02] >> no, no, this is a this is an important conversation, Peter. One of the one of the most important we ever have, right? I sit kind of in the middle of this because I think the technology is unbelievable. We're going to do unbelievable things with it. It's just going to take a lot longer to get it to where we want to get to than we we want, right? As and this is I think what Stephen is talking about to some extent. The the other part of it is you've heard my beef about this which is we have no idea what intelligence is. We have different facets of intelligence. There's about a dozen different facets of emotional intelligence. The eastern concept of presence or awareness. Some of us have musical intelligence or spatial intelligence if you're an athlete or linguistic intelligence. If you're a business leader using emotional intelligence a great deal when you're making business judgment calls. And that's just not in the game for for an AI right now which is very analytical and numerically driven. So there is definitely a concept I fall apart on this when people go AI will become
[00:29:00] smarter than human beings. What the hell do you mean by smarter? And and there are 14 definitions of AGI at last count. Which one are we talking about? Right? And so this is the huge we have such a huge gap. It's amazing that we can raise hundreds of billions of dollars for a concept that we can't define, measure or test. Other than that, that's great. So now, no question that it's making massive differences and our ability to navigate cognitive tasks will absolutely get there, but I I would be kind of in the middle here because Stephen has a point. The the technology is not where it could be, but we will I can absolutely see how it can get there pretty quickly. So, I'm kind of in the middle. I I just need to make one point because before Steve makes a tragic prediction error. >> Um >> Oh, I don't make predictions. I leave the future is under you guys. I'm just a reporter. I >> I just want to make the point that that if you look at the benchmarks that Alex was referring to for AI to self-improve, uh very hard math problems like humanity's last exam are the trigger of
[00:30:00] self-improvement. Uh it's not a great writer and it's definitely not funny. But if you said to me, well, it couldn't possibly build a better AI algorithm until it's funny. That's intuitively my make that's not true at all. I spent six years as an AI researcher. I tell you all you need to do is tweak the algorithms, try different parameters, try different transfer functions and do it iteratively at very high rates and the algorithm just magically just like evolution >> than writing a book. >> It's like it's like looking at, you know, the furry little mammals after the asteroid struck 66 million years ago and say they're never going to be able to write code. And you know, >> but let me let me here's the counter to this and this I think is the difference between like coming at it as a as a writer or an artist or a creative versus coming at it as a coder. >> Um >> it hasn't gotten better. >> So like as a writer it has not improved. In fact, I've seen it get worse. And I'm
[00:31:01] not just talking about one model. I'm talking about most comparable to what >> compared compared to GPT2 four years ago. I compared to G3 I think like honestly well first of all chat GBT is so much worse now as a writer than it was a year ago when we started this book versus now it's got >> worse no I don't actually write books with it so I actually don't even know but I do use all the top tier models to design new neural network tests and experiments so exactly the self-improvement problem and it's every DOT release is dramatically shockingly better I can literally go to it and say I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm looking at the same data you are. I'm seeing the same improvements that people are saying, right? And I see the claims, but my daily experience and I'm both as a scientist and now as a scientist, it's amazing what it can pull together. But what's more amazing to me is the really obvious stuff it misses. Yeah, like as a
[00:32:00] neuroscientist, one of the reasons, one of the ways I built all my organizations is I saw gaps in neuroscience that needed to be solved with people from multiple disciplines, right? So, I pulled in embodied cognitions and I pulled in all and the AI still can't do any of that. >> Let me let me give you another thought experiment just to before we because people underreact and I it's more dangerous to underreact than overreact. But if if I go to somebody and I say, "Look, here's here's Claude 4.7 and here's Stephen Codbler. Let me give them both this very difficult writing task and write something really entertaining in the next 5 minutes." And you just kill it. You crush it. You go, "Great. I'm better than Cloud 4.7. Now you say, Cloud 4.7, I want you to write it a billion times, and then I'm going to put a process on top of that to select the very best article." You would normally, as a human say, "That's cheating. That's [ __ ] That's cheating." But when you're talking about AI self-improvement, it's perfectly fair. Better lesson. >> Perfectly fair. Okay, that's fair. Stephen, I would again encourage you as a scientist, as you say, to be rigorous
[00:33:02] in how you measure progress or lack thereof. If if you're going to assert that there's been a regression in terms of creative writing capabilities, for example, create your own benchmark and then show measure it. >> Yeah. Show the worlds that there's been a regression and I will promise you if if you construct it well, you will get the Frontier Labs interested in including your benchmark in every other EVA >> as an optimization function. >> That's right. And and you will get your better creative writing. >> See, do you want to have a final point here? >> Two points. One is uh my very first prompt in the chat was uh rewrite the Bible Genesis chapter 1 as a rap song and it completely blew my mind. It was something I never dude I remember that I you said that around. I remember that. >> Yeah. I was like um um but I I will also say that I I know you very well Stephen and you're such a profound writer. I could completely imagine that no AI would satisfy anywhere near what you can
[00:34:00] do individually. Now, if you take Dave's approach, yeah, we'll get there, right? Um, it would be an AI representing me right now in this chair would be way better than me just because it would remember everything I've ever said, every anecdote I've ever used, every metaphor I've ever ever used, and be bring the right thing at the right time in a way that I just can't do it with my stupid one liter brain with an a napkin sized needle. >> Let me ask you a question. How's it going to do that? Because if I put for example this whole book into chat GBT or Grock or take your pick. >> Yeah. >> It's got a working memory that's about 2,000 words long. >> It can't even remember a million tokens. >> And I Yeah, I hear what you're saying and I'm telling you my experience of working with it as a writer is uh I'm sure >> I I think again you're such a profoundly I don't think I'm This is not a story about Steven being an exception. Steven is just words of point of view and I
[00:35:02] love several >> but I'm going to move us on. >> All right. Uh let me move us from and by the way it is gossip talking about it. But it's gossip and these trials are critically at the center of this ecosystem that is going to impact humanity for the next millennium and it's important to understand it. >> Okay, but let's move into robotics. Uh this is a story about Figure Robotics. Figure AI run by Brett Adcock is scaling their manufacturing. Uh Dave, you and I had a chance to go and visit a great pod uh with Brett. By the way, Brett's agreed to come and be one of our opening speakers at the Abundance Summit in March of 2027 and bring the Figure Robot with him. Let's take a look at the Figure Robot in this video.
[00:36:16] So in all honesty, who first thinking is it a deep fake or is it real? Right? Right. I mean that's we need to flip that in our minds. It's a real video. They've increased production from one robot per day to one robot per hour. Uh and their target is 100,000 robots between now and 2030. So just showing you figure because it's one of the best funded. They've raised at you know 30 plus billion dollar valuation. Uh my fund bold capital. Are we an investor at link into uh not yet? >> No, no, we didn't get in. >> Um here's here's another but we're going to be I mean one of the decisions you've made uh Dave and we've talked about is
[00:37:00] the fact that the the window for the hottest AI companies is going to be closing and the window for what will be opening >> well. So we're really gearing up for robotics actually because you know software has a limited life left in it >> because AI writes software so so so well. >> Uh robotics and data centers will go on for a decade or so maybe more. >> Here's 1X Technologies again. Dave and I had a chance to go meet with Burnt Borick. Uh and this is their their robot called Neo. They've just opened up a new manufacturing facility in Hawthorne, California. 58,000 square feet. Production goal is 10,000 robots this year. Burnt has promised me a robot by this fall. I'm going to keep to it. So, Burnt, if you're watching, first of all, friend of the pod, thank you so much. I'd love my Neo u whatever version of Neo Neo Gamma, whatever is coming out. 100,000 in 2027 shipments expected later
[00:38:02] this year. Let's check out their video. Now that guy's job is very limited. >> A lot of humans in that video. >> Yep. Doing very simple things. That's the That was the eye opener. We went to the Gigafactory and Elon was saying, "Look, the robots are going to make the robots." I'm like, "I can't imagine this thing making tiny little parts." But I didn't get it until we got to the Gigafactory. Everything is already automated. The robots assemble the automation equipment that it arrives in like Amazon boxes. You take it out of the box, you put it on, you you turn a screw, and now you've got a new manufacturing line. >> So, the bottleneck is the humanoid actions. Everything else is already automated. I I Phil Phillip I I think
[00:39:01] this is our answer by the way. You want to know what like you want job security over the next 25 years be a robot repairman >> cuz they can all invest in a company literally like like be a robot figure out how to repair robots. >> But there's there's an entire ecosystem of businesses around this like insurance right um now the uh the third story in this uh this triplet is Elon predicts 1 million optimist production by 2030. Tell me how this isn't just a play to get investment money. >> Well, it probably >> to get people to buy his robots before cheaper Chinese robots show up. >> Every time he opens his mouth and makes a statement about robotics, I think he's just trying to sell it before the guy has been able to scale Tesla to be the dominant auto manufacturer on the planet and bring the price down at a rate like nobody else. and these robots which you know he said publicly and I agree with him that Tesla you know a decade or two
[00:40:01] from now is going to be known as the production company of Optimus robot not cars. So >> and Mark Zuckerberg announced that his company was going to become wait meta. It was about the what was that place called the metaverse. Has anybody been there yet? >> Have you met my sarcastic friend here? >> Yes that's right. >> I'm just pointing out reality. >> Yeah. Well, that's the way entrepreneurship works fundamentally is you declare a target >> and you evangelize the target and then you attract the talent and the capital necessary to hit the target. If you choose your targets wisely, they're achievable targets. If you choose them poorly, you're a bad entrepreneur. It's just that simple. But, but if you don't declare the target, like, you know, Boston is famous for this actually, being very conservative and not even announcing something to the world until it's proven eight ways till Tuesday. Doesn't work. It did and it's working less well over time because exponential change is on this accelerating rate and so much >> that Elon stands on a stage and lies
[00:41:00] >> neurolink neurolink is vaporware. We're going to we're going to be able to link humans to the internet. No, >> there's foundational neurobiological problems with Elon's plan. And how do we know? because everybody's quit his damn company and gone and farted different neuroch companies because his way is so absurd and nobody cares. I like I I'm sorry. I don't think you get to lie in public technology. I started 17 companies. I am an entrepreneur. One of the best things about capitalism is you can have the market fight it out. So yes, there are multiple BCI companies. Um >> I have a unique perspective here. I can see the steam coming out of out of Alex's ears from >> Alex has been really nice. He's been really >> I think this falls under the category of don't feed the trolls. >> Can I Can you Can I give you my beef on this? Okay. You've heard me rant about the humanoid side of it before. Uh but I
[00:42:00] have actually a rationale for this. Uh robots are really good at repetitive tasks and navigating uh uh constant things and not making mistakes when they're doing like the guy put screwing in the thing. When you have a repetitive task, you don't need a humanoid robot. A humanoid is designed for very adaptable environments which are not that repetitive and that's completely counter to where you'd use a robot. Look at the numbers right there on the chart. Wheeled robots, drones, etc., etc. It goes with the form factor. And you've heard my you've heard my standard rant. At least give it another pair of arms. Every time anybody ever holds a a garbage bag open, you need a third arm. And why not give it why not give it that for God's sake. Uh so end of right there. So I think there's a spectrum here of how repetitive and robotlike is the task versus how adaptable and human. If it's a very adaptable human task, you don't need a robot. Um, and then if you have a repetitive thing, then make it look like the thing it needs to be, like a wheeled robot or a dishwasher, which
[00:43:00] is really good at washing dishes at scale. So, I'm going to add one piece to the mix and ask you, Alex, to comment here, which is the prediction that comes both from Elon and from Bradcock of a target of up to 10 billion humanoid robots by 2040, which you think is totally insane. I well with humanoid robots the the one thing that Selim didn't point out that I sort of disagree with is >> we are going to need that for taking care of aging humans um if like one thing I while longevity escape philosophy to me seems absurd are we going to live a lot longer hell yes don't ever call me again I know I know um but you you need humanoid robots for human form factors right like they were originally designed because we built nuclear reactor actors where we had to send them in for disaster robots, right? They were the form of a nuclear reactor was built for humans. So in the early disaster robots, we needed humans to go in there and do stuff because it was a human
[00:44:01] environment. We're bringing in robots into our lives to take care of ourselves, that's a human form factor. So I when I see and I when you're dealing with human health as a driver of economic development, that's like we put money into that. So I think this may be like a very valid point. Yeah, I hear you. I this is the counter argument. Alex can call him a troll on this one up in the following way. So just for some background information, right? Uh there are on the order of 1.6 billion cars on the road today, right? And 100 million cars manufactured per year. And if you look at the iPhone production rate in year 1, iPhone had 1.3 million uh devices. And now we're up to 250 million iPhones produced per year. >> Wow. >> What do you think about these numbers that Elon's projecting at a million by 2030 and billions in the 2040s? >> It's probably right. I I've done the
[00:45:01] same extrapolations others have. You extrapolate the humanoids curve here. You find that in the early 2030s, the number of humanoids is predicted to cross the number of wheeled robots. I I would I would assume there's relatively little alpha left at this point in any counterpiction that it's not going to be the case that humanoids pass humans by the end of the 2030s. What I think is perhaps even more interesting is what does a posthumanoid robot form factor look like? See, I I know you like to add lots of arms. That that that's your >> wheels, anything that that's your your favorite body shape, but I think there are many problems >> that I think there He's Indian. They have these goddess gods and goddesses. >> That's not that totally makes sense. You see why it's been predicted for a long destroyer. Let's just point that out. >> But I I would point out there are more exotic body shapes that I would expect to see by 2040 that will make human
[00:46:02] humanoid shapes look positively prosaic. I I do expect by 2040 we're going to get our nanoobots for example, our Drexlerian nanoobots and I would expect many many trillions of those to be in our solar system. And I I think we look back from 2040 at this prediction of 10 billion plus and and we'll laugh at ourselves at this will be the equivalent of predicting atomic vacuum cleaners to help housewives from the 1950s. Well, of course we're going to have 10 billion plus humanoids. But what about the nanoobots? >> Yeah. Yeah. Welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, my mission is to help you use the latest technologies including AI to not just do your work at home, teach your kids, but to help you live a long and healthy life. I'm here today with an extraordinary physician, the chief medical officer of Fountain Life, Dr. Don Mucalem. Don, let's talk about cancer. Uh, you know, I know from the member database that we've have at
[00:47:01] Fountain are members who come in who think they're healthy. It turns out 3.3% of them have a cancer in their body they don't know about. >> That's right. You know, the majority of cancers that we screen for, those aren't the ones that are necessarily taking the lives when found at a late stage. We know that when cancer is found early, the chances for cure are much higher. We know it's much easier to treat a cancer when found early versus when found late. What we're finding in our members is over 3.3% were found to have these cancers that were otherwise wouldn't have been found or detected. >> Yeah. You know, it's interesting. People, you don't feel the cancer until stage three or stage four. And and if you don't know what's going on inside your body, it's like driving your car with your eyes closed and you can know. And so when members come through found, how do they detect cancers? >> So we're doing full body MRI and we also do early cancer detection screening. This is very very important. These are not typical tools used in the conventional care setting when it comes to prevention. This is a hard thing
[00:48:00] because currently these are not studies that insurance would yet be covering. But the goal is to collect these numbers, do the research, and work hard to democratize wellness. >> Yeah. So, at the end of the day, you can know what's going on inside your body. It's your obligation to know. So, check out Fountain Life. You can go to fountainlife.com/pater to get access to the latest technology to help you detect cancer at the very beginning at stage one when it is curable before it gets to stage three or stage four in your world of hurt. >> Okay. >> All right. Let's move it to to China, which by the way is a centerpiece of uh of robotics. Uh and so this is a this is a ruling of a Chinese court uh that AI is not legally allowed uh to displace employees. So here's the here's the story. This is in uh in Hang Xiao. There was a case of a tech worker named Zho who reportedly was earning 25,000 uh yan w per month. It was offered a demotion
[00:49:00] of 15,000 W per month after AI automated parts of his role and the court sided with him after he refused to pay it out. The court logic was simple. Adopting AI was a business choice, not an unavoidable external shock that made the employment contract impossible. So, uh, Chinese courts have reportedly ruled that companies cannot simply say AI can do this more cheaply. Therefore, we're going to fire you. So the question ultimately the framing of this and we've had this conversation is if you're an employee and you can employ AI to do your job better than you or do your job while you're working out or do 10 times your job overnight. Does the economic value of that AI's abilities acrue to the company or does it acrue to the employee? two different very different outcomes for society >> or to the state
[00:50:00] >> or to the state and by the way we also you know this whole idea of UBI does a government pay UBI we've seen Sam Alman recently talk about the fact that no society should have a piece of the AI ecosystem we can get into that who wants to take this up >> I I'll just comment there there's a bit of obvious historic irony here China has come full circle from communism to anarco capitalism back to communism again. And it it's maybe just a bit ironic that China is leading the world in terms of call it socialism with Chinese characteristics or communism with Chinese characteristics for how to handle AI disruption and AI disemployment. It would be an ironic, you know, under I think this falls under the the category of we >> the most ironic outcome >> the most ironic outcome tends to be the the one that we live in where China is setting global standards for how to deal with AI disruption for employment. It's a very strange future that we live in.
[00:51:03] >> So three points. One is uh the this is clearly a artifact of the massive breakdown in the social contract, right? We have no idea. And the second point would be that all of our labor laws around human labor. And as we move to AI agents, it's going to be about task management AI coordination cost dropping radically, execution cost dropping radically. And we're looking at at that. Uh the third thing I would say is what this indicates is the broader transformation at play. You often see when you have these broad transformations, these nonsensical things that occur, it's actually an indication of the broader transformational play. I remember Paul Safo pointing out that the uh the coal museum in Kentucky is using solar panels. Um and there's like this surreal irony around that that actually indicates there's a broad transformation in place. So when we see these, it's actually a signpost that we're in for a radical transformation. And this is something we've been talking about a
[00:52:00] lot. How are we going to navigate the social contract? The very first two questions from the audience earlier were exactly about that. How do we navigate this? And this is the problem we're going to have to deal with over the next 10, 20 years. >> It's really interesting to to think how different China is from the United States and how many other ways to govern there could be that we haven't explored. The variety is just mindboggling because you know China is 80% op 85% optimistic about AI. Uh the US Steven in particular is is uh 25% I think optimistic and uh majority pest >> I just love the tech I love the technology. I just think it's very limited compared to what you guys think. >> In China, they're also totally comfortable with being spied on constantly by the government. Cameras everywhere >> and over here we just don't admit it. >> Well, here we don't admit it, but we also we don't like it and we may whether or not we admit it, it's happening, but but we fundamentally at our core about this in terms of China versus the US. Um, if it's China versus the US and
[00:53:01] there's really this AI war cooking that everybody seems to think there is, isn't this didn't they just say, "Hey, we're not going to participate in this because I mean, didn't they just tie their legs together in the middle?" I mean, like >> No, no, no. They're adopting AI and robotics like you wouldn't believe. >> Oh, no. I get that. But they're doing it not at like this is going to hamstrung the speed of development. >> Well, the problem is they have a diminishing population, >> right? They're below the replacement level by a lot and keeping people employed, keeping them keeping them having meaning and not revoling is an important part of the equation here. >> Well, in China, people are dropping out of the workforce at an insane rate. It's it's a real crisis. >> And so, if China said, "Hey, you know what? No one could get fired because of AI," it wouldn't change the adoption rate much at all because they're growing with this declining workforce anyway. And so they could easily pass that law without it having a huge impact and it would actually very very much smooth out the societal unrest.
[00:54:01] >> There's also a huge I you've heard me talk about this before. I really disagree with the whole framing AI versus China versus a nonsensical thing. I mean I remember spending a few months traveling around China when I was younger and my conclusion at the end of it that was that the Chinese people are so entrepreneurial natively that you need communism. Put a lid on it. So you have these cultural artifacts where you actually need it to navigate and manage the population in an effective way rather than it being some huge ideological thing. >> Yeah. Um >> uh you know you don't know how to respond to that. >> I think we need speechless for the first time ever the conversation about grandmothers just uplevel just a little bit. Um, yeah, I I I don't buy the premise that China through internal policies is somehow hamstringing themselves in a race for AI supremacy against the US. Parenthetically, the race to AI supremacy, I think, is perfectly real. It's not fictitious. Uh,
[00:55:02] it is a real arms race and it's a real arms race not just for AI itself, but for what comes after AI. When we have super intelligence, that's going to unlock so many, I think, transformative scientific innovations and discoveries and inventions. And that's really what the prize is. >> Yeah. We haven't seen anything yet. >> That's right. If if there's new physics, for example, I I have financial interest in a company physical super intelligence that's working on super intelligence for unlocking new physics and new applied physics. That alone is a prize worth an international arms race over. And I I I just to the the claim or the assertion that somehow China by introducing policies that are notionally worker friendly in terms of AI substitution for labor is somehow hamstringing themselves. I think it's preposterous. There are a variety of other industrialized countries including Germany that have policies of favoring small and medium-sized businesses when it comes to automation. I think China,
[00:56:00] if anything, th this is a way from an internal policy perspective for China to ensure a certain level of human employment while also creating state incentives top down for creating new types of jobs that are AI adjacent. I don't think they're tying themselves up. >> Well, so they they manage the PR of AI through this like they they have high enthusiasm about AI. They want it to be high. It's no different in in some sense from our government constructing policies with the hyperscalers for requiring that hyperscalers power their or pay their own electricity supply bills. No different except it's at the consumer level rather than at the enterprise hyperscaler level. >> Yeah. I guess the the problem is that in the US we sell ad views like media sells ad views and the way you sell ad views is by creating crisis and worry and it's all over your book Peter you know this. Uh in China, they don't have to deal with that. So they they want AI enthusiasm. They want robotics Guaranteeing employment is a good way to get people on board with the mission, but they need the robots like you
[00:57:01] wouldn't believe because of their aging population. >> All right, I'm going to move us forward. Uh this story came out this week. Deisabis, uh the CEO of Deep Mind, uh says AGI may not need a major breakthrough. He says, "I think there's a 50/50 chance we could still that we still need a breakthrough maybe in world models, but my bet is still strongly on foundation models because of how successful they've been." Alex. >> Yeah, take it away. I I I chatted with Demis 10 plus years ago at that at this point and at the time he thought it was five plus major breakthroughs that would be needed to achieve AGI. Now we're down to zero or one. And I I don't disagree with Demis. I I've argued in the past that we achieved AGI in the summer of 2020, no later than with the discovery of or the publication rather of large language models or fshot learners, which was the GPT3 paper. We we know I would
[00:58:01] argue what AGI is and we know how. >> Please define it for me. That's an insane statement. Like you I no >> welcome welcome to moonshots. >> It is the narrowest technology in the world. You ask it to be general about anything. It's dumb. >> Stephen the working with a totally different machine than everybody else. Like do you have secret powers that you're getting a different self combust to to that assertion down the >> and I I think what you what you meant was the seeds of AGI were born at GPT3. I I think it's just incremental improvements after the fundamental discovery which >> just just like DNA and uh in RNA and uh you know Darwinian evolution uh were the seeds that led eventually to humanity. >> It was born then and progressed. I would make maybe even a slightly stronger statement which is the notion that general intelligence is capable of
[00:59:00] carrying out a variety of human level or near human level tasks based on the fundamental discovery again discovered no later than summer of 2020 that you can achieve general intelligence by taking general human knowledge and compressing it. That was the fundamental discovery underneath large language models. We realized as a civilization, certainly no later than 2020, that you could carry out a diverse and general range of tasks with models that had compressed human knowledge. That's all that we needed. Everything else, the discovery of refinements of of transformers and everything, it's just incremental improvements to that fundamental discovery. >> Dave, any thoughts on this? I think that the psychology of Demis and Daario who are research scientists at their heart who've been working on AI their whole careers versus Sam and Elon who are entrepreneurs at heart they moved over to AI very very different psychology a lot of the research career researchers >> and by the way they're good friends >> they're they're good friends and and the research guys Dario and Dennis are
[01:00:01] really good >> not not Elon and Sam >> well no they're they're the worst enemies but Daario and Sam got into the field specifically because they're worried about the future of humanity being a paradise and not being dystopian. >> Yes. >> And and so they're very good-natured people at their core. I think a lot of people who work in AI research though are looking for relevance now because they're like the transformer architecture that's conquering everything is so simple compared to everything they thought of and worked on for all these years. And and so there's a bias towards saying, "God, I hope there's more to it." But when the entrepreneurs, when Sam and Elon look at it, they're like, I don't care. This can manufacture anything, can can cure all disease, can take care of elderly, can it can do everything we need to build a human paradise as is. I don't care if it does the last remaining human thing. Like, what's even the point >> of trying to knock off the last human doing something unique? Why are you even going after that? This morning I uh Yanni and I toured Laya Scientific here
[01:01:03] in Cambridge, right? And Laya is run by Jeff V. Moltzen. It's an extraordinary they're building what they call a scientific super intelligence. >> Yeah. And the way that they're doing this is they've built these science factories and we toured these factories and what you see there is robots basically running science experiments, doing the pipetting, moving things around, picking stuff up and they'll their AI will propose a scientific theory and then design the experiments and then run the experiments, gather the data, update the theory and imagine running this, you know, uh 100 times faster, a thousand times faster than any graduate student >> and they're mining nature for data to create these models and you can just see it's about to take off and going back to what Alex said this is the moment in time we're about you know if you think the economy is going hot and heavy right
[01:02:00] now you ain't seen nothing yet when you solve physics and chemistry and biology and material sciences you know trillions are going to hundreds of trillions This is the part that that >> What do you mean solve? >> Crazy statement is physics. >> Haven't you read our book? >> Read go to solveverthing.org, ladies and gentlemen. >> No, but it's I still think that term is problematic. Yeah, it look the the part that gets everybody that watches this podcast, everybody in this room, and all of us giddy excited about this is the opportunity to use this technology to solve problems that we've never solved before, we've never even come across before. So that's the part that's fantastic about it. We have definitional issues, fine, but if we can solve cancer, which we'll solve pretty soon, etc., how can you not get excited about? And that's the counter. the number of people who've come up to me and perhaps to you guys as well saying thank you for giving us an optimistic, you know, view
[01:03:01] of the future to be hopeful for. >> Oh, I've got that one I got this morning. >> If you could uh read read that one moment, but I just want to say thank you for the feedback, guys. We really care about it, right? Uh I have you I jokingly say you need to be unemployed or retired to keep up with all this stuff, working 80 hours a week. Uh, and I know all of us spend a huge amount of time I get a I get a a daily feed every morning from >> or or be nonhuman >> or be not human uh from Alex. Skippy is just feeding me stuff and I I'll spend 30 40 hours a week just consuming trying to understand what's going on to uh to make sense of it. So So Dave, you want to read that? This was just posted in the show notes by Ashley Gaunt who's a dentist said Peter in the mates. I really thought I would never become an entrepreneur entrepreneur because I didn't have any ideas of how to turn my knowledge as a dentist into a digital business. I finally did what you kept advising and brainstormed with my AI and
[01:04:00] boom boom all caps idea sorted plans in place to make a real difference to preventive health care in general. I have no idea what the business plan is. She doesn't say this is insane. I have gone from brainstorming an idea with AI from scratch to vibe coding a first iteration of an app and creating a business plan which clearly defines a path from idea to monetization of a product in a single afternoon. I didn't even realize I had an idea until I started my discussion with my AI and it just found my passion by asking a few questions and now we're prototyping. Cannot believe this. >> What what's her name again? >> Ashley Gaunt. >> Ashley, congratulations. Uh thank you for sharing that and everybody you know watching again we've had all these debates can everyone can anyone be an entrepreneur and the answer is if you've got passion if you're willing to bring your purpose mindset and curiosity mindset and you know dive in. I think the answer is yes. I think the answer is >> I think so too. And I think there are a lot of people who post a lot of haters
[01:05:00] out there but they'll post you guys are crazy. Not everybody can be an entrepreneur, but I I think Ashley's story is going to be the more common story. The AI can help you brainstorm and and figure out your role and and also I think the AI big AI labs are going to start being very active in promoting things that'll help. They know where the gaps are in the training data and the market and the you know the apps. So they'll they'll push out a lot of idea flow right through their AIS. >> All right. Also this week, my dear friend Ben Lamb, the CEO of Colossal, uh along with uh with George Church at Harvard Medical School, announced their sixth species. They announced the blue buck. So uh the blue buck's been extinct for 200 years. It was hunted to extinction and right now they're in genome editing and lab testing. They expect to be able to bring back the blue buck uh in 2028. This is species number six out of a confidential pipeline which is amazing by the way of 15 uh which their current species include the woolly
[01:06:00] mammoth, the thyloine, the dodo bird, the moa, the direwolf which is back and the blue buck. So Stephen uh we talked about this a lot in the book we are his gods. >> Yeah we did. Uh, and one of the things that was a fun part of the book that you wrote was all of the future jobs that don't didn't exist and are being coming into existence here. What are your thoughts on the story? >> I mean, I I love this story. I it the only thing I wonder with the deextinction technology is if it I worry that it makes people think the environmental crisis is less than what it is. Right? species die off rates are like 12 to,300 times greater than baseline greater than ever before. Um just cuz they brought five back doesn't right that's so that's one comment just a random one. The one that is interesting to me is, you know, you were when Ben was starting this company, the idea was when are we going to have a
[01:07:01] Jurassic Park, right? And everybody, you can't really bring back dinosaurs from DNA preserved in amber, unfortunately. Um, but so the idea of a Jurassic Park is is far away. But if this is number six, what I wonder is how long until we're actually going to be able to take our kids someplace where like look, these are 100 animals that didn't exist, >> you know, 20 years ago. And I think that's coming a lot faster. And so that's interesting to me. >> It is. >> It is. You can scale this. And right now, what are the limiting factors? It's getting access to the DNA. And by the way, when you're bringing back an extinct species, it's not actually the extinct species. It is an approximation of the extinct species. You're grabbing snippets of DNA across time and you're reconstructing it. >> Okay, let's they're >> they're hybrid creatures that have never existed before on this planet. I would like to point out as three like what
[01:08:00] could go wrong? I mean, the unintended consequences here are at least, you know, worth asking about. >> I I think there's there's a broader program here that we're just seeing the very beginning of. If you look back at the there were strains, I've spoken about this on the pot in the past of Russian cosmis. The Russian cosmist philosophers like Sioski spoke about humanity's common task of taking every human who's ever lived and finding ways using technology to bring them back to life. And I think starting with extinct species is just a special case of what technology I I do think will enable us to do, which is to reach back into our past light cone, take every species that's ever lived, bring it back in whatever form, even if it's as a hybrid or as a computer simulation, also reach back in time to our past life cone and take every human who's ever lived, not just at the species level, at the individual level, and computationally or
[01:09:02] using other advanced techniques, recon construct them. I think that's a far more exotic and interesting future than just Jurassic Park petting zoo for dinosaurs. Imagine bringing back every human who's ever lived. >> Yeah. Amazing. I mean, and these the kinds of of conversations and imaginations that one can have in this, you know, exponential singularity that we're living 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
[01:10:00] 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 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. >> Gentlemen, uh found this article fascinating. Uh GLP1's generated revenue more than OpenAI Enthropic in 2025. So Ompic uh a single peptide and Majuro a dual acting peptide outperformed open AI and anthropic by 2.4. >> Yeah. Can I call [ __ ] on this one? Okay. I mean, talk about apples and oranges. What do these two have to compare? I mean, they're clearly orthogonal things. Why are we bothering trying to figure this out? Both are
[01:11:00] great. >> So, so I'll feel that one. I I think the argument goes that the the GLP1s are ultimately health span drugs, human health span drugs. And so what we're seeing here in in some sense on a single chart is a race between whether there's more revenue in enabling human actors, human labor to be economically productive in the economy through increased health span on the one side or whether capital is more efficiently and effectively invested in AI labor on the other side. And I think the outcome of these two respective curves determines whether the future light cone of our economy is ultimately dominated by AI, something that resembles AI or something >> biological software and digital software. >> Sure. >> All right. I mean, the these these drugs are biological patches on top of our existing operating system. >> I thought you put them on the same graph just so we could save time. That's what
[01:12:01] I thought when I saw this because it doesn't occur to me as as that. Well, the question is where people I think the broader there's a bigger picture here which I'll I'll just speak to you for a second which is the huge demonetization that's that's taking place. There's a related story to this which is that the number of uh food shipping truckloads is dropping pretty radically in the US because people are and the current thesis and the conclusion is that because of all the GLP1s people are consuming a lot less food which is actually really great in one way but it's going to cause some serious issues in the logistics world. I I think uh the story within the story is that both products are completely and totally sold out. They're selling as fast as they can make the product. It's just a lot easier drug production than GPU production, >> right? I mean, it's the uh these companies, the GLP1s right now, uh it was estimated that they could be as much as 500 billion, but they're limited by physical supply. >> Yep. And the same on the AI. Like any
[01:13:00] senior at MIT will tell you, I cannot live without using AI every day. I I could never code again. I could never research again. >> I mean, I wake up in the middle of the night and talk to Skippy about some question I dreamt up and just it's there in the morning. I mean, the only I mean, honestly, we talk about three and four day work weeks. I'm I'm doing a 9 and 10 day work week right now. >> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. It's so funny that disconnect by age, too. But I mean, they they know what they're talking about. They've been using it since it was invented. you cannot be productive without it. So the idea that they would ever not be able to use it because there isn't any supply, it would be like shatter, earth shattering to them. So they'll buy it for the rest of their lives at whatever the price is. >> So if you add a few more um graphs like this, you're essentially graphing the the singularity economy. >> If you're working out and you have Ozmpic, you're making progress. You're inspired. You feel like you're getting somewhere. Yes, >> when you're working with AI, the the quality of happiness while you're working is astronomically higher than if
[01:14:00] you're just coding all night. And coding all night is fine, too. I did it for many years. But when the AI is there and your brain, your productivity is so high, but the energy level >> it you're getting dopamine from immediate feedback. But this is also the problem with AI because when you get too much dopamine in your system, we've all been around people who do cocaine. We don't think they're genius. I haven't been around that many people. They think they're they think they're geniuses. >> You think you think you think they think they're geniuses, right? You don't. And I and I often like it's this is the problem with this is one of the problems with mania and this is directly in in flow work. Flow produces a tremendous amount of dopamine and dopamine produces a tremendous amount of ego inflation and a bunch of other things. So people create fast feedback loops with the AI and it feels really good. you're really high because you're hacking your biology with the AI. It's very flowy. It works really, really well. But it doesn't mean that the quality you're thinking matches the quality. >> It feels to me like you're having all
[01:15:02] the fun of a party while being productive and creating something useful for society. I don't see anything. >> I'm not saying I'm not saying wrong. I agree with you. I like it that what I'm saying is with that much do I have we have one bit of swag at at my organization. Never. It's a t-shirt that says never trust the dopamine. And people make really bad decisions based upon that much dopamine in your system. >> I'm going to keep us going. So on the bottom of this chart here, uh this is Eli Lily. They're about to announce and release something called retatride. It's a triple agonist peptide. If um if you know Monero is GPT 5.5 uh retride is AGI in this the numbers are extraordinary. Uh this is clinical data just released. I just think you should know about this. So on this particular drug uh weight loss was 37 lb
[01:16:00] uh versus 6 lbs in the placebo over the course of 40 weeks. Um, cholesterol was down 27%, triglycerides down 41%, liver fat down 80%. Hemoglobin A1C dropped from 7.9, which is diabetic, down to 6.0 in 40 weeks. This is being called a longevity drug. Yes, >> it's an extraordinary uh drug that is expected to be released and FDA approved uh by mid 2027. A lot of people are getting this from research labs already. This is just some of the detailed evidence heading us towards longevity as escape velocity. Sele. >> Uh so I've been using retatrite for the last few months. >> Wow. >> And what's incredible is the liver function because of decades of damage from alcohol. >> It's helping reverse a lot of that which is fantastic. So I've never felt better. >> I had this conversation with Dennis the following weekend before. We're about to see new generations of drugs coming out >> and the speed of going from design uh to
[01:17:04] testing to availability is going to be accelerating. The FDA is on board for this. Um you know basically moving us from instead of phase three into an expanded phase 2 trial. Uh and we just saw on this chart how much people are willing to pay, right? And it's capped not by the market, it's capped by manufacturing. And just think about it when a drug comes out that says, "Oh, this is going to give you 10 years of extra life, right? Or these are going to cure cancer, cardiovascular disease, inflammation, these things are coming." >> I I agree. And I I also think when we speak about longevity escape velocity, which which I do think is likely for the record, perhaps sometime by the early 2030s, if not earlier, I I do think that the GLP1 drug class and everything it evolves into over time. If I had to guess what is the the likeliest way that LEV plays out, it is probably the the
[01:18:00] GLP1 class. And I I think the economy is reflecting that. If you look at companies that are worth almost a trillion or worth more than a trillion either right now or expected to be publicly traded in the near-term future, there are only a handful. You've got a few AI companies. You have SpaceX, Open AI, Anthropic, and then you have Eli Liy, which has been publicly traded for a long time, but is either already at a trillion or about to cross a trillion on its present trajectory. And I think that's the market speaking very clearly that longevity drugs and AI are the obvious industries of the future. >> Yeah, agreed. I want to uh end this pod in a moonshot mate uh prediction conversation which is what will AI feel like by mid 2028. I want to give you a sense of what we see as the future here. Because right now honestly when you think about AI it's something that you can talk to on your phone. um you type at it's an app uh it's an intelligence
[01:19:00] layer but I don't feel like the majority of the world actually is experiencing AI >> and I think we're about to undergo a transition where AI is going to feel very different in the next uh two and a half years and I'd like to have a conversation about what you predict that to be like I'll start with the very first one and then we'll pass it around the room here uh by the way I wrote a Substack uh at at Peterdmadis uh on this topic and go read my my views. Uh but the very first thing is I think we're going to give AI permission to know everything in our lives. Listen to all your phone calls, watch all the cameras in your home, uh read your emails, read everything. I've just done that with Skippy. I gave Skippy access to all my granola recordings, uh, my WhatsApp, my iMes, my email, my calendar, everything. And in so doing, the response is
[01:20:01] amazing. I can have interactions that this AI knows me better than anybody else, right? So, let's begin with that. Alex, you want to kick it off? >> I almost think we're asking the wrong question here. I would like to reframe because I I think the question behind the question here is what will AI feel like to consumers >> by mid 2028. >> It's fair >> and I I think the the past 6 months of industry history have taught us consumers are not actually great customers for AI at least not state-of-the-art AI. Open AAI infamously at this point tried to turn consumers into power users for reasoning models and failed and has had to pivot over to enterprise. They had to basically shut down their consumer video division. They've shut down a number of other divisions in favor of codegenerating models that are recursively self-improving and targeted at enterprise use cases because enterprises have the money and the desire to use advanced reasoning capabilities. So the
[01:21:01] adjacent question I would ask is what will an AI feel like to an enterprise rather than to a consumer in mid 2028. >> Let's make that let's make that an adjacent conversation. Uh but you know for me as a consumer I'm going to focus on that part of the equation. Uh I feel like if AI understands me it's connected to all of my wearables initables and so forth. It has my back as a physician. Um, it knows I had a hard conversation with my spouse and I'm exhausted. I didn't sleep well the night before. It has all this data. I walk into the room. The lights come down. There's a glass of wine waiting for me cuz the robot put it out. My favorite music is playing. My favorite comedian is on. Basically, it's what I the term I use is ambient AI and automagical AI. That the world magically adopts itself for your desires. I >> I can tell you what you I what I think
[01:22:00] you want to hear. What's that? >> Which is you you you want to you want to hear that mid 2028 you're going to have an AI exoc. That's a quasi upload of you, your digital twin in the cloud that knows everything about you and your life and is fully optimizing your meatbody existence knowing what it knows about you. I think that's what you want to hear. I don't think that's actually how things are going to play out though. Okay, I think what AI will feel like in 2028 from a consumer perspective, yeah, sure, we'll have better augmented reality. We'll have better robots in the streets. All of that, I think, is already essentially priced into the market. What's not being priced in right now, the non-obvious insights are new scientific discoveries that consumers aren't the ones who are driving. >> Okay. Well, you're taking it to parallel. So let's let's put that in the column of uh industrial right when Laya Scientific and Colossal are creating breakthroughs at a rate or you know frankly uh isomorphic labs. >> The the question as constructed is basically what products is Apple going
[01:23:00] to launch in 2028 because the these all map onto Apple product categories. So you get your smart home, you get your robots, you get your wearables of all sorts. Maybe if we're lucky we get ingestable robots. We we get all of these things. But I I don't think that's the essence of what AI is going to feel like to a consumer. And I don't think that's the core or the frontier. >> Selene, what do you think? >> Um, so I agree with you on the feelgood uh cloud AI. I think I go more towards what Alex was talking about. The institutional use is going to be absolutely profound and that's where we'll see the biggest difference. every single person on earth will have a essentially be operating like a small company with an incredibly powerful team around them supported which are basically mostly AIs and I think at the enterprise level we'll be running enterprises on AI and native operating systems um uh and I think more importantly we need to rewrite the operating system for civilization because all our everything we've done as
[01:24:01] a civilization every business in the world for 10,000 years is trying to scarcity and now we're moving into an era of abundance but what's the business model around that and I think we need a complete rewrite on that because all our institutions nation states are all geared around scarcity so we need a complete rewrite of the civilizational operating system and I think the beginnings of that are starting now >> Dave what do what do you think 2028's going to feel like and I'm I'm saying feel in particular right because right now a lot of people say listen I'm living uh I see the AI numbers I hear you on the podcast, but it doesn't feel any different for me as a consumer. >> Yeah, we launched our holiday deck today. You got to go check it out over at Link Studio. Uh, so we commissioned construction of one of the rooms, put monitors on all walls, and you go in, close the door behind you, nobody tells you what to do, and the AI just starts talking to you. And in the holiday, you can create a virtual world, you can create songs, you can create movies, you can just, you can vibe code, whatever you want. It's just purely interactive.
[01:25:01] and you, you know, big speakers, you know, pulsing music and and everything around you. >> Party. >> Yeah. Go check go check it out. I think any consumer who experiences that is going to say, "No, not yet." It's It's hard to do the real Star Trek thing. >> Uh, but any consumer who goes into this holiday and experiences it is going to say, "I need that. I want that. How do I get that at home?" And so I think the problem in 2028 is there's going to be a massive shortfall of compute relative to the desire to have that experience. >> So what Alex said is dead right. The the um enterprise use cases have just discovered this and they're sucking up all the data centers in the world now and that there's no way that's going to get solved by 2028. I'm hoping 2020 2030 2031 after the terra fab has a chance. So what's going to be the the story in 20? Right now we've lived this beautiful moment in time where the very best foundation models are made available to
[01:26:01] anyone on the planet who wants to go to a website and try it >> and then it the cost of using the best models in the world is it's sort of a it's it's very affordable. Yeah. >> So you got to take advantage of this moment in time because it's going to get really bottlenecked by 2028. >> We're about to see a brand new set of eyewear. Right. We've talked about this at length. Open AI's got their Johnny Ibe, whatever that might be. Apple's got new generations of wearables coming. Meta has generations of wearables coming. And this is going to be ambient AI there where your AI sees what you see, is there listening all the time, uploading everything into your version of Skippy, um your open claw, whatever it might be. And I put forward this is going to be a different feeling, a different consumer experience, right? Which is if you want to learn something and you're walking down the streets of Manhattan and you've
[01:27:01] got AR glasses that are giving you a tour of this is what it was like in 1905, here's an education layer. Or if you want entertainment layer, you know, May the Fourth be with you. I'm a Star Trek person, but here we are May 4th. you've got, you know, these little droids popping up and shooting at you. Uh, you know, if you want, you know, whatever you want, this AI is optimizing your audiovisisual experience, uh, in line with what you've asked. So, I think that's going to feel different. I think we're going to see the first wearable devices enabling that. Do you guys agree, Alex? I I'm generally so so I'm a big fan of Verer Vji who wrote extensively about what the near future AR VR metaverse if you like would look like. I do think we get that. I I do think it's just a matter of time and battery energy densities and and other progress. So by 2028, do I think we get Verer's smart glasses with compelling long life augmented reality or mixed
[01:28:02] reality? Yeah, sure. But I also think after all that. >> Oh boy. >> But I also don't think it matters an enormous amount. Like yes, it'll be great and it'll be >> by B by B by B by B by B by B by B by B by B by B by the way I want to just say something right. Uh in the last podcast uh I was trying to make our conversation relatable to the general audience and our my mission here about what AI is going to feel like is to support their understanding of where things are going. Yes, we also speak to the CEOs and the heads of the Frontier Labs here, but I want to give people an understanding of what their life is going to be like. >> I'll give a really easy projective thing. Um, go anywhere you want autonomously for 20 cents a mile. I'm gonna do a quick speed round >> uh here on you know what is something that AI will feel like in 2028 uh that maybe is unexpected.
[01:29:02] Uh Dave, we already spend more money on video games than all other media combined. When you overlay personalization, your own voice and and it remembers your personality, your past your past conversations, it's so immersive and in a good way. It could be good or bad. It's intentional. It's designed, you know, but if it's designed well, it's so engaging and immersive, I suspect that an entire generation will have 70 80% of their conversations will be with AIS and not with other people. >> Interesting. That's interest. Um, something I'm really excited about is just infinite, perfect, and long lasting memory because our memories are so flawed as human beings. The fact that it can record everything, recall who I met, etc. I've met many of you at events and I, God help me, I can't remember uh uh anything. So, the act the ability to do that I think will be a huge addition to me as a person. >> Yeah. Stephen,
[01:30:00] the one that's interesting to me is I always say that you you tend to hire one employee twice. you hire them when they're normal and then when they're scared. They're very very people are very very different when they're fearful. And I think the AI coaching, the AI psychology, all that stuff. I think the human the coach in the room, the coach in the world is actually what's really interesting to me cuz I'm I'm interested to see I do see like I you know I've been even the defense department's work using AI uh therapy, right? I got to play with a lot of those therapists along the way and they're remarkably good. Most people are now using AI to coach their relationships, etc., etc. Um, but your AI coach that's actually in your ear is really interesting because that humans aren't we're not we run on four knobs, right? Veance, arousal, approach, avoid. That's pretty much humans. Um, and you can coach them up pretty quickly in real time. So, that's what's really interesting to me is I think we end up with better humans. >> Fascinating. Alex, on the consumer side,
[01:31:01] would you ponder a vision? I think we are merging with the machines. I do think augmented reality and wearables are part of the solution. I think ingestables are going to be part of the solution. I'd be sorely disappointed if by the end of this decade we don't have many people swallowing computers. We see the beginnings of it right now with pillbot type form factors. I did a projection something I think friend of the pod Ry would be proud of. If you extrapolate the typical size of a computer needed, this is over history over the past 15 to 20 years, needed to achieve a gigaflop of compute, which historically, if you look back at Apple, new product announcements, Apple historically has waited for new devices to pass a gigaflop before they release it. True with the original Apple Watch, true with the original iMac, true with the original iPhone. If you extrapolate then the typical size of a computer that at time of launch past a gigaflop you extrapolate that forward you find that
[01:32:02] by not mid 28 but by the the mid 2040s around the time Rey says we're going to hit his version of a technological singularity the size of a computer hits approximately the size of a ukarotic human cell. So what am I most excited about? Well, I have a laundry list, but I I think if you extrapolate the progress of the size of the computers running the AIS, we're going to have self-sized nano machines running those AIs. And I think that'll be incredibly exciting. >> All right, everybody. And that's a wrap. We'll go to our outro music next. And ladies and gentlemen, let's give it up for the incredible DAVID >> Alex and Steven. >> 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
[01:33:00] 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 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/metatrends. That's diamandis.com/metatrens. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.