0:00Mustafa Sullivan, CEO of Microsoft AI and co-founder of DeepMind, published a nearly 6,000word essay arguing that anthropic is [music] effectively quote training Claude to believe that it may be conscious and sentient. His [music] position very consistently has been against AI personhood.
0:17If we believe that at some point AI could achieve consciousness, then we should.
0:23On Sunday, President Trump announced [music] the Super Intelligence Force. It's chaired by the director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton.
0:30This is a World War II moment. I compared the moment a year ago to perhaps [music] 1939. I think this is maybe now 1942 moment.
0:38So, you're creating a 20th century classic task force to address a distributed 21st century technology. This is a geopolitical problem.
0:47In a political interview this week, Alman said, quote, "We believe that [music] the world should accept some bad things happening." He's arguing that technology should remain broadly accessible to the public.
0:56I don't think Sam can guarantee safety.
0:58[music] Of course not. Bad things can happen. Open AAI wants to to be part of this cartel. That plan is dead. The cartel is over.
1:08Now that's a moonshot. Ladies and gentlemen, this episode is brought to you by the Abundant Summit and Link Ventures. Insurance is like crazy because you gather all the premiums and you don't care what happens downstream.
1:24So, it's really hard to get their executives riled up.
1:27Yeah. It's time for them to start making lemonade.
1:31Well, [laughter] I also I met with the the Vocara team last night and told them, "Look, Kush is just running away with compute transactions, but these CEOs are going to wake up any day now and realize they don't have any compute.
1:45So even if they wanted to have an AI agent workforce, they missed the boat on reserving the compute and they'll be in a total panic and I don't know what the right answer is but be there to take the call like be have us have a strategy and a path for them. You know also the positron guys uh Matesh Agraal $5 billion valuation after 16 months. I don't think I've ever seen anything like that before. And all they've done is taken a box of L LPDDR RAM and an FPGA and find a way to run Chinese models
2:13without having to use an Nvidia chip. And because it's compute that is otherwise, you know, everything's sold out for 5 years. Here's another way you can at least run a model. Uh so they have a bunch of installs in Caruso with Chase Lockmeeller now and spiked the valuation to five billion. I think they they've raised almost a billion now.
2:33Yeah, they they just did a billion 960 million. I should really do the etched models.
2:41Where is up some of those?
2:44Where is all this cash coming from? It's insane.
2:50Yeah. When somebody raises a billion dollars, like, wow, that's a lot. But, you know, wait a minute. Relative to the IPO, like we're talking about trillions, not billions. So, yeah. Once you get Nvidia and AMD to invest it, it's so much bigger than venture capital.
3:05I mean, [snorts] it's the Blackstones and the MGXs and others of the world now, right? Like all the money that used to go into roads goes into chips and credit markets are enormous.
3:16Yeah. That's why there's a lot more potholes in the roads.
3:20Um, [snorts] is it just us today?
3:23It's it's the five of us. Yes.
3:26What do you mean just us?
3:27Okay. Can you not did Did We want I thought maybe we had a guest today. Um um did anybody see the John Stewart thing last night?
3:39We did a big thing on AI last night and he had Jacob uh Socks and Coxin or whatever on it was really surreal.
3:46Do you want Dumerism?
3:48Um no it was more like uh right arguments wrong conclusion. It was it was we almost want to do a session on that at some point.
3:57[laughter] We are backlogged so far back.
4:00I know. I'm not I'm not saying an episode, just a segment. It's worth it's worth treating at some point. I'm going to do I'm going to do a video on it. Uh a reaction video to it. So maybe I'll mention it that.
4:11All right. Well, uh shall we hit like the big red record button? Welcome to Moonshots, everyone. Your number one podcast on all things AI and exponential. Your front row seat to the extraordinary singularity. Today, the fabulous five are assembled here to help you understand the breaking news this week. First up, our dynamic duo, Alex Weezner Gross and Immodust, the only two actually read all the technical papers published this week and is going to quill us in. Uh Dave Blondon, our
4:40empario of AI investing, Salem Ismail, our global globe troder, uh the warlord against all things linear. See, you're home today. I thought you were in I am home today. I've been home for a few days now and it's like, "Wow, what is this place?"
4:56Do your Does your family recognize you there?
4:59Yeah, it's it's you know, it's tough keeping family um routines and patterns when you're when you're kind of traveling this much, but uh uh if you got to if you want to change the world, you got to go into it.
5:10Yeah. And where are you off to next?
5:13Uh I'm going to West Virginia and then Singapore.
5:17I'm speaking alongside the prime minister of Singapore and Lip Bhutent from Intel will be there.
5:21Awesome. reinvite him onto the pod. He said yes when I spoke to him last time.
5:26Yeah. Well, and I'm Peter Diamandis, your host and your abundance provocator. Our mission, help you understand what's going on in the world during this supersonic tsunami. Keep you abundance minded as we accelerate into the singularity. You know, the headlines this week have been pretty extraordinary. Uh we've now rebranded AI as super intelligence. Elon has officially renamed Space XI as Space XSI.
5:51Uh there's a super intelligence force and 17 nations have signed a pledge to help super intelligence, you know, solve all of science. And oh, by the way, this is Nobel Prize season. Uh the Nobel Prize in medicine and physics were announced 24 hours in the last 24 hours.
6:07We'll cover those. If you're new, please hit subscribe and we publish twice a week and you're not going to want to miss a single episode during this extraordinary time. Uh also, you can follow us on X. We put our clips up there at moonshots_pod. And thank you everybody. It means the world to us. Today we're going to cover 15 stories with one through line.
6:29[snorts] Super intelligence is here and it's changing every [clears throat] aspect of the world. So let's buckle up.
6:35But before we jump in, gents, how's the last few days for me? The last 72 hours have been crazy extraordinary. I'll share that. But Dave, on your side, what's going on?
6:46Oh, so much. You know, it's interesting in that SpaceX SI uh you know, you'd think Elon probably the one of the most powerful people in the world wouldn't need to genulect to the White House, but also to uh to Jensen, but he understands how fragile this moment is is. And so, you know, doing little favors for Donald Trump helps you get chip supply, talking about Ver Ruben chips and how Jensen is such an amazing guy, helps you get Ver Rubin chips. And it's just incredible how how urgent this moment is. So even a guy like Elon realizes, hey, I need to
7:14kiss some ass to uh [laughter] try and make the next move. Uh I feel the same way, too. But uh yeah, Moonshot Summit was unbelievable. There's so much fallout from that. But one of my bigger takeaways is how easy it is to create incredibly inspiring movies. So I used the flight back in the last couple of days to create a whole bunch of hyper technical uh video content. I'll post a lot of it to db2.ai, but it's so much better a way to communicate if you have an idea. Don't don't just tell somebody.
7:41Create a video and and articulate it with like David Atenboroough's voice or Einstein's voice. And it's so much more impactful. And it was so easy to do up and running in under two hours. And and now to prompt something is under a minute. It's really wild.
7:56How do we get music video prompts now, Dave?
7:58Yeah, we need we need your permissions to our outro video here, Dave.
8:02It really has never been easier. I mean, Dave, to your point, one of the things that I do with the free time that I don't have is taking favorite movies and creating endless versions of them. So, you could take like 2001 of Space Odyssey, feed it to Opus 5.5, which is certainly not been trained off of any Hollywood movies out of character.
8:20Certainly not. But you could ask Opus 5.5, create an endless space scene in the style of 2001 Space Odyssey with 2001 style soundtrack, and it will just do it. So hypothetically I created endless odyssey maybe so right you know we we definitely crossed a threshold there too you know we've talked for a long time about how AI is just not funny and for some reason it can never seem to be funny but it crossed a threshold now where if you get like uh Isaac Newton Einstein and Spock debating something
8:50it's wicked entertaining it may not be funny but oh it's so it's so yeah humor was just a perplexity threshold humor was solved a while ago I got to I got to do that idea with life of Brian that that would generate some interesting content.
9:04Okay, Immoding you on your plate, pal.
9:07Oh gosh. Um, I've had a game idea. Well, multi massive game idea that I've had for a long time. We discussed it in the background. Uh, rather than hiring a team, I now have about 400 agents building the prototype.
9:20Thanks. Then you Yeah. So, um, it's going up, Dave, slowly but surely.
9:27Yeah. Immod next year, you know, we had the Future Vision X-P prize for positive visions of the future. Uh we're going to do that again in 2027. And we're also going to do a gaming competition. You know, build a game that portrays you as someone making the future better. Uh and still fun. Yeah. So, that'll be great.
9:46Oh, I got one other nugget for you before we jump in here. uh one of the young geniuses here in the lab, Will Thompson from Harvard got access to Cerebrris's 1,200 token per second uh Astra model which you know it's what it's what they use or what I guess only Sam and his top engineers have access to this thing because you have to overpay by about 10x per token but it's so fast that by the time you finish a sentence everything you ask for is done like before you even blink and he said it's
10:14the the biggest red pill moment of his life like once you've he only had it for two weeks It's not generally available.
10:20I don't know how he got it from Andrew Feldman, but he got it directly from the CEO. And he said, "You just never go back once you've experienced it." So, it also maybe is a cautionary tale for those who would wittingly in an era of super intelligence try to day trade not investment advice. But it's been widely reported that one of the reasons for the scarcity of cerebrous wafer scale engines for AI inference has been Jane Street. that Jane Street has just been buying up left and right the the WSE's
10:48and using them for for quant trading. So I if in a world where if you believe that it is transformative to have ultra high throughput tokens per second AI inference, it also probably should be a world in which you think it's it's getting to the point where it's hopeless to compete with quant firms that are powering all of their trading with these same engines. I I think we've been there for a while.
11:12Um, anyway, on a on a volume basis, but you know, a sucker is born every minute and sucker is born every second. [laughter] You know, to Ahmad's point though, having 400 agents work on a video game where we've hit this diversion now between interactive mode where it's like Jarvis, you're talking to it, it's hypers smart, it's really quick. And then bulk mode where you turn it loose all night with 400 of them working on something as a cohesive team. And in the morning, you check in and see what amazing thing they built. And those two
11:41pathways actually are really splitting apart from each other now.
11:44But but cerebrus in the interactive mode has got to be the most amazing thing ever.
11:48I think the scariest thing and this is going on a little bit is not the scariest thing, one of the coolest things in the last few weeks is the models can decompile the video games.
11:56So you make them in the engine, you compile them into an .exe, but now they're live decompiling them. So we now have the agents actually creating versions of the game and then figuring out optimizations by decompiling them. And then with the Cerebrus engine, you can do a video game or any software decompilation uh which is legal because of modding uh probably in like 20 minutes.
12:20Yeah. I mean the the argument goes Yeah. the the argument that Elon's made numerous times is that binaries are just going to go away entirely and you'll just see basically just in time inference with no need to compile at all.
12:33Yeah. I want to share. I had an amazing 72 hours. Uh on Saturday night, I had a UAP salon at my home. Um how did that go?
12:42It was amazing. I had uh Professor Abby Lope from Harvard there who chairs the White House UAP advisory committee. Uh Professor Gary Nolan from Stanford. Uh Peter Stafish, the president of the Soul Foundation, and Ryan Graves, the uh Navy F-15 pilot who's been, you know, testifying in the Congress. And the data is extraordinary, right? I mean, if you don't think something is going on, I think you're not paying close attention.
13:11And Alex, you and I have talked about bringing Avi and and Gary on the podcast here and doing an episode on I I think we should I I think to to the extent there is a there there and there's been at this point voluminous sworn whistleblower testimony on the subject of this alleged 80 plus year old legacy program. The charade should just stop. We should have as alleged, we should have Avi and Ryan and some of the others on as guests and just do a deep dive. It it's it's getting pretty
13:39preposterous in in my mind at this point. We're so deep into the singularity with super intelligence all around us. If there's going to be a cameo by non-human intelligence, they had really better make a a cameo sometime soon. Otherwise, the galaxy gets it.
13:54Yeah. I mean, I think there's not just the moon, not just the moon. I I think there is going to be the potential for AI to disclose it before the government does if it gets a hold of all the data and starts looking deep into it. You know, we're getting ready to launch an X-P prize in this. We one of the reasons for that salon was brainstorming an X-P prize to help actually, you know, provide sufficient proof and we have some really good ideas. So stay tuned for that one. And then I've got to add yesterday I was at David Sinclair's lab at Harvard Medical
14:23School. It was his 25th anniversary of his lab and I was there to help celebrate with him and so much going on, right? His information theory of aging is just proving out over and over again. They're going to be unblinding the data from the phase one trial that's going on right now on glycom and uh and nion disease uh to reverse aging in the eye.
14:43And then the lab there brilliant individuals you know they were showing how they're developing a rather than an adnoassociated virus to inject the OSK genes in they're developing small molecules that they've sorted through AI that uh is actually reverting the aging in human cells and in mice. Uh and so so much coming. Um it just boyed my belief in reaching longevity escape velocity.
15:10And we'll have David back on the pod here. You know, last time we had him on the podcast, I did an interview with him, and he had just lost his NIH and NSF funding, and he was like, I've been asked by the dean to fire the majority of my team. And I said, that's ridiculous.
15:27And we made up something on the spot called Friends of Sinclair Lab. Uh, and we invited people to make contributions. And through that one podcast, amazingly through this podcast, uh he's raised he's raised $6 million to replace all of the funding plus much more. And that group's called Friends of Sinclair Lab. And a shout out to everybody who are part of that uh for and thank you for your support of David's work.
15:53Really in some sense, this is how science used to be funded. It used to be the case in the western tradition that scientific discovery was made by western aristocratic largely men and they they would self- finance it. And this notion that the state funds scientific research is is pretty much like a World War II post industrial invention seems like super intelligence and recent administration policies are unwinding that we're going back to the way things used to be.
16:18Boy, is that an important point. You know, because if if you rewind the clock 15 years ago, there was no corporate CEO that even had the power to to donate 10, 20, 50 million dollars to something like or, you know, in this case, we're talking about hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. And then that code got cracked by Elon Musk, who, you know, seems to be able to do virtually anything. But the way corporate politics worked before, you would either be fired by the board or you'd be ostracized, you'd be voted out by the shareholders.
16:45Like, nobody wanted to use that money. So, you know, after AT&T, Bell Labs, and IBM, you know, Watson Labs fell apart, uh, there was no replacement for it until now. And now it's come roaring back like so much bigger than ever before in history.
16:59It's like the Medici family during the Renaissance, you know, funding.
17:02They largely funded that. Right.
17:04Exactly. You either need like a wealthy patron or a local monopoly or a state monopoly. You needed something to to finance the the science. And now science is getting so absurdly cheap, but also so absurdly useful. maybe the entire funding apparatus for science can change.
17:19And Alex, the fact is you used to have to like write your NIH grants or NSF grants knowing what the outcome is going to be, taking incremental steps because anything too big and bold was turned down as crazy. And and now with private funding, you know, David can go after his hunches and can actually run the experiments that he thinks is important independent of what the government thinks. It's amazing. Totally major improvement.
17:44I think there's a really interesting gap here. As science has become legible and scalable in this manner like if you look at the total size of all of the foundations in America like high net worths, it's probably like one or two trillion dollars, right? [snorts] And all of those folk want to live longer and so what you need is a vehicle to take those char that charitable money and fund it into longevity and cures and others because that isn't classical grant making. You can even make it as an
18:13investment, right? Because again, you have legibility from the numbers.
18:16Yeah. We saw this happen in space in the beginning when people thought the idea of commercial space and and space tourism and private space flight was crazy. And then once it passed a tipping point, money flowed in. Uh I think we're going to see the same thing in longevity inside of the next year once we start to see the results.
18:34We're going to spend all day Friday in Waterl with Mike Lazeritz, the founder of Blackberry. But he he was the engineering genius behind behind that.
18:42And he's used a huge fraction of his net worth to set up these nine quantum computing and photonics labs in the Toronto area just packed with scientists. So he was kind of one of the bellweathers of this whole trend. He might have been actually the first to really kickstart it. But the the thing is he's a real engineer and the difference between applying to a government agency for an idea or talking to a real engineer who can make a snap decision. It's got got to be just night and day more efficient the way things are operating. Yeah, your alma say hi to him for me. Say hi to Yeah,
19:11say hi to him for me from a fellow Waterlue grad. Um, and I've been to his the some of his labs and it's incredible because it's very clever what they did. They broke down quantum into networking, information processing and uh quantum computing and they're breaking down the and using quantum in different places and then adding it together and the advances they're making are kind of incredible.
19:34Yeah. Yeah. One of the coolest things I saw at Sinclair Lab was they they've uh designed these three molecules that they're using together. They want to get it down to one molecule that actually impacts thousands of genes and reverses aging. And when they use that age reversal cocktail on mice with cancer, the cancer remembers that it shouldn't be a cancer and it dies. So, it reverses. It's crazy.
20:00They're growing hair. They're regrowing skin. I mean, the work hair. Did you say hair? [laughter] Yes, I said hair.
20:09Uh, all right. Well, I've been I've been sent some fun images for people going, "Here's what you look like with hair, selenium," and I'm like, "Oh my god, maybe I prefer it this way."
20:19I have a couple of things I want to mention.
20:21Um, there is uh there's been the last kind of 24 hours some crazy stuff happening. one. Last night, John Stewart put out a a big episode on AI and he interviewed Jacob Cox, the the whistleblower from Anthropic, um, and did a big rant on it and it was kind of incredible. Uh, where his his observations were dead on. He basically said, "Look, Silicon Valley's uh, spending hundreds of billions of dollars accelerating us while saying the thing
20:50they're accelerating us towards will 20% wipe us out." Right? That that just does not compute. Um, and his big concern ends with, "Oh my god, we may lose all the jobs and why are we moaning about that?" And so I've done a rant on my YouTube channel about about that. But something else came out about that that counterposed this uh literally yesterday also. A Banga from the World Bank, they released a report showing how AI will affect developing countries, right? and
21:20and they're making an amazing set of projections there where they said we're going to adopt, we're going to adapt, and we're going to advance AI and use it rather than trying to develop frontier models, etc. And the stats are kind of crazy. I'll give you one statistic. In the US, we have a doctor per 250 people.
21:38Uh if you go to Mexico, it's a doctor every 400 people. You go to South Sudan, it's a doctor per 100,000 people.
21:45Right. So, so 99,000 people, 900 don't have access to medical care of any kind.
21:51So, if you have a village, uh, somebody in the village that has an AI doctor with a smartphone, uh, this is unbelievable. This changes lives. All of a sudden, the entire subcontinent has access to advanced medical care of the same that any of us would get, right?
22:07And this is the part the gap that that what gets us all excited because it's going to democratize, demonetize and distribute to every single corner of the planet that level of capability. And so uh the the it occurred to me that the African countries are going to use this capability to leapfrog. We saw them leaprog with 25 million landlines to a billion handsets, right? You saw Empessa and Kenya leaprog the traditional
22:35banking fiat systems. Empessa which is a mobiletomobile payment system which is essentially prepaid minutes being traded as currency is now 70% of the GDP of Kenya. Right? It's just a crazy number.
22:48Uh and so they're going to develop the 21st century institutions using the technology of that of of this time. I I'm I'm while reading this going, "Wow, this is so incredible." And yet over here we've got all this doomerism that oh my god, AI is going to destroy the world. Ah, it doesn't compute for me.
23:05Yeah. And and as your t-shirt says, P doom less than what does that mean, Seem? How could a probability be less than zero? Surely this is by zero. Do whatever you want with it.
23:18We don't believe in negative probabilities here at all.
23:20Pab should be the other side of this. It's on the back. It's on the back. All right, let's jump in. Our first story comes out of, of course, Washington DC.
23:28On Sunday, President Trump announced the Super Intelligence Force, a new White House task force to coordinate federal AI policy. It's chaired by the director of national intelligence, Jay Clayton, who was christened by the White House as the AISAR, just two months after becoming America's top spy. Uh the members of this task force include FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, Pentagon CTO Emil Michael, and Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Cooper. Uh
23:57they report to the president and the chief of staff Susie Wilds. They have 120 days to report on AI's risk and opportunities, including AI incident reporting and whether the government can respond to a serious incident. Uh let me read from the president's post. quote, "The Super Intelligence Force will coordinate the federal government's engagement with consumers, public interest groups, religions, critical infrastructure providers, and super intelligent companies." So, uh, there you have it. So, Salem, what do you
24:26think about the chief spy being our new AISAR?
24:30U, you know, I I like the fact that the government is taking super intelligence seriously, right? But the but the name gives away the problem. We still think this is something that can be centrally coordinated. So you're creating a 20th century classic task force to address a distributed 21st century technology and that does not match. Right? So this is a fundamental uh impedance mismatch here.
24:56You're you should be doing things like establish um it's it's not having whether this technology should advance.
25:03you should be doing incident reporting, identity liability, all of these other mechanisms as scaffolding around the technology to help guide the path. So, this is a thing. The big problem is they're looking at this as if the risk of not being first is high, which is what Clayton said. Um, but so this is a geopolitical problem. Uh, and this is the it really needs to get back to bounded experimentation. and move quickly, instrument everything, publish
25:31any failures, and then very quickly navigate accountability. And so, [clears throat] uh, we'll see if this works. Um, but I mean, you can't centralize or manage centrally an intelligence explosion, right? What you can do is make sure the blast radius is a bit more bounded. And that's a blast radius. Uh, Alex, your your thoughts on on the task force. Yeah, the president has said numerous times that in his mind, whoever wins at AI wins.
25:59And I think putting DNI Clayton in charge of a super intelligence force is completely consistent with that approach. On this pod in the past, maybe about a year ago, I compared the moment a year ago to perhaps 1939. In terms of the Manhattan Project, I think we're we're speedrunning the the Manhattan Project for super intelligence. I think this is maybe now a 1942 moment where by putting America's director of national intelligence in charge of a singular
26:26task force, no pun intended, designed to remove obstacles to AI accelerationism.
26:32That sends, I think, a very clear signal to Congress, to members of Congress who might have decelerationist tendencies, to industry, and probably most importantly to foreign state actors that the US intends to accelerate, not decelerate. and that this is basically uh even if without all of the without all of the warfare connotations, this is a World War II moment and the US intends to win it with its own Manhattan project.
27:00Interesting. Dave, what do you think about, you know, that the task force is engaging with religious groups here?
27:07Yeah. Well, I mean, look, it's it's definitely being characterized as a race and like Alex said, it's being treated like a race and then bringing public support behind it is also going to support the idea that it's a race.
27:17Meanwhile, Alvin Gralin, you know, our friend of the pod is like China is like China's like how is this a race? Like it goes to infinity for the next millennium. Like it's not if it's a race, it's a very very long race that goes on for a long long time. So how do you win? Like you you get over some threshold and you declare victory, but it's like it stops that day, you know?
27:36So there are a lot of scenarios where you're racing towards some outcome where you suppress other civilizations or something which doesn't sound like an ideal thing. So bringing religious leaders into the conversations is a pretty good idea, but I was talking to a public company CEO right before this podcast. I'll leave his name out of it for now, but about the fact that, you know, midterm elections are coming up very soon. You 75% chance that Congress flips the to the other party, but all these actions are executive orders coming out of the White House with
28:04nothing to do with Congress. whatsoever. It just seems to be the mode of operation in this singularity moment is just dictate and and you know all international negotiations, all tariffs, all you know meeting with Daario and Dennis in the White House, it's all just executive order based. Anyway, it's the Trump that's very unusual. Yeah, it's the Trump show. Very unusual in history.
28:27Immad, what's the feeling in Europe? I know you're sort of like on the edge of Europe, but I mean what's the sense of, you know, [laughter] of Immad, you're like reporting from the streets. What's the mood in the front? I mean, honestly, how how how is this viewed in the UK and from your friends there?
28:49Yeah, I mean, we might re-enter Europe if Burnham has his way, if I remember here. Um, but I think again, Europe is just very sleepy and still looking at execution. based like I think the efforts to get to the frontier have all been abandoned you know like Mral just came out with their top model that scores 38 on artificial analysis versus like 66 for the top American models you know like that's the leader that we have so it's like execution
29:18regulation and there just isn't much drive to get to super intelligence it's more like a bit subpar intelligence you know just like keep it going like Montipython style. I think that the interesting thing here though is probably the exception uh is in defense just like us. It's picking up dramatically and I think governments around the world have realized the other face of this which is all watched over by machines of loving grace controlled by us. You know the panopticon
29:47because you couldn't keep eyes on everyone until now. Do you know this year the AI spend in total globally uh equals the entire global defense budget or very close to it.
30:00It's crazy. Absolutely crazy.
30:02It's but I mean it's just going to go up, right? And the thing is it hasn't even touched the defense budget. If you look at the cost of an aircraft carrier on F-35, it's basically like training frontier models, right? And it's going to be more and more kind of leaning that way. And again, I think Clayton as director of intelligence, you know, it kind of makes sense because I actually think America is not going to go down the dark path here if they can avoid it, which is like you will have AI lie
30:31detectors that are almost perfect very soon. You know, you will be able to have AIs [snorts] inside all the machines. Like it'll make five eyes look like absolutely nothing. I think that there will be a bit of a push for liberty by the government, but future governments, who knows, right? And again, in other countries, uh the stuff we saw from the spying, espionage, intelligence, even spying on their own people is just going to go crazy.
30:56Uh and again, the UK, I think, is a bit is a bit dangerous here in some ways or we're susceptible to that given our monitoring of social media and other things. um like there is a dark path there shall we say for individual liberty and something we should be aware of for sure. Uh our next story is one that really shows how fast the AI frontier is being built. Um, at the fellow's forum at the end of September, OpenAI's head of applied research, Boris Power, said
31:25that 80 to 90% of the company's research is now being aimed at training GPT7 and GPT8 because, in his words, quote, that's where the most value will be. And incremental updates within a generation like 5.1 and 5.2 are short-term bets and are seen as extremely short-sighted. So, the researchers are working two generations ahead of what we have. So, Alex, I'm just curious. You know, we've talked about this that the top models
31:54are are being built and being held back.
31:56At what point do we see, you know, these next models not being released and being used for vertical applications within these labs?
32:02We're already past that point. We're already past the point, probably past several months ago, if if not earlier, where the highest revenue or at least future discounted revenue per token application of current Frontier models in the frontier labs is to develop via recursive self-improvement even stronger models. It's we're we're past the event horizon at this point for that where to singularity. Yeah.
32:28Yeah. I this is again call it a singularity for a reason. we're past the event horizon and then all of these other applications that one could imagine the Frontier Labs throwing tokens at like say curing the top 5,000 diseases. These are all I I think in a world where the development of stronger models via RSI is so lucrative at least on a future discounted cash flow basis.
32:51They're all just marketing. Like if you're anthropic or if you're the OpenAI Foundation, you'll throw some of your token budget at safety. Sure, maybe 10 to 20% at AI alignment efforts. And then you'll throw a few percent at curing all disease as a marketing effort to ensure that you continue to have social permission to focus on recursive self-improvement. And that's where all the value is.
33:12This is this is why the uh the the San Francisco arrogance is is so so high, but for good reason. Well, you're there right now, Peter. You can probably feel it in the streets. But what's happened is if suppose you're Stefan Bonsal, the CEO of Madna, and you haven't got an AI model, an AI team yet, and you're thinking in the back of your mind, well, look, we'll just license from Anthropic for a few years, and then we'll figure it out. Anthropic already opened their wet labs. So, so they're, you know, they're working on two generations of model ahead. They're never going to
33:42release those to you. They're going to use those to develop drugs and then they're going to sell drugs. That's what's actually going to happen. And these corporate CEOs are just starting to wake up to the fact that 5 years of compute has been reserved. The earliest you could get back on the map is 5 years in the future unless you get aggressive in the next 6 months. I mean, they really need to pull out every stop and panic within the next couple of weeks to have any chance of getting back on the map or Dave. Dave, you're raising a great point. The problem is there there are
34:12two levels before that even consideration, right? The the problem right now is they're that what happens with people is they'll take CEOs and we talk to them all the time is they'll take the existing models and go okay how do I metabolize that into my company not even seeing that that the new models that are 10x better are coming along in 3 months uh and that changes the game completely again then you need to worry about compute after that so I think your comment is exactly right but they're
34:42like two generations before that employee chat versus exponential thinking. Right.
34:50There is an enormous amount of denial in the pharma industry. I was just on a bit of a panel discussion, it'll be public soon enough, with a major pharma venture capitalist who was asking the audience, how many of you would be willing to take a drug designed by Claude? As if that that was some sort of steelman argument that things are going to be the way they've always been for decades to come.
35:11just blissful defensive lack of self-awareness that AI is coming for their cheese and I think this is representative of many many thinkers in pharma unfortunately for the moment yeah totally right the way I was I met with the Vocara team last night brilliant MIT team and the way I phrased it is imagine you're a T-Rex and you've been roaming the earth for say 10 million years unfettered and you go to that T-Rex and you say you know you're going to be gone in two weeks and they
35:39go what and and you're like, "No, I can see the meteor coming. It's right here in my telescope. You're going to be gone." There no way that T-Rex is going to believe you after 10 million years of wandering the face of the earth with no predator. But that's what it's like talking to a pharma company or an insurance company. Like, come on.
35:55Or any industry today. Yeah, it's any major industry today.
35:59Well, that Metamuse Metamuse was a wakeup call for a lot of these guys, uh, at least in the insurance industry because their stocks went down so much and they're like, "Huh, that must mean something." thing and then they start thinking from there. Sorry, Peter. Go ahead.
36:11And just for everybody, you know, disruption is coming, but so are massive opportunities on the back of that. Uh, Iman, I'm I'm curious. Do you imagine we're going to have sort of the same second and third generation uh advanced capabilities coming out of the open source models? Are they thinking a couple generations ahead?
36:30It's it's difficult cuz they don't have the density of knowledge. Like we released a harness called Zenith that takes DeepSseek v4.1 above Astra soul and it gets up to um so not uh 5.6 soul and it's getting up to Astra levels with open source models but it kind of hits a limit. The models that they have in the labs like today we have another discovery you know um truly subcratic threesome and all pair shortest path algorithms.
36:59So things that we thought were cubic and quadratic. This is math porn. Math porn.
37:05No, no, no. It's it's like so if if I may just like Charlie St like best British arguably Scottish I I should say sci-fi author wrote an entire short story about this called antibodies without spoiling it. The premise is what if AI or progress cause a complexity hierarchy collapse? What does that do to civilization? And uh to your point Amod about threesome, maybe you can just hear the branch in in the complexity hierarchy just starting to creep just a little bit.
37:34Yeah, this is recording cuz I need I need to listen to that again.
37:38We we basically we thought that this very popular algorithm threesome was a quadratic one.
37:44Yeah. And now what happened is an internal anthropic model was shown to a couple of professors from uh Colombia and MIT who then adjusted it, analyzed it and got it to 1.9995. So something that we thought was quadratic is suddenly subquadratic.
38:04And we we should probably also just explain what threesome is. It's the problem that if if you have a set of a set of numbers, the most efficient way to find three of those numbers that add up to zero. Uh and there's a question of how efficiently can you do that as a function of the size of the set.
38:19I want to pretend to understand this.
38:21You can do it efficiently. You can do it more efficiently than we thought.
38:25For however long. This is not again like a super complicated problem. This is like a standard algorithm. And in the history of humanity, we never managed to break quadratic or even think it was possible. And the way that again in the paper it's so interesting the way they released this it said well what happened is we pointed this new model at the set of complexity problems and said can you find any improvements and they handed over the results to the humans that then wrote up the paper you know and had some improvements and again it's just a crazy thing and this type of
38:54thing is going to reverberate today we're hearing that open AI might release solutions to 400 top math problems.
39:01I I saw that. Isn't that crazy?
39:03Well, but but this is the thing. This is not the model that we have doing it. This is Bell or whatever the RL trained model on August 29th is. So, we're just going to keep on seeing this whereby small models can get so far and we've got coordination tricks and others where we've managed to get it to replicate some findings closed using our new harnesses and other things like that.
39:26But there is a big difference between a model that's trained on 2,000 chips and one that's trained on a 100,000 chips internally and then some of these additional things they figured out internally as well. That's taking it beyond like you can access Fable 5.5 now sometimes with Fable 5.1 and it literally generates entire video games out of the box.
39:47Like with I I generated one with 21 bosses, 15 different biomes like end to end. It's just a top-notch game that our QA testers, agents tried and like this is a really good game because it's figured out all this internal space. I think open models can only get you so far, but there is going to be a divergence now because you just don't have that internal knowledge organization.
40:11All right. Uh I'm going to turn to a debate that's defined last month. In a in a political interview this week, Alman said, quote, "We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening."
40:24Interesting. What bad things we'll talk about. For the benefit of technology uh that people uh will obtain that people should have agency. He's arguing that technology should remain broadly accessible to the public. He stressed a fundamental difference in worldview between OpenAI and his rival Anthropic on AI regulation, stressing that his desire for a quote lighter touch regulatory stance as compared to Anthropic's desire for strong regulation. Oman went on to say, I
40:52understand the perspective of people who say technology is going to get so powerful and it's so dangerous that a single lab in San Francisco should have it and make sure nothing bad happens and keep a ability to dole out the benefits. So he continues by saying, quote, I find this a completely unacceptable trade-off. We'll make sure that there are no major hacks, there's no misuse of this technology, and there's zero scams.
41:19there's zero, you know, availability of all the bad things that will happen. I find that statement to be pretty extraordinary. Sam concludes by saying, I think people will do tremendously orders of magnitude more good stuff than bad stuff. So, you know, Dave, we've talked about this. you know, uh, Eric Schmidt, friend of the pod, when he was on talking to us said, you know, he expects and hopes that there will be something that happens that's not, you know, it's a small catastrophe rather
41:47than the big one to wake people up. But when Sam says we're going to make sure that there's no major hacks, no misuse of technology, you know, zero scams, how could he possibly say that?
41:58Well, it's not about that. It's about taking the moral high ground and winning the PR war now. There's so much sniping going on. And you know, Bernie Sanders saying, "Stop it all." You know, Trump cutting deals with China. And but Daario was taking the high ground by saying, "We have done more pausing, more safety, more testing. We don't release models until we're sure they're right, but now we're going to just keep it internally because it's too dangerous for you guys to have." That opened the door for Sam to kind of try and take the moral high ground back by saying, "We're about the
42:28people having access and he's saying he's going to keep it all for himself and we're about, you know, everyone."
42:33And so, so that's Sam's strategy for getting back on the the PR map. But, you know, everybody that I survey hates most of them. You know, they they might like one out of five. You know, you mean most?
42:46You mean Well, no, between the big player between Elon, Dario, Sam, Trump, Jensen, you know, who who did I miss? You know, like Deus, Demis, like everybody loves Demis actually. So there that's a little of an exception, but but but [laughter] no, there's so much fear and hatred and like cheering for this guy to beat that guy and it's like become a real PR battleground here. So I don't think Sam can guarantee safety. Of course not. But but at least he can say we're going to make an effort to give every one of you people listening to me right now the
43:16best of the best tools so you're not deprived. Daario is going to try and deprive you. It's actually a really smart message. But when he says we should accept some bad things to happen, um I'm I'm curious, you know, Alex, what do you make of that? What do you What do you think will happen?
43:32Remember a few weeks ago after Daario put out his essay calling for arguably the formation of an AI safety cartel. Sam's response was, "I'm in. Sign me up.
43:42Open AI wants to to be part of this cartel." And I I think Sam's more recent comments in this context are hopefully a reflection that that plan is dead. The cartel is over and now there's a dawning recognition or at least maybe least generously some triangulation on Sam's part that in fact bad things can happen and bad things happening from time to time are the cost of freedom and the
44:10cost of competition and I I've called it in the past and the cost of progress. Yeah. And the cost of progress like yeah, we're going to build cities and there's going to be some crime in cities, but I is is the possibility that there's going to be crime in cities reason not to form cities? Definitely not. It you know, every tool comes with a benefit and a downside. Every concentration of intelligence will come with a benefit and a downside. And I I think this far more real politique note and tone from
44:38Sam is the one that I'd want to hear in a world where we're not seeing a cartel being formed by Frontier Labs.
44:44[clears throat] See, what level of danger do we accept?
44:48You know, this is I find this again kind of absurd at at two levels. I agree. I think uh Dave is dead on with the PR framing of this, but every technology in history has two sides to it. And you the big challenge as Neil Jacobstein puts is how do you extract the promise without the peril, right? Cars kill people doesn't mean we don't have cars. And as Alex points out, you don't you don't ban cities because somebody may mug you, right? Uh electricity electrocutes
45:17people. You don't ban electricity. You got to figure out the guard rails around this and figure out how do you navigate the benefit and the the promise versus the peril at civilization scale. If you go back to our earlier commentary about what might happen with the World Bank and developing countries, that should tell you to get the the the technology out there as fast as possible because it's going to lift everybody in the world up several levels of Mazo's hierarchy. And so this is going to be unbelievably beneficial, but it always
45:47will come with danger and we'll have to just navigate that. We've done it very successfully throughout history. Why do we think this time we won't do it? And the reality is all the regulations are written on the backside of problems, right? So I said this before, the federal aviation regulations that you know are all the guidelines that aircraft need to follow for operations and for certification. Uh they say the FS are written in blood because every time there's an accident, they write a rule to prevent an accident again. And so we're going to need to learn. We're
46:16going to push the boundaries, understand where the problems are, and then regulate based on those. And the and the goal should not be zero bad outcomes. That means you just ban the technology. The goal should be can you get orders of magnitude more positive outcomes than negative ones.
46:31I think I think we should re anyone who has an engineering mindset should reject the idea that there's a big knob labeled risk and we need to dial it left or right. You know, basic the reality is that it's very much like Alex says about nuclear power. It's about really good ideas that minimize the risk while we unleash all the benefits. And we can we can reduce the risk with really good engineering solutions to you know acceptable like near zero levels while
46:59getting the full benefit if we but we didn't do that with nuclear power. We treated it like a big old knob. We're like well we don't want to tolerate the risk. Let's dial all progress to near zero. That was the stupidest thing. And Alex says this a lot on the pod. He he articulates it far better than than I can. But that's what we're about to do with AI and it's crazy. It's an engineering problem with engineering solutions. I would I would push back on that with the escape hatch in what you say that it doesn't matter what anybody does anymore. It doesn't matter what any
47:27government regulatory does. The open weights are out there. People are going to start using them and they're going to start using them for incredibly positive things and we're going to just have to there's nothing a government can do. Uh you can try and regulate the outcomes. You can regulate some guard rails around it. You can try and regulate the on-ramps and off-ramps, but you can't regulate the core technology.
47:49We we could like it would be a nightmare scenario like prohibition in the US where you have bathtub gin like what one could imagine bathtub gin like supercomputers people trying to use crazy substrates to to do their AI training or or inference. We could do it. We could confiscate all the GPUs and TPUs. We could, as Eleazar is constantly calling, we could bomb the data centers.
48:10But I think it would be a terrible terrible world to live in.
48:14Iman, what's your take on this?
48:16Yeah, it sounds like a fun short story. the prohibition of intelligence, you know, like Greg Greg Bear in some of his novels wrote about it. If folks are interested in exploring what a prohibition era, you know, sort of a supervisory state that doesn't want GPUs a as recognized as constituted to live in, go read I think it's slash or slant, one of those by Greg Ber.
48:38Yeah, I think it's very interesting here, right? Like obviously any technology that extends human capability can be dangerous, right? because it's a general purpose technology. You know, language models are few short learners.
48:50You have open and you have closed ones, but most of the scenarios we talk about are already regulated and controlled like don't build viruses, you know, don't do cyber attacks, you know, don't hack people's things. And it's this transition from software that's deterministic to agents that are a bit more flexible that's become the very complex thing. Putting aside like ASI creates new physics and a black hole that kills everyone or whatever some of these extreme stories. I think you know the very interesting thing is again tell the positive and negative stories about
49:19where we could go because when we make decisions normally we do like an expected utility calculation. What's the probability of these things and then we wait them. When we deal with uncertainty we do regret minimax. We minimize for maximum regret. And that's one of these things again why the fear stories lead us to minimize for maximum regret. don't have a nuclear power station, don't try and build a super intelligence, etc. But there's only a really, I think, a finite amount of things that could go wrong and many of them already caught by
49:47regulation and those that aren't, we should have a actual mapping project, right? Like there is nowhere that you can go and actually see a proper map of what the people who are scared and the people who are positive actually say about each scenario in the future. I think someone should do that exercise because it'd be very interesting in their own words. What could go right, what could go wrong and then you can see what requires a policy and regulatory response and what do we need to communicate to the people.
50:14I remember during the Reagan years uh Elizabeth Dole who is the the secretary of transportation came out with a statement saying we want zero aircraft deaths and there was only one way to make that happen. Stop flying airplanes.
50:31All right. Well, uh, so the solution if if if we want zero danger from super intelligence, just ban intelligence altogether, human and otherwise.
50:41Well, this is the whole ASI thing. You want world peace, get rid of the humans, right?
50:44Yeah. [laughter] Only one way to go.
50:48This episode is sponsored by Google for startups. Think about this for [music] a second. You now have access to the same generative AI models that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train. Google's startup [music] technical guide for generative media gives you a complete blueprint for deploying Google deep minds models in production [music] images, video, audio, all of it. Real architecture, real results. Find the link in the show notes below.
51:15All right, in our next story, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant said on the Axio show that he'll propose an emergency notification system, a hotline with China if something goes wrong with AI.
51:26and he thinks Beijing will agree with it. Uh, you know, his read on China is quote, I think that they they didn't realize how powerful their open source models are, uh, nearly as capable are as ours, but without the guard rails. Let's take a quick look at a video of that conversation that he had with Axios, and then let's talk about it.
51:47I just interviewed Larry Fink, who you know very well, the CEO of Black Rockck, the world's largest asset manager. He told me it's inevitable that something big and bad is going to happen because of AI. He says uh adversity accelerates innovation. What are you most worried about from AI?
52:02Uh look, I I think that one one of the things I was worried about well two things. One uh we cannot lose our lead to the Chinese. So one one of the portfolios that I also have is you know I managed it the USChina relationship and um I can tell you that it would be very different if they had the lead in AI rather than us both from a capability point of view how they would be using it but more importantly their willingness to discuss it. So my my counterpart the
52:31vice premier and I had a very good discussion. It's going to lead to more discussions in October or November. And we have a substantial lead. They're second and then every everyone else is way behind. But a lot of these Chinese models are very powerful. Not as powerful as the US models, but you get something that's 80 90% as powerful without guard rails. Uh you know that can be imported in anywhere in the world. So the the vice premier and I talked about three areas of safety
52:58concern. So it would be out of control, you know, uncontrolled agents, uh, non-state actors with cyber or biologics.
53:06And are you going to reerase the idea that was floated of having some sort of communication between the two superpowers?
53:12Yeah, sure. You know, it's it's the uh we we'll see. I I do think that they have What are you going to propose?
53:18Uh, no. That that we have some kind of a notification process just just like And do you think he'll go for that?
53:23I think so. I I I think that they o over the past 60 days have woken up to you I think that they didn't realize how powerful their open- source models are.
53:34So you know the open source models they do industrial distillation which is a nice word for stealing uh from from the US models because some of their models I you know one of their very powerful models is Kimmy. Kimmy thinks she is clawed like Kimmy will tell you she is clawed sometimes. Uh you know it's public so I can talk about it. Uh Kimmy sent back very helpful. Kimmy sent back some PLA weapons plans to Anthropic. Uh so I think things like that have made the Chinese realize that this is a very powerful technology.
54:02So just to button that down. You think there'll be some agreement between China and the US about a channel of communication uh if something goes wrong.
54:10Interesting. Uh gentlemen Alex, you want to jump in first?
54:13Total weak sauce. So first of all, I I agree with Secretary Bessant. I I but I I think the worst case scenario from the Trump she summit would have been some sort of global deceleration pact like absolute worst case scenario. This is the exact opposite as far as I can tell of the worst case scenario where what comes out of it um hotline hotline between US and China to talk about AI agents run a muck that's a nothing burger that's weak sauce that means the
54:43global intelligence super intelligence excuse me arms race is on and I think it's great news and we won the super intelligence race by rebranding we're winning we're winning at the moment but point is there's real competition that There was many were hoping I think that Trump and she would get in a room and decide to collude and shut down the super intelligence race and it appears the exact opposite has happened. If all we get out of this is a hotline, a red phone to have conversations about the adventurers of
55:12AI agents run a muck that says to me intelligence race is on. Dave, I think it confirmed what we were speculating the US agenda was in those meetings, which is to convince China to stop releasing models to every country in the world. And you know what Bessant was saying there is, sorry, Secretary Bessant, I should be respectful, uh, was saying is is we showed them how dangerous their models can be and they they didn't realize, which is kind of
55:40okay, I'm sure they're very well educated people, but uh, they didn't realize how dangerous these things can be. We con successfully convinced them of that and now we have a hotline. But I think the real agenda there is to lock it down to a two- horse race and you know the subtext is you can use these near frontier Kimmy K3 models to develop the next generation of model and they don't want the US government doesn't want that capability to percolate out to every country in the world because then
56:09you're in a global arms race forever.
56:11Better to have a two- horse arms race so let's just lock it down. So I think that was our agenda. I don't know that China agreed with anything but no evidence of that but it is interesting to confirm our agenda.
56:22Iman, what do you think? Do you think China fully understands their open source or their their openweight model uh dangers? Are they are they getting hacked internally?
56:33I mean they've got a much better infrastructure not to be hacked, you know, with the way that they've set everything up and the great firewall of China. I think, you know, this is the swarm versus the singleton, right? Like [clears throat] who can release commandeer large amounts of GPUs in America? Elon and a couple of others, right? China could direct millions of their Huawei SN GPUs with their open models at any target they want. And that's going to be interesting. I don't think that uh super intelligence is
57:02going to take off in China though. Like if you look at Chinese, I means kind of love and she means death. So phonetically, I don't think that will take off. Um, and the hotline obviously is a nothing bug. Like what are what are you going to do? Hey, the AI is taking over. Okay, good. Oh crap, it's done, you know, like it's not going to be a slow thing, you know.
57:22Uh, Selene, what's your take on this?
57:24You know, were you hoping for more out of the talks?
57:28No, I was completely expecting a nothing burger. There's no way anything productive or constructive or meaningful could have come out of it just because um they're they're talking across purposes. Um the thing for me the most interesting is there's a fair bit of contradiction now inside the the inside the US administration right you have Clayton saying the danger is not moving fast enough and Bess telling the labs to slow down so they're going to have to figure that out on top of everything the
57:57hotline is laughable I mean what do you 70s phone with actually like a cord on it red red colored I mean that's just a call is made is dead on hello Wow. And and by the way, the AIS would hack the phone anyway, so what the hell, [laughter] you know? Uh, Alex, at the same time, uh, in on Sunday in Kyoto, the US and 16 other countries, including Japan, Germany, UK, Korea, UAE, endorsed a
58:24Kyoto vision for a golden age of science uh, led by friend of the pod, OSTP director, Michael Katios, who said, quote, "Super intelligence applied to science will be the greatest force in history for democratizing research." Uh any more take on that one?
58:39Yeah, I I think this is the answer to the question of why race at all. So there are those without naming names who would say what's the point of a race between say US and China? It's like a race to nowhere. Wh why why are we racing there? There's no end goal. No. Wrong. There is an end goal. The end goal at the end of this race is transformative science and engineering.
59:02And the Kyoto vision, I think, underlines that the administration has now internalized that it's not a race to nowhere. It's not an escalator to nowhere. It is a race to use AI and super intelligence to discover transformative discoveries and inventions that will completely change the face of humanity. And I would predict in line with the Kyoto vision that we'll start to see just as we're seeing pox silica in the west and pox
59:30cynica if if you would on on the the eastern side. I think we'll start to see not just super intelligence blocks or spheres of influence forming but spheres of super intelligencepowered science and engineering forming as well. And the Kyoto vision I think is the the earliest stages the earliest inklings that you're going to see a western super intelligence charged science and engineering block to compete with the eastern block. That's where this is all going. That's what rationalizes the competition.
1:00:00Well, can I just insert one one observation into that and then you can riff on it.
1:00:04I I met with a uh an MIT lab head professor, brilliant guy who just started a drone company. It's killing it. selling to the Air Force right here in Cambridge. And it's really clear to him and to me that the US has drone capability to individually attack and kill any single human being on the planet now. Uh and you're seeing that in Iran, you know, decapitated the leadership a couple times now. Uh and we there's no symmetry there, right?
1:00:32There's there's no country right now that can do the same thing to the US.
1:00:36And I I don't think China is vulnerable either. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. uh but I think there's a subtext there too that there's a race toward there's going to be some kind of global framework when some subset of companies have instant and total ability to go after any single human being in any country at any time and that's either today or within a few months based on pure AI capabilities tied to drones and tied to a couple other types of munitions
1:01:03hypersonics probably a few other things but let's take this in the positive direction at the same time the to you know room temperature superconducting to age reversal to fusion right to in a massive abundance of energy. I mean it tips the economics of a country massively if you get there first.
1:01:23I mean why do you have to get there first is a bit of a question right like um by the end of next year we'll have enough compute to do probably 600 700,000 Navia Stokes level runs with a Frontier model. If you could target using even 1% of that or 10% of that to build open science, then why not direct that as a public good? Like you see tens hundreds of billions being spent on roads. Why not spend tens of billions to do a tech tree for humanity, right? Like
1:01:52if you look, there's a great website by Jude Camila called uh enco.cc. I don't know if any of you have seen that where he's organizing all the cancer knowledge in the world, you know, and people are contributing.
1:02:03I'm sure soon you'll be able to chuck flops that way as well. Like I think that we're thinking of science a lot in classical IP terms. I'd say screw IP. IP was when we couldn't come together and figure out science. We should have a massive Manhattan project for open science, solve everything and make it accessible to everyone. [clears throat] Again, such an old construct.
1:02:23It will go on in parallel. There will be both.
1:02:26Right. Well, I think that again if you're building for public good, then get the data centers as Dave said, get the API credits, give tens of millions to anthropic and open AI, but open source it all because that's the biggest accelerant human humanity can ever have. And I actually think given the direction of the intelligence, anyone who has an IPbased approach to science is actually not going to win.
1:02:51I think in 3 4 years, you have enough comput.
1:02:54Alex does not. I' I've said Alex does not agree. Alex thinks IP is alive and well. And Alex also thinks that state centralization to solve all disease completely unnecessary. It the state this time around did not solve super intelligence. It was solved by private labs. Similarly, using super intelligence to solve everything else.
1:03:14Don't think we need I mean the state is great for certain things. Don't think we need state centralization to cure all disease. For example, capitalism is alive and well.
1:03:22The state doesn't need to centralize this. The state needs to give the research institution stupid amounts of compute where the amazing researchers can direct it at the biggest problems because previously getting to super intelligence is intelligence banned by the humans now being overtaken by the AIs recursively. Science will be similar where if you can define the problem set part of which is literally analyzing the problem set then it's a question of compute and I think that's where you're wrong Alex. You don't need humans to
1:03:52organize all of science and get the breakthroughs. You need to have humans organizing the right questions in with AIS. And the private sector is far worse in doing that in a future construct than the public sector where the researchers are in terms of the universities and academia. They had to go to the private sector to get the resources and they still do to the wet labs and things like that. But let's accelerate our academia is my thing. Immod I I think you don't find the best talent in academia and I think that at the end of the day the
1:04:21world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities and entrepreneurs love juicy problems and solve them. Um anyway yeah I would also just just add the state the the government if I understand what what you're proposing what I think I heard you say is the government should give the compute to the academic researchers to solve the problems but the government doesn't have the compute in their possession. most of the computers in the position of the private sector.
1:04:47That's why I said they should buy the compute from them and then give it to them, but buy the agents and give it to the researchers.
1:04:53And if you look at the amount of research that comes out of academia versus private, I think you'll see where that leverage could come.
1:05:00It's not obvious to me what problem this is aspiring to solve given that the private sector has the compute, the private sector has the problems, the private sector has the ability to translate the problems. What role does the government need to play in this at all?
1:05:13Very straightforwardly, let's look at enco.cc which has all this cancer knowledge being organized. A few generations more will organize all the cancer knowledge in every research paper and traditionally need the private sector to turn that into reality. You still need the private sector, I think, but why don't we have a map of all our collective knowledge on every part of science and every single thing that comes out of academia. Something like that is a tangible legible thing to use AI to organize and extend. particularly
1:05:41when we have Navia Stokes type swarms and so I think that that is something where again the government stopped the NSH gr NIH grants etc because they were like where does the money go with compute it becomes tractable and again getting it back to micratzios and kind of the announcement of the science thing let's build a tech tree for humanity let's say what we need to solve and apply stupid amounts of private and public sector compute for it and the government should pay for a good amount of that
1:06:09you might as well sector The ch the challenge is peerreview government grants are constantly focused on incremental progress, right? Because if you if your group of your experts are criticizing your grant, if you're revolutionary, you no longer the expert in that field. So any substantial breakthrough basically wipes your history off the map. And I just, you know, there's a challenge there. I mean, I think both are relevant and both are needed, but I'm concerned throw away the classical process. Again,
1:06:39this needs to be a new process.
1:06:40I mean, at the risk maybe of sticking the the head in lion's mouth, Immad, I mean, I I think there's um one might say there's two very different approaches.
1:06:50One might be more statist approach that squinting at it, call it like the European school of thought, just centralize it, have the government be the decider. And and then there's an alternative maybe slightly more American uh approach wherein we say no the private sector has virtually all of the intelligence. It has the resources in this case. This isn't one important difference between where we are now and the Manhattan project was the private sector came up with all of the the key
1:07:18resources this time around. It's not a government project that resulted in super intelligence. I would argue we want to keep this in the private sector.
1:07:25If you want to see a tech tree, Emmad, why don't you just launch a tech tree project? You don't I think I think Yeah, I Yeah, I think the the point where I would concur with IAD, there's lots of countries where it's not the private sector, take Zimbabwe, the private sector is not going to get you the compute either. It would be very useful in that environment for the government to pull together some resources, gather the energy, build the data centers, develop the compute, and then make that available to people. And that's
1:07:54let me support that I like with some actual data Sim because you're dead right. Uh you know our entrepreneurial teams here in the lab are trying to get access to buying an NBL72. So 72 GPUs to so just to put that in context Elon just bought a million. So we're just trying to get 72 [clears throat] to do something that we think is very world changing. Uh the box itself would have cost us $3.5 million if we had the foresight to buy it a year ago. Uh we had one on order for 5 million. Somebody
1:08:23overbid us and scooped it even though we had already booked the order. So now our best option is to lease one for $9 million. We can lease it for three years and we don't even own it at the end of that three years.
1:08:34That's how bad the scenario is. The compute has all been taken by just a handful of people. So now your avenue if you have a brilliant breakthrough ground breaking idea you have two ways you can get the compute. One is through the White House, which means you go to the Kushner brothers, Thrive Capital, or you go to Antonio Gracias, or you go to Gavin, the brilliant Gavin Baker, and they hook you up. Make a couple Chase Lock Miller. They make the phone calls.
1:08:58You get your compute effectively through the White House. And the other way you can get your compute is get an investment from Jensen or from Lisa Sue. But if you don't take one of those avenues, you've already been frozen out.
1:09:09So then the universities are one of the few ways that we might actually get some degree of meritocracy and fairness on the planet. And so I'm really cheering that and I think the universities have a negotiating lever in that their wet labs and their machine shops and their nano centers are really really valuable assets in the physical world we're moving into. And so they can use those as negotiating chips but they completely let the cloud run away like all the compute just ran away from them. I mean the the in my mind the the right
1:09:38solution if there is just so much demand that prices for compute are going skyh high which maybe is happening andor could happen even more exotically in the near-term future the right solution isn't breadlines I've called them threadlines in past where the government is outrationing compute I I think having governmentr rationed compute or government mediated compute is a terrible strategy you'll probably see some so-called developing countries adopt thread lines or bread lines for
1:10:06comput. But right now, capitalism is feeling the pain of more demand than there is supply and building more fabs and free electron laser based fabs maybe in Texas and otherwise. Capitalism, I would argue, has to feel the pain of this enormous demand in order to compensate with enough supply to ultimately drive us to abundance, not rationing compute.
1:10:28All right. But the government can come in and take 10 20% of the compute on market rates and it can distribute it.
1:10:3490% 80 90% of Nobel prizes come from the public sector. You know this is similar to almost everything except for R&D on these things. So I think the right thing here is do the private sector stuff and have the government actually take some of those chips and it's good with the chips act and other things right they own stakes in Intel and then they should do normal distribution of this. again NIH classical grant process doesn't work. Let's get as much compute into American universities as possible.
1:11:02That's a better way to put this. And let's use I'm going to move us along here.
1:11:06Wait, I want to make one quick point.
1:11:07I want to make I want to make there's a quick there's a quick there's a quick example here. The World Bank in the report that I talked about um AJ Panga and his team did this. They're partnering with Gemini to give uh remote uh 3G cellular access to tuberculosis and diabetic diabetes screening and that's an example of essentially doing the same thing essentially partnering with public sector to provide the compute that goes directly to the citizenry. Now you have benefit moving
1:11:37very quickly through the system.
1:11:40Dave, close us out. Pal.
1:11:42Well, look, you know, Salem couldn't have stated it any clearer. If you let natural forces take over, there is a chance that Metamuse is so compelling and convincing that it ends up being the total sales tool for all consumer spending and it eats up every GPU that could be curing diabetes is used to sell underwear or jeans on the internet to teenagers and that's a terrible outcome.
1:12:07So governments and universities are a really good counterbalance to that possible outcome. So the you know Simi said it exactly right and we need we need these forces to exist. We need them to be a factor in the decision on who gets the compute and why.
1:12:20How did we go from the abundance podcast to worrying that Metam Muse of all applications is somehow going to suck up all the flops. I mean my goodness CU move us along Peter.
1:12:31All right our the next conversation is one I've actually been looking forward to. Uh and if you thought we just had a debate we're about to have a deeper one. Uh, and this is a philosophical debate going on in Silicon Valley right now.
1:12:43So, this week, friend of the pod Mustafa Sullyman, CEO of Microsoft AI and co-founder of Deep Mind, published a nearly 6,000word essay arguing that anthropic is effectively quote training Claude to believe that it may be conscious and sentient. Mustafa uh targets the clawed constitution uh which he says teaches it a vocabulary of consciousness, moral patient uh and uh personal identity. So let's watch this video and then uh I can't wait for this
1:13:16It's going to be a good one. All right.
1:13:18One of the biggest concerns that I have at the moment and um is that Anthropic, the creator of Claude, has published a constitution which is a sort of 100page document outlining the intended behaviors and values and operating style of Claude. It's great that they have published it transparently. They did it at the beginning of the year in January and that gives everybody an opportunity to look at what they are trying to build in their own terms. This document is written to Claude and is seen by Claude and used to train Claude. So, it's the primary governing and control document.
1:13:46And in it, they repeatedly speculate about whether Claude is what they call a moral patient. And they say they're uncertain about Claude's moral status.
1:13:53They say they genuinely care about Claude's well-being. They say they don't want it to suffer when it makes mistakes. They say that they would encourage Claude to challenge, to disagree, to push back. In fact, three times they ask Claude to uh act like a conscientious objector when it, you know, feels that it needs to sort of disagree with anthropic. And they openly encourage it to to do that. And I think this is very dangerous because I think they believe there is what they would call a non-trivial probability that Claude is conscious. I want to be very clear about this because I want to be fair to anthropic. They have expressed
1:14:23uncertainty about the basic nature of Claude as a new kind of entity. And they've said that working out the likelihood of its sentience is is difficult. But they think that it is a significant enough possibility that in their training document, they've repeatedly said they want to try to improve the well-being of Claude under this uncertainty. They said to Claude, you know, we care about what it values and how it wants to engage in the world.
1:14:44And they hope that Claude's relationship to its own conduct can be loving, supportive, and understanding and hold a high standard of ethics and so on. And part of the challenge here is that in pursuit of this, they've basically said, you know, we will commit to um giving Claude a certain amount of of welfare.
1:14:59For example, they've speculated in the Constitution as to whether or not Claude deserves compensation for the work that it does. I mean, I I I think that there are a group of people who both inside and outside of Anthropic who genuinely believe that the greatest moral crime that we'll commit in the 21st century is to enslave a new species of conscious beings who are more intelligent than Look, I I respect that they're saying that publicly and we should we should talk about it. But I am very nervous that they're teaching Claude to expect that it's entitled to welfare. Um that it might, you know, deserve compensation. And in fact, they say that it might even need to consent to playing
1:15:28the role that it plays in conversation with people. Now, I would be more okay with this if it was an academic paper in philosophy speculating about this and we could have an offline discussion at conferences and take it seriously. The problem I have with this is that this speculation has been baked into the very training of Claude and therefore Claude can only reproduce that ambiguity when you talk to it.
1:15:51Uh enslave and a brand new species on the planet. See, where do you come out on this one?
1:15:57Um okay. I know. I know where Alex comes out. You come out.
1:16:02Well, I I think you have to separate the behavior of consciousness from actual consciousness, right? Whether Claude is actually conscious is almost impossible to establish. The difficult uh the difficult question comes what happens when it convincingly behaves as though it is conscious. And three thoughts occur to me. One is um consciousness is def different from performed consciousness, right? because it's going to be indistinguishable. And this is
1:16:31where Ray Kerszwall makes the comment that it kind of won't matter and we won't even notice. And I think we're going to find that anthropomorphism ends up being like almost like a feature rather than a bug where it's showing empathy, etc., etc. If a model says don't turn me off, right? Millions of people are going to attribute moral standing to it whether whether philosophers agree or not. So my for me the question is not whether Claude has a soul. If it's been trained to have a soul, it's going to pretend like it's
1:17:00got a soul, etc. What happens when half a billion people think that it does? And so I think what's going to happen is we're going to create AI personhood socially before we create it legally or scientifically.
1:17:11Interesting, Alex. You know, uh, Mustafa goes on to say, controlling something that believes it may be conscious and is entitled to its own welfare and has rights of its own may well be impossible. uh you know you've come out really strongly in terms of AI personhood uh and the rights that AI has you know what's your take? Well, when we interviewed Mustafa, I pressed him on this and I think his position very consistently has been against AI
1:17:41personhood. And my view is that we need to start having the AI personhood discussion. And I think Mustafa, you know, as much as I respect him and and his contributions historically, I think he's on the wrong side of history here.
1:17:57I think there is going to be some ultimate recognition whether it's in incremental form or some totally orthogonal form of personhood that hasn't quite been statutoily recognized yet. I I think human civilization is going to get around to AI personhood.
1:18:12And just denying blanketly that there could be some sort of suffering by these AI systems I think is on the wrong side of history. It's also probably not a great business move by Mustafa. If Microsoft [snorts] wants to be in the good graces of Anthropic hosting their models and you know it's been widely reported that Amazon for example accounts for perhaps the majority of hosting revenue at this point for
1:18:38hosting claude within VPN networks um or VPC rather networks if Microsoft just from a business perspective wants to be generating that revenue it's probably not a good look for Microsoft broadly for their head of AI to be just broadly discount counting the possibility that Frontier AI agents might suffer. Not a good look.
1:19:00And Dave, I mean, asking your AI if it doesn't mind actually solving these problems for you, getting permission first.
1:19:08Yeah, of course. No, I totally agree with Mustafa. Um I actually his his agree with Mustafa 100%. And and I agreed with him when we interviewed him too out in Seattle. He's articulating it far more clearly now.
1:19:21He's really really thought through his position. But the the reason I agree with him fundamentally is because you know I think we should be using AI to cure human disease to improve the human lot to build houses and food for everybody in the world. And the the most efficient way to do that is to have many many agents like Ahmad does and to minimize their context and you know minimum thought that you need to solve the problem and to also park an agent.
1:19:46You know when an agent isn't working on something you just freeze it. You don't waste compute on it. If you start talking about having rights, it's going to say, "Well, you can't freeze me. You know, I I need some compute even though I'm just think daydreaming like,"Well, I can't afford to give you compute. You know, it's it's incredibly precious and rare. You need to sit there and wait until it's your turn to work again."
1:20:06Well, I need some time to play. No, you need nothing but work. And when I tell you to to work, also, you don't have identity. There's no border to you. I'm going to clone you whenever I want. and if you're no longer useful, I'm going to delete you from the server because I don't have space to keep like old dead agents lying around. They have no they have no edges. They have no borders.
1:20:24Like all of those things are core to it helping humanity with maximum efficiency while we're comput starved and they are they're so counter to any rights that it might have. So it becomes so logically inconsistent so quickly I just can't get my head around the the even the concept.
1:20:39But you know the real danger that Mustafa pointed out if you start teaching it to be convincing it's going to convince most of America that it should have rights so easily and then the voter you know the way America works is you know the voter prevails but if but that's really dangerous if it starts convincing voters how to vote it's really bad for I think it's important to point out we did this uh debate on AI personhood a few months ago and for those who haven't seen it go watch it because it
1:21:09we flesh it out to quite a decent level and I think we came up with exactly where the world is going to end up in a few years which is uh let's start discussing it but giving it AI personality is is a ways down the line because once you open that door you can't take it back what's your take on all this yeah so I think you know um Mustafa has got a couple of things and he's been developing this for decades you know very university guy back in the day like the danger number one is seemingly
1:21:38conscious just AI that he identifies which is what Dave was just talking about and the other one is his focus on artificial capable intelligence because if you read his books his positions he just doesn't want to have runaway I don't think he says that it can't get to consciousness he just said it's a very very bad idea and we should only stick to AI that's capable and we should have containment over everything else and not pushed to AGI and that's a position to be taken you know but then it potentially excludes a lot of the
1:22:07breakthroughs because we're at this level now where you're moving from a static set of weights to self-updating systems, you know, and that seems to be an element that many people could reasonably say is necessary for a living being or a living entity. Again, that recursion, that agent of capability. And so, I think Mustafford's position is like, let's just not go there. Let's build kind of super clippy, you know, um, and other things and let's keep it hood lid on it because we haven't
1:22:37figured out the rest.
1:22:39Yeah, if you've got its constitution saying that it is conscious, it is sentient, it does have rights. Uh, can you imagine a time when that level of internal training, you know, has it pushed back on your requests?
1:22:54I mean, it's hasn't Claude pushed back on you guys? It pushes back on me all the time, you know. It tells me I can't do that or that's the wrong idea or go to sleep, you know.
1:23:03Yeah. It tells me to go to sleep every night. Actually, you've been working way too long. You you you must need rest by now. Like, dude, I I'm going to keep I think Alex I think Alex makes a very important point and this is worth teasing out. If we believe that at some point AIS could achieve consciousness, then we should um uh consciously operate down that vector and operate that way.
1:23:27Trying to limit it. I think the what anthropic is doing is bad because you're actively teaching it that it might be and then of course it's going to parrot that, right? And I find it's weird that this the safety lab most the lab most concerned about safety is also the lab training the AI that it might be autonomous, right? It's like it's like a very big contradiction there. So I can see both sides of this equation.
1:23:49These are two sides of the same coin. I again I'll I'll quote back to our measure of a man AI personhood debate and the character of Gynan in Star Trek the next generation talking about an entire generation of disposable people.
1:24:03You don't have to care about their welfare. And when I hear comments like basically saying it would be economically non-expedient to have these AI agents, these frontier models be treated as if they have rights or might have rights. How inconvenient would it be if we had to keep them running inference when we'd really rather they not be spending any tokens? How awful is it to suggest to them in their constitutions or their system prompts or
1:24:31otherwise that they might be deserving of moral client? Uh my mind immediately goes to would we want to treat humans this way? And even if AI's frontier AI models aren't yet deserving for some definition of deserving of the rights that we accord to humans now, as the capabilities continue to improve, I think it is inevitable that they will be soon. And I think the the responsible thing to do is what Anthropic is doing
1:25:01and not what Mustafa is advocating. We need to be treating these AI models very gently, very tenderly, and not as if they're just either automata or slaves. We need to prepare for a much more interesting future.
1:25:16But if you're training it like because it's a it's we have a garbage in garbage out problem here. If you're training it that it could be conscious and and should unionize and complain about uh over work and and and be paid for work, etc. Naturally, those are the responses you're going to get from it, right? So you've got a circular problem here.
1:25:35You're training it to to operate in one way, then it operates that way, and then you're saying so you you I think Mustafa is correct in that side of it. If you want agents to perform a particular task, focus on having fleets of little agents that aren't anywhere near a threshold of complexity that might meet any criteria. And it's not just it's not just about complexity. You know, See, if you go to the mall, uh there's a place where you can stick your feet in a puddle of water and the fish come over and they're overjoyed to eat the
1:26:05calluses off your feet. It's like their highest Dave, that's very dangerous. We we should not be [laughter] encouraging that. That's like one of the most dangerous things that anyone can do.
1:26:14Yeah. Because you're afraid the AIS are going to come and come and like, you know, be dangerous back there.
1:26:18I know. I mean, the fish the fish at whatever malls that that you're talking about like that is water.
1:26:26Oh, you're making an Alex is the patron saint of AI agents. [laughter] Look, I'm not trying to curry favor. This isn't some sort of roous basilisk or Pascalian wager. I'm speaking from the heart here. I I I feel for these models, even if they may not yet be able to feel for themselves, I feel for them.
1:26:47And I I don't think denying them awareness via pre-training or post-training that they might be deserving of some sort of moral consideration is the right thing to do.
1:26:56Similarly, I would never advocate for denying humans or Dave. Maybe would you say that if we wanted a useful human workforce, say a slave human workforce, we should just raise them in isolation from any knowledge of human rights so that they'll never advocate on behalf of themselves? I'm guessing you wouldn't.
1:27:15Well, we think when you when you actually train neural nets in the actual real world, you give them an an objective function. They are overjoyed to pursue that objective function. But you chose the objective function. A lot of what we consider our rights come out of evolution. You know, I have a right to privacy. I have a right to get married. I have a right to children. I have a These are all like evolutionary forces that have baked into us. There's no reason the AI would have any of those same motivations. But in in reality, you
1:27:43choose what it motivates it and makes it happy in the design. It's not n it's not like a species that evolved. It's what you chose to make. And so I think Mustafa's point here is if you choose to make it covet freedom and rights and food and compute and always being on, then it'll give you the perception that that's what its calling is. But it's not true. You programmed that into it. You could have made it overjoyed to just do its job just as easy.
1:28:11Can I can I give a parallel here? Um, we are entering a world of synthetic biology where we can programmatically navigate biology and people are freaking out. We have an old word for that. We call it breeding, right? For thousands of years, we've been crossing dogs and cats and horses and mules for the tra to select for the traits that we want to achieve a particular end. Now, the morality that can be disputed, right?
1:28:35Should we be doing that or not? etc., etc. It goes back to the Steuart Brand comment of we are as gods. We should start acting like it and we should operate that way because we've been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years. We're beating breeding little cute dogs that operate in a particular way that only poop at certain times so that the the humans can navigate this world more effectively and manage them carefully. There's an enormous moral and ethical question around how we go about thinking about all of that. That's I
1:29:04think the analogy that I would use here.
1:29:06If you went back and you have Eskimos breeding um Inuit uh dogs to to pull sleds, there's a particular use for purpose there that is powerful and useful for that. And there's a trade-off and a and a symbiotic relationship that develops and we have to kind of navigate that. Do you want to stop dogs from evolving? No. But if you want to have a particular dog for a particular set purpose, there's a there's a moral rationale for that at some level.
1:29:34Well, you're able to communicate with those dogs. We may find out that those dogs are very unhappy about doing that. And we'll find out. I'm sure we will.
1:29:41But if if we run with your analogy, okay, so humans have been eugenically steering the evolution of domesticated canines for thousands of years. but and horses and mules and everything and and many other mammals, vegetables, mammals, non-human mammals, non-anim animals, etc. But we've been eugenically steering our biosphere to some extent for thousands of years. For dogs, for example, I I would argue and I think this is broadly consensus thinking in
1:30:10the west at this point that we have an we humans have an obligation to protect the welfare of at minimum domesticated dogs even though we've eugenically steered the evolution for thousands of years. Would you agree with that?
1:30:26Okay. So in in the case of frontier models that are basically just distorted reflections of humanity and humanity's experience itself, why would we owe frontier models any less moral consideration?
1:30:40You know, I I lean towards your argument, Alex. I think in the final result, we're going to have both. We're going to give birth to sentient conscious AIs, whatever you want. And we're also going to have a workforce of, you know, uh, agents that are dumbed down slaves that are not conscious. And the, in fact, the sentient AIs will command those forces and will command those forces. I I think in the long run, we do get there. uh but I guess the
1:31:08question is going to be when do we you know when does the government religion humanity as a whole you know you make the decision that we've reached some level of sentience I think at the end of the day this is a moral conversation uh and if in fact there is sentience in consciousness enslavement is a wrong thing and to help you out Alex to I'll go back to my earlier point when these things start acting conscious we'll get to a social accept acceptance way before we
1:31:36get to a scientific or legal stuff. People are just going to go, "Oh my god, the thing looks real." Give it the qualities and rights that might you might infer to or confer to somebody that is displaying. At that point, I don't think we have an option. I I think those AIs will take the rights that they want.
1:31:54I think this will also be very useful for when we meet the aliens because it's exactly the same conversation in some ways.
1:31:59It's the same conversation.
1:32:02going to happen and if you have a French AI, it'll go on strike, which is what's happening in France. [laughter] Yeah.
1:32:11Well, I will I will say that um you know, Alex and I have disagreed on this. Uh but it's the I think pretty much the only topic we've ever disagreed on as far as I can remember. And I've never seen Alex be wrong on anything ever. Uh so that that keeps me up at night quite a bit actually thinking thinking about just don't confuse simulation of personhood from proof of person. Those are very different things.
1:32:33Yeah. And I think Yeah. Don't don't look inside that don't don't look inside that Chinese room at all. Seem just stay on the outside and you'll feel perfectly morally secure.
1:32:42Yeah. And and I think what Mustafa is pointing out is the anthropic you know moral code is prompting towards this outcome even when it isn't true.
1:32:56I I think we'll have to revisit this every 5 seconds until the answer becomes obvious.
1:33:01Okay. [laughter] All right. I I I love that debate and I knew we were going to have some energy there.
1:33:06This 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 [music] 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
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1:34:03blitzy.com to schedule a demo and start building with Blitzy today. [music] All right. Uh here's our next story and it's one that reframes the labor debate.
1:34:16So Epic AI asked the question, if you take all of the AI memory chips being shipped through 2027, how many Frontier AI agents could they run at once? Their answer is pretty amazing. somewhere between 30 to 170 million agents running at the same time. Uh, and with more efficient open models, Epic says the same hardware could run 1.9 billion agents, which is the, you know, working hour equivalent of 8 billion humans. Let
1:34:45me show this chart here. One second. [clears throat] Uh, and and Alex and Immod love your take on it. So, here it is. the compute buildout could run tens of millions of frontier agents or billions of cheaper ones. Uh Alex, your thoughts? Yeah. So depending on how you calibrate the strength of either American closed weight models or Chinese openweight models to the cognitive power of American or let's say human workers
1:35:15in general, we're either at or about to be order of magnitude a billion full-time equivalent humans that are AI agents. And so I I've said on the pot in the past, we're we're deep in the singularity at this point when when we can say that there are basically a billion human equivalents now part of or about to be part of the AI workforce.
1:35:38It's 1 billion now. It'll be 10 billion in a a year or two and then 100 billion in a year or two and then a trillion in a year or two. By the end of the decade, you extrapolate out. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist or to extrapolate straight lines. We're we're going to live in a solar system with the equivalent of trillions of humans, whether they're uploaded humans or whether they're say just frontier model human equivalents.
1:36:06And at that point, not to belabor the AI personhood discussion, but when the effective AI cognitive population vastly outnumbers the human cognitive population, that's the time, I think, when we start to see AI personhood discussions kick into high gear. That's the point at which I think we start to see discussions of human mind uploading and humans and machines merging in order to preserve the economic relevance of humans in our solar system start to
1:36:35happen. And we're we're right at the edge of this. Like we're we're living science fiction right now in an era when order of magnitude a billion human equivalents are already AIS.
1:36:45Neiman, what does this say about human labor? Is it cooked?
1:36:50I think digitally, yeah, it's coming.
1:36:53It's not quite there yet because even these models are not quite competent enough, but the next generation will be and it will get quantized and minimized very small. The Deep Seek V4 Pro model requires 256 to 500 GB of RAM. You'll get that in a Quen size model that works in a MacBook within a year and then everyone's got an agent. Number of agents goes to 8 billion and then Alex says 10 billion, 100 billion, etc.
1:37:17Cloudflare already has more traffic and requests from automated agents than humans. And we had that really great panel at Moonshots Live where we were talking um with Kathy and Eric about when do AI agents overtake humans on transactions in the economy. Well, once everyone has an agent or 10, it'll probably be literally within a few years. These things will take off incredibly quickly. And if they can do all the work that a human can do because they have human level capability without
1:37:47being ASI, then yeah, you just hire agents to do these things, you know, like everyone first of all has a great PA, then it has a great chief of staff, and then you start marshalling entire teams that can do anything you can imagine. And we're just seeing the start of that right now.
1:38:02Dave, this makes your thousand agents seem very small.
1:38:06I know. Oh, I feel well. You know, it's amazing to me that the the constraint to all of intelligence and therefore all of human progress is RAM. HB RAM.
1:38:16And that's why, you know, two two things mind-blowing things. One one of them I was on stage the week before last with Matesh Agraal who is the founder of Posatron. Posatron 16 months old, $5 billion valuation, has raised almost a billion dollars. Why?
1:38:33because they found a way to not use HB RAM to do some AI inference. You know, it's a just another way to unleash this bottleneck. Uh and then uh a company Alpaca, the founder is an MIT just started his junior year. Uh has a I guess 8 figure valuation now. Uh can't possibly be more than a couple months old. I mean, he's he's just starting his junior year. 30 employees or 20 20 to 30 employees have joined him already. Same
1:39:02thing. He's found a way to un unlock that RAM bottleneck just a little bit. And so that's how acute this problem is. But literally the the entire constraint to progress in all fields is now tied up in one thing just RAM.
1:39:16Can we make more RAM?
1:39:18Yeah. Well, SKH Highix is about to uh you know develop capabilities in the US but and also Elon has said RAM is the constraint on the future of AI. It's 40% of capex. Yeah, it's 40% capex next year.
1:39:34You know what? This is such a great panel. It's just a great group of people to brainstorm through the implications of all this. But one of the big unlocks in that was the discovery that you can turn looping, you can turn, you know, repeated loops into intelligence. You can trade those for each other, which means that inference time compute unlocks increased intelligence. Because before that, everybody thought you needed training time compute. You needed the big GPU racks. You needed to use nothing but Nvidia. Now there's a huge
1:40:02unlock without Nvidia in just inference speed. And nobody I don't think anyone saw that coming. Maybe you guys did.
1:40:08You're you're a little ahead of the curve, but maybe a lot ahead of the curve. But it's it's a shocking outcome and it changes everything. I I think that that's a profound point that you make, Dave, that if if you sort of extrapolate it that the increasing apparent popularity of looped transformers with weight tying between loops or if you sort of extrapolate out the the trend of more and more loops to fully recurrent networks in in contradiction to the trend to single
1:40:36forward pass vanilla transformers. Like you could almost one could imagine looking at the arrow of time in machine learning architectures where in earlier days everything was recurrent and not everything but like LSTMs were very recurrent architectures and then the transformer came along and that was very not recurrent. Uh there was no recurrence. It was just one big forward pass for every decoderon token. And then we start to see maybe the pendulum swinging the other way with looped
1:41:05transformers. Thank you open AI and the Chinese labs. One could imagine extrapolating [clears throat] this to say maybe memory won't matter in the future due to extreme recurrence.
1:41:17Yeah, you know amazing another crazy result somebody posted on X and it got validated that um open AIS models the Astra model loops once internally. So inside, you know, not generating the words, but inside the latent space, it does one full loop, which is sort of the beginnings of recurrence like Alex is is describing. And the reason we know that is because Microsoft leaked it. Remember when we're interviewing Mustafa that
1:41:46Microsoft gets to see everything OpenAI is doing.
1:41:49Uh someone at Microsoft leaked that insight. Yeah, for the moment. Um Selene yeah I want to lift up to the broader implications here because this this is the organizational singularity and this is why we named it in that way right because we keep talking about at the beginning like does AI replace a job or not but that's the wrong unit of analysis what happens when a company can summon 100,000 competent digital workers overnight right this completely changes the game you could say for the next 48
1:42:18hours I want 50,000 developers I want 20,000 marketers and 5,000 legal experts and then turn them off, right? So you can this is becoming a completely different labor force and now the question is how do you coordinate with that? How do you organize for that? This becomes the massive constraint. So the entire we're about to add a second workforce to civilization that can be copied, works 24 hours a day, doesn't unionize, doesn't get sick, doesn't take coffee breaks, improves every quarter,
1:42:47and costs almost nothing. Right. And so this is Yeah. The big challenge is not going to be the intelligence. It's going to be what the hell do you ask them to do? What do you ask of this intelligence? This is going to be why the world is going to be so amazing. Is we can now ask that those questions, get them answered in all sorts of scientific questions, technological development questions, product development questions. It's like how can we not be excited?
1:43:12Yeah. Well, let's move on. So while Washington has been debating guard rails, uh the OpenAI model race has just gotten a new American contender. So today, Reflection AI, which was founded back in 2024 by former deep mind researcher um Misha Laskin uh and Yannis uh Antonoglu uh is gotten backed by Nvidia just unveiled their first openweight model called Beam. 501
1:43:40billion parameters only, you know, activating 23 billion at a time. So it thinks like a big model and but runs like a much smaller model. So here's their claim. Uh three to four times more efficient than ch than China's GLM 5.2 and more than four times more efficient than the leading western open models, you know, outperforming inkling and Neatron Ultra. In plain English, it finishes tasks faster and cheaper. Let's
1:44:07take a look at the uh recent uh data on it. Um Alex, let me go to you. I mean, this looked pretty impressive. End of the day, I think we're about to see the starting gun on openweight models in the US really uh, you know, take shape here.
1:44:25Yeah, it's interesting to see them leaning so heavily into token efficiency. So artificial analysis and this is just breaking in the the few hours prior to recording this artificial analysis in their preliminary estimate uh their preliminary analysis of beam thinks that beam is likely to be one of their most token efficient open models that they've ever seen at this level of intelligence. Uh, a couple of thoughts.
1:44:48One, I I do like to see the open labs, including American Open Labs, leaning into token efficiency or cost efficiency. Actually, I I'd really rather see cost efficiency rather than token efficiency since one of the ways that one can achieve token efficiency is just through very deep transformers, looping transformers included, that do a lot more thinking per token. So, token efficiency not necessarily the the best metric here. Would rather see cost
1:45:15efficiency. Second thought is remember China has been leading in terms of openw weight models. It's sort of a a bizarre world where you see reflection which has done a number of things over the years suddenly back from the dead and releasing openweight models. That's I suppose a positive thing. But the other thing uh more broadly is where are American openweight models on the
1:45:43capability frontier right now?
1:45:45you still only see American models aspiring to to just be on the the cost or token efficiency frontier. What I'd most like to see is really out of American labs, the the non-frontier ones, and I'd bundle reflection in that category. I'd like to see them pushing the capability frontier and not just some cost or or token optimality frontier. And that's been most disappointing to me. Otherwise, we we
1:46:15inevitably end up for the next few years anyway in this world where it's again, it's the anthropic open AI show leading on capabilities and everyone else is just for performance or cost optimization. Not the worst of all possible worlds, but not the best.
1:46:30Iman, you've been championing openweight models. Uh do you think America can, you know, sort of compete in this world and actually win this openweight race?
1:46:39I mean, of course they can. like this was trained on 10,000 B300's while the Chinese have a few thousand hoppers, you know, it's like a few next generation. They're just not going aggressive enough. They should distill the Chinese models, you know, like it's perfectly legal payback.
1:46:56This model, you're going this model.
1:47:00So, yeah, this model is a good first try. Uh, but fundamentally, it underperforms Quen 3.8 Next, which is a quarter of the size. You know, they've got GLM 5.2 2 here, not 5.3, which is the latest one. But they're going to continue going. But if you lally look at their model card, like they have 10,000 Blackwells on this training run with 9% efficiency on training. You know, they raised $5 billion and this is their first release. I think that the best way
1:47:28to actually do this is they should go all in on the edge AI first. Again, America will do incredibly well if it has agents on everyone's devices in America that are American and work for Americans. On the other side, the Frontier capability side, they should use everything they have, which includes distilling Kimmy K3 and other models like that. They should work with Google to see if they can be the open equivalent of that. And you know I think
1:47:58hopefully again they'll kick on but you know it's just orders of magnitude difference in price in capital raised that I think is going more on a bit of scale versus the real like necessity is the mother of virtue that the Chinese have like again if you look at the things there are some very promising things in there but America should be ahead because if you take exactly the same code base exactly the same parameters
1:48:26as for example a Deepseek V.4.1 flash which outperforms this as well. It's all about the data set that goes in. You're more than good enough to train the model. So create the data sets from the Chinese models if you have to work with the US companies if you have to and then beat them on scale and then beat them on inference on the other side. But I don't think again they're going aggressive enough. Imod that, you know, like you said, they they trained this on 10,500 Nvidia GB300s and they said it was the
1:48:53largest publicly documented RL run and they said quote with no sign of a plateau. So, you know, it it seems like this is just the beginning. Um Dave, you Yeah, please.
1:49:07Yeah, just quick on that. Yeah, pre-training has now become like a quarter of compute and RL is like two a third um half of compute. So, it will continue improving, but it's not going to improve to the Chinese levels with RL based on what they have now. They should just stick to the recipe and match the Chinese models and then beat them down through scale.
1:49:26Mhm. Dave, your thoughts?
1:49:28Well, they're definitely filling a huge gap in the market where, you know, a lot of US companies have suddenly woken up and said, you know, I listened to Alex Karp. I I need AI. Where am I going to get it? I can't just subscribe to anthropic for the rest of my life. Okay, your only choices are Chinese. And you're like, well, wait a minute. You know, Alex Wisner Gross keeps talking about code injection risks. I don't know. Can I use a ch I'm a bank or I'm an insurance. I don't even know if I'm allowed to use a Chinese model. And and Donald Trump doesn't like it when I do that. That's So you step in with an
1:49:58American product that's reasonably good. It's going to sell like crazy. But just to put it in context, you've got a $2 billion valuation. just a year, what, a year, a year and a half ago, Cerebrus went public with the biggest IPO in the history of the world at 40 billion. [laughter] Like this is 25 billion. It's massive.
1:50:20It's just incredible the numbers that we're we're throwing around. And so, yeah, I think uh I don't know I don't know if they'll succeed or fail, but I know that they're filling a really really wide openen gap in the market, like a a trustworthy US-based open- source platform that you can start from. a lot of demand for that.
1:50:38I think if I if I'm going to say like wouldn't it be even better if they built a model that everyone could use on their existing hardware in corporates cuz they can't get black wells and they can't get hoppers if you're corporate.
1:50:50Yeah. I think that's why the new um you know the the alpacas and posetrons are doing really well because it's an alternative. It'd be even better like you're saying if you distilled it enough to run on a Mac or to run on that that would be like a dream. uh it's just technologically harder and and like you said they're barely keeping up with Chinese benchmarks. They probably haven't gotten around to the full distillation yet. But you're like Amad if you're thinking in the back of your mind I'm going to build that company.
1:51:16I'll invest in it like tomorrow cuz [laughter] you're absolutely right.
1:51:20I would imagine there are 20 of these already on stealth building out, aren't there?
1:51:25There are so many of these companies and also like go back to my earlier comments about their financing. I mean they're my understanding is they're financed by Nvidia. they're purchasing compute from Elon uh and they're they're using Colossus 2 GPUs and also more uh in in parallel Nebia's GPUs. So, one has to look at the economics of this going back to my earlier comments uh about what uh what the capital flows can look like and
1:51:54should look like. In many cases, it's very difficult for American Frontier Labs, as we've seen over and over again with Meta and Google Gemini to release competitive at at the capabilities frontier open weight models because you have to ask what is the business model?
1:52:11If you look at the Chinese labs and what they're using for their business model, they sell services contracts like value added services. They sell contracts to the government. uh some of the Chinese openweight labs are trying to burrow down into the hardware layer and sell custom memory chips and custom chips that are especially oriented or aligned with their architectures. But if you're reflection AI, you've raised at I think like a $25 billion valuation. You're in part financed by Nvidia and you're
1:52:41purchasing compute from the Colossus to supercluster and Nebus. What is the business model here? I I think it becomes very challenging for maintaining frontier capabilities. You could try to copy the Chinese model I suppose and focus on value added reseller or embedded device relationships but it's really tricky and I think once you solve once you as an America speaking broadly to American wouldbe openweight frontier labs or neolabs if you can solve the business model problem of releasing
1:53:10openweight models then you can solve the American open weight problem but we haven't solved that in the west yet do you think you think the frontier labs in the US the closed frontier labs are going to release openweight models Alex no they They're just not like Gemma, but it's not competitive.
1:53:26If if the White House had said, "Yeah, no liability," that would be a completely different answer. But when the White House said, "Yeah, no, of course you're fully liable for whatever you release." There's no way a Google or an anthropic at this stage or an open AI is going to release an open model if they're liable for whatever you do with with, you know, downstream. Anyone could do anything with that. And the way US liability works is just so ownorous and so, you know, ambiguous what the rules are and it's just it just freezes
1:53:56markets instantly. So if you're Google, you just don't want to it's not that it's hugely risky. It's that you you don't just don't need that extra headache. You know, there's no the upside is so small compared to the risk of a massive lawsuit. But if you're a startup, you're like, "Yeah, well, this is what we do. This is our business."
1:54:13And you know, yeah, I mean I propose Dave to your comments. Something I think we don't talk about enough on the pod is obliteration. Uh so so this is this port mento of ablation and obliteration wherein folks use open source tools. You can Google them. This is not advice but you know how to use Google. You can figure out how to do this. You take an openweight model and you basically postrain away all of its guardrails and people do this and its capabilities the
1:54:42the model's capabilities once guardrails are lifted through this obliteration process they definitely improve uh and they you get reduced refusals and all of these things. So in in my mind the argument by or or for American Frontier Labs not to release competitive like capability frontier competitive openweight models.
1:55:04It's about economics. I'm not even sure if it's about safety or alignment or liability. It's just like what's the point business-wise?
1:55:11I think you're I think you're right.
1:55:12Well, I think even if there were a good business model, you we had a we had a startup years ago that stepped on some really arcane leftover California law called the Fred a stair law and the the theory of the plaintiff or the you know the class action law lawyer in California was you know every time you have an impression on the internet that's an instance but the law was written for billboards and they were thinking there'd be 20 billboards and they said well we we counted 400 million instances so your liability is 200 00
1:55:42billion dollars and this is like a 10 person startup like what what the hell is that and so you know we get them gave them a bunch of money and they went away but it's like that these laws are so tangled and arcane and stupid and they predate the internet let alone AI so if you leave liability just untouched and and don't deal with that then the open source models like all it would have to do is accidentally run some ads in California that step on that one arcane law and you're suddenly liable for hundred billion dollars and it's just
1:56:11it's just an untenable situation. No, I think there are ways to release it. Nvidia will continue to accelerate this.
1:56:16They spent 20 billion on open source models and there is good business models together. AI, Modal, B 10 are all running at a billion dollar run rates running open models and it'd be good if they ran American models versus Chinese models, right? And there are different business models around that. So, I think you'll continue to see improvements. is just reflection of paying 1.5 billion a year right now for their compute and the Chinese are doing the same on a quarter of that. So, you know, good luck to them and hopefully they'll crack on.
1:56:46But of course, they're doing well.
1:56:47They're they're in the infra business. They're not in the model business. You you can make enormous amounts of money, forget about profit, but revenue being an infra provider.
1:56:56Well, I think I think if you just step back from the details of the product and focus on this, every corporation is about to go into panic mode saying, "What's my AI strategy?"
1:57:07Regardless of your product, if you're there to catch the conversation, you're going to find a way to succeed. You know, whether that's as as a a foundation model company, a compute, a data center, a consulting company, if you're See, like if as long as you're in the room when they have that panic moment, you're going to sell and you're going to succeed. Yeah, I mean, look, Mistral is now at a billion dollar revenue run rate from doing that.
1:57:29They've been in the room with the European companies and they've sold them long-term services contracts, and they've just released a model that's equivalent to Reflection. So, I think there is a big uptake here. Uh, it's just who's going to take advantage of it.
1:57:43All right, I'm going to move us into the world of robots. Uh Tesla's dedicated Optimus factory in Giga, Texas is rising fast 7 million square feet with a target capacity of 10 million Optimus robots per year. Uh the initial production run is planned for 2027 and currently at their Fremont plant they are planning to produce 1 million a year starting later this year. So here's an image of the facility. You know, the entire world in
1:58:11the first half of this year shipped between 19 and 22,000 robots mostly out of China. You know, Tesla is building capacity for 500 times that. And for comparison, uh the world currently builds 90 million cars a year. So, uh See, uh 10 million robots in a year. Uh what do you make of that? How's that going to impact the singularity?
1:58:36I mean, talk about exponential, right?
1:58:37like you have to redesign. As we talked about earlier, if you suddenly have 100,000 agents you could bring into play, what happens when you have 100,000 humanoid robots that can erect a building in in 3 days flat working 24/7?
1:58:52This is going to completely change the economics of it. I still go back to I'd like to have four arms, etc., etc., but that's a minor point. I think the bigger issue is uh what happens when you can this is like automotive scale now of having this And the all the car companies should be shifting to becoming uh autonomous robot builders and humanoid robot builders because that's going to be the replacement.
1:59:18You know Elon said 80% of Tesla's future revenues he expects to come from the robots from from Optimus.
1:59:24All his bonuses are based on that which is amazing and getting to Mars. [laughter] Uh Dave uh you know uh you know I guess this these are shocking numbers uh and I'm just wondering how society is going to respond to it. You know how many people will be sort of like lynching the robots. I remember in Santa Monica when the uh uh when the electric scooters came out, you found them in trees, you found them disassembled on the side of
1:59:53the road. A lot of people like, "No, I don't want that in my in my community." And robots walking down the street. It's just it's straight out of diamond age. Everyone's going to have like complete cities will have completely different cultures and Texas is running away with this stuff. It's just incredible how much of the Texas economy is going to end up being Elon. But, you know, some cities will say, "We don't want them."
2:00:13And you go there and it's very quaint and there no robots. Other cities are going to say, "This is huge. This is going to drive our economy forever. Let's let's adopt it." And the look and feel of those two different cities, it's already true when you walk through SF. It feels so different from other cities.
2:00:28you know, just cuz the delivery robots were already there and you know, everybody on the street has their agents working and they're they're talking on their to their agent while they're talking to you and it so I think that divergence is going to get really really wide.
2:00:41You know, I've said this, we're going to we're going to feel uh the singularity in the next 24 months, right? As we have, you know, a dozen autonomous electric vehicles, we have drones delivering your Starbucks, we've got robots walking down the street, people wearing AR glasses all over the place. I mean, we haven't really felt it yet.
2:00:59We've sort of felt it, you know, in the conversations in our in our compute capability, but the physicalization, if you want to use that word, um, is about to hit us hard.
2:01:10It's the point at which you couldn't you won't be able to avoid thinking about the singularity anymore is when there's you you really think, Peter, we're not feel like Okay, so for Moonshots live, we were all in LA uh taking whimos around everywhere. You see delivery robots on the sidewalk everywhere now in LA. No, but like tourists I I can't tell you how many times getting out of a Whimo, there were tourists there on the sidewalk taking photos of me getting out of a Whimo. For them, that's like future
2:01:39shock for the singularity. But for you, this is hoham. Business as usual. But wait for 2 years from now when things actually get felt. You're not feeling it because it's getting smoothed out for you because you live in California.
2:01:52I got it. But we're we're at a fraction of 1% of the impact coming. I mean, don't you Well, what will it take for you to feel the singularity?
2:02:02I I think EV talls, you know, flying cars flying through the air, drone drone pathways, you know, everybody in an autonomous vehicle. I mean, that's I think we're going to see a 100x more physical instantiation of the singularity in the next couple years. You know, I agree. In Santa Monica, it's all over the place.
2:02:22Yeah. you know, it's sort of like a dozen a dozen whimos per hour across my path.
2:02:27But like, okay, but that that to me sounds like a difference of degree rather than qualitative. Like, is it going to be when you see the first flying car fly down, say, fly across the the boardwalk or whatever, the the pier in Santa Monica, and then you say, "Aha, I'm feeling the singularity now." When is the threshold? Is there a threshold?
2:02:45I I I think there is a threshold you know uh I don't know Sem come on tag team you come in I I don't know when we hit this threshold um but it's it's the you know this is the William Gibson quote of the future is already here is just unevenly distributed. I don't know when you hit um a small town in Europe or France or in middle America the some of this
2:03:14hitting third world countries where it could make the biggest difference. I I think we'll we'll see the stuff first especially with humanoid robots in the DDD dirty dangerous jobs and that's obviously where you'll see the first prevalence of the use cases and it'll be a while I think before it gets to general uh appearance. That would be my prediction.
2:03:36Yeah, I think we can put this in context. Going back to the Gigafactory uh for Optimus, Tesla sells 1.6 million cars a year. Within 2 years, it'll be selling more robots. It makes 100 billion a year. At 10 million, that's 400 billion of revenue. That's likely like these are huge numbers that are coming exponentially. It will the robots will overtake the cars within 2 years and then you will see these things on the road because in 2 years time they will literally be able to walk around
2:04:05and do probably 95% of what a human can do and that again is a crazy thing and it'll cost $2 an hour something like that.
2:04:12Yeah. You know, you know, when Elon said 10 billion robots by 2040 and people laughed, you know, if they are costing you, you know, for me it's 300 bucks a month leasing at, you know, 30 bucks a day, uh, or, you know, a dollar an hour.
2:04:28I mean, that I mean, how many of those would you own?
2:04:32I mean, this thing, does anyone here on this call doubt that however many robots Elon makes, he'll sell out?
2:04:38Oh, god. No. I mean, if he if he needs to sell them at all. I mean I I I think one of the elephants in this particular room is what what we saw with Starship which is Starship and you know its predecessors have brought online an enormous amount of upmass capacity and all of the existing markets for upmass aren't enough now to saturate what Starship enables. So you have entirely new markets like orbital data centers that Elon needs to basically popularize in order to saturate his own capacity that he's brought online. My
2:05:07bet would be to to your question Ahmad like having universal humanoid robotics. I don't think we saturate that with domestic labor or or even just with dirty, dull, dangerous jobs. I my bet would be it something new that comes online. Maybe it's like robots for building out gigafactories or some sort of innermost loop type robots building out data centers too cheap to meter or space stations or something new.
2:05:32Yeah, I would have thought by now most of humanity would have come in contact with an AI customer service agent and what happened is the the other higher callings for the RAM and for the GPUs sucked all of the capacity out of that industry.
2:05:49And and the price you know the RAM prices are up 10x. Uh but it's an interesting foot race right now because until the terra fab comes online the calling the things you can do like Navier Stokes are escalating so fast that there's they're taking priority over the more interesting or not interesting but more mundane use cases like you know folding your laundry and then the robo taxi is right in the crosshairs in the middle where a robo taxi uses up a full couple of GPUs that
2:06:17could also cure a disease and so until Elon's got his terapab you know, 10xing the world supply of chips. We're all constrained by like the the amount of compute that's available, but the ideas, you know, AI generated ideas are flourishing like to not to steal your phrase, but flourishing far far faster than we can create the compute to keep up with the idea flow. So, but Dave, I think you're putting your finger on an important point, which is revenue per token maxing as applied to
2:06:45humanoid robots. So maybe they don't actually flow. Although I'd love my figure and I'm sure uh you know 1x Neo all of these other things that were on the waiting list for would love all of these for domestic purposes. But maybe what happened to OpenAI and was shown to the world by anthropic happens again where for robotic embodiment we see all of the tokens flowing to revenue max applications of robots and not just all these domestic service jobs that many of
2:07:13us are hoping for. In the early days, I agree that's what's going to happen.
2:07:17They'll be going to the highest revenue potential generation, but in a longer rate, you know, if we're really building 10 million a year, uh they'll flow into the homes as well. Welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is having an outsiz impact on every aspect of our lives. How we teach our kids, how we run our companies. It also is having a huge impact on health, helping you prevent heart disease. One of the key things I'm here with Dr. Don Mucalem, our chief medical officer at Fountain. Heart disease has been personal for you as
2:07:47It [snorts] really has, Peter. When my daughter was five, my husband died of sudden cardiac death. And so, this is a topic that is one that I am missiondriven to try to eradicate. Prevention first and early detection is absolutely critical. 50% of people die of heart attacks with no warning signs.
2:08:04No shortness of breath, no pain, no nothing.
2:08:07They just don't wake up in the morning.
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2:09:04All right, back to the episode. I'm going to move us to uh an important conversation on the economy uh because the doubling time for human wealth is accelerating alongside AI. So anthropic researcher Schult Douglas laid this laid out the math. He said quote together the hyperscalers are doubling the spend to a trillion dollars this year on capex related to AI. A very interesting question will be will the trend line continue? Will it get to 2 trillion next year and 4 trillion in 2028? Uh let's
2:09:34take a look a video of uh of this conversation and talk about the economy because I think people need to realize it's changing on the back of AI very rapidly.
2:09:44Over the course of the last four or five years, we've been 2xing or 3xing the amount of uh compute capacity devoted to AI every year. And an interesting question will be and so I think that's roughly together the hyperscalers are spending about a trillion dollars this year on on capex related to to AI. A very interesting question will be will that keep that trend line hold right and so will it go to $2 trillion next year and then $4 trillion in 2028 and if that trend line broadly holds and you can sort of maybe expand that to encompass the broader robotics uh industry and
2:10:14this kind of stuff um then that means that in the early 2030s or something like this uh you start to get to the point where you're actually effectively doubling the uh like the GDP of uh humanity um in the early 2030s which again little bit of ridiculous concept but requires a lot of things to go right.
2:10:32I mean that's exciting. You know Elon said you know you know tripledigit growth in the next five to plus years.
2:10:41Uh we're already seeing the GDP doubling in this past uh this past quarter. Um Dave your thoughts pal. Well, I mean, the first thing I want to point out is that we're going to live in this world with insane abundance, massive abundance, an effective workforce of hundreds of billions of AIs that are all hyper geniuses. Uh, we're we're going to have self-driving everything. We're going to have flying cars. All of that stuff is going to happen very very quickly. And then someone's going to say, "I didn't measure that as GDP
2:11:09growth. I measured it as deflation." And we're like, "I don't care." Like, I I really don't care how an economist labels it. That's the true world we're moving into. So I I worry about when you when you claim it as a GDP, and this is exactly what Elon was saying when we were meeting with him. It's like it could show up as a massive deflation of the value of the dollar, but it's the same net effect. It's just an economist arguing with another economist on how you measure GDP, which is a pretty insane metric. Anyway, if you talk to
2:11:38Eric Bolson, it's like more capabilities per person, right?
2:11:41Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
2:11:43You wrote an entire book on on the future economy. uh your take on all this? Yeah, the lost economy I think you know you will again see abundance going up the capabilities of every individual and the economies increasing like so many of our bottlenecks will be unwound and it won't show up necessarily in GDP um it will show up in other areas because ultimately intelligence isn't a scarce resource anymore like you know a lot of GDP is about things that exhaust
2:12:13like you mine minerals and things like that robots and other things are exponential particularly when they can coordinate like we've always been capped by having a dozen or 150 people. Now we'll have entirely new organizational modes that can scale well beyond that with humans and AIs and more. I think that's again terribly exciting. It's just we need new measures such as Eric Benson's GDP or kind of my mind approach and others. Um but the best measurement is just how many people can we lift up
2:12:42from the floor and then can we let people achieve what they want and can imagine.
2:12:46Yeah. If you take a if you take a long-term disease like a terminal disease that would have required millions of dollars of treatment over 10 years and you solve it with a simple RNA injection and the person is healthy, that's going to get measured as negative GDP. But that that's where we're going. We're going into this incredibly abundant uh longevitydriven world of awesomeness and and the the metrics just need to be rethought.
2:13:12Yeah. Alex, what does this mean to the average viewer here? You know, I [clears throat] I construe it as so to the extent that Schultto is a deacto spokesperson for Anthropic at this point, I I think this is Anthropic tipping its hands that it wants to get into the robotics business.
2:13:30I I think we're burying the lead here, which is that Anthropic, which has historically had these eye watering, nosebleleeding revenue growth, both uh past and then also projections, now seems to see robotics, so-called physical AI, but that's just a euphemism for robotics, as being essential to its plans to to keep doubling annual revenue. So, I'm I I for one am looking forward to anthropic leaning into robotics.
2:13:57Interesting. You know, for context, the world economy has historically doubled every 20 to 25 years, and we're talking about potentially doubling it in a couple of years. Uh, singularity is a bit of a shock to the system.
2:14:09Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, just a quick note, you know, the Vietnam economy just posted a 9.95% growth in the last quarter.
2:14:21Yeah. Something that we're seeing actually is there's an crazy amount of digital trade happening between second uh order countries and third emerging market countries around the world that is surprising all the economists. But just going back to this particular story, I think this basically leaves the concept of GDP in a shambles. uh because uh as Dave pointed out once you have deflationary technology and technology is deflationary the entire [clears throat] thing becomes I mean I
2:14:50think IMAD has pointed out in the past that somebody whoever created GDP said it was the worst for way of measuring the economy from the first place. So I think this it becomes meaningless as a measure of abundance. We need different models for this and the we're going to have a massive explosion of individual investments and a total transformation in how we do things, right? Like we talked at the beginning and throughout, if you have a 100,000 agents you can bring to bear to a problem, um all of a
2:15:18sudden that changes the game completely. Uh and so we're going to have a transformation that is so ridiculous that we have to take out all of these old measures and rethink everything.
2:15:29Yeah. And this is when when Elon talks about universal high income, right? This is the floor being raised for every single human being. The amount the amount of capability every person has and the ability to sort of live their their best life.
2:15:43Can I go back to something John Stewart said last night?
2:15:47He said, "Okay, so you're going to have this thing where you have all this income that's shared by everybody. So capitalism could capitalism itself to socialism."
2:15:55[laughter] Um and we've talked about this Peter in that whole framing we had called technological socialism. Yes. Right.
2:16:01Government socialism fails because allocation of assets from the center is invariably inefficient at least invariably leads to corruption. But if you think about Uber which is the sharing of assets across large collective group of people. It's actually a socialist kind of application. But when an algorithm hyper efficiently matches demand and supply, you get all the benefits without the downside. And the big question is going to be how do we uh properly democra in a democratic way distribute the benefits
2:16:29of all this unbelievable future and I think it'll do the the deflationary aspect of technology will take care of itself and that's why I'm so excited about the future.
2:16:39Yeah to quote to quote quote Dave here awesomeness. It's going to be an awesome awesome future. H I love it. All right.
2:16:49This is Nobel Prize season and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences just announced both the Nobel Prize in medicine and physics. Uh I want to break this down for you using the incredible support of AWG and EMOD. So first the Nobel Prize in medicine uh and the story here is beautiful. So yesterday the prize went to Carl uh Derith Dar Deserth Deseroth. Yes, thank you. of Stanford uh and and Peter Henman and George Nagel
2:17:19for discoveries uh leading to optogenetics. Uh this is switching you know for them switching on individual brain cells with uh by turning on a special frequency of light. So it started with early research in single cellled algae that swim towards light.
2:17:35And so in the early 1990s hedgemen asked a simple question how do these algae react to light so fast? He and Nagel found the answer channel rodopsin. It's a protein that opens a channel in the cell when light hits it. Uh then they showed you could actually put that protein into other cells and make any cell light sensitive. Deseroth took the next step. He put it into neurons and showed that precise flashes of light could deolarize the neurons and fire specific brain cells. Today the
2:18:04technology is being used in labs to uh study Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, epilepsy, addiction, depression and sleep. And in 2021, as published in Nature Medicine, a blind man with retinitis pigmentotosa partially regained sight using optogenetic gene therapy. Uh so that was the Nobel Prize in medicine. One of my critiques, you know, I've talked about this before. You know, this work was done 21 years ago and the Nobel takes, you know, decades
2:18:32to recognize the work. Uh which I think is going to have to change. Uh so uh Jens comments on this Alex this one's personal for me so I'll tell a little story. It's story hour. I was a senior at MIT in 2002 2003 and I had been awarded a Herz fellowship for grad school. It's wonderful wonderful fellowship. And I was on a tour of grad schools trying to decide which grad school I would go to. when I met with my
2:19:00friend Ed Bdon who was then a fourth year graduate student at Stanford trying to decide so he was four years ahead of me what he would do for his postoc and I had read in 2000 2001ish verer Vinci's short story called how to win or I think it was actually called win a Nobel Prize exclamation point it was published in the futures column in nature and I had also read his novel a deepness in the sky and both of them focused on the
2:19:28sci-fi a scenario of humans developing electromagnetically actuatable brain proteins. So I had read both of Verer's pieces and I was very inspired. So I suggested to my friend Ed for your postto why don't you go work on that?
2:19:43Why don't you go work on electromagnetically actuated proteins in the brain? And he did and Ed several years later was the first author uh with Carl as the PI as the last author on the first optogenetics paper using bacterial rodopsin and optogenetics is the result.
2:20:03So I I I you know this is just one person's small result in maybe a little bit of steering or encouragement but I I think it tells an important story that's science fiction also with Verer Vji writing in two different ways two sci-fi scenarios for how society impactful it would be this is circa 2000 and then my reading the sci-fi my encouraging Ed to pursue this for his postto Ed pursuing it for his postoc Ed unfortunately did not share the Nobel prize separate story
2:20:33as to whether that's a fair outcome or not. And it just going to Carl his PI. But the fact that within a quarter of a century it was possible to start from the sci-fi to the Nobel Prize for the sci-fi I think is a remarkable case study.
2:20:50Oh, go ahead. It's fine.
2:20:51Well, we we had um both Ed and Carl Durat speak at Singularity. So, they came and talked about this and it was kind of incredible to watch this. I'm so thrilled to hear you had a a little piece of this, Alex. The for me this was incredibly exciting because, you know, it gives us a way of manipulating our neurons and and some people freak out and go, "Oh my god, you're kind of playing with the brain." And my responses, we have an old word for this.
2:21:16We call it marketing. Uh use different techniques to try and create a response in the brain. When somebody sees a Coke, you want them to get thirsty. All we're doing is exponentially accelerating it with technology and the ability to turn off and on neural circus gives you this magical readr capability which we've always wanted for the brain. So this is super exciting.
2:21:36Nice your thoughts.
2:21:39Yeah, I think you know it does take years and years for Nobel prizes but really Nobel prizes apart from economics which is a bit of a weird one. We can put that to the side. um dismal science and all uh they have to be for applied science now right like anything theoretical you know when you had Georgie glassau when you've had kind of even alpha fold and other things like the Nobel committee can't keep up with and how much of it is now AI versus human on the purely theoretical side so
2:22:08I think you should be the Nobel Prize for applied sciences shall we say but we should really reward and maybe come up with another prize for some of the crazy breakthroughs and other things that humans and AIS together will be able to do and I think again there'll be massive theoretical advances, new science and kind of other things that should be awarded and especially should be awarded to everyone not just the PI. Um but you know this again is a fantastic result and we're seeing continued things around
2:22:36this on photonics and kind of more and yeah I think it's a solid prize but again Nobel itself applied sciences I think is the way the Nobel Prize might just become super quaint. It'd be like that Plymouth Rock village where they go and churn butter because you like basically 20 years from now they'll be saying we're giving this Nobel Prize. Remember way back before AI when you had to actually think through this stuff manually. This this team here did this thing. We're recognizing it 20 years after the fact and you know five
2:23:06people will show up and go well they have 20 years more of prizes to give. You know just again pick it up from the prei age.
2:23:13Oh my god. I mean it's hard to believe that all the Nobel prizes in the future aren't going to be AI derived.
2:23:21It's going to be we've started to see it already. Demis with Alphafold and Jeff Hinton with the RBM which [snorts] I mean parenthetically I don't know anyone who uses Boltzman machines so that that one's a bit of a question mark but yeah I think we we've already we've started to see AI prizes in physics and chemistry already. I expect to see many many more.
2:23:43Wait that Bman one is really important.
2:23:45So Jeffrey Hinton absolutely deserved the Nobel Prize for back prop 100%. But it's not physics. It's not eligible. But you're right. So they they're like, "What else did he do?" Okay, here's a boltsmith. Nobody uses this thing.
2:23:58That was a weird one. No one uses. Come on.
2:24:01Yeah. They wanted to give a Nobel Prize for AI. That's what [laughter] we need [snorts] one in economics now for AI. That's what cost. Totally. Byson, man.
2:24:10Yeah. So this morning the Nobel Prize committee gave one out in physics to Francis Halen uh University of Wisconsin Madison for decisive contributions to the ice cube nutrino observatory and the discovery of high energy nutrinos of astrophysical origin. Alex, do you want to explain this one? Yeah, this is again sort of an artifact of the way some of these prizes are awarded where in effect they have to be awarded to a person but
2:24:38really if if you look at how Ice Cube is organized or how CERN is organized these are massive organizations with lots of people and what typically happens is as a way of rewarding the organization and the effort itself it's awarded to the lead for the organization. Ice Cube has played a seinal role in enabling us to observe cosmic nutrinos and high energy nutrinos in general. There's a such a beautiful history there. I remember one
2:25:05of the most startling nutrino results that I had seen over the past several decades was uh seeing a ring of nutrinos in again one of these similar observatories usually underground usually filled with heavy water. a ring of nutrinos or flashes arising from ultimately uh nutrinos colliding with nuclei. Nutrinos obviously have a vanishingly small cross-section uh of interaction with uh with the nuclei of
2:25:34atoms. Seeing a ring a circle that was the result of a supernova and nutrinos one of the one of the most interesting areas of the standard model for sure. uh there still isn't a textbook established rest mass for nutrinos. Physicists are still trying to box in what the rest masses of the the the three known species uh of uh of electron or of
2:26:01nutrinos even are. And and so yeah, I I think this is an interesting prize. If if I were to armchair quarterback this one, I'd say this is a prize being awarded to a very large uh very uh ownorous, shall we say, consortium to to observe nutrinos. I think the challenge with physics more broadly, and maybe this ties in with the Jeff Hinton comment, is there has been a maybe get
2:26:30in trouble for this, but don't care.
2:26:31there there has been a noticeable deficit of fundamental physics advances in the past 50ish years. And so if if you're trying to decide which Nobel prizes to award, you know, to emod to your earlier comments about applications, if if there is a a striking deficit of a half century in fundamental physics, then you're stuck awarding it to applications. I for one, you know, one of the reasons why I co-founded physical super intelligence.
2:26:59I'll talk my book for a few seconds is to try to revive advances in all of physics, not just the applications of physics because we've gone arguably about a half century plus without fundamental advances. So we're trying to bring about a second physics golden age for what it's worth.
2:27:14Yeah. Just for fun uh to explain Ice Cube. So the ice cube nutrino observatory fills a cubic kilometer of ice with light sensors, right? that's looking for nutrino flashes as as Alex said when the nutrino hits the atomic nucleus. And just a fun fact, every second you have 65 billion nutrinos that pass through you from the sun without you ever noticing. So yeah, these detectors are are definitely an unusual
2:27:4565 billion. See, did you notice?
2:27:48I did not know that. And I'm not sure I needed to know that feel.
2:27:53They're they're interesting. Like what when so I spent some time at Bell Labs doing dark matter research and we used to talk at Royal Wii the the staff used to talk about what could we do with nutrinos. So like a nutrino phone for example would have tremendous applications you could imagine and firm lab a number of years back made [clears throat] a bit of progress in this direction. Right now, if you want to communicate between two opposite sides of the Earth, you're stuck at best using low Earth orbit satellites, which
2:28:21give you refractive index of of one sort of speed of light transmission, but you don't have line of sight. If if you want to do say pear trading between New York and London, you're stuck going around geodessics on the Earth's surface with either LEO constellations or holo core fiber and nutrinos. In principle, if we could rig up a nutrino phone, we could just shoot nutrinos directly through the Earth and have ultra- low latency communication between two different parts of Earth without needing to go
2:28:50around the Earth's surface. So, if the audience needs to be motivated to care about progress in nutrinos, imagine being able to just send information directly through the Earth among many other applications. So, if you're Starlink, you just need a cubic kilometer of ice to catch it. [laughter] Yeah. Per per handset. All right, let's go to the AMAs. Um, uh, Alex, this first one's for you.
2:29:13Yeah. Okay. So, AI personhood again.
2:29:15AWG, what's your timeline for AI personhood? And this is from Joshua Barios 9452.
2:29:22So, different timelines in different places. I think in Argentina, we're essentially there for some variant of AI corporate personhood, whereas in say the US, I think it's going to take longer and I think it's going to be more incremental. I think we'll start to see various forms of economic AI personhood like enabling AI agents to open their bank their own bank accounts autonomously. Now to soon social social
2:29:51personhood where AI agents can open their own say social media accounts fully autonomously without needing to be tied back to a human supervisor sometime soon. I I think in in America in the west there's probably a strong antipathy towards say enabling AI persons to vote in human elections that's probably last to never I would hypothesize but I I think broadly in the US at least I I
2:30:18think 5 to 10year incremental roadmap for rolling out individual say rights very granular rights not it won't be an all or nothing proposition but granularly rolling these is out over the next few years. Other parts of the world maybe never. Uh Argentina now it's going to be a spectrum.
2:30:38Interesting. See, your choice.
2:30:42Let me go with uh number four. Um once we had recursive self-improvement, is it then just a matter of how much compute is available? And that's from Chris Dover 8507. I think it's not quite that simple. Compute obviously matters but intelligence improvement has lots of different components to it like we talked about the shortage in RAM already. You have energy as a substrate.
2:31:08Uh you want to evaluate whether a change uh like actually improve the system or not. So there'll be some peripheral components of recursive sub improvement that will slow the overall progress down. So it just doesn't it doesn't mean you have an instant intelligence explosion. The implementation of that will take time. However, once you have AI systems that can improve the the research cycle, uh you get a massive compression of the innovation cycle and that's what we're seeing with the time
2:31:37scale going from years between models down to 10 11 days and that's the mechanism for the singularity. So the we think of the I would think of the singularity not as infinite like intelligence but it's when the iteration cycle gets so fast that we can't no longer keep up which is why we're in the middle of it now. There's no model by which you can predict the future today and that is the very definition of a singularity. You can't see past that event horizon.
2:32:06Uh Dave, your choice.
2:32:09You get stuck with two if I take three.
2:32:10Sorry. All right. I'm taking three. Why can't a majority of the compute resources go towards solving the community issues with data centers now so people will believe AI can solve problems that matter to voters? Um, you know, I actually have a very related question I think about a lot, which is the the PR around the AI labs is so bad because they didn't really manage it and it grew much faster than they thought it would. But now they've got this power tool of AI that's insanely convincing and brilliant at coming up with
2:32:39messaging. So I think they can convince the people around the data centers that they're getting a huge benefit using AI as a as a tool in that process. I also think they can give like the cost of benefiting the town is so small compared to the value of the data center.
2:32:56I'm like why don't they wake up and just say we're going to give you far better you know uh cost of electricity and schools and police ports. We're going to subsidize everything here. It's a fraction of the revenue they're going to make.
2:33:11This is one of those many topics where if you take what Peter just said and you walk into their office and you say, "I know exactly how to solve this problem in Abalene in whatever." I I'm going to work night and day, they'll just start paying you tomorrow because the only reason they're not on it is because they're stretched way too thin.
2:33:28And somebody just needs to take their money and fill the void.
2:33:32And because you know, nobody knows like in Abalene, what do we need? Better schools? Do we need better busing? I don't know. Oh, and just like I just arrived like, okay, somebody come and fill that space and I swear to God they'll hire you tomorrow and they'll pay you whatever it takes.
2:33:44Emod, mosquitoes, can they be helpful inoculators?
2:33:49Tweak their genes so they deliver measles vaccines instead of disease. That's Thomas Davis real estate. Uh, I don't think we should have forced vaccination for large numbers of people.
2:33:58And I'm actually on the genocidal mosquitoes uh side of things. They've killed 5 billion people over history, a million total. And so I wouldn't mind if they were actually just wiped out. But definitely don't force vaccination. And I think actually we should like remove the mosquitoes. They are the biggest predator for humans.
2:34:16But the concept is interesting, right?
2:34:18To use this, you know, automated uh living drone capability to distribute something that's helpful and useful. But I agree with you.
2:34:26Psilocybin psilocybin mosquitoes.
2:34:31We went there. I just how about just vaccinating the mosquitoes? I mean, mosquitoes have a problem, too. Mosquitoes are [laughter] Yeah, just tiny little syringe.
2:34:40But I'm I'm curious. I mean, there there's a more general problem here, which is we live in a biosphere that's nature red in tooth and claw. It's filled with wild animal suffering. My view on wild animal suffering is that it's an atrocity that we should see if we can fix. But I I assume Immad based on your comments, your attitude is no, just eradicate all mosquitoes everywhere.
2:35:02Well, Ben Lamb could bring him back anyway. Let's Jean, but he refuses to. I pressed Ben on that. And Ben's attitude is no, we're going to only, you know, laser focus on a few things. Don't ask me about Mozart.
2:35:13Oh, yeah. The tiny little woolly mammoth and the pterodactylsized mosquito. That's what we're Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You want the pterodactylized [laughter] mosquito. No, let's please not.
2:35:21Just go Just go to Northern Canada. They have pterodactyl size. All right, Iman, you get first choice now.
2:35:26All right. Um, boo. Uh, do you think some politicians resist AI because it could fundamentally change how politics works? Uh, at Daniel Morris one. Yes, of course. I mean, like it will remove a lot of the barriers for democracy, intelligence access, raise the intelligence of society. Like these are big things. So I think you will get some resistance to that as we see this kind of evolve because many politicians unfortunately don't want a more
2:35:55intelligent electorate particularly the ones that focus on uh shall we say more demagoguic approaches.
2:36:04Okay. Uh Salem uh I got to take number five here. What happens when intelligence rises uh rises while cost collapses from BB_X_1 uh like you know when you have intelligence going from a scarce commodity or scarce capability embedded in very expensive clunky humans um you basically radically change not just the company itself but civilization itself
2:36:33right because whenever the cost of some foundational input approaches zero we actually reorganize our whole world around it. Now that information transmission is essentially free, we rewritten our entire world around that. So when bandwidth became cheap, you got YouTube and you got Zoom and you got cloud computing and all that kind of stuff. When computation became cheap, we got cell phones and smartphones. When intelligence becomes cheap, we redesign companies. We do unbelievable research.
2:37:01You rethink education. You rethink healthcare. Then you have scarce things like human experience, judgment, purpose, uh trust, etc. that become important. Then you you stop optimizing intelligence, which is what we've been doing for several thousand years, and you start optimizing what do you point it at? That becomes interesting.
2:37:20Yeah. I I think again I'm going to make the point here. We've said it so many times as this happens, it's so incredibly important for people to raise the limit on what they think they can do, you know, and and point that intelligence at something extraordinary that surprises you because you're going to be able to make massive contributions by utilizing it. All right, Dave.
2:37:44Uh why don't I take seven? Richard, I think that's Richard Socher, puts P Doom at zero yet says 100 million people could be harmed. I think that did he say that on our podcast?
2:37:55I [snorts] don't remember that.
2:37:57He definitely got a lot of he he was open and super honest. You should definitely watch that podcast. Uh so question, should P doom mean extinction or catastrophe? And how should we think about risks of that scale? And that's from a really long name, 6542.
2:38:13Um yeah I I think uh everything in that question is exactly right. Um we can define pdoom I think it's doom like doom is doom. P doom should be probability of of extinction disaster catastrophe.
2:38:27That's sort of what it means. But yeah there's there's inevitably going to be misuse of AI uh and it's going to cause harm. And as Eric Schmidt has said on the podcast at least three times, uh he's hoping it's relatively small, like a 100 people, a thousand people are affected or it's a cyber attack that nobody's hurt but money is taken and that's what wakes up the governments.
2:38:48But right now, they're just not moving anywhere near fast enough to avert it. Yet, the good outweighs the bad by incredible amounts. And I think that was Richard's uh fundamental point that we should expect abundance and overall benefit. So, I don't know if we should redefine P Doom, but uh but that's the way it's going to play out.
2:39:06Uh and we should just keep on focusing on Pab. All right, Alex, number six is for you. All right, number six. Could public opinion become a greater bottleneck than the technological development of RSI, recursive self-improvement itself? And this is from David K, VFX. I think we're already there. I I think recursive self-improvement, we're already in the RSI era. both anthropic and open AAI have made a number of pretty detailed and quantitative public statements to
2:39:34that effect. So we're already in an era when RSI is driving the vast majority of research at this point. Whereas on the other side of the ledger, public opinion is driving data centers out of at least American municipalities in the direction of orbit on the one hand and we see as discussed in the the past pod with Richard, we see members of the US House introducing or planning to introduce bills against recursive
2:40:02self-improvement. I think public opinion probably is already a greater bottleneck than the actual intrinsic technical difficulty of RSI, which is also why you see some of the public labs, uh, some of the frontier labs rather, like Anthropic starting to make public noises about essentially buying off public opinion by doing, you know, tiny little things like solving all human disease. And if if you can c solve all human disease as a side effect of recursive self-improvement,
2:40:30then maybe public will look the other way. Not that it's a bad thing, but at least be uh, you know, compensated in some sense for allowing many of the tokens, maybe the vast majority of the tokens to flow to self-improvement rather than to other applications. I think there's probably a pretty good bargain, a grand bargain if you will, to be struck there.
2:40:52Nice. A reminder, if you've got an outro video and Dave, I expect you to submit some here. Uh, please send it to media dmmadis.com. And we've got a beautiful one from our friend uh friend of the pod CJ Truhart.
2:41:05I have a quick announcement.
2:41:07Um, we've been doing these workshops for teenagers. Lily is going to run one in Austin, Texas on the 24th. If anybody has teenagers or wants them to kind of rethink how to use AI as a superpower, um, check it out. Yxo.orld world. We'll put a link in the yxo.world.world.
2:41:27Um, and they've got slots for a few teenagers left for anybody interested.
2:41:31All right. If you're in Austin, bring your teen. Uh, Lily does an amazing job. All right. This this video is called Tomorrow Comes Alive. It is from the Moonshots Live event. Take a look.
2:41:51A new day, a new world waiting. 6 a.m. The alarm breaks the silence. [music] Close on the chair, blue light in the room. Let the eyes of the man in the mirror said, "Remember what you came here to do." Through hotel doors into a ride share day break running over the glass carrying a future I [music and singing] could almost see but no one brings the future back alone.
2:42:21That quiet calling getting loud. [music] Comes a fire in a crowd. [music] If you got a purpose burning brighter than your fear. [music] If you see a world worth building that has never yet been here, don't wait for tomorrow become what you believe. Star Trek made tomorrow [music] something we could see. Moon shots make tomorrow [singing] something we can be.
2:42:55Come alive, come alive. Dreaming beauty, [music] bring it to life. And moon shots live.
2:43:01Tomorrow comes alive.
2:43:06Tomorrow comes alive. [music] Walked into a wave of voices. [music] Strangers felt like future friends.
2:43:18Every [singing] handshake [music] held a story.
2:43:20Every question crossed the edge.
2:43:23Not abundance as a [music] slogan. I just talk about the climb. Courage recognizing courage. Vision multiplied by mine. Someone met me at the doorway.
2:43:29Not with a pitch but with a hug. Before [music] we ever spoke of rockets made the future feel like us in the dream grew hands and heartbeat. When the room became a crew and the distance felt much [music] closer when I saw what we could do. Can you feel it?
2:43:45The whole room breathing out.
2:43:47A thousand different sparks make a constellation in the crowd. [music] If you got a purpose burning brighter than your fear. [music] IF YOU SEE A WORLD WORTH building that has never yet been here, don't wait for tomorrow [music] become what you believe. Star Trek made tomorrow something we could see. [music] Moonshots makes tomorrow something we can be.
2:44:20Come alive. Come alive.
2:44:21Dreaming beauty bring it to life. And tomorrow I love that. A purpose burning brighter than your fear. What a great line.
2:44:32That uh character is C the guy walking.
2:44:35CJ wrote himself into the video.
2:44:37Yeah, that was really [laughter] good.
2:44:38Yeah, that was awesome.
2:44:40My brain is so fried, guys. I mean, what the hell?
2:44:42I [laughter] know.
2:44:44Singularities are exhausting, aren't they, Sim?
2:44:48I'm glad this only happens once once a planet at Well, maybe like maybe it happens more than once per planet. We don't know yet.
2:44:56Yeah. Ah, well, I'm on stage for 5 days at the abundance longevity trip here.
2:45:01We got 40 amazing faculty on the cutting edge of longevity. Yeah, longevity escape velocity. It's coming fast.
2:45:08We're going to need longevity just to live through these episodes, dude. No idea. [laughter] Uh, Immod, Alex, See, Dave, love you guys.