← Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Claude Opus 4.5, White House "Genesis Mission" & Amazon's $50B AI Push w/ Emad Mostaque, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin & Alexander Wissner-Gross | EP #211
01:28:52
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- [00:00]
Alex
I've compared this moment to 1939. This is the Manhattan Project, similar to.
- [00:05]
Peter
The Apollo Project that put a man.
- [00:07]
Alex
On the Moon in 1969. This is an all in national effort.
- [00:12]
Peter
To take the power of AI to.
- [00:14]
Alex
Use the world's largest supercomputers to advance innovation and science.
- [00:20]
Peter
This is just extraordinary. I think this could be the greatest accelerator for human knowledge in the US yet if it's properly funded and executed.
- [00:29]
Imad
Genesis 1 has is, you know, God created the heavens and the earth. Finally we have the tools to be actually able to understand them properly. Application of large amounts of compute with the reagents allows us to unravel the mysteries of the earth and the universe.
- [00:41]
Salim
You know, if we went back to the beginning of the year, did we predict that we'd be here or is it moving faster than even the few of us could predict?
- [00:54]
Peter
Now that's a moonshot. Ladies and gentlemen. Hey guys. Welcome to our emergency pod for Thanksgiving week. A lot going on here. Genesis mission, we're going to be talking about that. We'll talk about anthropics. You Claude 4.5. I'm here with AWG Mr. Exo. And thank you Imad for joining us. I know this is Thanksgiving for you in England as well, isn't it?
- [01:21]
Salim
It's Thanksgiving for everyone.
- [01:22]
Peter
Aha. Yes, for sure. So I wanted to start with a question, which is what does Thanksgiving look like in the year 2035? I'm curious, is it going to change at all? Salim, you want to kick it off? Is 2035 far enough away to make a difference?
- [01:39]
Salim
It's a hell of a difference. I mean, look, by that point we should have the cost of Thanksgiving dinner dropping by 10x. It should be personalized to you for your nutrition so that depending on your metabolism, the turkey or ham or whatever the heck it is is totally customized to the ability. I'll have a little device inside me saying whoa, whoa, whoa, before you eat that turkey. I'm still metabolizing the cauliflower. Give me three minutes. Please take a sip. Do not drink alcohol quite yet. Da da da da da. And I think we'll have, we should have gotten the point over this hump of kind of expensive energy that we have. Ultra cheap energy, ultra cheap food. And we're crossing right into the Alex Rubicon.
- [02:26]
Peter
All right, all right. My addition is we'll have Tesla bots serving us everything. How about you, Alex?
- [02:35]
Alex
Yeah, I think if we're not celebrating, at least some sub. Some subset of humanity is not celebrating Thanksgiving on Mars. Some subset is celebrating Thanksgiving in the cloud in the form of uploaded humans and maybe we have some uplifted non human animals also celebrating with us at the table. Then something's gone terribly wrong over the next few weeks.
- [02:56]
Peter
So I get this. So good to have uplifted turkeys arguing with their lawyers to keep a ceasefire against killing them all.
- [03:04]
Alex
Yeah, if that doesn't happen, then something's gone wrong over these 10 years.
- [03:08]
Peter
Imad, how about you? What are you gonna see in 10 years time?
- [03:11]
Imad
Yeah, I mean 10 years is the pessimistic end of the AGI forecast.
- [03:14]
Alex
Right.
- [03:14]
Imad
So assuming that humans don't end up like turkeys, where we get happier, happier and then AGI, it goes straight down. Well, we'll figure out how to do perfectly moist turkey by then. But then, as Alex has said, mathematics should be solved by then, science, etc. So you're in the post abundance world, hopefully with the robots and more, and there should be a lot to be thankful about. If we can navigate what's coming.
- [03:40]
Peter
If we can navigate what's coming. Okay, well we're going to talk about that, but before we do, I want to jump into our first story, which is a doozy. Let's hear and learn about the Genesis mission coming out of the White House. Very powerful concept. All right, let's dive into this with a video.
- [04:03]
Narrator
In every age, humanity invents new ways to see further. The telescope let us glimpse the stars. The microscope revealed the worlds within us. For centuries, thinkers like Leibniz, Shannon and Turing dreamed of making all knowledge computable. But today, knowledge grows faster than our ability to understand it. Truly billions of data points, a universe of information still unconnected. Now a new instrument emerges, one capable not only of observing the universe, but of understanding it. Genesis mission will transform how science is done in America. Uniting our brightest minds, most powerful computers and vast scientific data into one living system for discovery. Built on artificial intelligence and quantum computing, it will radically redefine the scale, speed and purpose of scientific progress in America. This is the work that will define our generation's legacy. A new revolution begins, one guided not by competition alone, but by curiosity, imagination, and the belief that discovery is the truest form of progress.
- [05:32]
Peter
Wow. Just wow. What an incredible story coming out of the White House. Again, the title here. US Government launches Genesis, transforming science through AI computing. This is Trump's executive order to use massive federal scientific data sets to train powerful AI models. Department of Energy will connect US supercomputers and lab data into one unified platform intended to shrink the research timeline from Years to days through AI driven experimentation focusing on biotech, fusion, quantum. It's a big deal. Awg, you want to kick us off?
- [06:09]
Salim
Yeah.
- [06:09]
Alex
I've compared this moment to 1939 and this is the Manhattan Project. And in the Manhattan Project, as I've remarked previously, we turned the country into one big factory for nuclear weapons. In the case of the Manhattan Project, in this case the country is being turned into one big AI factory. And this is an incredibly ambitious. We speak of moonshots. This is an incredibly ambitious moonshot not just to turn the country into an AI compute factory, but also to supply some of the limiting reagents as it were, like data sets, federal data sets that are locked up in a variety of different enclaves are now according to the the XO going to be unlocked and made available for pre training, probably software tools that right now are unavailable being made available. And I think to the extent that there may be a race dynamic with China whose government is also collecting large amounts of data, I think the Manhattan Project positioning is probably pretty intentional and I think it's just glorious to see the sort of ambition ambitious unlocking of scarce resources. I'll also point out Dario Gill, who's who's been named as the mission director for Genesis Mission. I worked with him as an undergrad at MIT and it's really great to see MIT in general and that level of scientific influence positioning in again a 1939 moment. Such an ambitious initiative.
- [07:36]
Peter
Yeah. I should just mention by the way, our other mate Dave is on a research mission in Italy this week. Let's leave it at that. We miss you, Dave. Wish you were here. I mean this, this is just extraordinary. I. I think this could be the greatest accelerator for human knowledge in the US yet if it's properly funded and executed. Imad, is this something that every country is going to have to follow through and do a similar situ, a similar move?
- [08:05]
Imad
I think that you're seeing this in the UK we had something similar with DSIT on a much smaller scale and new regulation acceleration for nuclear reactors, etc. I think fundamentally like Genesis 1 is God created the heavens and the earth and now finally we have the tools to actually be able to understand them properly. That's what this is really talking about. Application of large amounts of compute with the reagents AWG said, allows us to unravel the mysteries of the earth and the universe and so obviously that's a massive advantage. But I don't think it's any kind of coincidence that it's Department of Energy that's running this because we've talked about how energy is so important and the US has been falling behind on energy compared to countries like China and more. And you'll see more and more deregulation, more and more fusion, solar, etc. Play into this. And the impact again can be immense if you can figure out any one of these things. And I think that we're in a good place to figure out almost all of them again, if it's done properly.
- [09:07]
Peter
Salim, your thoughts, buddy.
- [09:09]
Salim
So I think this is where you see the best of government because they can leverage those global data sets in a powerful way. And so when you can do that, I think it brings out the best of what government is able to do, unlike private sector. And so I think that's one really great point about this. The second I think is that this is kind of catch up in a sense because lots of countries use their federal data sets in different ways. China, France has been doing it for years, etc. So this is catch up in one sense. But taking the data which is now a sovereign resource, and then applying it with all the AI capability the US already has, I think really amplifies a huge outcome. So the potential here is kind of incredible. It reminds me back in the days of when Silicon Valley started. They created secret labs at mit, Harvard and Stanford to figure out how radar could be blocked and came up with aluminum tinfoil thrown off chaff thrown out the planes. And they had to create this global initiative or this countrywide initiative to protect and solve for World War II. And this is kind of like that initiative. I think this is that big. I love it.
- [10:22]
Peter
I mean, this basically in my mind reframes basic science as a compute problem and it's throwing everything we have at it.
- [10:30]
Alex
Yeah, I think that's the elephant in the room. And I'll also point out the Department of Energy has also clarified that one of the goals of Genesis mission is to double Scientific American scientific productivity in the next decade. So when we speak of Thanksgiving 2035, I would say if we haven't 10x'd or 100x scientific productivity by Thanksgiving 2035. Also something has gone wrong, but I think having a 2xing of productivity is an excellent baseline here.
- [10:58]
Peter
Every week my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI and quantum computing to transport energy, longevity and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters that impacts our lives, our companies and our careers. If you want me to share these metatrends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week. Sending it out is a short 2 minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends ten years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you. If you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dashmandis.com man metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. All right, now back to this episode.
- [11:52]
Salim
I'm reminded of a. We had a very senior guy from the DOD at Singularity one year, Peter.
- [11:58]
Peter
Yeah.
- [11:58]
Salim
And he, during the Q and A, he goes, this is all great. You guys all Love these exponentials. VCs are all hovering at the knee of the curve trying to catch a technology that goes vertical. You forget who funds the arbitrarily long flat part of the curve, which is government. And this allows government to really accelerate that flat part of the curve. So I think we'll see exponentials moving forward in time in a pretty amazing way.
- [12:22]
Peter
Yeah, I mean, I do. Please, go ahead, Iman.
- [12:26]
Imad
Yeah, but I think it's interesting how it's moved from the NSF and again the classical grant making that's been disrupted over the last year now to much more of a techno optimistic approach. I think one of the key things that will determine the success of this is is this Manhattan Project style closed and private? Because obviously, even though they've announced it, it could be. Or is it open? If it's open science, I think it'll be truly exponential. But if it's actually building up public private partnerships with strong IP protections and doing a lot of stuff in private, I think it'll have a much lower impact on the other side.
- [13:00]
Peter
Yeah, I'm excited to just watch this for me. And you said it. You said it perfect. Alex. It's a moonshot. It's an extraordinary nationwide moonshot. It's nothing less than, if not a.
- [13:11]
Alex
Shot at the moon, as I sometimes say.
- [13:16]
Peter
We'll talk about that. I mean, the only difference is it hasn't set an objective mission like get to the moon and back before the end of the decade. But this is America throwing its might and, and coordination at a massive opportunity.
- [13:34]
Salim
Well, and look at the areas, right? Biotech, fusion, quantum. I mean, those are all moonshot domains that totally rewrite the rules of life. Amazing.
- [13:43]
Alex
I would maybe just add, as I pointed out in the past, I think the next big thing after solving superintelligence, which arguably has either already been solved or is imminently solvable, is solving math, science, engineering, medicine. This is, this is what that looks like at grand scale. This is taking federal resources and applying them singularly to solving grand challenges.
- [14:11]
Peter
Spectacular. All right, let's go on to our second big story of this, of this particular week. It's what's going on with the hyperscalers, but in particular Anthropic. Nice to see Anthropic making some moves. Here is the story. Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.5, which uses 76% fewer tokens to reach the same results as older models, outscored the entire engineering team and leads to seven of eight programming languages on industry coding benchmarks, Improves multi agent support by 15%. Alex, you want to kick us off? How, how significant is Opus 4.5?
- [14:48]
Alex
Yeah, we're, we're nearing, if not already, at the point of recursive self improvement. Finally. The point of recursive self improvement, many would say, is the point at which more compute, more infrastructure is being allocated by Frontier Labs to AI researchers than to human researchers. And I think that the most important indicator isn't that the benchmarks, the evals are going up and to the right, although they are, and it's wonderful and I love benchmarks. It's that Anthropic has also announced that as you alluded that incoming employees to Anthropic in particular on the performance team are now being outperformed on key tests, key homework assignments by the AI. I think that's the canary that were imminently, if not already, given that this model was arguably pre trained based on the data cutoff date several months ago. We're now entering the moment of recursive self improvement. I think that that's the sort of bigger thing, small, smaller headline is I of course have my evals whenever these cogen models come out. One of my other non cyberpunk FPS evals is asking it to see if I can one shot a Mario style side scroller and it did a beautiful job.
- [16:06]
Peter
Amazing. And Dario's been talking about, you know, being able to get to 100% or 90% of all the coding being done. So this is a big move in that direction. Ima, I'd love your thoughts here.
- [16:18]
Imad
Yeah, I mean I think from our tests like we made, we got top of the SWE BenchPro benchmark which is scale AIs 1 and it was really difficult with 45%.
- [16:28]
Peter
This is with intelligent Internet, right?
- [16:30]
Imad
Yeah, that's with intelligent Internet framework using a combination of the other models. This model without reasoning scored 52% without even reasoning tokens, which I think was the most shocking thing for me. So usually like the big breakthroughs we've had is the models can think longer, they can check, etc. We didn't think it would be that way with just the straight output. And the quality of code it outputs is actually just really, really good. Which is going to be very interesting because the average code base is 100 to 200,000 tokens and this should be able to one shot most code bases by next year. And the cost has dropped 67% from the previous version. So it's now $25 per million tokens as well. So coding and tokens will be ubiquitous. And it may not be that reasoning tokens are what are needed for those tokens, which was again completely shocking to me that it would score higher non reasoning than reasoning.
- [17:25]
Peter
Fascinating. Salim, any thoughts here?
- [17:28]
Salim
It feels to me like we moved geopolitics from nation states to these hyperscalers. I mean this is incredible stuff that's happening from each of these big four or five and it's rewriting all the rules of everything. Then you have states riding on top of these, which is a much better way of doing it than the other way around.
- [17:46]
Peter
Alex, I want to take it back to the to our subscribers here. What does this mean for the average individual who's not using Opus 4.5 to code?
- [17:55]
Alex
What's the this is the inner. I mean I think there are multiple levels of impact. The highest level impact is I've spoken in the past about what I call the innermost loop of civilizational progress. This is the innermost insofar as we're starting to see models that are so strong that they can conduct research and generate code for better versions of themselves, that that's the innermost recursive self improvement loop that I I've argued in past that's going to spin out and touch the rest of the economy. It it's already in progress, but you'll see much more of it over the next two to three years as it solves fully robotics physical world automation, leading to optimistically radical economic growth. So I would say like that's the macro story. The micro story is in the meantime it's going to be trivial to generate programs, applications, complex workflows on demand Implicitly explicitly mentioned in past. With the length of a tweet, you'll be able to create a AAA level first person shooter or video game. People are going to be creating so much software, so much more software, so trivially that will be drowning in AI generated software of very high quality. That's the narrow micro impact in the short term.
- [19:13]
Peter
Amazing. Please go ahead.
- [19:17]
Imad
One other thing that's interesting in this, in that by itself it scores 75% in multi agent. When it's the same agent, Opus 4.5. When they combined it with Haiku, which is a very low cost agent or sonnet, it got up to 88%. So Opus is a really good orchestrator of agents. And this is the multi agent support type of thing. And everyone was saying, well, agents can't look after other agents. This is the first agent that prove or the first AI that provably can. And that opens up the whole swarm nature of things that we've been discussing.
- [19:48]
Peter
It reminds me of a. There's a competition that people do called the spaghetti competition where they are looking to put, you know, uncooked spaghetti and see who can get the highest vertical height. And they found that the team that had a very efficient executive assistant as part of their team always scored the best.
- [20:07]
Salim
This is the marshmallow challenge.
- [20:09]
Peter
The Marshmallow challenge. Yeah.
- [20:10]
Salim
Here's the show. You get 20 sticks of spaghetti, a yard of a meter of tape, a meter of string and a marshmallow. And you have to structure something so that the marshmallows on top and whoever gets it highest wins Importantly. You're right, Peter. The winners are the folks that have an EA on the team. But the second place are kindergarten and, and last place. Last place are MBAs.
- [20:35]
Peter
Yes, consistently.
- [20:36]
Salim
They lie, they cheat, they, they kind of break things, etc. It's an amazing exercise.
- [20:41]
Peter
You were going to make a second point on this one, Salim.
- [20:43]
Salim
I think, you know, if we went back to the beginning of the year and could we, did we predict that we'd be here or is it moving faster than even the few of us could predict? Faster than the few of us could predict. Although, Alex, no, like.
- [21:02]
Alex
I'll pat myself on the back narrowly for this and say, as Dave, who's not here at the moment would attest. But I think Peter, you were in this group chat as well. At the beginning of the year, Dave challenged me to formalize a prediction for what end of year solving math would look like. I was banging the drum throughout the year. Math is going to get solved. Math is going to get solved. I made very specific prediction about frontier math tier 4 and AI models passing that and if anything they've slightly overshot my my very conservative baseline.
- [21:33]
Peter
So how dare they.
- [21:35]
Alex
I know. I think we're more or less where I expected we'd be by the end of this year in terms of strength of AI models solving math, science, engineering.
- [21:43]
Peter
I'll add one last thing on the anthropic story here, which is last pod we talked about their economic success as a business that they're heading towards significant profitability in the next two years. And this is part of that equation. So congratulations to Dario and his team on Opus 4.5. Let's go to our next story again on the leaderboards and I'll turn to Alex for this the ARC AGI leaderboard update. And this is not just performance, this is performance per dollar.
- [22:12]
Alex
Alex that's right. So the big story we're driving the cost of intelligence to zero. Cost of superintelligence is being driven to zero as well. The ARC AGI 1 and 2 benchmarks are really lovely benchmarks I've supported in past. The general theme is can AIs successfully visually reason and visually synthesize new programs to reason. And what we're seeing for the first time between the Opus 4.5 results that are demonstrating breakthrough state of the art level cost efficiency of visual program synthesis and then also an earlier result I don't think we got a chance to touch on which is company named Poetic has announced superhuman level performance on the Arc AGI 2 benchmark. We're seeing visual program synthesis start to get solved and with the world needs harder benchmarks, we need harder better evals that the so what for for everyone right now is so many problems in the world, especially in the physical world, rely on some sort of visual reasoning, some sort of intuitive ability to manipulate the physical world and to spot patterns and to synthesize implicit programs, even if they're never written down as source code. And Arc AGI Arc AGI 2 are really like excellent ways to capture problems that humans generally find easy but AI have historically found challenging and that's all getting solved now. And saturating.
- [23:41]
Salim
You mean like proprioception for example?
- [23:44]
Alex
Yes, and being able to in general recognize a pattern and be able to solve it visually.
- [23:50]
Peter
Imad your takeaway from this one?
- [23:52]
Imad
Yeah. I think even the authors of ARC AGI are like what on earth do we do now? I think I've seen some tweets from them saying that I think the next benchmarks are dollars so you have vending, bench and some of these other benchmarks where it's like how much money can they earn? You start to see trading benchmarks. You've got the tip off point now where these models go from very smart people you tap on the shoulder that can do individual tasks to being able to do real economic work. And we'll see many more benchmarks where the axis is literally dollars and that's the next year story I think.
- [24:26]
Peter
How far are we guys from the single entrepreneur with a set of agents building a billion dollar business? What do you think Imad?
- [24:38]
Imad
I'd be surprised if it wasn't within two years, probably next year. There are some amazing entrepreneurs out there and their only thing was how do we scale talent that listens to me and given they'll be good at using these again it's a year or two away at most.
- [24:52]
Alex
Alex I think it's now ish in the sense that right now as I remarked in past, you see these poor baby AGIs that have some agency sort of peddling altcoins on X. I think the first zero human or half human billion dollar startup is probably for better, for worse, probably unfortunately likeliest to be a baby AGI that that pumps an altcoin that becomes worth a billion dollars. And I think we could do way better than that as a civilization than pumping altcoins but I think that that's probably unfortunately where it's going to happen first.
- [25:33]
Salim
So I would have gone for porn rather than pumping altcoins because that's such an obvious place where people have. But in terms of the broader picture, you know there's a colleague of ours that we all know who launched 47 AI startups in a month a couple of months ago. So people are now kind of using this as a platform to really kind of change the game and just whole incubators are just launching AI startups. So I'm going to make a point that that's already in the works and it just has to see hit a market segment.
- [26:10]
Peter
So here's the question for you then Salim and, and Imai and Alex which is is this just going to accelerate the rich poor divide? Right in terms of the ability for now single individuals who, let's face it, who are 21, 22, 23 years old, just out of MIT, just out of Stanford, able to launch something, create extraordinary wealth at a pace that doesn't need other employees as part of their team.
- [26:37]
Salim
Well what's going to happen is you'll have that happen but the rich poor, the Ability to go from poor to rich has never been faster. And this is a really important point that I think you pointed out in abundance, Peter, that the richest people in the world used to exclusively have inherited their wealth and today the richest people exclusively have earned their wealth.
- [27:01]
Peter
Yeah.
- [27:01]
Salim
And that loop is going to just accelerate and now you're going to get 100 Vitalik and Sam Altmans, etc. Thousands of them just springing off companies. The bigger question I think is what happens to the broader economy when this happens.
- [27:14]
Peter
Yeah, economy 3.0. Alex, please.
- [27:18]
Alex
I think all of this like capital substituting for labor discussion misses an important point, which is these AI agents are arguably neither capital nor labor. They're, they're a new third category. And everyone whose hand wringing and I, I hear this a lot. Oh well, like how are we supposed to survive? Not everyone wants to become an entrepreneur. I, I would argue a near future where everyone survives by quote unquote becoming an entrepreneur misses the point entirely. It's not I, I would expect going to be the case that everyone becomes an entrepreneur. Everyone's going to become an investor. The entrepreneurs increasingly are going to be these AI agents that are identifying and solving valuable problems. And humans, the average human, average unaided biological meat body human is going to be able to invest in fleets in entire economies and indices of AI agents that are acting as the proximal entrepreneurs.
- [28:19]
Salim
This is the accelerando premise also.
- [28:21]
Alex
Exactly.
- [28:23]
Peter
Okay, another, another.
- [28:26]
Salim
I think he might say something about this because he's been studying the.
- [28:28]
Peter
I am, I'm going to go to him next. But this is, you know, this is accelerando as don't mean it but in on the hosting Saleem, you do a beautiful job as well. But this is the accelerando playbook for people to read. Imad over to you pal. You've been thinking about this very deeply.
- [28:44]
Imad
Yeah, Accelerando is a great book. Obviously my book the Lost Economy is also great. But the problem is that it's going to be very difficult to outplan and outcompete something like Claude5 when it comes to coming up with businesses. Unless you have skin in the game and you care, this is the main thing because they will try things dynamically and they'll just move on efficiently. Whereas you can apply these agents to tasks. And the key thing is in economic terms, it's all variable cost. Normally when you had a company, I had to go and hire someone. That's a pain to do. You know, I had to launch my own servers before the cloud. Now everything is variable cost and it's also cash flow positive because you typically pay the AI providers a month or two after when you have an enterprise contract and you charge people upfront. So you can have brand new economic models where you're taking information, organizing and adding value to people. And I think that does close this rich poor divide because you won't know where companies are coming from and the compliance and everything can be done automatically. Now we're actually seeing around some of these big AI startups entire things that will do your tax compliance, that will do your financial forecasting, that will automatically balance payments and things like that. And the stack is nearly ready again. It's about a year away before you can launch a business, probably in minutes with everything there.
- [30:06]
Salim
Can I mention something here? Of course, a plug for EXO here, which we stumbled across accidentally. Peter Reif quoted Jeremy Rifkin's book, the Zero Marginal Cost Society. Yeah, one of the about 3/4 of the way of writing the Exo book, we stumbled upon this economic kind of insight. When you're running a business, you worry about demand and supply and hopefully the cost of demand and the cost of supply. Hopefully you're on the right side of that equation. What the Internet did, it allowed us to drop the cost of demand exponentially. Online marketing, referral marketing, every company's trying for a viral loop. If you get there, your cost of acquisition goes to zero, which is an amazing thing. We saw an initial wave of YouTube, Facebook, et cetera, explode out of the gate with that. But exponential organizations and new models have done is drop the cost of supply exponentially. Right. So you think about Airbnb. The cost of adding room to their inventory is near zero. If you are hired, you have to build a hotel. And with the launch of Amazon Web Services, you could take computing off the balance sheet and make it a truly variable cost. To Iman's point, everything now becomes a variable cost. You have almost no capital expenditure. So now you take out the denominator, the market cap explodes. And for the first time you have a breed of organization that with low cost of demand, low cost of supply. And that's like a magical holy grail for business. And how we navigate that is going to be unbelievable over this next few years as this paradigm rolls out.
- [31:31]
Peter
Love it. All right, I'm going to jump into our next story. A lot still to cover. The ChatGPT introduces shopping research. It compares and searches and provides sort of recommended products that you're interested in. There's no question that this is coming out on Black Friday. They are moving this quickly. This uses ChatGPT Mini and their claim is that they're able to get accuracy of sort of best, best predictions at what you want to buy, up to 64%. So for me this is about replacing the search engine, the affiliate blogs, YouTube reviewers or Amazon's own recommendation engine. It's AI replacing the entire product research economy in this one at least from my perspective. Alex, I'm curious. The middleman's going to lose and the models are going to win.
- [32:26]
Alex
What's your thoughts critically? Not just generalist models. This is a specialist vertical agent. To the extent that there was some expectation that we'd end up in a singleton near future where there's one generalist agent that does everything, it appears like that's not the case, at least to the extent that OpenAI is, is a leading indicator. By my count, OpenAI has launched at least two major vertical specialist agents. They launched Research, Deep Research originally, which is general research, and they've launched Coding agent Codex and this is the third ish vertical agent by my count that they've launched other than the baseline model. And I think it's, it's really interesting. Where are the generalist models? I mean, yes, they're, they and other frontier labs are launching generalist models, but we're starting to see proliferation of specialist models. I think we're going to see many more. Wouldn't be surprised if we see more specialist post trained models for finance and for medicine and for management consulting, just picking off broad industry verticals one by one. In this case, this is going after consumer purchases.
- [33:36]
Peter
But of course I don't want to be calling on a particular model. I just want my AI to do this for me. Right?
- [33:44]
Salim
Yes.
- [33:44]
Alex
They're throwing a lot of resources at model routing and routers in general. So what, what you'll gain with this umbrella router I think will be a single pane of glass, a single UX surface that you talk to.
- [33:57]
Peter
Love that.
- [33:59]
Salim
I have a question.
- [33:59]
Peter
Yes, Lynn?
- [34:00]
Salim
How far are we from a, you know, Peter, you call it Jarvis, Right. A personalized layer that watches on your behalf is totally secure from a privacy perspective and a sovereignty perspective and navigates the external world for you. So if you've got a shopping you want to do or you need to buy something, or you need something that you may not even know you need, it's figuring out what even which of the agents to use and sorting it out. How far are we from that point.
- [34:28]
Alex
Now, now, I mean what you're describing Salim is I would argue like a computer use agent, a cua and Microsoft and other major companies and Frontier labs already have CUAs that are either about to be rolled out or have already been rolled out and are in beta stages to do just what you described for a desktop. Now, I think what Ironman has is a CUA on top of heads up display in hud, but that can come as well imminently.
- [34:57]
Peter
You see, what I find interesting here is the notion that we're about to give our eyes access to everything we read, everything we say and our intent, attention and intention. So as soon as we get our heads up glasses or augmented reality glasses that are able to not only have forward looking cameras, but actually cameras that look back at our pupils to determine what we're staring at. Right? Am I if I'm staring consistently at that beautiful lamp over Alex's shoulder and my AI says would you like a lamp like that? Or if I make some side comment to somebody else, it may purchase it for me and ship it to my house. So this ability to understand what we truly want by listening to our conversations or looking at where we look empowers this AI to become our, our magical shopping agent in many ways. Imad, how do you think about this?
- [35:55]
Imad
Yeah, so Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon recently said, I believe that their agent Rufus, which I doubt any of us have actually used, has 250 million users, a shopping agent, and they're estimating next year $10 billion in incremental sales from it. Given conversion statistics up to 60% higher, who would have thought? I think that the key thing is where is it? You know, like Bing and teams and other things had access to the user's eyeballs. The challenge for ChatGPT and OpenAI here is how do you become that first intentionality on the shopping experience and then what type of shopping is it? Because if it's toilet paper, who cares? You just want your AI agent to just do it or whatever automatically if it's super discretionary. Some people apparently enjoy shopping. Maybe not people like us, definitely my wife and kind of others. And then you have this middle bit like how many TVs do you really buy? You kind of know what TV you're going to get. So I think that the key thing is who is the AI next to you? You go to Amazon for a shopping experience, you use a Rufus, you Google search, you now have Google AI mode up there. The key thing I think going to Salim's point is who comes up with the agent that's the most charming and engaging and licenses Paul Bettany's voice for a Jarvis, because that can then disintermediate everything. And that's what the fight is on for now.
- [37:19]
Peter
Fascinating. All right, let's move on. Let's get to Google here. Google further encroaches Nvidia's turf with their new AI chip push. So Google has launched Ironwood tpu. It's their seventh generation AI chip with four times the performance of their previous version. And importantly, instead of selling hardware, Google is Now offering their TPUs as a cloud service. For example, Meta is running on them without purchasing the TPUs in the photo. Here we have Thomas Kurian, who's the CEO of Google Cloud, who has been crushing it. Google Cloud's been doing amazing and this puts them directly in competition with Nvidia. Alex, how do you think about it?
- [38:00]
Alex
There's been so much hand wringing Peter, over Nvidia's purported monopoly, or CUDA as a purported architectural monopoly. GPUs are now finally facing healthy competition. We see TPUs that are being both purchased according to this reporting as well as licensed and rented. We see obviously AMD with, with their own stack. We see Trainia and other Amazon chips and asics in general. And I think what all of this is turning into is finally accelerated compute is turning into a fungible commodity. It's not just a one supplier commodity, it is a multi supplier, very healthy, very heterogeneous ecosystem of fungible accelerated compute, which is exactly the sort of competitive ecosystem we want to find ourselves in.
- [38:51]
Peter
Ima, do you have a comment?
- [38:53]
Imad
Yeah. So we used thousands of TPUs a few years ago and from the V5s this now has 10 times the compute and the chip size, the single die. The interconnectedness of the Google chips is beyond anything you've seen. So you've gone from 64 in a unit now to I believe 4,000, no, 9,000. So what Google's really really good at is connecting lots of chips in one place and even multi data center. We had runs of up to 50,000 of their low energy chips. And what that's important for is context. So right now actually DRAM prices have gone up by about five times.
- [39:32]
Peter
Yeah.
- [39:33]
Imad
So if you want to get the DRAM for your gaming PC, it's gone up crazy. Google actually has the ability to use cheaper chips in massive scale to do large context window things. And that means that Gemini has a million 2 million input tokens from video to audio to others, whereas it's still limited on other GPUs and that's going to become even more of a difference going forward. Google originally built these chips to power Google search and now they've matured to a point where they can offer it to everyone, even hosted. So the cloud service has been available for a few years, but now they're exploring actually saying meta, you want it in your own data center. We can look at that and that's going to be super interesting going forward, particularly as RAM versus FLOPS becomes the key differentiator in terms of performance because context becomes almost everything because the models are already really fast.
- [40:25]
Peter
To be honest, just kudos to Google. I mean they continue to crush it week over week.
- [40:31]
Salim
Two plugs for us here. About three months ago we said two things. One is that Google would inevitably start to lease or sell the TPUs and here we are. And second, I think, I believe Imad it was you a few months ago on the pod that said invest in DRAM companies because DRAM is going to become the short supply, etc. Etc. So it seems that we're typically three months ahead of the game.
- [40:58]
Peter
Amazing. Amazing. Salim, that's great.
- [41:00]
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- [42:05]
Peter
All right, let's move on to the next story here. Amazon is spending up to 50 billion on AI infrastructure for the US government, so it's projecting it'll add 1.3 gigawatts of new data center capacity, beginning construction in 2026. So what's the story here? AWG? Do you want to take a shot?
- [42:25]
Alex
Yeah, the government clouds in many cases, including with AWS and otherwise. The government has its own availability zones and they're notoriously under supplied when it comes to accelerated compute with GPUs. And I think it's sort of Surprising given that the public sector is depending on how you count either half the economy or about a quarter of the U.S. economy that how COMPUTE starved or at least how GPU starved it's historically been. So I think this is a welcome investment, at least from my perspective. We want a vibrant public sector and vibrantly supplied with accelerated compute public sector. And I view this as a very positive step in that direction.
- [43:10]
Peter
Nice. Some of the stats here in this article. Aws is serving 11,000 government agencies and expecting to spend $125 billion in capital expenses by 20 end of 2025. Massive support right now has really just dominated.
- [43:26]
Salim
Is this essentially the federal government saying AWS is their cloud provider? That's a big deal if that's the case. Because that sort of seems, well, the.
- [43:34]
Alex
Government, US government has multiple cloud providers. This is pretty well publicized and reported on. But Amazon is an AWS key supplier to US government cloud resources.
- [43:45]
Peter
All right, I'm going to move us along here. Also another article, article on Amazon here that their data center tally tops 900. And we forget the fact that Amazon, you know, because of aws has been running a massive number of data centers around the world in over 50 countries. Launching now something in Indiana. It's 1200 acre data center and they're putting it up and getting it online faster than anybody else. Any particular thoughts on this one?
- [44:15]
Salim
I was struck by the fact that the Indiana one uses 2.2 gigawatts of energy. That's like an unbelievable amount of energy for a data center. That's a small country with power.
- [44:25]
Peter
Yeah.
- [44:25]
Alex
I would just maybe note we're tiling the earth with compute. That that is, that's what we're really talking about here. And this is just the opening act. And the Indiana Data center in particular is. We were speaking about Anthropic a few minutes ago. That Indiana Data center is the core computing facility for Anthropic, both for training and for inference. It's called Project Rainier. And it was farmland that was converted almost overnight. I mean it took about a year, but almost overnight into modern compute. This is 1939. When you see farmland in the Midwest being converted to compute resources. Yes, Alex.
- [45:06]
Salim
You can't imagine the number of comments about from people saying what does Alex have? Why is Alex against the moon? Last podcast.
- [45:17]
Alex
Obvious. The moon's had it coming for years.
- [45:20]
Peter
We have it. We have an AMA section that we're going to hit in a few minutes and that's one of the questions being asked. Don't we need to save the moon.
- [45:28]
Alex
It's lunacy, Salim. Lunacy.
- [45:32]
Salim
Touche, touche.
- [45:34]
Peter
Oh, goodness. All right, the third Amazon story here is Amazon opens $11 billion AI data center in rural Indiana. We've heard about this already. It's running 500,000 Trainium 2 chips. So how does Trainium chips compare to the TPUs compared to the Nvidia's GPUs? What do you guys think about this?
- [45:53]
Imad
So we used a bunch of them previously. Trainium 2 chips are equivalent to the Hoppers and they're good for inference, but they're much more difficult to do the large scale training runs on. But if you look at the breakdown now, like you have a core cluster for training and Anthropic just announced another big Nvidia deal. 10 billion with Microsoft and Nvidia. But for serving up of Claude, you always hit those capacity constraints. And Trainium is very solid for inference, similar to how previously Amazon went all in with Graviton, which was their CPU equivalent. And now that runs massive workloads for Netflix and everyone around the world. So I think that it's still one more generation until Amazon starts to catch up again. They're about a generation behind, but all those chips are going to be used, but probably for inference versus actual training.
- [46:44]
Salim
I have a crazy question here. So if your model is this closely bound to the chip, then if you did an inference model for any of these big Hyperscalers on Trainium vs TensorFlow, would you get a very different result because the chip is different?
- [47:04]
Imad
No. So you typically use a framework like OpenXLA which automatically translates it to different things once it's actually doing the inference. Because the process of inference is quite straightforward. Matrix multiplications, the process of training, the training can be really complicated in the way that things move back and forth, etc. And that's where you really need to have high resilience, high interconnect, whereas it's just a single chip or a group of 8, 16 chips as these are. They're just doing forward passes. It's a lot easier to code and to have speed on. But again, there are certain things, like Cerebras for example, that will give you much faster inference or a highly optimized Grace Blackwell, et cetera. It's much simpler than training.
- [47:51]
Alex
Yeah, maybe to expand on that. Back prop is the key problem. If we could do away with backpropagation at training time and have some sort of magical, like I remember Boltzmann machines were one sort of concept for how we could do away with global backpropagation if we could do away with backprop entirely, then one could imagine a near future where training looks a lot more like inference and training would be a lot more portable and a lot more parallelizable. But no one has yet in production figured out how to do away with back prop. So back.
- [48:20]
Salim
But aren't LLMs like fundamentally anchored to.
- [48:23]
Alex
Back propagation a training time? Training time. Not, not at inference time. Inference time is only forward propagation. So if we could figure out how.
- [48:31]
Salim
To train fundamental to the training.
- [48:35]
Alex
Back propagation is fundamental to training neural networks for now. But one, there are lots of paradigms, there's a whole cottage industry of of researchers trying to figure out ways to eliminate back propagation entirely. If we could eliminate back propagation, that would certainly eliminate a training time compute bottleneck.
- [48:53]
Peter
And by the way, just as a reminder, if you're listening and you've just heard a conversation that you think is is being spoken in Greek, then my suggestion is take the joint, join the club, take some, take some notes and go to your favorite. I mean have a conversation.
- [49:09]
Salim
Bruce Willis said in Die Hard, welcome to the party, pal.
- [49:13]
Peter
You know, I'm going to hit what you said earlier, Salim and Alex. I think the most significant thing about this is going from farmland, the seven buildings in one year, so big 2.2 gigawatts. I mean it is just the beginning and we're knocking down regulations and capital is flowing in. This is continuing. All right, I want to get to our ama. I want to hit a couple of stories on the science side real quick. We've been talking about launch costs. We've been talking about launching data centers, been launch talking about going to the moon. I want to give folks a little bit of overview for a moment about how quickly the cost of launch has been changing. So the space shuttle, which was originally supposed to cost about $50 million per launch and launch 50 times per year, ended up costing somewhere between a billion to $2 billion per launch and was launching anywhere from one to four times per year. Massively excite expensive $50,000 per kg, super high cost. Falcon 9 comes in, drops the cost at least 20 fold to $2,500 per kg by making the first stage fully reusable.
- [50:22]
Salim
Right.
- [50:23]
Peter
It's got nine Merlin engines. So you're recovering most of the engines on the Falcon 9. And then here comes Starship, which is reducing it again another 25 fold. $100 per kilogram. So you know, how many kilograms do each of us weigh and what's your cost to get into orbit? It becomes Affordable all of a sudden, right? So as starship becomes fully reusable. But. And then Elon comes and starts speaking about the work of Gerard K. O'. Neill. Jerry o' Neill at Princeton University had actually designed and built, at least on the ground here, what are called mass drivers, electromagnetic rings that accelerate a bucket to lunar escape velocity. And just for the cost of electricity, which by the way on the moon is relatively cheap because you got all the solar flux, you can accelerate something and shoot it towards the Earth into a, you know, Earth acquisition orbit. And we get here the price coming down not 100 fold, but a thousand fold to 10 cents a kilogram. So all of a sudden we gain access to all the resources on Earth. I like to remember, remind people that everything we hold of value on Earth, metals, energy, real estate, all these things are in near infinite quantities in space. So the, the nine year old space geek in me is like super excited of what's coming. Alex, you want to add anything?
- [51:47]
Alex
Yeah, I'll add that disassembling the solar system is going to require low cost to orbit. So this is great.
- [51:54]
Peter
Alex, you're going to start protest outside our front door.
- [51:57]
Imad
Dyson sphere in the way I like this is generated by nano banana as well.
- [52:02]
Alex
You can see the little thing.
- [52:04]
Peter
Yes, of course. All right.
- [52:06]
Salim
I mean basically this turns lunar launches and rocket launches into software, right? That same loop is now hitting this. And it's one thing of two things here. One is importantly, this is a log scale. So for folks watching, this is like ridiculous orders of magnitude per level. And that's unbelievable in a very physical environment. This is not some social media gaming Silicon Valley play. This is getting out of the physical gravity of the, of Earth's gravity well, this is nuts.
- [52:38]
Peter
This is energy, baby. You know, the one complaint I have about my conversations with Elon is he wants to get out of Earth's gravity well and then go directly back into Mars gravity well. You know, I'm far more interested in staying either in the, you know, Earth moon system, or better yet, build what some have called o' Neill colonies in which you are basis. I'm not disassembling the moon, Alex. I'm disassembling the asteroid belt. All those pesky asteroids deserve to be disassembled and used. And we'll use, I mean, sure, if.
- [53:10]
Alex
You, if you want to start with the asteroid belt, we can start there. That's fine. Training wheels for solar system disassembly. That's great.
- [53:17]
Peter
No, all right, listen, so disassemble asteroids and Build large rotating cylinders called o' Neill colonies where you live on the inside, you know, omega squared R. All right, one more story before we get to our Q and A, which is a story from a friend, Matt Angle, the CEO of Paradromics. So Paradromics has been one of the, you know, significant number of BCI companies, brain computer interface companies, and what's interesting about them, they've just completed their testing in sheep. Neuralink did their testing in macaque monkeys. Paradromics has done their testing in sheep and they're been approved to go into humans, which they will do in about about two months time, early January, February time frame. And I think what's most interesting is that they've been able to hit a speed about 10 times or actually 20 times faster. The neural link. So Neuralink's been at about 10 bits per second. The Paradromics implant is at 200 bits per second. So Salim, you and I have always talked about, is Ray's prediction on high bandwidth BCI by the early2030s, 2033 going to happen? So we're seeing all these companies moving forward here.
- [54:36]
Salim
A few years ago I was a hard no on that. Yeah. And now I'm like, oh shit, he's right again.
- [54:44]
Peter
Alex, what are your thoughts here, buddy?
- [54:46]
Alex
Yeah, I think we're seeing the BCI space become competitive, which is great. Yes, we should all get our Ray was right hats. Fine. But I think if you extrapolate this, one of my more fun thought experiments is when do we actually get our nanobots in the brain for high throughput oravec process type bci? And it's interesting, you can look at the cost of producing a gigaflop of compute versus the typical size of a gigaflop of compute. So when Apple introduced the imac originally first imac was like about a gigaflop, the first iPhone, first Apple watch. There's something magical about rolling out a form factor with about a gigaflop. You extrapolate out that curve, naively assuming exponential progress for a gigaflop, saying like gigaflop, that's the threshold at which we have useful general purpose computing, including for the purpose of maybe even substituting for human brain cells in the context of high throughput BCI and or very invasive uploading scenario, that curve you get 2045, which is again rayisright hat that's when you get about a gigaflop the size of a human brain cell. So I do think we're very much on trajectory for, for Ray is right style human mind uploading and, and invasive BCIs and non invasive. This isn't. This is a quasi invasive bci. I think we're also going to get like lots of.
- [56:17]
Salim
By the way, we have Ray coming on.
- [56:19]
Peter
Yeah. Ray is going to be joining the pod in early January to talk about his predictions for 2026. Also, we'll have Brett Adcock coming on the POD to talk about.
- [56:30]
Salim
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We can't ask Ray about 2026. We gotta ask more of 2066. I mean, it's too, it's, it's a waste of time.
- [56:37]
Alex
Too soon. Too soon.
- [56:40]
Peter
We'll ask him about all of it. We'll ask about all of it.
- [56:43]
Salim
We need a bigger podcast.
- [56:44]
Peter
Yeah, well, we'll get one by then. Hey, by the way, we crossed 400,000 subscribers, so thank you to all those who subscribe to push us over. Our next hill is 500,000. Then we're going for that million. Why? Because Jet and Dax want mess to get a million subscribers.
- [57:03]
Salim
This is, it's, you know, whatever chemistry we have here in terms of processing the news and making sense of it for others, it's seeming to really resonate up the number of calls and accolades and kind of feedback I'm getting.
- [57:17]
Peter
Thank you to.
- [57:17]
Salim
Sure. You're seeing the same thing.
- [57:18]
Peter
Thank you to our listeners for the feedback. We do read all of your comments and in fact we process the comments and pull out the questions. We're about to jump into that segment with an ama. But imod, what are your thoughts on bci?
- [57:34]
Imad
I think that this year has been a breakthrough year. Next year you'll see even bigger advances. We've both seen what else is going on behind the scenes, and I think it'll probably be one of the biggest investment areas in the next three years, actually. Because what could be better than solving the issues, but then augmenting humanity directly? I think, as Elon said, like, the only way you're going to be able to keep up with the AGIs is to plug in.
- [57:58]
Peter
Yeah.
- [57:58]
Imad
And so it's going to be a geostrategic importance as well as a financial importance.
- [58:02]
Salim
There's something fundamentally interesting about the brain because we still really have little idea how it works. But as long as we can interface with it effectively, that's very, very powerful. Like, our memories are already now outsourced to our smartphones. We don't really use our memory neurons in the same way we used to. And therefore we'll start doing that with more and more brain function. Capacity and releasing that load off that and putting using it to other things. So I'm really excited about what comes with this.
- [58:27]
Alex
Maybe just to add quickly to Salim's point, this is admittedly a bit of a hot take, but arguably we solved AGI, we solved superintelligence without actually having a good mechanistic understanding of natural intelligence. I think it's pretty likely we're going to solve brain computer interfaces and maybe even whole brain emulation without actually still having a detailed mechanistic understanding of the human brain. You can get pretty far with phenomenology.
- [58:56]
Salim
Alex, do you think we can use AI to solve the hard problem of consciousness, the whole Qualia thing?
- [59:01]
Alex
Yes.
- [59:03]
Salim
Okay, we want to have a conversation about that in terms of how that goes about, but let's take that offline.
- [59:08]
Peter
All right, two quick points here now, two quick points on this BCI number one, Amazing people playing in the space, right? Max Hodak, who is the co founder of Neuralink, now has a company called Science and go and check it out. They have a completely different approach to interfacing between the compute world and your neocortex. Brilliant. Basically using neural stem cells to grow nerve endings into the brain that wire together and fire together. And then Sam Altman invested in something called Merge Labs. It's still kind of under wraps, but we'll be hearing a lot more about Merge in, in the next few months. So I have one final question. Ray's prediction on high bandwidth BCI is really dependent on having nanotechnology. And the question is, where are we on that front? I'm still waiting to hear some good updates on the ability to assemble molecules atom by atom. Not with wet nanotechnology, which is biology, but assemblers like Eric Drexler spoke about. Alex, any thoughts there?
- [60:23]
Alex
I spent so many years chasing nano assemblers, I, I do think we're going to get to Drexlerian style. Although even Eric Drexler had sort of a personal evolution. We've chatted, I've chatted a number of times with him about this. From sort of pure Diamondoid style, quote unquote molecular assemblers to then there was the, the nanosystems phase where it's not about self replicating nanorobots, it's more about desktop factories that produce things. Here's what I think. I think by at the very latest, and this is in my mind like an ultra Conservative Outer Bound 2045, we get our Drexel area nano assemblers. I actually think we're far likelier to get them in some soft form. Maybe they'll look like DNA origami, maybe it'll look like AI solving the Feynman grand challenge, which includes both computational and nanorobotic challenges. I think we're likely to get some AI solution to Drexlerian early style, Drexlerian nanotech in the next 10 years. I don't think it's going to take that long.
- [61:24]
Salim
But at the same time, there's our 2035 date.
- [61:27]
Alex
Yeah, like everything gets solved in the next 10 years.
- [61:30]
Imad
I don't think you need to have that high bandwidth, to be honest. Like, we did work at stability on Mind's Eye, where we reconstructed images people saw from MRIs, which is incredibly low bandwidth. If you look at the forward backward diffusion pass processes, what you're likely to have is before you get to the full bandwidth, you'll have partial bandwidth that can effectively reconstruct brain processes with very little information. And then you'll just run diffusion models to do that in a similar way to actually Sunday robotics and others have done things going forward.
- [62:00]
Salim
All right, I think there was a project. Hey, I got to throw this out. There's a project out of Japan called called Dream Catcher. And what they were doing is having you sleep in an MRI machine and they're storing the images coming off your optical nerve and then replaying your dreams back to you the next day, which was hugely unnerving. You know, very quickly on this one.
- [62:19]
Alex
Peter, you get, with fmri, you get approximately a million voxels per second just streaming off. You can do high bandwidth decoding of thought with a million voxels per second.
- [62:29]
Peter
I just don't have my. I just don't have my portable FMRI machine to carry around in my.
- [62:34]
Salim
Yeah, but you, those are getting smaller.
- [62:36]
Alex
You will have one.
- [62:38]
Salim
By the way, there is a team that I've been talking to that seems to have a credible, credible path for molecular manufacturing. So you're happy to connect them with.
- [62:48]
Peter
I, I can't, I can't wait. All right, let's get into some of our questions from our subscribers here. Let's jump in. The first one is from David Bowman, 6224. David says I'd like to hear AWG tackle EMODs thousand day prediction. So what does AWG think of IMOD's AGI in a thousand day prediction? So IMOD, do you want to state your prediction first and then love to hear Alex's commentary?
- [63:14]
Imad
Yeah, I was just saying that I think that most human economic work is negative value within 1,000 days. Well, 900 days now left at most. And not that it will replace all the jobs, but definitely it'll be there for just any job that can be done on the other side of a keyboard or mouse. So that's a weaker version of AGI than in some cases.
- [63:34]
Peter
Alex?
- [63:35]
Alex
Yeah, I think the central challenge, as always, is defining what we mean with AGI. I think if AGI means generality, I think we've had AGI since at the very latest summer 2020, when GPT3 and language models are few shot learners. Paper came out. If AGI means economically some sort of economic parallel with humanity. Yeah, I agree that either it is the case Schumpeter style that we already have some sort of economic generality. For example, as parameterized by OpenAI's GDP VAL benchmark. If you believe that benchmark economically, General AI is is either already here or imminent, like the next few months. Or if you have some other preferred benchmark for human economic output, it's probably imminent, if not already here.
- [64:29]
Peter
All right, let's go to the next question from John.
- [64:31]
Salim
Insert my standard rant about AGI.
- [64:34]
Peter
Okay, so, so, so incorporated by reference, so acknowledged.
- [64:38]
Salim
Thank you.
- [64:39]
Peter
So at Josh S5937 says, what is the future of land ownership in a future without scarcity? Land is finite. Will it remain the final scarce resource? So Josh, it's a good question. The way I answer it is two different ways. Number one, we're going to be spending a lot of time in the virtual world and there you'll be able to gain access to unique virtual real estate. The second is you're thinking with a very Earth centric point of view. There's the moon, there's Mars, there are massive o' Neill colonies built out of the asteroids. And we're going to start to see humanity migrate outside the Earth. Having said that, yes, Central park west apartments are still going to be scarce.
- [65:25]
Salim
Deeply disagree. I want to rant on this.
- [65:27]
Peter
Okay, go for it, Salim.
- [65:29]
Salim
So I did some fact checking here. It turns out there's about 16 billion acres of habitable land on Earth. That's about 2 acres per person. Okay, that's a pretty decent number. And that's habitable. Let's note that passenger drones are going to make difficult to reach areas very habitable. So that goes up to about 20 billion to 22 billion areas of habitable land. So technology will expand the amount of habitable and reachable land. Still, if we get to about 10 billion, we'll peak at about 10 billion population by 2050. Before we start dropping off still about 2 acres per person, which is a pretty decent number. And all of the technology is allowing us to get reach that land more easily, make that more land more usable. And if you fly across India, the most populous country in the world, it's mostly empty.
- [66:21]
Peter
Yeah, right.
- [66:22]
Salim
You see populations at the edge of the, on the coast of the middle is kind of. There's nothing there. Same with Africa, same with the US you fly across the US there's nobody there in the middle and I'm Canadian, there's nobody in Canada. So there's a lot of land that we can use in technology, makes it much more accessible. Temperature, H vac, heating, cooling. The only constraint is, is energy and compute as Alex would say.
- [66:46]
Peter
Amazing. That's a great point. Good.
- [66:48]
Imad
I think just give a practical example to listeners. Waymo is now basically legal across San Francisco.
- [66:54]
Salim
Right.
- [66:55]
Imad
And so that could completely just change where people live because you can just get into and it will just take you and your kids anywhere. The prediction from.
- [67:04]
Salim
Sorry, just to add to that, the prediction for Tesla is about 30 cents a mile to get somewhere on the robotaxi, that's like near zero compared to. It's a 10x drop from where we are now, Alex.
- [67:15]
Alex
And yeah, and maybe, maybe to just add a bit of nuance to this, I think in the short to medium term land is, is becoming post scarce. As you say, we can build up, we can build down, we can builds on other planets. Important use case that hasn't been touched on. We're going to have so many humans, I think uploaded in one form or another into the cloud. The cloud doesn't have the same concept of land. So I think short to medium term land is post scarce. In the long term, I think the scarcity of land depends on whether AI economies have a better use for land than we do. If we do find ourselves taking apart the solar system, land could actually become really scarce in the end.
- [67:57]
Peter
Yeah. By the way, let's just talk one second about uploading. I mean when do you actually believe we're going to start to see human uploads to the point where you, Alex, say okay, upload me. And there's this speaker that comes over, you know this, this voice comes over, says hey Alex, I've been uploaded, you can off yourself now, we don't need your biological body anymore. I'm in the.
- [68:20]
Alex
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I, I think, I think we've already seen non invasive uploading in the form of large language models. Large language models are arguably sort of an upload of an ensemble of all of humanity. Yeah. In terms of like individual uploading, that's non invasive. I think we're either there already in the form, you know, IMAD touched earlier on or alluded to, like constructing foundation models from FMRI scans. There are a number of groups that are training foundation models from FMRI scans. Arguably those are like low fidelity facsimiles, but non invasive of human minds. I think we're.
- [68:59]
Salim
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on a second. There are people training LLMs on FMRI scans?
- [69:06]
Alex
Correct. A number of groups now, including meta, by the way, really well financed, really talented groups.
- [69:11]
Salim
Holy crap.
- [69:12]
Peter
Okay, so.
- [69:13]
Alex
So the real idea of loading the implication is. So LLMs are trained to reproduce sort of behavior of humans like fat biological meat. Fingers tapping keys on a keyboard, uploading text to the Internet. But with foundation models trained off of FMRI data, like a million voxels order of magnitude per second. You can imagine pre training a foundation model that basically encapsulates human thought. Certainly for human thought decoding purposes. You get that.
- [69:47]
Salim
And FMRis can track a single neuron firing in real time.
- [69:52]
Alex
No, FMRIs are both. They're spatially low resolution, temporally low resolution. You get like 1 to 2 second temporal resolution, approximately 1 millimeter cubic spatial resolution at best, but nonetheless turns out to be enough for thought decoding.
- [70:07]
Peter
So Alex, the concept around a true upload is can I actually map your connectome? Can I map for a human roughly not only the hundred billion neurons, but the 100 trillion synaptic connections typically done by slicing the brain into ever thinner slices and using AI to map those interconnections there. It's a destructive process. Do you think we're going to have.
- [70:32]
Alex
Really invasive right now?
- [70:33]
Peter
Yes, very invasive, yeah.
- [70:36]
Salim
Here's my brain. Slice it into a thousand pieces.
- [70:39]
Alex
Yeah, I think we're going to have billion pieces, so I think we're going to have reference non human organisms. So. So Drosophila, major progress already. Flies, fruit flies done. Mice bound to be done. Like there, there have been like a few one to three cubic millimeters of. Of mouse brain upload or scanned. And in some form or another, to the extent that the connectome is a proxy for uploading done, I think mice overall going to be done shortly.
- [71:07]
Peter
Lobsters next, right?
- [71:09]
Alex
Lobsters are easier. Interestingly, mice are harder. I think we're going to see the full human high res connectome probably in the next five years.
- [71:19]
Salim
Alex, aren't you an advisor to Nectome?
- [71:22]
Alex
I'm not a formal advisor to Nectome. I am an advisor to a company, EON Systems that is working on solving human whole brain emulation and uploading.
- [71:30]
Peter
All right, I'm going to move us forward here onto our next AMA question here and then I want to close out with what are you most thankful for in 2025? So start thinking about that in background. So at Success Coach Cody writes how do we prevent a world where millions fall into poverty before AI driven abundance arrives? What are the real solutions for people who may lose their jobs long before long term benefits of AI kick in? @jnkind5 asks a similar question. How often you often say I will lift up people at the bottom. How exactly will that happen for those who can't meet basic needs like food, health care today? You know we hit on this about two pods ago where there's concerns that we saw this out of the data from the FII9 event. Concerns about, about poverty, about losing jobs, about being able to support your cost of living. Salim, you want to jump on on this one?
- [72:36]
Salim
Wow. Ton of. There's about 20 questions buried in each of these here. I think the we are in a difficult kind of 10 year period when we transition all of our world systems from scarcity to abundance, right? Consider the fact that almost every business in the world is focused on scarcity for the last 10,000 years. If you didn't have scarcity, you kind of didn't have a business. We're moving now to abundance models and actually exponential organizations find business models around abundance which is the starting point of that transition. But for society at large, we need to move to some model whether it's UBI or UBS being Universal Basic Services, right? Similar type of concept where you just give basic capability and make that available to everybody. Solve the bottom two layers of Maslow's hierarchy. And the trick for UBI by the way, for people that are naysayers, is if you can find the balance where people are can survive but not be happy, you still have a very thriving economy, entrepreneurship explodes in that model, etc. Etc. So we're not far away. The problem is governments and getting governments to move from a union, labor, job, taxation model to that is such a big leap. We don't have confidence in governments doing that. And the problem with government we have all over the world is they like they want to be needed. They ran a two year UBI in Manitoba in the 70s and it was so successful at some point the government realized we're not even needed here and they canceled the program so that it could be needed. That's the immune system problem in government that has to be solved. Just a quick thing for all the folks that emailed me saying hey, how do I find out about that? I'm putting some stuff together, we'll send it out shortly to everybody. So I tend to be in the optimistic side. Technology uplifts people. At the bottom people are leveraging technology to make more and more money. In the short term we've got lots of data around that and as we get technology democratized and demonetized to a broader population, then everybody lifts up. And you, Peter, you and I talk, all of us talk all the time. But forget the richest people. If you can lift the bottom, that's the key. And the bottom is being lifted very, very appreciably. You just don't see it that it is being.
- [74:48]
Peter
People compare themselves against their, you know, the Kardashians or whomever else. Imad, you've been doing incredible work here with intelligent Internet on this specific problem. Could you sort of lay that out and give us your thoughts here?
- [75:03]
Imad
Yeah, I think as with many things in human life, this is a coordination problem. Right Again we have enough resource, 2 acres per person, you know, food, healthcare, et cetera to coordinate everyone. But we've always lacked the capability to do so because our systems are dumb. So we have projects like SAGE which we launched at FII to do top down policy. And really the way that I've been thinking about it more is like AI social scientists, we talk a lot about AI scientists for biology, for chemistry, for quantum AI social scientists to figure out economics, politics, implementation are going to be so huge. That's basically our SAGE project. On the other side I think you need to have universal AI given to everyone. A Jarvis that's looking out for people to help them navigate on an individual basis because that's how they get access to food, health care, etc. The reason they don't now is because people are invisible, particularly the poorest of people. But the pace at which this is going to come over the next few years is going to be so intense that governments need to take a big step forward and say A we need to use AI to coordinate this, B we need to get AI to the people and C we need to look at historical counterparts. And I think probably you need to look at the 1933 New Deal that came out of the Great Depression and others because you might see entire industries disappear within a matter of days. Months like Grok 4.1 fast just scored like 95% on Tao bench the customer service benchmark and it's 50 cents per million words better than any human. That was just no customer service jobs within two years. Again, it takes a little while, but it's one way. So coordinate with AI, give everyone universal AI and then layer services and coordination on top of that.
- [76:46]
Peter
You know, you're gonna, you're gonna appear as the headline in some news article. Now Imad, if you remember, you said no more coding in a year like headlines across India.
- [76:55]
Salim
I think the point that Imad makes, that's really the really killer point that Iman makes right there is this is one way we're not going back. Yes, we have to face the future that's coming and let's get real about it. Let's get data driven and evidentiary around it and just frickin make it happen. Because it's not going to, you know, left to itself. We've got these two futures. A Mad Max future or a Star Trek future. Right. And you can see our politicians pulling us straight to Mad Max. We, we have the opportunity with technology to pull us in that direction. This is what this community is about. This is what we have to do.
- [77:29]
Peter
Alex, closing thought on this one.
- [77:31]
Alex
Yeah. Closing thought is, I think the central policy challenge is growing the overall economy much faster than the value of conventional human labor is destroyed or obsoleted by AI. So I'm primarily focused on ensuring that we can achieve radical macroeconomic growth. If we can do that, then making sure that ubi, UBS or UBE Universal Basic Equity or some, some other variant thereof, some door number four. I think those all become more a matter of policy decisions. But it's relatively easy to distribute abundance if we have abundance.
- [78:06]
Peter
Yeah. All right, we're going to close out on a question aimed at you, Alex.
- [78:10]
Salim
This is, I'm going to coin a phrase here.
- [78:12]
Peter
Yes.
- [78:12]
Salim
Just occurred to me. Uba, Universal Basic Abundance. There you go, Peter.
- [78:16]
Peter
Okay, I love it.
- [78:19]
Salim
And then that gives you abundance of very interesting things underneath that, that solve for all the others.
- [78:25]
Peter
Love that. All right, the final ama. And please, if you're listening today and you say I've got a question, put it in the, in the, in the chat on this particular episode of Moonshots and we'll look for it. And if it's intriguing enough, love to ask it to the moonshot mate. So @xfinx96 asks, hey Alex, the moon and Jupiter should be off limits to mining, don't they stabilize our environment. What are you trying to do, Alex? Start a, start a report we're having.
- [78:58]
Alex
In all These worlds are yours. Except Europa. Attempt no landings. Their moment. I think if you've read 2010 by others. E. Clark no. So many thoughts. First is no, we don't need to stop mining the moon and Jupiter to stabilize our environment. Jupiter does at the moment play an important role in protecting the inner solar system from Oort cloud bodies and other objects from the outer solar system. The moon does play, for the moment, an important role in the tides and other sort of atmospheric and romantic love.
- [79:34]
Salim
For the moment.
- [79:35]
Alex
For the moment is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. So once we have the ability, which I think seems likely, we will increasingly have to disassemble the moon and disassemble Jupiter. And assuming the solar system does go in that route, we will also have the ability to protect the inner solar system from variety of asteroidal bodies and to. To recreate the tides artificially.
- [79:57]
Peter
I.
- [79:58]
Salim
My favorite quote from you Alex, is Saturn has had it coming for a long time. That's got to be an all time Alex quote. It's true.
- [80:05]
Peter
Oh goodness. All right, well, asteroids represent a significant amount of mass and I think they can handle our needs for at least a decade or two. So. All right, if you like that. One thing I want to close out with a question here. What are you guys grateful for having happened in 2025? As a closing gratitude, I'll kick it off. I'm super excited that humanoid robots have made so much progress and they're a real. The capital is being invested, the manufacturing plants are being invested and my own version of data or C3POs on its way. Alex, how about you?
- [80:46]
Alex
So many things, but I'll pick one. I'm grateful that math is credibly and defensively being solved by a. That that is in my mind such a canary that this is going to work. The singularity is, is in progress. We're going to solve all of the grand challenges to math, science, engineering and medicine over the next few years. And math is just the tip of the iceberg. It's very exciting.
- [81:11]
Peter
Amazing.
- [81:12]
Salim
Salim, again, a million things. I think three things pop to mind. One is I'm unbelievably grateful for this podcast. Peter, thank you for pulling together.
- [81:22]
Peter
I am too.
- [81:23]
Salim
And thank you Dave, a lot at this moment and than.
- [81:25]
Peter
Thank you. Just, just let's just say it real quick. To, to Nick, to Nick Singh, to. To Dana, to Gianluca who helped this really be excellent. So thank you guys for that.
- [81:35]
Salim
I. I think this is like this radically optimistic, realistic view of the future is the most important kind of tonic for what's happening out in the world today. And the.
- [81:47]
Alex
The.
- [81:48]
Salim
This kind of palpable relief from all the listeners going, well, thank God. There's something I look forward to every week or two. That's number one. Number two, I think I'm kind of starting to just wallow in gratitude on a near permanent basis to just thinking about what the. The incredible future that is appearing in front of us, driven by that inner loop that Alex talks about. I'm still a fan of the moon for the moment, so let's, let's. We don't need.
- [82:16]
Alex
Enjoy it while it lasts.
- [82:20]
Salim
I think the third. The third would be. My exo ecosystem is kind of finally gelling in a really powerful way. It's been like 10 years building this ecosystem. If I ever say in the future I want to build an ecosystem, please, somebody get a baseball bat. Take me behind a witch head. It's unbelievably difficult, but it's actually now coming together and in a very, very powerful way. There's a whole bunch of announcements that we have. And finally I'll do a plug. We're doing this meeting of Life session where I will claim to answer why we are alive and how we live effectively. And so the link will be in the show notes for everybody.
- [82:54]
Peter
Tickets are selling fast for that nice imod. Would you come out on your gratitudes?
- [82:59]
Imad
Yeah, it's a nice small one. Sleem. Small question you're answering. I think that there's two.
- [83:05]
Salim
I go for niche projects. Yeah.
- [83:07]
Imad
I think there's two big things. One is, I think we've had the technological breakthroughs and infrastructure breakthroughs to be able to build the AI social scientists to improve our infrastructure and finally coordinate as a species. And that is a huge thing that we'll start seeing rolling out and announced next year as well. And number two, I think minus the hard light, we have all of the tools we need now for the holodeck.
- [83:30]
Peter
Awesome.
- [83:31]
Imad
We just got to put that together.
- [83:32]
Peter
I'm going to add one final gratitude to close us out here, which is the incredible progress being made on reaching longevity escape velocity. Right. The. The focus by all the hyperscalers and. And model builders on how do we understand how to add decades of health into our lives. As Dario says, how do we double the human lifespan the next five to 10 years? That gets me jazzed. You know why? Because I'm excited to see the Star Trek future coming our way. We're going to close out. If you're listening to this versus watching it go to YouTube to watch this incredible outro. Music and video by John Novotny.
- [84:14]
Salim
John Again.
- [84:15]
Peter
John. Again. You're gonna see all of your favorite moonshot mates as Star Trek characters. Here, of course, is the opening scene with AWG as a Vulcan. All right.
- [84:27]
Alex
As a blonde Vulcan with a ponytail.
- [84:30]
Peter
Blind Vulcan with a ponytail. All right, let's check it out. And Salim, once again, you look hot here, buddy. You look hot. All right, enjoy.
- [84:44]
Alex
Winds call.
- [84:48]
Salim
The map is torn to.
- [84:49]
Alex
Pieces but we're setting out regardless of it all Hack your courage tight we're given everything as long as I get a phaser for every path turns epic when you're chasing moonsh before Stick with secrets and mountain sharp and tall.
- [85:20]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
We.
- [85:21]
Alex
Leave the hidden chasms and we never fear the fall.
- [85:28]
Peter
The storm may arise.
- [85:29]
Alex
To test us but we'll meet it on the spot and the ones who take moonshot.
- [85:46]
Peter
That was epic. I just don't like wearing a red shirt on some of those planets. Yes.
- [85:52]
Salim
If I can be likened to Picard in any way, I'm good.
- [85:57]
Peter
And Alex, of course, you're the science officer on all the missions here, obviously. Everybody, I wish you an incredible Thanksgiving holiday. To all our listeners. To my moonshot mates. Dave, we missed you on this episode. Looking forward to seeing you recording again early next week. A lot going on and we're going to be spending some time with Mustafa Suleiman as well, the CEO of Microsoft AI. And we'll be doing a podcast with him. A lot of incredible things. Get ready. 2026 is going to rock the planet. Hopefully not physically, but definitely emotionally and intellectually.
- [86:34]
Salim
Let's all wallow in gratitude the next few days.
- [86:37]
Peter
Yeah, beautiful. And stuffing. And turkey. All right, take care, everybody.
- [86:43]
Salim
Take care, folks.
- [86:45]
Peter
Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI and quantum computing to transport energy, longevity, and more. There's no fluff, only the most important stuff that matters that impacts our lives, our companies, and our careers. If you want me to share these metatrends with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short 2 minute read via email. And if you want to discover the most important meta trends ten years before anyone else, this report's for you. Readers include founders and CEO CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive tech. It's not for you. If you don't want to be informed about what's coming, why it matters and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dashmandis.com metatrends to gain access to the trends 10 years before anyone else. Alright, now back to this episode. So you're about to make a trade.
- [87:55]
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Peter
We could buy a house in Tulum, get optioning those options. We could lose everything. Or let's do a little research, get your head in the trade and make the investment decision that's right for you.
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