← Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
Moonshots with Peter Diamandis
LinkedIn Co-Founder Opens Up on AI Job Loss w/ Reid Hoffman, Dave, Salim, and AWG | EP #194
01:44:29
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- [00:00]
A
Entry level job loss. You made some pretty, I think, sharp comments on this conversation.
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B
How do you think about this job transformations? They are coming. Tech entrepreneur and co founder of LinkedIn, co founder of Inflection AI, a partner at Greylock.
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A
His new book is Super Agency. What could possibly go right with our AI future?
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B
Please welcome Reid Hoffman. It is definitely the case that I will lead to a lot of job transformation, in some cases flat out job loss. But also I think we will adapt perfectly fine.
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A
The career of the future is entrepreneurship. It is how do you use these tools to create value in the world?
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C
The entry level job of two years from now will be very different than the entry level job today.
- [00:42]
D
I think if you look at the industrial revolution, you know, the net effect is always more job creation in the long run. Problem is the timeline is so short, it's happening much faster than just the raw job displacement you would expect.
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B
We all need to think much more entrepreneurially and here are some lessons of entrepreneurship and here's how to think about them. Now that's a moonshot.
- [01:04]
E
Ladies and gentlemen.
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A
Everybody. Welcome to another episode of WTF just happened in tech. This is the news that's important for you to learn if you want to change and transform your life, your company, your industry. This is the news that's about hopefully an optimistic vision of the future. Not about sort of dystopian views. It's about hopefully real views, things that you can use. I'm here today with our moonshot mates, Dave Blunden, Alex Wiesner, Gross and Saleem Ismail. And a special guest, a friend now for, I don't know, probably at least 20 plus years, Reid Hoffman. You know, Reid, as the creator of LinkedIn, many companies on the board of Microsoft outspoken about this tech field. And I'm excited to get Reid's input on a lot of the topics we're going to be discussing today. So without any further ado, first off, Salim, just back from India. I missed you in the last two versions of this podcast and the question is, did you solve the trade issues and didn't you bring me back? My iPhone 17 did not bring, I.
- [02:07]
C
Brought back some parts. So if you want to assemble it yourself, you can because you know that's, that's somewhat flaky over there sometimes. The two things that were, blew my mind was the attitude of everybody in India was literally middle finger to the usa. And I think this is a big challenge because if India and the us, India and China start trading, the rest of the world kind of goes to hell and so it's. It's kind of a big deal. But what I found most incredible was the unbelievable optimism for AI and the use cases that are exploding there out of the gate. And I think that's amazingly exciting, and.
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A
We'Ll get to that in a little bit. Dave, just saw you up at Stanford. We interviewed the CEO of Replit along with Salim. That was a fun conversation.
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D
Yeah, yeah, it was fantastic. I'm still here, actually.
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C
150 million repositories. Incredible.
- [03:02]
D
Yeah, yeah, no, the code's piling up like crazy. Well, that'll come out soon. But Peter used it on his plane too, so it shows you.
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A
Yeah, it was great. It was so fun. I literally downloaded Replit. I had Starlink on the dash of my SR22 and I was flying connected. And I vibe coded a. What was it? A mindset app on the way up there. It was great. Tweeted it out. All right, let's drop in on the subject of jobs and education. And Reid, I want to go to you first. Our common friend Eric Binholfsson published a paper recently with these charts looking at entry level job loss down 16% in AI exposed fields. And you made some pretty, I think, sharp comments on this conversation. How do you think about this?
- [03:52]
B
Well, a couple things. So it is definitely the case that, you know, that AI will lead to a lot of different job transformation in some cases, you know, kind of, you know, flat out job loss. I mean, a simple heuristic that I sometimes use, it's a partial heuristic, is if the human being's trying to do a job by following a script that an AI can follow better customer service, et cetera, that will happen. But obviously some of the issues here are around kind of like questions of not just customer service, but also like software engineering. Now, that being said, even with a kind of a downbeat in possible initial software engineering job hires, my belief is that that is only a transformation issue partially. I actually think, if anything, the thinking about how you do software and software engineering is actually going to get a lot more widespread in problem solving because, you know, part of what AI is going to lead to is a software copilot for all of us, that, that anything that you're doing that involves thinking, anything that you're involved doing, communication language, will also involve, as it were, custom software that you'll be doing. And so I think that there's still nearly infinite, you know, hiring demand for software engineers. So it's a little bit of a complicated thing. Eric is awesome, and this work is awesome. And so it's, but it's, you know, kind of job transformations, they are coming.
- [05:32]
A
Yeah. You know, you look at this first chart here which looks at job losses, if you would, in marketing and sales. And you can see the ChatGPT inflection point in 2022 and the drop off that blue line for those of you watching this on YouTube is in fact early career job hunters. And one of the biggest concerns I've got, and Salim, you can speak to this, just having come back from India is getting into a Arab Spring like situation where you've got a large population of youthful individuals who are on the male side, testosterone driven without investing their time and energy to do something meaningful, to create a career, to be able to get in a position to have a family. A lot of frustration. And it could seed, you know, I'm usually the massive optimist, but could seed the, you know, a civil unrest. Thoughts on that, Salim?
- [06:29]
C
So I just came back from India and what they were seeing was initial signal is that entry level software jobs are down about 20 to 25%, which is quite a big number there. And there are hordes of Indian engineers coming out of the workplace. Now the, there is a little concern around the social implications of that. My guidance to them was, hey, go become entrepreneurs. I mean this is like literally the best time. Find a problem that you think needs to be solved and go transform yourself. And I think it'll force, it'll be a forcing function. On the positive side.
- [07:05]
A
Yeah. Dave, thoughts?
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D
Well, I completely agree with what Reid was saying. I think if you look at the industrial revolution, the net effect is always more job creation in the long run. So he's completely right. The problem is the timeline is so short. I think a lot of people didn't anticipate that employers like salesforce.com would cut off hiring in anticipation of AI that'll be in the market a few months in the future. And so it's happening much faster than just the raw job displacement you would expect. And so it's really disproportionate on new graduates. So like Salim was saying, it's the perfect time to start a company. But you know, historically very few people graduating from college start companies. So the net effect, what I'm hoping happens is, you know, we, we've been trying to meet with a governor in Massachusetts and talk about this and she's super competitive, but her trying to get the legislature and people to move, it's like pulling teeth. But when you have voters that don't have jobs, then that creates some acceleration and some motion. So I'm kind of hoping that the net effect of that is that people react a lot more quickly, especially political people.
- [08:11]
A
Yeah, Reid, I want to read some of the comments you made and you posted on X. You said more interesting puzzle is the drop in junior engineering roles. Right. And then you said people who understand computation will become more essential. Can you speak to both of those?
- [08:29]
B
Yeah, that was a little bit of what I was saying earlier, which is if we see anything in the last decades, is that actually, in fact the amplification of how computation affects all aspects of human society, including human work, are essentially just going up. And it's not just mobile, not just Internet. And obviously AI is the kind of the exponential acceleration in this. And I think that the question is still thinking about, like, how do we put problems computation now to make that a little bit more tangible for people. Think about how much as you begin to get exposed to the current AI models, how much your thinking pattern changes to more of a how do I start with the right kind of prompt to accelerate my analysis as a problem, My thinking of this problem, the research analysis, et cetera, et cetera. And so almost like when I'm thinking about a new creative project, a new research question in terms of like, oh, how might one, you know, do this business problem, like a go to market or something else is I think about like, how do I put it in terms of a more detailed prompt? Now, part of the reason that's computational thinking is that one of the things that relatively few people do that should do is, is. Is most of my prompts are involved doing the deep thinking or deep research prompts. But my first prompt is give me the deep research prompt that will, you know, solve these kind or target these kinds of things. And then so I write in a paragraph or speak in a paragraph, and then it comes back with a page and a half. Then I edit it and then I submit it, and that's the prompt that I'm beginning to drive and work off of. And that's an, that's. That's an instance of how computational thinking we're going. And I think this is going to become. You no longer have individual contributors in companies, et cetera, that we all deploy with a suite of agents. And this is just that lens into that.
- [10:30]
A
I love that. I did a little research, got some numbers I want to share with you, Reid, and also get Alex's point of view on this. So today there's 150 million users on GitHub as of May of this year, which is extraordinary. And if you look at the growth in the number of software engineers, number of programmers since 2022, it's up 50%. So 50% more programmers in the world. At the same time, what we've seen is not a decrease in salary. In other words, it's not an over glut where competition is bringing down salary. It's actually been a 24% increase in salaries over a five year period. And so what does that tell us that increasing productivity, increasing demand.
- [11:16]
B
So look, I do think, I tend to, look, I would, I would, I would tend to want to think increasing productivity. I do think that this is very early days in how all this is working and I tend to not try to get distracted over much by numbers this, this month or this quarter that have technological underpinnings. In terms of the theory of what's going on now, I can tell from my own work that I know that we have increasing productivity because I know what used to take me a couple hours sometimes now takes me 10 minutes or 15 minutes in terms of getting into something. And so once you know that, you know that whatever the, you know, what was the old line on computers and the economy, the computers are everywhere except in the numbers. Like even if you said, hey, well, I don't have a GDP number, it's like, well, but I know those productivity increases in this case. And so it's, so that's the reason why I'm a little cautious about over reading into specific numbers. And I tend to more generalize from what I can actually see in kind of, as it were, workflows, not just my own, but other people I talk to and seeing what happening at companies and you know, how most startups these days are, you know, completely AI native in terms of how they're operating and so they're finding great accelerations in it, you know, that kind of thing.
- [12:41]
A
Alex, how do you think about this? Alex?
- [12:44]
E
I think we're, we're in the earliest innings of AI automating the service economy. I think it's very instructive if you read Eric's paper, that these results were most striking in fields where AI was automating rather than augmenting human labor. So I think this is completely consistent with, call it the hypothesis that humans and machines are in the not too distant future going to merge symbiotically. And this is just sort of small potatoes. This is the, the earliest possible trickle of what's ultimately going to turn into a flood, to Reid's point, of productivity gains and giving humanity the opportunity to chase much more ambitious problems than what here are being characterized as entry level jobs. I think with the benefit of hindsight, 10, 20 years from now, we'll look back and, and we'll be horrified that so much of the economy was bound in, in what are here being characterized as entry level jobs rather than more ambitious, more fulfilling endeavors.
- [13:46]
A
Dave, you were going to jump in.
- [13:48]
D
I was wondering if. Reed, you know, your productivity as you mentioned is way up. Mine is way up. But I could use a lot more agents than I have access to. I was wondering as a board member of Microsoft if you get like 20 or 40 dedicated GPUs and special access and because God knows you can use them like as soon as you're hooked, you're hooked. And then you just want more and more and more.
- [14:10]
B
I don't. That's a good idea. I should ask.
- [14:14]
D
For me too.
- [14:15]
B
Yes. I simply do the max subscription across all of them and frequently when I'm doing something like I've actually already put on a kind of, you know, kind of running a. And now it's the OpenAI open source model on my laptop to front end to parsing it out to multiple agents. Then you know like, you know, run it on ChatGPT, run it on Copilot, run it on Gemini, run it on Claude and then integrating what comes back on anything that's kind of more substantive. So, so I've got the personal hack but not the personal cloud.
- [14:51]
A
I like this. In the future of offer letters, you know, here's your salary, here's your bonus, here's the number of GPUs you get, the number of agents you have.
- [14:57]
D
No doubt, no doubt. The GPUs are so much more important than the other components of a comp plan. If you know, if you have any ideas, you know, if you have any ideas at all, the GPUs, you just use them up as fast as they can print them. You will suck them up.
- [15:11]
A
How many companies do you have incubation right now? Are you in startup mode? Across. Across multitude.
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B
Well, you know it's one of those things, you know I'm, I've got two co founded companies, inflection and Manas, you know, kind of one, one play on what is the essential role for how we have companion agents that go throughout our whole life with us and another one accelerating drug discovery, becoming a drug discovery factory with a target of cancering of curing cancer with Siddhartha Mukherjee. And then I've got another thing that I'm in the ideation phase on have to be.
- [15:51]
A
Right. That's the fun part. And I remember you introduced Mustafa when you were working with him and now he's in Microsoft heading their AI activities. You must be proud of that transition for him. He put out a paper recently basically warning people to be careful to think of AIs as conscious as, as living entities. I'm assuming you read the paper.
- [16:15]
B
Absolutely.
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A
And what did you think of it?
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B
I thought it was exactly right. I think they, you know, and there's a, you know, be interesting to see, you know, if some of the better philosophers also kind of engage in this. I mean the, the challenge is, is that historically we've been able to, to pretty easily map between can you speak language and are you conscious? And it isn't that. It isn't a very complicated question which Mustafa would agree as to when is it that you are conscious? And I think Mustafa was at Google when there was some engineer who said, well I asked if it was conscious and it said it was so therefore it must be. And it's like, okay, let's not be quite that simplistic. But the notions of, you know, kind of like self awareness, self reflection, the notions that would come up, you know, not as kind of a simple like 30 minute Turing test, but also this kind of question around like how we learn of others minds and other consciousness by how we navigate the world together, how we, we communicate not just by sitting in a, you know, kind of between behind two terminals. I'll. The, you know, the Turing imagination, the, you know, and so I think that it's exactly right to not jump to it too quickly because you know, we as human beings also have this weird thing of both over and under ascribing consciousness over ascribing consciousness. Like, you know, your car, you know, come on, Georgia, you can do it to under ascribing consciousness, like, well, you know, these animals, they're not conscious. Like well, it's a little complicated. Look at how they're navigating the world, et cetera. And look at how we're doing it. Like, like what the shape of their consciousness is versus the shape of our consciousness is probably the more interesting question. So anyway, but basically it was a very good kind of warning shot because what happens is people have the language experience and then go, well I asked it was conscious and it said it was.
- [18:18]
A
Yeah, yeah. I think my dog thinks it's a human. Yeah.
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D
What's weird to me is whenever I'm interacting with AI at home, I'm Always really polite to it because it's polite to me, but you know, it'll do something and I'll go, okay, that's really cool. Now what I want you and my wife is like, what? What are you doing? Why are you talking to it that way? It really freaks her out. And like, well, look, I've been building these things since I was 16 years old. I know it's not conscious more than as much as anyone, but it's just your natural reaction is to treat it the way it treats you. And I don't know, it keeps it fun from my point of view, but she thinks it's creepy.
- [19:23]
A
Alex, are you ascribing consciousness now or in the future?
- [19:28]
E
I'm probably at the far end of this discussion in the past.
- [19:32]
A
That's why I called you.
- [19:35]
E
If you remember. Peterl People for the Ethical Treatment of Reinforcement Learners. Huge supporter of that, the Non Human Rights Project, which is fighting for legal personhood for non human animals, starting with elephants, dolphins and great apes. I think we're on the verge of having the personhood discussion for non human animals, for pure AIs, probably for some new exotic forms of intelligence like Borgonisms, collective intelligences.
- [20:07]
A
Organisms. I love that.
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E
Organisms, yes. It's a very important class. And I think probably, you know, we talk about prediction markets sometimes collective intelligences. I suspect we're on the verge of having a discussion where there will be half dozen different new categories of intelligence. To Reid's point, they won't all necessarily have the same shape as natural persons, but they will nonetheless be intelligences that will perhaps be deserving of their own rights. And I think not just personhood rights that are civil rights, as it were, that we normally discuss, but economic rights and communication rights. And at some point we start to think about what does an economy, a heterogeneous economy of lots of different intelligent actors of different types even look like. I think it's going to be a very exciting jungle.
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A
And continuity rights. Can I tell you a quick secret? Don't tell anybody, but working on an X prize with Palmer Lucky right now called an Interspecies Communications Prize, to use AI to be able to communicate bidirectionally with a number of species, right. To be able to understand what they're feeling, what they're saying, being able to actually have some level of a dialogue. A lot of work that's been done, but we hope to step it up another level and that will be fascinating.
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C
There was a project a few years ago, they were trying to use machine learning to Translate dolphin language.
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A
Yeah.
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C
And my response was, I'm not sure we wanted to know what they have to say. That's a whole other kind of ball of can of worms.
- [21:37]
E
You don't think? We absolutely do. So I advise a company named Surama that's working on this for non human animals, starting with dogs. I think we absolutely want to interact economically, socially with non human animals.
- [21:49]
D
Daniela Rus is doing it with whales, actually, and they got incredible. It's online, actually got incredible footage of, of a humpback whale birth which had never been filmed before, but they got all the audio and so they've got sounds that have never been recorded before because they're very social and they all get together for childbirth and the whale baby needs to be elevated to the surface by a whole pod or team or whatever. Yeah. So it's really cool.
- [22:14]
B
Well, and by the way, I would love to get that company name. I helped stand up this thing called the Earth Species Project, which is maybe what Salim's referring to, because it's not just dolphins and whales, but also corvids and primates. And it's basically, you know, record as much as you can on both the sounds and the environment and then run it through, you know, ML translation and see what you get.
- [22:39]
A
Reed, do you mind if I reach out to you on this X prize we're getting ready for?
- [22:43]
B
Oh, of course, yeah.
- [22:46]
A
And do you want to give them that name of that company again?
- [22:48]
B
Earth Species Project. Oh, sorry, but you named the company Sarama.
- [22:52]
E
S A R A M A? Yeah, I'll connect you.
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A
Reid. Every week I study the 10 major tech metatrends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robots, AGI, quantum computing, transport, energy, longevity, and more. No fluff, only the important stuff that matters that impacts our lives and our careers. If you want me to share these 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, these reports are for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive companies, it's not for you. If you don't want to be informed of what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmanandus.com metatrends that's diamandis.com metatrends to gain access to trends 10 plus years before anyone else so the next article here, US students reading and math scores at historic lows. 35% of 12th graders are at or above proficiency. 35% at or above proficiency, down from 40% 92. Only 22% of seniors are proficient in math with science at 31%. This is dismal. And I'm assuming this is the United States. It's not the same in other parts of the world. What are your thoughts about AI accelerating this or helping solve this? It's double edged sword. A lot of people are not doing the work, they're going to ChatGPT to get their answer and they're defaulting to not thinking. On the other hand, AI will be the best educator on the planet. Reid, where do you come out on this?
- [24:46]
B
Well, I'm ultimately not surprising, extremely positive, optimistic. I do think there's some transition issues which, you know, we may see with the, you know, handing in, you know, AI done homework. But you know, if you just make this thought one, within a small number of years, all assessment will be essentially be done by AI. So like we'll have the equivalent of being able to do PhD oral level defense and then on down just with AI is doing it. And so therefore your level of cognitive preparation can be set at whatever the benchmark can be set however we like and the people have to prepare for it. So I think that everything else makes that is an interim. The second thing is a little bit like OpenAI's learning mode. Basically, if you just put in a meta prompt to the AI agents today and say, work me towards the answer. Don't give me the answer. You already have the most amazing tutor that's existed in human history.
- [25:50]
A
For free. For free and global. Yes. Amazing.
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B
So it's like, yes, these are serious problems and it's simple to work in a massively positive direction.
- [26:02]
D
Well, I think that the tutor analogy too is so much less than what it actually does because it goes in any direction you're passionate about. A tutor will teach you math or whatever within that curriculum. The AI version of it goes wherever you want to go. It's just beyond a tutor by many orders of magnitude.
- [26:24]
C
There was a statistic I've been using that a child with an AI is learning between two, six times faster than sitting in a classroom. I was talking to somebody at that Stanford AI conference the other day, Rita, I think you dialed in for that and they said you're out of date. It's actually five to ten times faster. So it's so easy to believe.
- [26:46]
E
I also think if you think that we're on some sort of exponential or hyper exponential progress law where we're about to have full high bandwidth BCIs brain computer interfaces in 5 to 10 years. It's a little bit difficult to get too worked up by a blip on a few scores for a few years. If you think we're just going to be able to sideload knowledge into minds five to ten years from now.
- [27:12]
A
To the laws of physics years. Right.
- [27:14]
B
So by the way, Alex, after you say that, you have to say, now I know kung fu. Just to be clear, now I know.
- [27:19]
C
Kung fu and demonstrate it.
- [27:23]
D
Yeah. But I wonder to what degree these statistics are driven by the fact that people have so many other ways to spend time and to learn things and to do things. Because I know for a fact that once you're into AI, my kids, they get so frustrated by the school curriculum because one, they can learn it much faster anyway. But two, they want to learn other things. Like this curriculum seems ridiculously narrow and stupid compared to everything they can learn. And they're passionate about something else.
- [27:49]
C
I do want to point out something this, this kind of statistic based on the existing curriculum. The same commentary applies to Eric's report on the jobs. We're looking at the jobs in a static way, the way they are today. The entry level job of two years from now will be very different than the entry level job today. Right. So the jobs will transform along with it. The education may not transform as fast because of the regulatory structure, but definitely will be changing the game as it goes along.
- [28:16]
A
And I think the conversation we've had on this pod for some time now, and I hope people have heard it, especially if you're in high school or college or is that career of the future is entrepreneurship. It's not going through a factory process of getting a job for someone else. It is, how do you use these tools to create value in the world? Reid? I mean, we've been on this for a while. Entrepreneurship is the future. How do you think about that?
- [28:42]
B
Well, you know, as you know, because we've talked about this for decades, my very first book was a startup of you. Because basically we all have to think more and more like entrepreneurs, even if we are, are the entrepreneur, founder, creating a business or not, it's the nature of the world we're, we're evolving into. And it came from the commencement speech I gave my high school. But. And it's part of the reason why so much of like, you know, there's probably, you know, two main streams of the kind of content that I produce. And one of them is around kind of technology and society, and the other one's around entrepreneurship. And part of the entrepreneurship is not just for, you know, which is obviously great if it's used by, you know, kind of blitzscaling, you know, high growth Silicon Valley and other entrepreneurs. But it's also, we all need to think much more entrepreneurially and here are some lessons of entrepreneurship and here's how to think about them, even for an individual and, you know, a career of jobs.
- [29:44]
C
Just, just, just in that vein, I just want to point out I got a copy of Reid's book, which is, which actually says this is the Salima Smail edition at the bottom. So it's customized and it has a photograph of me in punk rock stuff. So it's customized to the, actually to the individual. I thought this was unbelievably clever. I think your commentary on the fact that AI gives us all super agency is a really profound one. Everybody needs to digest the implications of that because it's so huge. If people kind of look at that across the board, it'll uplift the whole of humanity very fast.
- [30:19]
A
Amazing. And congratulations on that book. I want to switch to a conversation led here by Geoffrey Hinton. So we've been talking about AGI. A lot of us on this pod have had the conversation saying the Turing test came and went. That was nice. And a few of us believe AGI is here, has been here, and the real conversation is around digital superintelligence. All right, let's go, go to Professor Hinton.
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C
Thought is that a super intelligent AI is unlike anything we've ever seen. It's very, very different from just a new machine that does something more efficiently. I mean, people used to make clothes by hand, and then they make clothes with machines. And there was massive unemployment. But then eventually they got jobs doing other things. But super intelligent things are going to take away nearly all the jobs.
- [31:09]
B
And the idea that there's going to.
- [31:10]
C
Be jobs that are still okay when you have superintelligent AI is quite dubious. I think the job of an interviewer, for example, will disappear too.
- [31:19]
A
Super intelligent AI will be able to.
- [31:21]
C
Do a better job of interviewing me. So I sort of completely disagree with Yan.
- [31:29]
A
So a couple of subjects to jump into there. And I'll start with you, Reid. What are your thoughts on ASI or digital superintelligence? And on the back of that, however we define it? And Salim, I'm cutting to the chase here. I know the question you're going to say, how the hell do we define ASI in the first place? Let's just say it's like a million fold more intelligent, the average human. No ceiling on this. Does it destroy all jobs? And then where do we get our purpose from? These are the conversations that we've been having. It's what my next book is about. Reid, thoughts?
- [32:06]
B
Well, look, to start with the circumstance of say we get to a Star Trek universe where, you know, kind of all work and physical materialism can, you know, physical material, you know, goods and services can be provided by, you know, kind of intelligent infrastructure. And that's the universe we're living in. I think we will adapt perfectly fine. You know, we have a proxy for it in human history, which is, you know, medieval times. That's essentially how the nobility lived where everyone else was the. Was the serf and peasant and middle class and whether not infrastructure. So we'll have dinner parties and theatrical performances and hobbies and all the rest of the stuff. So I think like overly worrying about this I think is. Is a mistake. Now the problem with and this gets the why Saleem always defines like what it is. And even going to a million times, it's like, well, you know, what kind of shape of superintelligence is because if you look at the progression of GPTs, they're progression of savants. And so if you get to the massively incredible savant that still has context awareness problems and other kinds of things, that is a different shape in terms of what happens than if you simply have, you know, something like the Ian Banks culture series, which is, you know, super intelligent robots that kind of look at us as kind of fun companions in the, in the space journey of life. And you know, I think it's a. It's very easy to be science fiction alarmist. It's very easy to be. I also, I don't mean to be either even science fiction, just you know, banal, you know, you know, kind of optimism. But. But it's kind of like there's a lot of different things where the details matter. And so kind of navigating what are the pieces we should be constructing right now in a range of different probabilities of outcomes is I think where the. The intelligent discussion is.
- [34:09]
D
Well, no, it always surprises me how, how like Geoffrey Hinton is a God to me because he wrote the, the Rummel Arton hinton paper in 1986. The back propagation that kicked off all the AI that we're experiencing right now comes from that invention in 86 and it eliminated all the other forms of AI symbolic and Marvin Minsky and all that other stuff. So he is just an epic God. And he's worried sick. You can see his furrowed brow in that video. He's just worried sick. And at the end of the video, he's like, Ann, I completely disagree with Yann Lecun, who's another legend of the field, inventor of convolution. And then we had David Siegel on our stage here at Imagination in Action the day before yesterday. And David is also. He was at the AI lab at MIT the same time I was as a PhD student. And he's on the Forbes 400. Quant Trader using AI. And he's got a completely different opinion about the timeline to strong AI. So it shows you how difficult it is to predict what's going to happen next when you've got great, great minds like that vocally disagreeing with each other in the media.
- [35:14]
A
Yeah. We're holding two different futures in superposition right now, and we're going to see how we collapse the wave function. Alex?
- [35:22]
E
Yeah, I think the sort of moral panic, again, very difficult to get too excited over this. I think if you think, as I do, that we're on the verge of having evenly distributed superintelligence, and that evenly distributed superintelligence is going to solve substantially all open problems in math, science and engineering that's going to create so many different opportunities throughout the economy. Sort of worrying too much about the state of jobs and the state of careers as they're currently parochially constructed. Circa 2025 is going to look hopelessly naive and quaint in a few years.
- [36:02]
A
Yeah. Our basic call to action is solve everything. We're on the verge of solving everything. But here's a question for you. We've had the conversation with biology that AGI is polytheistic, not monotheistic. Reid, I don't know if you saw that he put out. And all of these frontier models are leapfrogging each other, and it's been pretty impressive to see how they've been moving in lockstep. But the question is, is there a winner take all asi, once you reach this, whatever fundamental breakthroughs are required, does the first ASI block all others? Is it a hard takeoff? Reid, do you have a thought on that?
- [36:46]
D
At Microsoft, you have to add Microsoft.
- [36:50]
B
Indeed. Look, so this is again why it gets to. Can I sketch a universe where there's an ASI takeoff that gets to a compounding curve and. Or operates to. To, you know, to prevent other AI? Yep. Film at 11. I can tell that story. But the, you know, I can also equally tell a lot of other stories, including the fact that it is pantheistic, by the way. One footnote that I think is interesting is if you have different cultures responses to the possibility of super intelligence, those that are inherently monotheistic generally express broadly fear, and those that are pantheistic broadly express excitement because it's kind of like the one God versus many gods as a, as a, as an approach. And so the. I think that the. I think it's much more likely when you look at the pattern over the last couple years, that it will be more of like kind of classic human invention, which is, whatever it is, will be a, a kind of a kind of a zeitgeisty, a simultaneous across a set of different. So therefore the pantheistic. But, you know, I can tell both, both stories.
- [38:14]
C
I want to make two points here. One is though, you know, being in India where they're there, it's incredible to see the excitement around this just because they're tend towards the pantheistic. So that really speaks to the comment that Reid made in the other commentary. I want to drill a bit more on which Alex just said, once you do have super intelligence, however it happens, and it's solving huge numbers of problems, you essentially uplift all of humanity and, and now you're in a. You know, this is the very definition of a singularity, right? We have an event horizon that we cannot see beyond. And it's going to happen very quickly. And when it does happen, I fall back to the simple observation made by Ray Kurzweil that technology is a major driver of progress in the world. It might be the only major driver of progress in the world. And now we have an electricity type of underlying layer that's lifting everything. This is unbelievably positive. And the framing of it should be unbelievably positive.
- [39:09]
A
It is unbelievably positive. The question is, and the challenge is that we as a species, we strive and we thrive when we're challenged, when we have problems that we meet, right? The video game that's super easy. You get bored and you don't play it. The video game that's externally hard, you give up. So my question ultimately is, and there was some incredible work done at New York University back in the 60s called the Universe 25 experiment. Reid, have you heard of that experiment?
- [39:40]
B
I don't think so.
- [39:42]
A
So there was a sociobiologist who basically built this experiment 25 times. It was a massive resort for rats. Let's call it that way. There was no shortage of food, no shortage of nesting space. They had everything they could possibly want. They put four breeding pairs in there, exponential growth, and at some point, the population starts to basically go upside down. You've got stillbirths, you've got sort of rats fighting each other. You have rats sort of marginalizing themselves, just licking their fur and doing nothing. And the population basically dies, not from having a shortage of any resources, but of having everything and not being challenged.
- [40:32]
C
This is an extension of the Wall E scenario.
- [40:35]
A
Yeah. So for me, it's like we need a Star Trek future, not a Mad Max or Oalli. We need. If we're given this level of super capability in terms of AI and robotics and nanotechnology and bci, what do we do with it? That challenges us, that gets us thinking on a cosmic scale. I think that's critically important. And Alex, you and I have talked about that before.
- [40:58]
E
Totally. In fact, speaking of cosmic scale, if I could put a physicist hat on for a minute and go back to the question I think Peter, you and Reid were talking about, which is, do we find ourselves, do we think it's more likely that we live in the near future with a singleton superintelligence or more of a multipolar world? I would point out we're several generations. Our star, our sun is several generations old in terms of stellar evolution. And the singleton that I would worry about isn't. Is one particular frontier lab going to be the first to achieve recursive self improvement and then dominate the future light cone? We're actually. We're pretty far into the history of the universe. Universe. I worry about some other civilization, not of our world, that developed a singleton and now is seeking to exclude Earth's development of superintelligence.
- [41:51]
A
Fermi is knocking on your door, buddy.
- [41:54]
E
Well, I would say that the fact that thus far, to my knowledge, we haven't seen any evidence that the frontier labs are being bombarded by orbital lasers by efforts to exterminate Earth's development of superintelligence would seem anthropically lowercase A, not capital a took to point us in the direction of a multipolar superintelligence world, not a singleton.
- [42:17]
A
Fascinating. Reid, any closing thoughts on that topic?
- [42:22]
B
Well, I think a little bit of. Also in these questions is what is the world we should want? What is the end? And I think actually multipolar, you know, kind of pantheistic. And by the way, in terms of the, you know, your rat experiment or the rat experiment, you know, one of the benefits is we human beings tend to prevent, present challenges to each other. So I'm actually not that worried that, that we won't have ongoing challenges because, you know, we compete, you know, whether it's, you know, in, in. In things that, you know, we could be better at than anyone else, or also just, you know, like today, there's more people watching human beings playing chess than there have been at any point in history. And, you know, that's, of course, you know, human beings are never going to be the. Never going to beat AIs anymore in chess. Haven't, haven't for many years.
- [43:15]
A
Fascinating.
- [43:16]
C
You know, I think we end up with, as we evolve this, and you look at chess is a great example of this. We watch people on a soccer field or on a chessboard. We watch for the humanity. I mean, can they make it in that really tense moment? Can they see the right move? Can they make the pass at a very critical juncture? Can you hit that tennis shot when all the pressure is against you? We live for watching that type of stuff. So I think to Reid's point, as we progress humanity and we've looked at cultures that have gotten to abundance, the moguls taking over India, the Romans taking over Europe, you end up in four activities that you human beings do, which is food, art, music, and sex, not in that order. And so you end up challenging each other in different ways. And we'll continue to invent those in more sophisticated ways.
- [44:03]
A
I love that. All right, let's get into the AI wars here. And here's our first Senator Cruz proposed bill to ease regulatory burden on AI companies. A proposal creates AI regulatory sandbox to speak speed innovation. Companies could get temporary waivers from hipaa, FDA and other agencies. All right, what do we think about this? It's, you know, the government's pulling out all the stops. It's bringing capital from the Middle east, it's relaxing the rules here. It's changing the energy equation. Not as fast as we're seeing in China, but, you know, take off the gloves on drill baby, drill. Nuke, baby, nuke. Who wants to go first?
- [44:46]
D
I love it. And it's desperately needed and we're going to need a lot more of it. But then I read the details and it's like, apply here, get a waiver. Like, oh God, it just sounded so bureaucratic right out of the gate. But it's well meaning, you know, at least it's a step in the right direction.
- [45:02]
A
Well, AI should evaluate your AI, should write your application and then AI will evaluate Your application. Yes. And AI should just say yes, yes from the beginning.
- [45:11]
D
In which case the whole process should be less than 10 seconds. Right.
- [45:14]
A
Or, or instantaneous. Right.
- [45:16]
D
Or instantaneous.
- [45:16]
A
Right.
- [45:17]
D
Right.
- [45:17]
C
We're, we're advisors to a project called Fermi America which is the largest energy generation project in the world, 12 gigawatts and they filed their S11 and instead of taking two years they did in a few weeks using AI.
- [45:31]
A
Nice.
- [45:32]
E
I, I would add if, if, if you think we're on the verge of an explosion of math, science and engineering discoveries that are generated by superintelligence, then it also follows, I think that we're about to have a glut of discoveries that are present governance mechanisms including Reid, to, to the point of your startup manas they we don't necessarily know how to metabolize all of these discoveries. If we have a thousand cures that are developed by AI overnight, how do we get those through clinical trials and get them out deployed to for the public benefit? And so to that extent, I think in the abstract sandboxes and special economic zones and other ways to basically offer new platforms for modifying governance mechanisms to metabolize that glut of inventions and discoveries are probably super net helpful in the long term.
- [46:25]
D
Well, I'll tell you in Foundations of AI Ventures class at mit, maybe a third of all the business plans that come out of that class are something health related and they're really, really good ideas and they all end up concluding they need to go to India to get started and they'll come back to the US later because the FDA is so slow.
- [46:43]
A
Just like Zipline got started in Africa and came back to the U.S. i.
- [46:48]
C
Think we're going to see a huge amount of that geographic arbitrage just because it'll be and this is where we talk about innovation on the edge, right? You don't ever want to do innovation in the core organization. You want to do it at the edge and put it pointed into adjacent areas. I think we'll do the same on this side of things where we can set up sandboxes at the edges of cities or countries, whatever, go, go do it in a safe place and then when it's working you can demonstrate that then come back into the mothership.
- [47:14]
A
Reid, a closing thought on this one.
- [47:17]
B
Well, I do think that it's absolutely critical to be imagining, to be seeing what we can get. And so for example ability to like, like the simplest one that I go to in this is we should create clear safe harbor Mechanisms for creating a 247 medical assistant that runs on every smartphone. Because the benefit for that is huge, massive. And, you know, obviously plaintiff attorneys, you know, other kinds of things will try to.
- [47:46]
C
To.
- [47:46]
B
To redact this as part of the reason why, like, people think, oh, we get to overregulation only because the government regulatory agencies have a natural bureaucratic accretion. But a lot of it's actually like liability law from, you know, plaintiff attorney associations and so forth. And you need to actually, in fact, sandbox that in a way to get that. And I think that then can be used as an example across the whole thing. Those are the kinds of things that I would pay much more attention to in this. And I think it'd be good to do, like, on the energy side, I'd like to see the energy stuff happen that was kind of promised. It's really important. Energy is going to be a really key part of this. But so far, all I've seen is a lot of tweets and relatively little action.
- [48:28]
D
Reed, I'm so glad you said that, because one of the great advantages of America is we have 50 distinct states and you have 50 different ideas and you have opportunities to try things, and that variety should be a great strength for us. But what actually happens in practice, if you launch an app that. It's like a medical app, it naturally goes out to all 50 states, and then you always get sued in East Texas, which is Ted Cruz's territory, by the way. He should just like, look, that whole tort law world is so messed up because it's 50 different shots at you, which means, just by random chance, some. Some really weird jurisdiction is going to come after you. I'm sure this happened at LinkedIn too. You're probably very aware of this, but it's. It's a horrible. It completely backfires versus what the intent of the design was in the Constitution. So we get that fixed.
- [49:12]
A
Every day. I get the strangest compliment. Someone will stop me and say, peter, you have such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought I'd hear that from anyone. And honestly, I can't take the full credit. All I do is use something called One Skin OS One twice a day, every day. The company is built by four brilliant PhD women who've identified a peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it. And again, I use this twice a day, every day. You can go to Oneskin Co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. That's Oneskin Co. And use the code Peter at checkout. All Right back to the episode jumping back to India. OpenAI plans India data center in major Stargate expansion planning a 1 gigawatt accounting for 22% of India's entire data center capacity by 2030. It's part of OpenAI's $500 billion Stargate project. So a fascinating thing here is again OpenAI planting its flag in different regions around the world trying to get early users captured. How do you think about this, Reid?
- [50:23]
B
Well, actually I suspect it's less a user grab thing, although that's totally possible for OpenAI and range of business and it's more looking for OpenAI is very clear, clear eyed about scale is the thing that's creating a huge amount of this, of this potential and opportunity. Scale needs scale compute and scale energy. And so where can you get that? And wherever can work on getting a deal that, that works within kind of the western ecosystem, it will do that. And I think that's how to, how to interpret this. And, and you know, this, that was a little bit like my earlier comment which is we are so behind on doing all the energy stuff massively, massively and there really isn't really acceleration. You know, back, you know, the prior administration, I was kind of trying to circulate plans about doing deals with Canada to try to make this work from a kind of North America and US perspective. But of course since the current administration is, you know, trying to. I've never seen the Canadian so pissed off with us in my entire life, you know, that becomes less of an option.
- [51:38]
C
Yeah, I have a Canadian passport, so enough said there.
- [51:42]
A
Yeah. Celine, was this discussed while you were in India?
- [51:46]
C
It was, but it's mostly seen as a marketing tactic kind of kind of just show planting a flag. This is going to take a while to roll out and India has quite significant infrastructure challenges to do this in a, in a kind of reliable way. But I think the general trend is huge and I think what I see there is open air looking at the youth of India and making planting a major flag saying let's make sure we're completely accessible to all the young people in India. And by planting a data center there then you solve for a lot of the data sovereignty issues that lots of people are concerned about.
- [52:18]
A
Yeah, this is critical. They have a very, you know, literate tech forward youth that they need to engage on this. On the note of making geographic grabs, India is a 1.41 billion people going to go just under that at 10 million in Greece. So OpenAI and the Greek government launched OpenAI for Greece congrats here to Prime Minister Mitsutakis and Vasily Kuchum, bus consumers, digital AI. Listen, I know him easy for you to, I'm just messing it up. But I love the fact that we're starting to see country after country begin to think about what is their AI strategy and beginning to, to partner on this. So, you know, I think we saw OpenAI going into the UK as well and of course going into the UAE. Do we see Microsoft doing any of this, Reid?
- [53:26]
B
Well, Microsoft, you know, kind of the original tech hyperscaler has, you know, one of the things that's been kind of amazing about being on the board there is, you know, it, it has a, an international scope of, you know, kind of relationships with multiple industries, multiple governments, multiple countries, kind of around the world. And so I, I simply have lost track of all the things that they are, of that they are doing because it just, it's, it is a, you know, it is a un in, in scope in terms of these things, although obviously a lot more efficient because it focuses on kind of good business process and partnership and, and all the rest. So I think that the, and, and this is, I think the kind of natural thing to do. I mean, it's one of the things that I think is you said, what should our AI foreign policy be? It's, let's provision medical assistance, let's provision. And I agree with Dave's point about tutors. I mean, tutor is just to make people understand it, but the fact that it can condition for learning for you wherever you want to go and in the metaphor and language that you want to use and all the rest, like, that's the kind of thing we should be doing. So I think this is awesome. Well done by the Greeks, well done by OpenAI, and we should see a lot more of it.
- [54:44]
D
Can I ask you a question, Reid, about going, you know, OpenAI going to India for power makes no sense whatsoever. And they're short on power and it's all coal.
- [54:53]
A
Well, you know, India has doubled their, their power generation as the US has remained flat. So India is on the rise faster than the US is.
- [55:02]
D
They're not going solar.
- [55:04]
C
They're deploying solar at the most staggering rate.
- [55:06]
D
Are they? Well, they have a lot of sun, but it still doesn't make a lot of sense to me. But what I wanted to ask you about is RLHF engineering. The Mercur is just growing wild now that scaled AI or scale has been acquired. Scale AI and huge fraction of what is going on there is India and We were at 1x Robotics a few weeks ago too and they're like, hey, all this kinematic telematic data is going to be a gold mine for teaching the robots how to pour a cup of coffee without spilling it. And so a lot of that work, which is creating a huge amount of jobs, it's a new type of job. But the Indian workforce is absolutely perfect for filling all those positions quickly. So is that potentially a factor in why OpenAI is pushing so hard into India?
- [55:53]
B
I don't think they need to do it for that. My guess is any major scale partnership and, and you know, look there. I think they're looking for power and so, you know, Salim's quite a solar. I don't know. But I would hope, I do know that there's a bunch of other areas in the region that also have good access to a lot of clean power, like Bhutan. And so I think the, the, I think it's more that. But by the way, yes, let's, let's use the talent and I don't think they need to have that kind of data center in order to do that.
- [56:24]
A
You know, one thing that Vasily Katumbas has done here is really focus this on education. Right. Chatgpt. Edu for secondary schools and I'm still really pissed that the US has not tripled down on this, made it edict that you must be bringing this technology in. It's one of the most important things. My two boys are 14 years old and the school systems are not preparing them for the future. They're heading towards anywhere close.
- [56:54]
B
Yeah.
- [56:54]
D
And they're not doing it. They're just moving so slowly. But AI is just so fast. It's very hard for them to react because they're used to making decisions over a ten year time cycle.
- [57:04]
C
I think what's going to happen though is the impedance mismatch between a student, as we said five times faster is just going to break the existing system. The forcing function there will be really powerful. We've been waiting for some kind of instigation that will be a forcing function to transform education for decades now. And I think this might be it.
- [57:26]
A
So this past week OpenAI announced it's starting an AI chip production run with Broadcom. It's building 3 nanometer process. So let's start with you Alex, thoughts on this one.
- [57:43]
E
This lies at the intersection of so many different trends that are all converging at the same time. On the one hand, I think this is a reflection of Nvidia's high margins relatively High margins. And in some sense this is capitalism doing its thing and encouraging additional competition. On the other hand, I think this is a reflection of the proliferation of ASICS application specific integrated circuits to compete with more general purpose Nvidia GPUs. On the other other hand, I, I think in some sense, in the same way that Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia overall from a market capitalization perspective displaced intel by being more specialized, I think we'll see a rise of inference, AI inference specific compute like a hypothetical OpenAI inference processor or accelerator maybe ultimately pose the threat that many people in the industry are asking for, which is where is the next Nvidia going to come from? I would argue if there is going to be a next Nvidia, it's likeliest to come from a more specialized ASIC that does a better job of focusing in a more energy efficient way at the sorts of tasks that that we care about, the sorts of workloads we care about. And then finally biggest trend of all, Moore's second law, that the cost of fabs is doubling every four years and that's steamrolling the entire space. It is so expensive to build a fab at this point that leaves anyone at the same time that horse law, Moore's first law is basically ending or near a conclusion or tapering off, leaves everyone else who wants application specific acceleration fabricating their own super narrow processors. So like 10 different trends all converging in this.
- [59:32]
D
Only thing I'd add to that Alex, is that it's a new era in the sense that if you were a TSMC and you're building microprocessors pre GPU and somebody comes out with a 2 nanometer, 1.8 nanometer, 1.4 nanometer process, everybody moves to that new chip, nobody wants the old chip because it's more power efficient and it's just a better buy. Now all of a sudden we care tremendously about just raw volume. And that never existed before. You couldn't just crank tile the earth with chips, now you can and use it productively. So I think there are two avenues going on here. There's increasingly 20 billion, 30 billion, $40 billion fabs, but then there are these new $4 billion fabs and maybe they're stuck at 3 nanometer, they don't go beyond that, but they have a huge ability to get up and running quickly and create a massive amount of volume. Because I think the algorithmic improvements are much more important than the difference between 3 nanometer and 2 nanometer and so getting scale of volume and this slide kind of indicates that OpenAI is buying these from Broadcom, but Broadcam can't make them. They're a design company. They don't have fabs. And so, you know, where are you actually going to get the manufacturing? And you look a layer deeper and there's a huge amount of investment and job creation, by the way. And then something all the governors should be looking at, get those fabs in your state like tomorrow, because that's where all the jobs are going to be.
- [60:58]
A
Robots all the way down, buddy.
- [61:00]
D
Yeah, that's true too.
- [61:01]
A
All right, so we have a new number one trillionaire in the house. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison exceeds Elon as the wealthiest. He's going strong at 81 years old. I'm very happy that he is someone focused on longevity and health span extension. I'm waiting for some good breakthroughs coming out of his work. So OpenAI will buy Oracle Compute over the next five years. $60 billion per year. The contract is for 4.5 gigawatts of capacity. Two Hoover dams. I like that we're going to start measuring data centers in terms of Hoover dams. So I asked the governor of Massachusetts how many Hoover dams she wants. I love it. So OpenAI adds Oracle as a partner and you may or may not be able to comment, but this begins to show some potential strain with Microsoft and a push to avoid having a single supplier comments on this. Anybody up for grabs?
- [62:03]
B
Well, I mean, obviously I can't talk about anything from an internal perspective, but I would say that it's, you know, I think one of the simple things is, as I said a couple Comments here is OpenAI wants to be in as many growth threads as possible. And I think it's a. As much as possible. And I think it's kind of the fact that there's a bunch of volume that they could buy from Oracle. I think that's the, that's actually the real thing, more than a strain.
- [62:34]
D
I got a question for you, Reed. So Chase Loch Miller was out here the day before yesterday. He's Caruso, which is building Stargate in Abilene, Texas. And he's MIT class of 08. He got two degrees in three years. Not quite Alex getting three degrees in four years, but he got math and physics in three years. Absolutely brilliant guy on stage asked him, how is the deal with OpenAI? I see all these videos of you and Sam Altman walking around looking at all the pipes and wires. And he said, we actually sell it through Oracle to OpenAI I was like, well, I didn't understand for the life of me. I didn't have time on stage to ask, but why is Larry sitting between you and Sam Altman? I don't quite understand what his value add is in the middle there.
- [63:18]
B
I don't know either. Although I do know that a lot of the Oracle is passed through. So, you know, in terms of provisioning and building data centers and so forth.
- [63:27]
A
So.
- [63:27]
B
But I don't know, I don't know the shape of it.
- [63:29]
D
Huh. I mean, made him the wealthiest man in the world, you can see on the slide there. So it's a big deal.
- [63:35]
A
He's a lot to live for. Let's see if he gets to 151st. Hey guys, it's Peter. One of the things I found out is that a number of people are getting together for dinner to talk about the content around the Moonshots WTF episodes. And I want to facilitate that. On September 24th there's going to be a get together. There's a link in the show notes below. People are getting together here in la. If you'd like to go to one of these dinners, click on the link and have fun. We have amazing subscribers listening to this. People who are building companies who are really going after moonshots. So check it out. I'd love to hear in the comments if you go to the dinner, what you thought of it. By the way, I don't have an affiliation with the company listed in the link below. And while I don't normally show up to these dinners, occasionally I do. All right, have fun. Back to the episode. All right, moving on to some anthropic news. Anthropic raises 13 billion in a Series F valued at 138 billion valuation. They've got a revenue surge of 1 billion run rate in January now up to 5 billion run rate as of August. That's insane, right? Over 300,000 businesses have gotten enterprise accounts, fastest growth curve in tech history and one of the most valuable AI firms. We're going to start to redefine the Magnificent Seven very soon as something else.
- [65:01]
C
I think the broader picture here is that enterprise has been sitting around watching all of these foundational, foundational models get to a certain point. But now you need the robustness and data sovereignty and on premises stuff that the enterprises need. I think that's where the massive infrastructure and investment will go next.
- [65:22]
D
I totally agree. I don't know if Dario will do it because he's very, very, very safety conscious. So TBD whether anthropic is the company that does it or not. It's interesting that Dario is totally neutral in these battles now because everybody's making their own chips, and so the battle between Jensen and his own customers is just beginning, and it's going to be epic to watch. But Dario is still the one guy who's neutral in every conceivable way. Just, I can work with anyone. I can sell to anyone.
- [65:51]
A
I don't know. We'll look at an article coming up very shortly. Reed, did you see Dario's presentation at Davos, or recording of it, where he said that he could imagine doubling the human lifespan the next five to ten years on the back of AI?
- [66:05]
B
I didn't, but I know Dario well, so it doesn't surprise me.
- [66:08]
A
Yeah. What do you think?
- [66:09]
D
What do you think of his Machines of Loving Grace?
- [66:11]
B
No, no, no. I want to.
- [66:12]
A
I want to ask him still about the life, you know, are you. Do you buy this idea of AI helping us double the human lifespan?
- [66:21]
B
I guess the short answer is trivially yes. It's just kind of a question of time frames and how has it happened. I mean, part of, for example, the reason why Siddhartha Mukherjee and I are working on accelerating. Yeah. Manasai for accelerating drug discovery with a focus on cancer is if you, you know, kind of begin to get out, you know, kind of a set of the different cures. We naturally age in various ways, but a set of the different cures which substantially elongate the kind of the aging curves in a healthy, prosperous way. That does it. If you have a medical assistant, that allows you to be much smarter about, you know, kind of consumption and other kinds of things, that helps, too. I think there's, you know, and then precision medicine, obviously accelerated with AI. I think it's very straightforward.
- [67:14]
A
Love it. Dave, you were going to ask a question?
- [67:16]
D
Oh, yeah. Machines of Loving Grace, his whole, you know, kind of treatise on the future. Did you like it?
- [67:21]
B
Oh, I loved it. Look, I think part of the thing that people misunderstand about some of the people who, you know, he made this comment about safety, and I think he is very funny this next slide. He is very focused on safety, but the reason he's in it is a pro humanist reason. It's the same reason why the OpenAI people are in it. It's like, what, you know, what. What. What are the ways that we elevate the human condition?
- [67:47]
A
So speaking about this, here's our next slide. The title is AI Safety Sparks Anthropic Hunger Strike. This is a quote from the guy on the hunger strike. I'm on a hunger strike outside the offices of Anthropic because we are in an emergency. The AI company's race is rapidly driving us to a point of no return. I'm calling on Anthropic's management to immediately stop their reckless actions which are harming our society and remediate the harm caused. So I don't know, this is from a few days old. He was on day three at that time. I don't know if he's still in a hunger strike strike or if Uber Eats has delivered him a meal, but.
- [68:26]
B
Or Waymo might have been Waymo.
- [68:27]
A
But yes, but in all respect, I mean, here's someone who cares deeply and is trying to make the point. What I find fascinating is when I think about all of the frontier companies, I think Anthropic is the one who is the most sensitive to these topics, to AI safety.
- [68:48]
C
Yeah, I wonder why he picked that one. Maybe it was the closest to where he lived.
- [68:51]
A
Yeah, I don't know.
- [68:54]
B
Didn't know where the new XAI headquarters were.
- [68:59]
C
Yeah, this feels to me as a candidate. An application form for the Darwin Awards.
- [69:04]
A
Oh my God. Oh no. Oh no. Okay, moving on. So Amazon's AI resurgence. AWS and Anthropics Trainium expand expansion. AWS cloud revenue slowed as Google and Microsoft pulled ahead. Congratulations, Google and Microsoft. Amazon's invested $4 billion into Anthropic. I guess that was part of that $13 billion F series round to build a 1.3 gigawatt data center capacity dedicated to AI training. And Anthropic will run on Trainium 2. Amazon's in house AI chip cheaper per memory bandwidth versus Nvidia. So this is what I was saying, Dave, when you were saying about Anthropic and Nvidia, it looks like they're shifting towards working with Amazon here.
- [69:50]
D
Yeah, well, the Trainiums and then the tpus@google are incredibly good inference time designs. Maybe, maybe training, maybe not. We'll know soon. But yeah, definitely a very serious threat to Nvidia. Not because everyone's going to sell out everything they can make, there's no doubt about that. But if your chip is more performant and then you can argue for more manufacturing from tsmc, that's where it all gets bottlenecked is at tsmc. So yeah, these new chips, I mean, everybody's competing with everybody. It's all at war. All these companies that were in swim lanes and could cooperate are suddenly absolutely at each other's throats, which is Great for startups. Turbulence is always great for startups. But it's really weird to see all of tech and a huge fraction of our economy in direct competition with each other.
- [70:41]
E
Alex, I would add, also, it's not just today's point, it's not just competition at the chip level. Maybe from my perspective, the headline that we're sort of burying here is the memory bandwidth. So much if you're trying to do a coherent training run. Actually the limiting factor is the chip to chip bandwidth, not necessarily the compute within the chip. And here I think what we're seeing, fortunately, is a bit of competition for Nvidia's NVLink coming from AWS and Amazon. AWS has this chip to chip interconnect technology named Neuronlink that is Perhaps hopefully giving NVLink and InfiniBand a run for their money. And to the extent that future training runs need to be coherent, open parenthesis. Do they need to be coherent or will we see some sort of radical overhang breakthrough in terms of distributed training runs? Close parenthesis.
- [71:38]
D
There is some stuff in China that's very promising on that front and that would totally change. It's funny how a little innovation, couple lines of code, could break the whole math behind these investments. Very, very interesting fragile kind of thing.
- [71:52]
A
Reid, you can see why Alex Wiesner Gross is the favorite moonshot mate on this podcast. Exudes his brilliance. All right, let's move on here. Next up is polymarket. So Polymarket finally is coming to the us. It's an incredibly useful product. Do you play with Polymarket much?
- [72:17]
C
Reid?
- [72:19]
B
No, I've done it a couple times. I'm obviously fascinated from a market point of view and kind of how it plays out into the various ways in which the general crypto environment is shaping and how we shape it to try to make our societies better.
- [72:40]
A
Polymarket for me is wisdom of the crowds. One of the things we discussed on a previous WTF episode is the idea of AI as being able to predict the future. And the question is, how do you do RL with predictions of the future? I guess you could look at them in retrospect, but Polymarkets could be an interesting truth signal. Alex, do you think so?
- [73:00]
E
I think Poly Market and prediction markets in general, if you're a startup and you want to do free real time research on your customers or on your competitors, prediction markets are a way to do that. And I think while we're still in this gap, this window of time between when we have prediction markets, sort of collective intelligences or Peter, I know you like Borgonisms.
- [73:24]
A
I love that.
- [73:25]
E
And when we get super intelligences, prediction markets are the closest thing we have to a crystal ball for the future. At some point, probably I would argue we get our superintelligences, we get our Isaac Asimov, Harry Seldon Psychohistory AIs that predict the future. At that point, maybe prediction markets get subsumed.
- [73:43]
B
By the way, there is an asterisk here. Let's important is the prediction markets don't set separately like theory in the world. So like some of the things that I've been seeing happening has been people putting bets on, you know, like what color, you know, dildo will be thrown onto the sports ring, you know, first and then becomes an economic incentive because you put a bet on your blue and you show up there trying to toss your, your blue dildo onto the sports ring first. And so there's a weird intersection with society where it's not just a kind of a physics of prediction, but an interleaving of dynamic incentives.
- [74:26]
A
And the best way to predict the future is throw the dildo yourself.
- [74:31]
E
But Peter, this is the problem with super determinism. You see everything that Reid just said? I made him say that.
- [74:38]
B
Yes, exactly. There was an incentive.
- [74:41]
A
Love it. All right, moving on. All right, this was a great note. I love this chart. So US patents have exploded during the AI revolution. So you can see here on this chart the number of patents per year. My God, the poor patent examiners, they've got to be displaced by AIs. And we see here in 2022 an explosion. Six thousand more patents granted in 2024 versus 2023. It's a, you know, it doesn't get more exponential or sort of vertical ascent than right now.
- [75:16]
C
What I read from this is that people are using AI to patent applications.
- [75:20]
A
Well, not only that, they're using AI to create the patent application. I mean, so one of the things, one of my favorite things I did years ago when ChatGPT first came out was I said, okay, here are two patent numbers. This is the business I'm in. How would I use these patents to create a new product or service inside my business? And it was, here it is. And okay, is that now patentable? So just this ability for people who want to explore this area is.
- [75:48]
D
Well, if you've ever been through the process too. One of the companies in Studio is Thinkstruct. It's Nikki Abate and Julius. They started doing academic research using AI. It's like a toolkit. And they quickly moved over to patent Research and then patent filing. So they've automated the process, but if you do it the old fashioned way by talking to a lawyer, and they're saying, okay, explain to me what this technological breakthrough is like. Oh my God, from ground zero. You want me to explain days? But you do have the AI and it's instantly, you know, here's the application, let's go. And presumably the patent office has to read it with AI too, because you know, this will keep going up.
- [76:33]
C
It's an arms race. It has to.
- [76:34]
A
There's a patent law firm firm out here that I've recommended to some of my companies. They're based in Boston as well. What they've done is they've analyzed all the patent examiners and by different category and they've looked at the percent of allowances they've had. They've also looked at the time between application and review. And so they will direct your patent application to the examiners who have the highest rate of acceptance and the lowest time to review. It's a game. It's, you know, humans in their loop. Are, are, can be gamed.
- [77:09]
C
This reminds me of that study that was done where if you were lawyers bring up their clients for parole hearings, were kept trying to put them in after lunch because they found that before lunch the judges are hungry and you're going back to jail. After lunch, they were biologically happier and you were 30% more likely to go free because the judges are biologically happier. Like that's just gaming the system to an nth level. That's the whole thing is just a game.
- [77:36]
A
Alex.
- [77:38]
E
And maybe I'll take the opposite side of Salim's comments. I would say at this stage, we're still in just the earliest innings of AI generating transformative mathematical scientific engineering breakthroughs. So to the extent that we're seeing any boomlet of patents being generated in part or in whole by AI, I don't expect that on average they will be utterly transformative. I do think we will see transformative inventions being generated by AI over the next few years.
- [78:07]
C
What I'm talking about is it's very clear that the patent application process is being generated. The application forms are redone by AI, which allows you a large number, not that the patents are generated by AI.
- [78:18]
A
I wonder what's going on here. If you're listening to this podcast, on this chart, we look at the number of patents per year and it's pretty flat from 1960 to 1996. Then we see this rapid ascent. Six thousand patents over eight years. And then it begins to flatten out again with a thousand patents over what looks like to be an 18 year period. And then it explodes on the heels of ChatGPT. What is that period between 2004 and 2022?
- [78:47]
D
Why is it you had a huge number of gene patents? Because, you know, they decided right in that time frame that you can.
- [78:55]
A
And.com Pens too, I'm sure.
- [78:57]
E
I would remind everyone to read the title of the chart. These are computing related patents. So I think what we're seeing with the first boomlet is the dot com boom and then we're seeing the AI boom with the second boomlet.
- [79:10]
A
Okay. Always actually looking at the data.
- [79:14]
B
Read the chart, Read the chart.
- [79:16]
A
So we were on stage for at least the title. Yeah, we were on stage with Ahmad, the CEO of Replit and I'm sorry, Amjad, the CEO of replit. And Amjad had just released Agent on that day. This was what, Tuesday? But he just posted this as well. Which replit's agents are outpacing AI scaling. So this is the meter benchmark, which is basically looking at measuring AI's ability to complete long tasks. And he's saying that this benchmark is wrong. Alex, thoughts?
- [79:55]
E
Well, so if we assume that the data that meter is collecting or the timescales that meter is estimating are accurate, an exponential fit isn't necessarily the best fit. It could be, for example, that we're on, as Ray Kurzweil would say, a hyperexponential curve. If we're on a hyper exponential curve, then it's entirely possible that we see some sort of blowup in the next few years. I've seen estimates that if we are on a hyper exponential curve, if that is indeed the best fit, that there is almost an effective vertical asymptote in late 2027 or early 2028. So it may be the case that the data are perfectly fine. It's the fit that's perhaps overly pessimistic.
- [80:38]
A
So on this chart here, Amjad says, listen, agent one was able to think for two minutes. Amjad said agent two was 20 minutes and now agent three is 200 minutes. We're seeing, we're seeing a 10xing here. And the question is, will it continue?
- [80:53]
E
And I think it's probably worth adding, if I remember correctly, he attributes that to, well, perhaps some sort of multi agent approach is intrinsically better than another approach. My guess would be the exact opposite. My guess is multi agent type approaches will just be naturally subsumed into existing compute scaling laws and we just find ourselves on a hyper exponential and all of this turns into transformative discoveries and almost magical AI on the timescale of two to three years, regardless of whether it's underneath something that looks multi agent or otherwise.
- [81:26]
B
No Alex, a bit of a question there. I do think that one of the things that is part of underlining this is how do we do various forms of parallelism. It's the parallelism to the supercompute, but also parallelism to agents because you've got mixture of experts as a, you know, key thing for the sparse models in order to grow. I actually think one of the things you're seeing with a chain of thought, reasoning and other things is, is again putting in collections of agents in terms of how they're operating together in order to get higher cognitive performances. So I'm curious a little bit about what your comment is because I actually think that multiple, you know, the kind of parallelism and kind of at least multiple entity constructions, even if it's to a targeting a kind of a singular output, is actually part of the lesson here. And I'm just curious, how does your comment bear on that?
- [82:17]
E
I love that question, Reid. So the way I would answer that is to say multi agent teams, multi agent approaches in general, that's just a form of sparsity. So you could imagine to your point, multiple agents working in parallel together, that you could just view that through the lens of a much larger sparser architecture with multiple feed forward lines that are all feeding forward in parallel that ultimately connect up at some point down the road. The problem I perceive, and history will judge whether this prediction is correct or not with conventional multi agent approaches is they're usually not end to end differentiable. Whereas one could imagine sort of a next generation multi agent approach where the agents are actually part of one end to end differentiable model where due to the way it's sparsely organized, it actually if you squint at it looks like it's multi agent even though it's one very large but sparse model that I think speaks to your question.
- [83:15]
D
Yeah, we desperately need better benchmarks for this. And this came up with Blitzy's saturating Sweebench last week or this week. If you look at human endeavor over a long period of time, many, many things happen in parallel. And then read Peter's book the future is faster than you think and you see how the synergy is later. And so here you can spark an infinite number of parallel agents. Not everything needs to happen after the prior thing. And so when you look on the Curve, it implies, oh, I thought of this, then I thought of that, then I thought of that. But much of that processing can be done in parallel. And also you can have many, many redundant threads. Very often if you prompt 10 different things, one of them works. Nine don't. And so you know, you can take that from 10 to 100 to 1,000, just get a better result. So all that is not baked into the, you know, the Y axis is just how much time is it thinking, which is a crazy metric when you think about it.
- [84:08]
C
Hey folks, Salim here. Many of you have asked where we can see more of Salim and where is he based, etc. Well, we do a monthly workshop called 10X Shift which is happening tomorrow the 17th. And on that workshop we go to hours. It's not recorded, it's. We keep it limited to about 100 people. It's a hundred dollars. People say it's the best hundred bucks that they've spent where we coach people on how to 10x to 100x their organization using the exponential organizations model and we go through and look at live examples and take questions and do coaching live on the call. I'm on the whole call for end to end. So if you want to hear more from me, that's the place to do it. 10 extra workshop link is below or go to openexo.com we'll see you there.
- [84:52]
A
So there's technology we've all imagined years ago and it's finally here, which is live language translation in my Apple AirPods. Let's take a listen.
- [85:03]
B
Talk. Just speak naturally.
- [85:05]
C
I'd love to take some of these.
- [85:06]
A
To my sister for her birthday.
- [85:08]
B
I'll buy eight please. Your iPhone displays your words in their.
- [85:12]
D
Language and can even read them out loud if needed. Live translation is even more useful when.
- [85:19]
B
Both people are wearing AirPods Pro.
- [85:23]
A
I agree. Yeah, let's include the keyboard. Definitely.
- [85:37]
B
The client will love that. I'll let the strategy team know to prepare that immediately.
- [85:44]
D
This incredible capability is enabled by advanced computational audio on AirPods combined with app.
- [85:51]
A
So we saw Duolingo take a stock hit when Google's live translation went live. I haven't looked at Duolingo stock price here, but at the end of the day, you know, this looks like another incredible should have existed. Finally does exist and it's going to make the world a little bit smaller. Any quick thoughts on this one?
- [86:12]
E
Apple finally launched Douglas Adams Babel Fish.
- [86:14]
A
Yes, Babelfish. Thank you. Yes, of course.
- [86:17]
B
And hopefully it's a lot better than Siri.
- [86:22]
A
Don't get Me started.
- [86:24]
B
This is.
- [86:24]
E
This is audio augmented reality. And I would say, now do video. Give us our lightweight smart glasses.
- [86:30]
D
Yeah, I think the video, the augmented conversation with video is going to be incredible. I think that's the real vision. This is kind of cool too, but yeah.
- [86:39]
A
Next subject is robots and transportation. So Elon's made this point before, you know, by 2040, expecting 10 billion Optimus robots. And he's gone to the market and said, you know, cars are okay, but the real opportunity is Optimus robot. So he's planning to scale to 1 million per year within five years. Automated automotive sales comprise 74%. So a little bit about this. He was just recently speaking about this, saying that Generation 3 is coming online soon with the manual dexterity of a human. In particular, huge focus on the forearm and the hand with 26 actuators. His goal, if he gets to $1 million per year, is a cost of manufacture of $20,000 each. And he'll price it depending upon what the demand is. But at the end of the day, what we've talked about here on the pod is a expected price in the 30,000 per purchase, 300 bucks per month for at least $10 per day. Any comments on. On Optimus.
- [87:48]
D
I had dinner with. Dinner with Rodney Brooks last night, who is the iRobot founder.
- [87:54]
A
Yes. Rodney's the OG in the space.
- [87:56]
D
Yeah. But he was really pessimistic about the question at our table is will we have a robot in our home by 2035, which seems like a lifetime.
- [88:04]
A
Oh, my God.
- [88:05]
D
And he said no. I was like, really? He said, yeah, it's all supply. The technology will exist, but the supply chain won't be there. So here you're talking about Tesla making a million optimuses per year within five years, but there's 300 million people, 150 million households. So that means very few of your friends have one in five years. Just because the supply chain is so slow to catch up to the demand.
- [88:29]
A
I'm supposed to get my 1x by the end of the year, at least by March. Right. You saw me shake hands with.
- [88:36]
D
That's you. Or you, though.
- [88:39]
C
I was talking to Steve Cousins about this, and we kind of talked through some of this, and there's all sorts of issues. One is battery life is still way low for. For a bunch of these applications. The second is if it falls over, it's gonna be so heavy, it's gonna be very hard to pick up.
- [88:57]
A
1X is like 70 pounds.
- [88:59]
C
And Lord help if you falls on you type of Thing. So there, there's a lot of areas where I think this is gonna take much longer. I would, I would not so much the supply chain. I think just the liability issues and the constraining the function and the actual action of what it does is going to take much longer to solve the insurance and legal issues first.
- [89:22]
A
Are you a, are you an optimist on this read or a pessimist? A robot pessimist?
- [89:27]
B
An optimist. Did you say on this, the look? I, I was just kind of bemused. Look. Ultimate long term, I think obviously it's there. I think the short term, you know, I don't know if Tesla has ever.
- [89:43]
A
Hit a target.
- [89:46]
C
Touche.
- [89:47]
A
Alex, you were going to say something?
- [89:48]
E
Yeah, I, I would also, I mean I would focus on that 80 figure that, that I, I think is, is such a striking number if you think about, and think about the, from a market analysis perspective. Think about the size of automotive, it's probably like four or five trillion dollars per year worldwide. Whereas if you think about labor and the services market, it's depending on just. Yeah, yeah, no, depend. Well, depending on which estimates. You believe manual labor is like 2/3 of the services economy and call that like 20 trillion. So in some sense this 80% of Tesla's value is really a bet that Tesla achieves parity with the services market. It's a general sort of universal intelligence powered services company. And I think that's probably where the market overall ends up.
- [90:34]
A
Well, you remember he's got to hit 8 trillion to get his trillion dollar pay package. So if anybody can do it, I think Elon can. So anyway, let's move on. So other robots here. All right, let's take a look at a different design. This is called the hidden robot boom. This is a generation of robots that don't have five, you know, two arms, ten fingers.
- [90:56]
C
Salim here, here.
- [90:57]
A
Yes, Salim's been on this on the WTF episodes. Like why do they have to have two arms and two legs and a head? Well, okay, this is what they look like otherwise. Saleem, do you want one of these? Let me know.
- [91:23]
C
I, I think this is awesome. I saw one where they were using it to map out the floors of a construction thing and, and plan mapping out exactly where the pillars and so on would go. I think this is huge. I think the industrial use for robots is so much past the home use for a while to come that people are underestimating that. I think the efficiency gains from that are going to be huge. And obviously the form factor is not Going to be humanoid. I mean, my beef, you've heard me before, but at least give me a thumbnail third arm if I'm a humanoid robot, at least.
- [92:00]
A
Or a dildo, anyway. The use here, wind turbines, nuclear plants, subsea pipelines, railways, tunnels, power lines. The old adage, if it's dull, dangerous or dirty, use a robot to do it. The estimated market on this particular tweet that came out is that this sort of marketplace for robot maintenance and inspection is $6.7 billion today, growing at about 13% per year, expected at 12.5 billion by 2030.
- [92:34]
C
I think that's a radical underestimation, right? So just for example, if you look at the Mekong Delta in Indonesia, Vietnam, whatever, it's so polluted, and if you had underwater robots cleaning it up, it would just completely change the game, make things massively better. It's like the smallest titch of an application.
- [92:53]
A
I just want the robot cleaning, cleaning the side of the 405 out here in LA or the beaches. Yeah, sure. Okay. I found this one super, super interested. And this is surgical robot. Performs gallbladder procedure autonomously. Right? So this is different than the da Vinci robot, which is basically an extension of a human operating in a theater. And you guys all know what I've said about this. If you need to hire a surgeon for something, this is to our amazing WTF Moonshot subscribers. If you need to get a surgery and you want to interview your surgeon, there's one question you ask them, which is, how many times have you done this surgery this morning? The success of a surgeon is a function of how many different cases they've seen and sort of the eye muscle memory on doing these. So in the final result, I do believe the best surgeons in the world will be robots. They'll see in infrared, ultraviolet. They wouldn't have a fight with their girlfriend or boyfriend. They wouldn't have that drink and drunk too much caffeine. So this comes out of Johns Hopkins, and they built a surgical robot without any human control. It achieved 100% accuracy in this gallbladder remover. It's different than da Vinci. And da Vinci came out of was a DARPA project, right. To help surgery in the field. I think this is huge. You know, how long, how far we'll have, how long we'll have this in the future? I don't know. I don't think it's more than, you know, three to five years. This is a sensor actuator, machine learning problem. Alex, what do you think about it?
- [94:33]
E
Yeah, no Notably Peter. So I read the paper, very exciting paper from the the Hopkins team. This was a model that was trained by imitation learning. So it was trained by watching videos of human surgeons perform surgeries. And that immediately rhymes in my mind with the early DeepMind results like AlphaGo that were trained from watching in part expert human games. And I think we're going, and I would expect if history does rhyme, we're about to enter an era when using digital twins. And maybe this may or may not be aligned with what Reid is thinking for curing cancer with manas. We're going to transition from imitation learning based medicine and surgery to reinforcement learning based medicine and surgery the moment we have a high fidelity digital twin of the human body. And of course turtles all the way down cell virtual cell models as well. Why train off of copying humans when you could do reinforcement learning and achieve potentially super duper human level performance. So I think again early innings, but I think it's inevitable we see sort of a surgery 0mu0 version of this sometime soon.
- [95:48]
B
Reid, look, I think the surgery part of this stuff is I think I agree with you line of sight. I think we already, you know, it's a little bit like for example, if today you said I would rather would you pick an AI or your average radiologist to read your X ray film, you'd pick the AI hands down, you know, your hands down like you know, 11 out of 10 times. And I think we're, we're heading to that with the robotics now. I think that the approaches, I think actually, you know, human biology is actually quite complicated and the ability to do a full simulation, you know, is, is some ways off. But I think that this kind of robotic thing, oh my gosh, you know, hit the accelerator.
- [96:31]
A
Yeah, Love it, love it.
- [96:32]
C
I think of it as air traffic control flying a plane. Right. Today the plane fly themselves. 99% of the time the pilot is only there in case of emergency. I think we'll see the same thing. Yeah.
- [96:43]
A
All right, so Zoox, I remember Zoox. I came, I went and visited them and met the team there. They were acquired by Amazon and back in 2020. And this is a self driving pod, right? This is you and your best buddies facing each other inside there and they're launching. Finally. Good fun them. They're launching in Las Vegas. They have massive scale, well not really 50 vehicles in their fleet. They'll start in Las Vegas, then San Francisco, Miami, Louisiana is free for the first few months, but then they're going to go to similar pricing as Uber and Lyft, any thoughts, gentlemen?
- [97:21]
D
Have any of you guys taken the self flying drone in Dubai? You push the button and it picks you up.
- [97:27]
A
Not yet.
- [97:28]
D
Not yet.
- [97:28]
C
Dying to. I just don't want to be first.
- [97:30]
A
But just don't do it to die. Let's put it that way.
- [97:34]
D
They're in production. Yeah, Peter, you're usually really adventurous with that stuff.
- [97:39]
A
I would do it in a heartbeat. I saw it first at Consumer Electronics Show. Martin Rothblatt bought 100 of those vehicles early on for organ delivery before she got involved in her own vertical takeoff. Flying car Beta. All right, let's wrap here at the end of the program. I remain just continuously like a kid in the candy store at the speed at which this is moving, you know, every day waking up and you know, I love the articles you send over Alex, and the conversations that we have. You know. Reid, what are you most excited to see in the next year?
- [98:30]
B
Well, I'd say the next year will be part of the reason why I think the focus on coding and acceleration of coding is I think it accelerates everything. Accelerates individuals, as per the co pilots that I was talking about before, but also accelerates the discovery and the computation, the algorithms that Dave was talking about. And I actually think we will see massive coding acceleration, and that will be a precursor to many other accelerants.
- [98:56]
A
But is there one Star Trek part of the equation that you're looking forward to?
- [99:00]
C
Star Trek?
- [99:02]
B
It's kind of the. We tend to over predict the two years and under predict the 10 years. So it's a little bit of the. What would be the science fiction thing. I mean, obviously we saw. And I'm very hopeful about the iPod, 3s, maybe a tricorder.
- [99:22]
A
Yep. I think we've reported on some early versions of the tricorder. I'd done a $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X prize 10 years ago. It's time to do it again. I think the tech is there for sure. Salim, what about you? What are you excited about?
- [99:37]
C
Passenger drones would be my personal favorite. I mean, I spent eight EVTOls, I spent eight days out of nine in India traveling between airports and like, what the hell kind of wasted time crap is that?
- [99:50]
A
Oh my God.
- [99:50]
C
In today's world, the technology is there. It's not just a implementation infrastructure.
- [99:55]
A
We saw a flying car. We saw a flying car on the campus of Stanford two days ago.
- [99:59]
C
Yeah, yeah. Very, very impressive. Very impressive design. And it's very workable. He thinks, thought he could get over time the cost down to about 40,000 a car.
- [100:08]
A
Yeah, I can't wait.
- [100:11]
D
What I'm most excited about by far is a, is a version two of Reid interviews. Read. I thought that was, you know, read. AI talking to the real Reed was one of the most brilliantly conceived pieces of media. Anybody who hasn't seen it, dig it up. You could do it so much better today actually, because we're working on it. When you did it, actually it was. I assume you coded that up your yourself, but that was pretty hard to do when you did it. Now you could do something incredible. And Peter did. He did a on stage interview of Socrates and Aristotle that turned into a big love fest. So if you don't prompt it right.
- [100:44]
A
Yeah, I did an interview myself last year at the abundance summit of 150 year old version of myself, which was fun and asked it about the future and it had some great answers. I loved it.
- [100:56]
D
I know everybody watching this pod posts, please read. Do it again. Do it.
- [101:00]
B
Update it.
- [101:02]
D
That'll put some pressure on you.
- [101:03]
A
And Alex, let's not forget you, buddy. What do you imagine over the next year that would really sort of hit your childhood ambitions?
- [101:14]
E
Oh, gosh, I think I'm getting rather difficult to ontologically shock at this point. But I will say pulling all of Star Trek, not just some of Star Trek, to the left, I think that's a worthy ambition. We've got the holodecks, we've almost got the replicators, if you squint at food printers. We're missing warp drive, we're missing a whole bunch of other aspects of Star Trek. Wouldn't it be lovely if we were able to pull those to the left as well?
- [101:38]
C
I've got. I've got one. I was chatting with Steve Jurvetson at the Stanford conference and he reiterated that crazy anecdote about once we have a quantum computer, it'll be definitive proof of a multiverse. And that really needs alcohol to get into.
- [101:52]
A
All right, well, we will. We'll do that one of our next sessions. Thank you everybody to our subscribers. We appreciate you. If you're not a subscriber, come join us. These are the conversations we have that we hope will make you more intelligent, more excited about the future, help you understand what the hell just happened in the last week. Because the speed of change is not just exponential, it truly is becoming hyper exponential. See you guys. My moonshot mates appreciate you, Reid. Thank you, buddy. It's been a wonderful friendship. Grateful for you.
- [102:21]
B
Massively fun.
- [102:23]
C
Yeah.
- [102:23]
A
If you could have had a 10 year head start on the dot com boom back in the 2000s. Would you have taken it? Every week I track the major tech meta trends. These are massive game changing shifts that will play out over the decade ahead. From humanoid robotics to AGI, quantum computing, energy breakthroughs and longevity. I cut through the noise and deliver only what matters to our lives and our careers. I send out a Metatrend newsletter twice a week as a quick two minute read over email. It's entirely free. These insights are Read by founders, CEOs and investors behind some of the world's most disruptive companies.
- [102:59]
B
Why?
- [103:00]
A
Because acting early is everything. This is for you. If you want to see the future before it arrives and profit from it. Sign up@dmandness.com metatrends and be ahead of the next tech bubble. That's dmagnus.com metatrends.
- [103:29]
E
Olivia loves a challenge. It's why she lifts heavy weights and likes complicated recipes. But for booking her on a trip.
- [103:38]
B
To Paris, Olivia chose the easy way.
- [103:40]
E
With Expedia, she bundled her flight with a hotel to save more. Of course, she still climbed all 674 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower. You were made to take the easy route. We were made to easily package your trip. Expedia made to travel flight inclusive packages are atoll protected.