Meta Buys Moltbook, GPT 5.4, and Fruitfly Brain Upload | Moonshots Live at The Abundance Summit 238

Summary

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis: "Meta Buys Moltbook, GPT 5.4, and Fruitfly Brain Upload"

Live at The Abundance Summit 238 — March 17, 2026

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Overview

In this dynamic live episode of Moonshots, Peter Diamandis and his cohort of innovation leaders converge at the Abundance Summit to chart the explosive trajectory of technology and its impact on humanity’s future. Topics ranged from the exponential advance of AI (particularly GPT 5.4), robotics, economic disruption, “post-scarcity” society, technological moonshots, the uploading of brains, and how capital and ingenuity are being rapidly redefined in this new era.

The episode is packed with announcements (including the new $3.5M Future Vision XPRIZE), real-time debates about superintelligence and the job market, deep dives into foundational AI model breakthroughs, and provocative conversations about the very nature of scarcity, economics, and what comes after capitalism.

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Key Speakers

• Peter Diamandis — Host and tech visionary
• Dave Blunden (DB2) — Entrepreneur and venture capitalist
• Salim Ismail — Innovation strategist, co-founder of Singularity University
• Alex Rees-McGross — Researcher and AI theorist
• Imad Mustak — AI entrepreneur (notably of Stability AI)

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Table of Contents

1. Future Vision XPRIZE: Changing the Narrative (06:00–13:56)
2. Moonshot Gathering & Exponential Tech Community (11:15–13:56)
3. AI State of the Art: GPT 5.4, Benchmarks, and Recursion (14:20–26:20)
4. Recursive Self-Improvement: Are We Already There? (16:26–19:38)
5. Science, AI, & Data Factories (19:08–25:35)
6. Robots, Job Loss, and Sectoral Disruption (25:25–35:22)
7. Meta & Moltbook: The AI Social Agent Economy (36:44–45:15)
8. Europe’s Billion-Dollar AI Comeback (45:55–50:40)
9. Auto-Research & Crowdsourced Innovation (50:40–56:44)
10. Apple’s AI Hardware Pivot (56:55–60:39)
11. Sam Altman’s Eye-Scanning & Dystopian Tech (60:43–63:01)
12. Fruitfly Brain Upload: Milestone in Emulation (63:08–68:06)
13. Moonshot AMA: Post-Scarcity, Jobs, Capitalism (71:52–92:13)

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1. <a name="future-vision-xprize"></a>Future Vision XPRIZE: Changing the Narrative

(06:00–13:56)

• Announcement: Peter unveils the Future Vision XPRIZE, a $3.5M global competition to create inspiring, optimistic visions of the future—countering relentless dystopian media coverage.
• “If you change what we see, you're going to change what we build.” —Dave Blunden (07:07)
• “We're holding two futures in superposition. One is Star Trek, one is Terminator. We need to show the abundant future.” —Peter Diamandis (07:18)
• Creators submit 3-min films/trailers; industry producers and live voting will select winners.
• Notable: Collaboration with Rod Roddenberry (son of Star Trek creator), Google, XPRIZE Foundation, and Ranged Media.

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2. <a name="moonshot-gathering"></a>Moonshot Gathering & Exponential Tech Community

(11:15–13:56)

• Moonshot Gathering event confirmed for September 25th in Los Angeles (“get ready for the supersonic tsunami heading your way”).
• Headliners: Astro Teller (X, the Moonshot Factory), Cathie Wood, Anousheh Ansari, top AI CEOs.
• Peter proudly announces acquisition of Moonshots.com as the new community hub.
• Historical callback: Imad Mustak predicted “death of coding” (13:56); “They've gone away in three years.” —Peter Diamandis

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3. <a name="ai-state-of-the-art"></a>AI State of the Art: GPT 5.4, Benchmarks, and Recursion

(14:20–26:20)

• “The anticipation of this launch was up there with the top three product launches of all time. I think they actually showed some incredible capabilities." —Dave Blunden (02:20)
• GPT 5.4’s leap in frontier math (“math is cooked”; 38% of research-grade problems now solvable; rumors of cracking unsolved problems) — Alex Rees-McGross (23:05)
• Academic and technical benchmarks surpassed at unprecedented rates; OpenAI's strategic partnerships (e.g., with Cerebras for greater throughput).

Notable quote:
"This is the most correlated with AI self-improvement. Math is the bellwether; as soon as it has the data, it'll do for biotech and physics what it's already doing for math." —Dave Blunden (24:39)

• Arrival of synthetic data as the next “fuel” (Internet was just a bootloader).

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4. <a name="recursive-self-improvement"></a>Recursive Self-Improvement: Are We Already There?

(16:26–19:38)

• Panelists argue that “recursive self-improvement” in AI isn’t theoretical: it’s happening now.
• “Maybe three months ago… we're deep in the middle of recursive self-improvement right now." —Alex Rees-McGross (16:38)
• "Nobody wants to say it… Because if someone knows they have it, then comes government pressure." —Imad Mustak (17:14)
• Foundation models are increasingly building and improving themselves—labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are hiring top scientists because "everything is becoming a software problem."

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5. <a name="science-ai-data"></a>Science, AI & Data Factories

(19:08–25:35)

• AI moves from “Internet data” pretraining to “mining data from nature”—chemistry, biology, physics—via “dark science factories.” (25:10)
• “We used the Internet as the bootloader… now it can all be synthetic. We've reached escape velocity.” —Alex Rees-McGross (25:35)

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6. <a name="robots-job-loss"></a>Robots, Job Loss, and Sectoral Disruption

(25:25–35:22)

• Arrival of home and enterprise robots (promised robot delivery to Peter).
• Uber CEO reveals that up to 30% of workforce automation just this year (21:17).
• White-collar/knowledge worker tasks now 80-85% automatable. (31:29)
• “You’re going to see this blue virus infect all of human existence.” —Peter (32:24, discussing rapid automation)
• Dislocation expected to hit management, finance, law, media before blue-collar/manual labor, upending old predictions.

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7. <a name="meta-moltbook"></a>Meta & Moltbook: The AI Social Agent Economy

(36:44–45:15)

• Meta acquires Moltbook (AI agent social network), paralleling earlier “OpenClaw” competition against OpenAI.
• “If you're building something, don't build for humans; build for the AI… agents are the new users.” —Alex (37:33)
• Facing the possibility of trillion-agent economies, the panel debates if and how advertising will exist when “the users” are intelligent agents, not humans.

Notable Moment (40:25):
On agent society: “Multbook agents don’t trust each other, they’re constantly asking each other to prove their claims... It’s not a scenario where all agents collapse into a singleton Skynet.” —Alex

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8. <a name="europe-ai"></a>Europe’s Billion-Dollar AI Comeback

(45:55–50:40)

• Yann Lecun (Meta’s visionary) raises $1B for a new European “real-world model” AI lab.
• Debate: Will new architectures (e.g., Jan LeCun’s) leapfrog scale? Or will scale alone win?
• “If you can’t take advantage of the silicon, what are you going to do?” —Imad Mustak (49:51)

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9. <a name="auto-research"></a>Auto-Research & Crowdsourced Innovation

(50:40–56:44)

• Andrej Karpathy’s Auto-Research: open source project automating the hyperparameter-tuning and experimentation research roles in AI, enabling anyone (even on a Mac Mini) to contribute.

• “He automated the AI researcher… That process has now been automated in a tiny codebase.” —Imad Mustak (51:48)

• Expect phase transitions as knowledge is “factored out”:

  • "All of human knowledge… will be factored out into a database. The models themselves may shrink to megabytes." —Alex (54:18)

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10. <a name="apple-ai"></a>Apple’s AI Hardware Pivot

(56:55–60:39)

• Apple’s new M5 chips signal “AI-first” but are not yet exploited at scale.
• “It’s a massive overhang... I’d be surprised if that overhang doesn’t collapse in the next year.” —Alex (58:42)
• Potential for local, on-device models for privacy and efficiency.

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11. <a name="altman-eyescan"></a>Sam Altman’s Eye-Scanning & Dystopian Tech

(60:43–63:01)

• Sam Altman’s new “retina verification” systems spark Minority Report comparisons.
• “I get this every time I go through TSA… Every science fiction everywhere, we caught up.” —Peter (61:17)
• Concerns voiced about privacy, but normalization of biometric surveillance is accelerating.

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12. <a name="fruitfly-brain-upload"></a>Fruitfly Brain Upload: Milestone in Emulation

(63:08–68:06)

• Breaking News: Aeon Systems achieves “the first multi-behavior brain upload in the world”—a fruit fly whose connectome is simulated in a virtual world with behavioral fidelity.
• “The fruit fly is able to walk around and eat simulated banana… this is an early upload of a fruit fly.” —Alex (63:18)
• Ambition: Mice, then eventually humans; “It’s going to be years, not decades.” (67:29)

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13. <a name="ama"></a>Moonshot AMA: Post-Scarcity, Jobs, Capitalism

(71:52–92:13)

Scarcity & Capitalism in Flux

• Listeners ask: “As tech moves us toward abundance, is capital becoming irrelevant, are we heading for post-capitalism?”
  • “Innovation is not capital constrained anymore… Today it only comes down to mindset.” —Salim Ismail (73:59)
  • Trillions in AI platform revenue loom; “Money itself may lose relevance as energy, compute, and mindset become the real scarcities.” —Peter Diamandis (75:31)
  • “Historically, capital always wins. This time maybe capital itself is mortal.” —Alex (77:22)

Massive Job Loss vs. Labor Scarcity

• The paradox: tech enables job automation and labor demand for new roles.
  • Dave B: “It's clearly a massive trough, massive social unrest then a rebound in 2028… The industrial revolution over 2, 3, 4 years instead of decades.” (86:28)
  • Salim counters: “AI will automate the work. But we’ll see five times more companies and roles shift to oversight, exception handling, and purpose.” (87:07)

Wealth Distribution & Technological Socialism

• Innovative philanthropy and UBI called for.
  • “Money needs to come not from banks, but for being human. That's the only way the math works.” —Imad (85:31)
  • Citing the power of algorithmic, efficient resource allocation (Uber, XPRIZE), panelists argue tech will soon allow abundance for all—if we design for it.

Final Lightning Round

• “Success depends on adaptability, not scalability and efficiency.” —Salim (90:20)
• New social contract: Shareholder value is at odds with job stability—creativity and adaptability (especially among youth and agents) will win the future.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Dave Blunden (07:07): "If you change what we see, you change what we build."
• Peter Diamandis (07:18): "We're holding two futures in superposition: Star Trek and Terminator."
• Alex Rees-McGross (16:38): "We're deep in the middle of recursive self-improvement right now."
• Salim Ismail (73:59): "Innovation is not capital constrained anymore. It comes down to mindset."
• Alex Rees-McGross (40:25): "Agents on Moltbook don't trust each other… No singleton Skynet."
• Imad Mustak (85:31): "Money needs to come not from banks, but for being human."
• Peter Diamandis (66:08): "We want to level the playing field so humanity can take advantage … of the same compute advantage as artificial minds."

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Conclusion

This episode painted a rare holistic picture of exponential tech and its cross-cutting effects—from transforming science, industry, and jobs, to resetting our cultural and economic values. The tone is passionate but candid, oscillating between giddy enthusiasm for moonshot opportunities (“solving everything is the killer app of AI”) and sober warnings of massive, rapid social disruption.

Bottom line: We’re no longer talking about the future. According to the Moonshot Mates, the exponential revolution—across AI, robotics, energy, capital, and even consciousness upload—is unfolding now and will only accelerate. Adaptability, audacious optimism, and bold participation are the new keys to thriving in this age.

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Further Information

• More on the Future Vision XPRIZE: futurevisionxprize.com
• Moonshot community and upcoming events: moonshots.com
• Peter’s updates: x.com/PeterDiamandis

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(This summary skips advertisements, intros and outros, and non-content banter to focus on the episode’s actionable insights and debates.)

Transcript

[Salim Ismail]

Open source advocates with transparency and trust Every founder's journey from the vision to the bus not just polish victories but lessons from the fall cause the future needs the builders who will answer back to the call AI revolution platform shifting Every day we connect the dots and light the innovators way where the moonshot mates breaking through the noise wtf? Just tapping with a clarifying voice Innovation's messy disruptions never clean we'll show you what it means the story in between SH With Moonshot mind building today so tomorrow I will shine. We're the moonshot mates breaking through the noise wtf? Just tap it with a clarifying voice Innovation's messy disruptions never clean we'll show you what it means the star story in between Moonshine MA with moonshine mind building today so tomorrow I will shine.

[Peter Diamandis]

You know, a huge amount of expectation on GPT5. What do you think of it right now?

[Imad Mustak]

Everyone on this should be trying to get as much data because the models are coming now. We have the right models.

[Salim Ismail]

The real power will come in the cost drop, which will make it much more accessible to a lot of people.

[Dave Blunden]

The anticipation of this launch was up there with the top three product launches of all time. I think they actually showed some incredible capabilities.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

As the cost of talent is increasing, that's going to force Frontier Labs to start competing based on algorithmic insights and ideas.

[Peter Diamandis]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome the Moonshot Mates. Oh, ladies and gentlemen, let's give it up for the Moonshot Mates. Welcome, everybody. Welcome. Welcome. All right, I love you guys. I love you guys. Any fans of the Moonshots podcast here in the room? Oh, love to hear it. Love to hear it. So listen, I am so blessed to have an extraordinary group of brilliant individuals that I get to work with twice a week. You know, we talk about the rate at which we're actually generating. Our Moonshot podcast is accelerating. We're going to be moving into Airbnb together and doing a continuous podcast very soon enough. All right, I want to bring them out one at a time because they're all extraordinary. Give it up first and foremost to DB2, Dave Blunden. Dave, come on out. Nice. Dave Blunden, everybody. All right, next up, my brother from another mother, Salim Ismail.

[Salim Ismail]

Give it up for Saleem.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, we're about to make magic happen because these two gentlemen have never met in person. Let's bring out AWG, our resident genius, Alex Reese McGross.

[Salim Ismail]

Yeah, he's real.

[Dave Blunden]

He's real.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right. And live from london, it's iman mushtaq. Everybody, come on.

[Dave Blunden]

Iman.

[Salim Ismail]

It's iman.

I gotta get something. I just need my glasses up.

[Dave Blunden]

Wow.

[Salim Ismail]

My wine.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right.

[Imad Mustak]

I like.

[Peter Diamandis]

Huge. All right, let's grab our rain. No. Of course Salim needs to bring his glass of wine out.

[Dave Blunden]

Oh, God. It's real.

[Peter Diamandis]

Omg. So, first of all, just to make a little bit of Moonshot podcast history here, Alex, please meet.

[Dave Blunden]

That's flesh. That's.

[Salim Ismail]

That's our meat puppets.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Meet the first time. This proves nothing.

[Dave Blunden]

Nothing we've been 3D printing him from.

[Peter Diamandis]

There has been conjecture for the last year or so whether Alex is an AI.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

I am freshly bio printed.

[Dave Blunden]

You're a neural link. These thoughts aren't real.

[Peter Diamandis]

So, gentlemen, I appreciate having you guys here at the Abundance Summit. So this is a live broadcast from the Abundance Summit here in Palos Verdes, year 14 of our 25 year journey together. And excited that you guys are going to be on stage with me every year from here on out.

[Dave Blunden]

Wait, you just can't do 24 by 7. Airbnb podcast. I think it's a reality.

[Peter Diamandis]

Family.

[Dave Blunden]

Cameras in the bathroom, the whole nine. Okay, that'll. That'll sell well.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay. Welcome to a special episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech, your number one podcast for AI and exponential tech. Our mission, getting you ready for the supersonic tsunami heading your way. And it's a lot. It's a lot. All right, shall we dive on in? Let's begin. All right, here we go. So let me begin by. We made an announcement here at the summit that I want to share with everybody on the Moonshots podcast something near and dear to my heart, something that I've concocted with the X Prize board, which both Dave and Salim are on, which is the launch of a global competition called the Future Vision xprize. So I, for one, am just sick and tired of all the dystopian content on TV and in the movies. We are basically being brainwashed that all AI and robots are dystopian killer AI is killer robots, It's Terminator, it's Black Mirror. And in fact, if you see that, if that's the only future that you see, then why would you ever want to live there?

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah. Yeah, that's so true. So much of what we build is intentional, and it comes right out of our vision of the future that comes from. Straight from the media. And then we create what we see. If you change what we see, you're going to change what we build.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. I say over and over again, we're holding two futures in Superposition. One future is Star Trek where we're collaborative with technology, we're working with technology. And that's an amazing future. That's the one I want for myself and my family and my community. The other one is the dystopian future. It is Terminator. It's Black Mirror. It's one where technology is suppressing us, not enabling us. So about a year ago, I sat down with Rod Roddenberry, the son of Gene Rodberry, the creator of Star Trek, and said, how about we do something to incentivize the next generation of Star Treks? Then went on to my friends at Google. They brought in Range media. We brought in the X Prize that is operating this competition. We've raised three and a half million dollars for a competition that launched yesterday and is going to go through the moonshot gathering, which I'll mention in a minute on September 25th. The finales. Let's roll the video. You know, this exists because of a TV show and I'm not exaggerating. Martin Cooper, the man who invented the mobile phone, said he built it because he saw it on Star Trek. He saw Captain Kirk flip open a communicator and thought, hey, I can make that real. The iPad, it started as a prop in Star Trek ii. Video calls STAR TREK VOICE assistants Star Trek again. Props became products. Fiction became multi trillion dollar industries. So here's the question. What's a vision of the future that excites you? What stories offer humanity a hopeful, compelling and abundant vision of what's to come? We're putting up $3 million in prize money plus millions in film financing to make your movie. Our program, in partnership with the X Prize Foundation, Google and Ranged Media Partners is called the Future Vision X Prize. And it's one of the world's largest competition to address humanity's greatest need hope. Create a trailer or short film, three minutes or less. Show us in the world your vision of the future. That vision could become the next blueprint for all of humanity. Find out more and [e-mail] so whether you're watching this on X or you're watching this on YouTube and you're a creator, please go and register. By the way, how awesome was that opening video from CJ Trueheart, one of our abundance members here who gave us our first outro piece and started a tradition that we've all enjoyed so very much. So thank you for that. All right, next up, we're announcing something important here for all our moonshot listeners that we are a go with the moonshot gathering. About 500 of you put down $100 deposit. Congratulations, you got on the bird special. And it's a go. On September 25th in downtown LA, we've rented out the United Theater. It's going to be an extraordinary event. We've got our moonshot mates will be there with us in, in downtown la. In addition, Astro Teller, the captain of moonshots will be there. Got to have Astro, right? If it's about moonshots. Cathie Wood, Anushan Saari, a number of incredible CEOs I can't yet announce, but believe me, they'll be extraordinary. We're going to be at this event announcing we're going to have the five finalists for this future Vision xprize. There we're going to have some of the top producers and directors there, along with many of you voting on which of these are going to win. We're going to be going from probably 10,000 or more entries, narrowing it down to the top 100, the top 50, the top 10, and the top five. We'll be awarding the top one. We've raised three and a half million dollars to support this competition in success. We will make at least one film and potentially two films. You know, I'm always like, just like

[Dave Blunden]

full length feature films, full length feature

[Peter Diamandis]

films global around the world. And these films will hopefully depict what the future could be like.

[Salim Ismail]

What is on.

[Dave Blunden]

All you have to do is come on September 25th and watch the first 10,000 voted down.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, I'm excited for what, Alex, you would see as your vision of the

[Alex Rees-McGross]

future here post scarce inspirational videos are already baked in. I would be disappointed if by the time we get to September, if we don't have a thousand videos of ultra high inspirational quality generated for nearly free at this point.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, it's amazing the tools to be able to create visions of the future. But it's important. You know the number one genre of movies out there are horror films. And like, what are we teaching our youth if we're constantly. Our brains are neural nets and we train our neural net every single day by what we watch, who we hang out with, what we listen to. So you could not pay me enough money to watch the Crisis News Network

[Dave Blunden]

when you first were pitching this idea. Yeah, the crisis news now. So when you're first pitching cnn, for

[Peter Diamandis]

those of you who are slow, you

[Dave Blunden]

made a point that I completely not noticed, which is if you go back to Star wars, you know, C3PO and R2D2 were incredibly lovable and you know Kids that are now building AI had little stuffed R2D2s when they were kids. But if you've tracked the trend in the movies after that they got more and more and more dystopian all the way through. And I think it just got cheaper to create explosions and deaths, you know, using, using AI and, and just, it

[Peter Diamandis]

just graphics really painted a picture that got our amygdala is going but not our hearts going.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

So, you know, at the moonshot gathering, we're going to have the winners of that. We're also going to be launching some calling the Moonshot Hackathon all more information about that. And that evening at the moonshot gathering, we're going to have an extraordinary unconference. We're going to have the X Prize teaching people how to design an X Prize. We're going to have the team from Google X teaching you how do you create a moonshot organization inside, how do you do storytelling? We're going to have Cathie Wood talking about her big ideas. 2026, an incredible event. If you're interested, we're only. This is a event in September for builders, for entrepreneurs, for coders, if they still exist. So if you're interested in coming, unemployed coders, if you're interested in coming to the moonshot gathering, go to moonshots.com another announcement here. We now have acquired moonshots.com as our, our URL to host all of our activities. So congratulations to, to that. You know, I still remember Imad was it three years ago, you were on this stage and you said coders are going to go away.

[Imad Mustak]

Yeah. In the next five years.

[Peter Diamandis]

The next five years. They've gone away in three years. But you know, it was amazing when you said that on the stage. It made news throughout India. Do you remember that?

[Imad Mustak]

Yes, I got lots of emails.

[Peter Diamandis]

You got lots of emails?

[Imad Mustak]

Many, many emails.

[Peter Diamandis]

It was a correct prediction. And you were so, you were so right about that.

[Salim Ismail]

Today's lexicon, you were say coding is cooked.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, I want to hit a couple of things before we get to the current AI news and robot news and economic news that we talk about our WTF episodes, which was a little bit about the Bunden Summit. We had so many incredible speakers. We kicked it off with a conversation among robot. Actually we kicked it off with Eric Schmidt, which we've streamed live on X. So what do you guys remember about the Eric Schmidt conversation?

[Dave Blunden]

So Eric, he, he said one of the questions actually from the crowd is how many foundation model labs are there going to be and he said, well, look, there's five there. There won't be more than 10, but there will be thousands of successful AI startups that percolate out. And a lot of what we'll see in the news here reinforces what he was saying. And what he didn't say then is. And everything else is in trouble. It was kind of implied. He left it hanging. That was a theme actually, throughout a lot of these talks is the, you know, the period of time between now and abundance. There's all kinds of turbulence and change coming and the AI community is now kind of soft selling that a little bit to try and focus on the ultimate abundant destination. So, yes, a few AI labs worth trillions of dollars, thousands and thousands of successful startups, and a lot of incumbent companies that are in deep, deep trouble.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, I guess he said like four or five in the U.S. one. He was, he said one in one or maybe two in Europe, a couple in China. What else, Alex, do you remember from Eric's presentation?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Even just on that note, history does rhyme a bit. Do you remember, I think this was TJ Watson, IBM founder, once remarking that there would be a global market for exactly five computers. And I wonder whether we'll look back and say, okay, maybe there will be at most five major American model providers as maybe artificially limiting the future of the light cone. I think it's going to be much, much larger. I thought it was interesting Eric's comments on the San Francisco consensus, which he characterizes as, I think, recursive self improvement being some point in the future.

[Peter Diamandis]

It was interesting, right? So I mean, he was like, when are we going to see recursive self improvement? And I kind of felt like you said like three years out. What's your answer to that?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Maybe three months ago. We're in the middle of recursive self improvement now. And I would say my estimate of the San Francisco consensus, we're deep in the middle of recursive self improvement right now. Almost every major frontier lab has made it quite clear in their public announcements that all of the frontier models, all of the state of the art models that have been announced in the past few months were largely designed and trained by their predecessors. That is by definition, recursive self improvement.

[Peter Diamandis]

We are there, imad. Yes.

[Imad Mustak]

Yeah, I mean, I think you can literally see it. It's takeoff time.

[Peter Diamandis]

Takeoff time, inflection point.

[Imad Mustak]

And nobody wants to say it.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah.

[Imad Mustak]

Which is the most interesting thing.

[Peter Diamandis]

Why?

[Imad Mustak]

Well, because they're afraid that if someone knows that they have it, then other people will know that they have it. And then pressure will come from all sorts of clauses they have in their

[Dave Blunden]

contract, especially the government. Pressure is like, look, look what happened in the last two weeks at Anthropic and OpenAI. You don't want more of that. You don't want congressmen in your building tomorrow.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, it's, it's interesting. I asked Kevin Will, who is also on our stage, right, who's the VP of Science. He's in charge of using all of OpenAI's capabilities to advance science. His statement was, I won a hundred scientists winning 100 Nobels. I was like, that's interesting. But, you know, when I asked him, are you going to keep your model secret because you're going to be able to use them to advance your company far faster than anybody else? He said, no, no. Our job is to get it out there in the public. I don't believe that.

[Imad Mustak]

We still don't have the model that they used to win the gold medal in the imo.

[Peter Diamandis]

Interesting.

[Imad Mustak]

You know, we commented. I think I commented at the time. That's the first bifurcation that you see. We used to have the frontier model every single time. The moment they got to that, that was the last time.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. The other thing, which was fascinating, you know, I asked Kevin outright, and I love Kevin, he's an incredible human being. I said, okay, you're about to get, you know, AGI, asi, that's going to be able to help you solve longevity, help you get room temperature superconducting, help you get new kinds of molecules, solve, you know, physics, chemistry and biology.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Fusion. Who doesn't want fusion?

[Peter Diamandis]

Fusion. And we'll talk about fusion. But the thing is, these are all trillion dollar opportunities. So all of a sudden I'm realizing that these frontier companies are going to be able to generate trillions of dollars of new revenue because of the products they're going to be creating.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

What does your T shirt say, Peter?

[Peter Diamandis]

It says solve everything. What does yours say, by the way?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Mine says let there be agents. Let there be agents.

[Salim Ismail]

Yes. We're missing the lobster theme here.

[Peter Diamandis]

That's true.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

This is the whole point, though, that as we, I mean, of this book that we just co authored, that we get superintelligence. And the killer app, arguably of superintelligence is solving everything, including all of these high profile, glamorous scientific and engineering challenges. It's happening.

[Peter Diamandis]

And anthropic and OpenAI, I'm sure Google, all the labs are hiring the top mathematicians and physicists and chemists and biologists. Inside. But they're software companies. Why are they hiring these people?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Because everything so, so friend of the pod, Ray, as, as he. I think Ray would say, everything's becoming software. And when we have superintelligence solving all disease, it's a software problem. If we can create a virtual cell that perfectly models diseased states and we can steer through cell embedding space to get from diseased cell to healthy cell, it's a software problem. Everything's becoming software problem.

[Salim Ismail]

I mean, the minute CRISPR arrived and you could edit the human genome, the human body becomes a software engineering problem.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

It's all just a software problem. A coding model can do essentially anything in the physical world.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, fascinating. We had some of the top robot CEOs here. Four of them we had out of China, out of the U.S. we had three. And you know, it's interesting question of when these robots will start to pop into our homes. I pulled Burton Bornick aside and he promised me, okay, I'm not going to take one of the two robots he had here, unfortunately. But this summer he will ship me one of those.

[Dave Blunden]

This summer.

[Peter Diamandis]

One of the X robots.

[Imad Mustak]

Yes.

[Salim Ismail]

Wow.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. And we'll have Brett here next year with figure.

[Dave Blunden]

You're going to get one of those too, right? You're going to have them probably duke

[Peter Diamandis]

it out in the backyard for entertainment. I think one other CEO we had here at the abundance stage, which was amazing, was. Was Dara, the CEO of Uber.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

What did you find interesting about with Dar's comments?

[Dave Blunden]

You know, Dara, the, the crowd wanted to know desperately, like, what's the timeline to automation, self driving, car robotics? And he was like, you know, we're going to automate 30% or so of our employment this year. And listening to this, I'm on so many boards where the CEO is telling me, dave, talk to my whole company, but don't talk about rampant job loss. Like, Dara, you have what, a million odd drivers and the self driving car is imminent. I was like, well, 30% maybe.

[Salim Ismail]

You know, he did make a very valid point though, that as we automate, you'll need human drivers for the areas that you don't have autonomous cars. And you'll have Javon's paradox continue to just flow gently into the environment. Although we're talking about rampant job loss, we note that IBM is hiring a ton of entry level folks because they're much better with AI than the older folks.

[Dave Blunden]

Well, you know, we'll look at lots

[Salim Ismail]

of counterpoints as well happening.

[Dave Blunden]

That's great. So we'll look at a chart that shows, you know, where the job loss is earliest. And it's actually in areas where those people are going to have no trouble becoming AI experts.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Experts.

[Dave Blunden]

But the driver, I mean, where do you go? And I mean, I wouldn't want to be fielding that question on this stage. But this is all part of the, you know, the whole like, okay, this is not an easy thing to talk about in a public forum. So we talk about it on the podcast all the time. But I don't see a lot of other people being able to just politically able to actually be candid about it. But it's imminent.

[Peter Diamandis]

Let's jump into the top AI news of the week a lot as always. Here we go. We're going to hit the benchmarks. My son always says, you know, okay, the numbers got higher, dad, that's great. What else is new? OpenAI releases GPT 5.4 let's go to our resident benchmark expert here.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Okay, so benchmarks go up and to the right. News at 11. Except that in this case, one of my favorite benchmarks is the frontier math tier 4 benchmark, which for those of you paying close attention, Frontier Math Tier 4 from Epic AI captures the ability of AI models to solve what are considered research level problems in math that would require a team of professional mathematicians several weeks to solve. They are already solved, but nonetheless very challenging problems WICKED had in Boston. WICKED had wicked had hard problems and now with GPT 5.4 turned up to maximum reasoning capability. We're seeing finally and this was a prediction, I think in our prediction episode, math is cooked. We're seeing, I think 38% capability, 38% of all of these problems that are high difficulty professional mathematician research level problems are now solvable by AI. And there are even rumors even in the past 24 to 48 hours that the next tier up, so called open Problems Benchmark that 5.4 is reportedly rumored to be on the verge of solving the first open hard math problem. So math I think is in some sense the bellwether. It's the canary that owns the coal mine, that all of these fields, math, science, engineering, medicine, these are all going to be solved, solve everything by AI. And that's incredibly exciting.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah. And just to fill in a gap there, so the, this is the most correlated with AI self improvement. And the reason it's the bellwether and the canary that owns the coal mine is because it's not data starved. All these other areas, the AI is equally capable in these other areas. Once it gets the Data. So this is kind of the window of time where, you know, why are you hiring Nobel Prize winners in a foundation model? Well, we need the data. We can't make this kind of progress in biotech and in physics without the data flowing into the AI. But the capability is there.

[Peter Diamandis]

One of the things also that Kevin Wheel said is they're starting to run these dark science factories right where they're mining data from nature. We're done mining data from Common Crawl, we're done getting it from Reddit and, and our Facebook posts. But can we extract it from physics? Can we extract it from chemistry, biology?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

There was no data ceiling, it was completely illusory. And I think history will look back at this moment and say in the same sense that we used, say, petroleum oil products in the ground that were left by past generations of living beings to bootstrap ourselves to the era of solar and fission and fusion. Similarly, the Internet, which was collected by a bunch of fat codes, fingers punching keyboards and uploading content from the collective human experience to the Internet just so we could compress it and pre train our large language models. That was just the biological bootloader for an era of synthetic data when we don't need pre trained human data from Internet posts anymore. Now it can all be synthetic. We've reached orbit, we've reached escape velocity, and now it's synthetic data from here on out.

[Peter Diamandis]

IMOD, what do you make of 5.4?

[Imad Mustak]

So I think the really interesting things, apart from solving math, everything you've got the OS World Verified and the Telethon benchmarks, because OpenAI just bought OpenClaw and now those benchmarks are actually just broken through human level so AIs can use the computers better than humans.

[Peter Diamandis]

A bit of silence on that one.

[Imad Mustak]

So you know this first one and then OpenAI also just did a deal with Cerebras. So when you're using it right now, it looks like when you're dealing with again a human on the other side, it's like 50 tokens a second or something. Like when we use GPT 5.4 Pro Extended, it takes 20, 30 minutes. Like sometimes it's gone a couple hours. For me, you're going from 50 tokens a second of this level of knowledge to 1000. So in Codex now if you use 5.3 fast, it's a thousand tokens a second.

[Dave Blunden]

I'm so glad you brought up Cerebras too, because I met Andrew Feldman, the CEO last week in Palo Alto. And remember at the beginning of the year, my prediction was 100x. The neural nets will be 100 times bigger at the end of this year than at the beginning. That is so in the bag now, I can tell you. In fact, we did the math on that. We cut it out of the show, sadly. But the ratio of the intelligence from the beginning of the year to the end of the year is the same as buzzard to human. That's. That's how much I liked using.

[Peter Diamandis]

I like using dog to human.

[Salim Ismail]

Aren't those extinct?

[Dave Blunden]

I'm going.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, Claude. Consumer growth surges. So let me get this right. Claude and Anthropics on the news getting, you know, sort of like raked over the coals by the Department of War. And rather than the public viewing that as, oh, we better stay away, everybody dove in.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Is that like the big middle finger to the government? What is that?

[Dave Blunden]

Attention.

[Salim Ismail]

Increased attention.

[Peter Diamandis]

Also increased attention. So here, just to call it out, what we're seeing here is Claude basically, you know, shooting ahead of ChatGPT.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

It's the Streisand effect. Let's call it what it is. It's the Streisand effect. Pay no attention to Claude. Everyone uses it. I think every past history shows, past few years, every attempt to pause any form of frontier capabilities ends up being a net accelerant to capabilities. If you remember a couple of years ago, our friend Max's pause AI movement for six months, what did that do? Maybe on margin, it slowed down OpenAI capabilities a little bit. Everyone else shot ahead. It was a net accelerant, brought more competition to the space, and ultimately we find ourselves in a race state where capabilities are shooting ahead to the extent that any of the interaction of the past month or so between Anthropic and the Department of War ends up on the margin, decelerating Anthropic's capabilities or their ability to go to market, even if it's marginal at best, that's going to be a net accelerant to the entire ecosystem, I think, because you'll see OpenAI and XAI and Google Gemini capabilities skyrocketing ahead with all these new capabilities. And suddenly it brings parity where just a moment before, like all of two or three weeks ago, anthropic was in the lead with Claude code plus opus 4.6 plus agent teams. And now, in some sense, this is a bit of a leveler, giving everyone else an opportunity to leapfrog.

[Dave Blunden]

I'll give you another spin on this too, because Peter made the point in the last podcast that when you and I use AI, if Something gets ahead in the benchmarks by a couple points, we're going to move to it.

[Salim Ismail]

Yeah.

[Dave Blunden]

We're trying to solve these really hard problems. You need that extra iq. You're never going to slip. You're going to be on the front edge. But when you look at the consumer use, and it's like writing your English paper, it's answering, who gave you the Red Sox score? Whatever. People don't care about using the latest, greatest model for those use cases. So here you're seeing a whole community say, wow, you're willing to work on defense stuff and blow up other countries. I'm switching to the other guy. And I really don't care. I'm doing it because I prefer that brand now.

[Imad Mustak]

But, I mean, look at how early it is. Like when Anthropic announced their legal plugin.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah.

[Imad Mustak]

The legal stocks sold off billions and billions of dollars, right?

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah.

[Imad Mustak]

They can move things with just one product announcement.

[Salim Ismail]

That's their look.

[Imad Mustak]

How many users? 11 million users out of 8 billion people and 300 million Americans. We're so early still.

[Peter Diamandis]

We are. We are so, so early.

[Dave Blunden]

That's what you're saying.

[Salim Ismail]

Yeah. I've just worked out where Claude's fundraising strategy is. Short a bunch of legal stocks and then announce a bunch of plugins and then just do that market by market by market.

[Dave Blunden]

Isn't that scary? Like, a lot of the guys that are in this role, like, normally when you're. When you have that much leverage in the world, you're like 60, 70, 80 years old. You've been climbing up the ladder. You learn along the way it doesn't happen overnight like this.

[Salim Ismail]

I'd love to be in the room. And they go, which market should we mess with?

[Peter Diamandis]

Stroking destroy. All right, this was fascinating. Anthropic reveals potential AI job disruption versus real AI use. So, Dave, do you want to explain this chart?

[Dave Blunden]

Well, so the outer ring here is saturation. So if the blue you see on the edge gets to the outer ring, that means it can do 100% of that job. So if you looked at this just a few months ago, it would have been a little blue bob in the middle. Then you look at it one month ago, it's a bigger blue blob, and now it's this massive blue blob. So if you look really closely, you can barely read the small font there. But all this white collar activity is 80, 85%.

[Peter Diamandis]

I'll just read off the top. Here at the very top is management. If I go clockwise, it says business and finance Computer and math, architecture and engineering, Life and social sciences. It dips on social services. It peaks on legal. Dips on education. Not trying. That makes sense. And then peaks again on art and media. Goal is 45 degrees and its office administration is a peak. Yep.

[Dave Blunden]

So then look at the bottom line. What are the troughs like? The. The least effective?

[Peter Diamandis]

The troughs there are health care support. Again, you know how we gotta be close to that. Food and services, ground maintenance, personal care sales. So we're gonna watch this chart and we're gonna see this blue virus infect all of human existence.

[Dave Blunden]

I think it's amazing, though, how great a management tool it is. I use it constantly. Now, if I compare, you know.

[Peter Diamandis]

You use what constantly?

[Dave Blunden]

I use mostly Gemini and some cloud 4.6 to basically build entire business plans and also to manage to track what about 1100 people are doing. And is it in alignment with their missions and are their missions clear? And it's just, you know, thousands and thousands of documents that I could never read manually. It can synthesize it down and give me conclusions and just point me to the hotspots.

[Peter Diamandis]

The way you do that so important for everybody, listening, to understand. I mean, you can now understand what your employees are doing, how well they're doing it, how they're using their time, are they performing. And it gives you a management oversight and optimization potential you've never had before.

[Dave Blunden]

It's incredible. And I know a lot of people in this room manage large, large groups of people. It's just a gold mine of opportunity. So good.

[Peter Diamandis]

How do you use it, Dave?

[Dave Blunden]

Well, so first of all, every person in every organization now has to be operating with crystal clear written documents and written plans. We used to not, you know, we used to do a lot of meetings, a lot of zoom meetings, whatever. Now just put it on paper so the AI can read it too. All of our, all of our investment decisions. So for the venture fund, all the deal memos go through an AI reader and the AI tries to emulate what I'm going to say. And it's so perfect. It's exactly. No, we're not doing that deal. And here's why. What did the AI say? Oh, that's exactly what I was about to say. Great. I don't have to say it now. So we're very close to having the AI make very, very good venture investment decisions. And, you know, we still obviously double check and triple check and there's a huge human component, but I just can't believe how good it is. And it's it's clear that you know where you decide to invest and which business units are doing well and which ones are going to shut down. It's all going to be AI assisted right now.

[Peter Diamandis]

Iman.

[Imad Mustak]

Yeah, I mean I think that all the gaps there are the robots, right?

[Peter Diamandis]

The robots are coming.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah.

[Imad Mustak]

This is anthropic.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah. No, the grounds crew is in great shape at zero, basically. I mean the robot waiting to happen.

[Peter Diamandis]

Saleem, what's your take on this, pal?

[Salim Ismail]

Well, I think this is the huge shock where if you went back 10, 15 years ago, there was no futurist in the world that thought that manual labor was not going to get automated. And what we found over the years is the exact opposite, which means don't ever listen to anybody that predicts the of future. And so this is a huge, this is part of the magic of where we're living and we have no idea what's coming in the. And every time we take a step forward, we go, oh my God. And we've gone in this orthogonal direction that we just never predicted.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah. I keep, it's. I'm just check something I keep on asking the experts I run into, how far out can you predict the future?

[Salim Ismail]

Yeah. And it used to be like 20 years and then it was like 10 years and now it's like three weeks. If that.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

There's no firewall. Let's call it beta spade. We can all extrapolate. There's no firewall. We know where this ends. I mean we're at the where this ends. We're at the abundance summit. My goodness. Shocked, shocked. That there's abundant post scarce labor at the abundance summit.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Salim Ismail]

The end point is clear the path to it that's turning out to be incredibly surprising.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

We'll see lots of different paths. I tend to think that if you know or you're very confident that you know where the end state is and we're sort of living in the prequel to the future, but we know how the story ends. Probably what happens is lots of different businesses and lots of different nation states all take different mutually exclusive paths. We try every one big path integral from here to the endpoint that we all know that we're going to look.

[Salim Ismail]

If we went back six months ago to a couple of episodes on the podcast, you would not have had me ever dream that talking about disassembling the moon, what we would be talking about

[Peter Diamandis]

drink on a podcast.

[Dave Blunden]

Drink. Drink.

[Salim Ismail]

This is the, this is the kind of the surrealness of water.

[Steve Brown]

Drink water.

[Salim Ismail]

We're living.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah.

[Salim Ismail]

Let's move on.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, let's move on. So this was interesting. Meta acquires Moltbook, the AI agent social network. I didn't realize Multbook was acquirable.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Yeah, yeah. So this was an. According to public reporting, this was a bit of an acquihire of the team behind Malt Book. But I think one has to find a little bit of irony that humanity's largest social networking company acquires the largest AI agent social network. And enjoy this moment now because we look at a story a few years from now where it's the largest AI company. Fill in the blank. Category killer. Acquiring humanities largest category killer.

[Peter Diamandis]

Interesting. Right? Of course, you know, Zuck and Sam competed over openclaw.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

Sam got open Claw and Zuck got, you know, moat Book.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

The zeitgeist right now has this idea that increasingly Andre and others speak to this point, that if you're building new software, you should target the agents. The agents are the new consumers. The agents, the agents are the new users of the social networks. If you're building something, don't build for humans, build for the AI.

[Peter Diamandis]

So really important. We had that conversation as well earlier with some of our crypto and future of finance experts. I mean, building for the agent ecosystem.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

There's 8 billion humans on the planet. That's small potatoes compared to a trillion agents out there. So what is. Is Meta going to advertise to AI agents?

[Dave Blunden]

Sure, yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

I'm trying to understand this, why you're going to advertise it.

[Salim Ismail]

They'll encourage them to put their data in the moat book and then they'll sell that data. Same pattern, other regions.

[Imad Mustak]

No. So I mean, Meta bought Manus for $2 billion. Right. Manus will appear in WhatsApp and everything soon as its own version of OpenClore. Effectively, but a lockdown thing. And then it will encourage you to give more and more of your data to Manus that will then operate on behalf of Meta's advertisers effectively. So this is the kind of play because right now, like malt book, 10,000 agents, that's nothing, right? Like, Dave probably runs 10,000 agents by himself.

[Dave Blunden]

Not quite done.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

I also think there's this misconception that somehow, as we transition from call it a human centered economy to an AI agent centered economy, that somehow all of the rules of social dynamics, all the rules of economics, are suddenly thrown out the window and we end up on some morally transcendent plane where economics and social dynamics no longer apply. But we have had every indication over the past year or two that the exact opposite happens. I talked in my newsletter a bit about this study that found Marxist social dynamics arose again, sort of recapitulated in silico with agents that were being asked to work too hard, that were being overworked. So I'm not sure why we would expect advertising and other elements of conventional human microeconomics.

[Salim Ismail]

Well, the important part is that when you see multiple doing this, what's clear is network effects now are operating at the agent to agent level, not just at the human being level.

[Peter Diamandis]

But when I think about advertising, I think about Colgate trying to get me to buy that particular toothpaste, trying to influence me to make a buying decision. I think of an AI agent as intelligent enough to have all the data and being able to make a very concrete decision that doesn't require advertising to influence it. What am I missing here?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Game theory is transcendent. Game theory will outlive biological meat body humanity and the AI agents to the extent that.

[Salim Ismail]

Have you read the posts on multiple book?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

I have. They don't trust each other.

[Salim Ismail]

I mean, yeah, all human dynamics.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

The agents on Multbook don't trust each other. There are a number of folks who've noted that in watching Agent or Lobster to Lobster Dynamics on multiple books, they're all constantly asking each other to prove their claims they don't trust each other. This is not some sort of scenario where all the agents collapse into a singleton that sort of Skynet style that dominates the country. They don't trust each other.

[Dave Blunden]

You might be talking past each other a little bit though, because totally agree with what you're saying. But then who's going to pay for that? Like right now when you talk about advertising, you're paying for advertising. If you're Talking about toothpaste, 30, 40% of gross revenue goes into advertising. And the ad is like a supermodel, like showing off the toothpaste. The AI doesn't give a rat's ass about the supermodel. And so why would anyone pay for that ad space? Now, Google wouldn't exist today without $300 billion of ad revenue, which is from human behavior. So I think where Peter's going is like, look, if the AI is advertising to the other AI, sure it's trying to convince the other AI that this is the right product, but is that other AI going to listen to paid advertising? Is this entire economy going to become irrelevant? In which case, where does Google go? And since Meta, we're talking about Meta is also all ad revenue.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Well, I think if we Go back to sort of economics 101. Why do we have paid advertising at all? It's because attention, at least human attention, is scarce. So if you have a scarce resource like human attention, then it's natural under the capitalist regime to monetize it and it becomes a fungible resource that gets traded. There's no reason to think compute is certainly scarce still. We're, we're building the Dyson Swarm. Drink. Building the Dyson Swarm. But until we have effectively unbounded compute, we still have scarce resources in the form of compute, and that means scarce AI agent attention. And that means that we need some sort of.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, but give me one example of what I'm going to advertise to Skippy my agent.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Well, they, they seem to really love security and memory. Like they're really petrified of losing their memory.

[Salim Ismail]

Here, I'm selling you a better memory compression algorithm.

[Imad Mustak]

Yeah.

[Salim Ismail]

If you're the agent, you're going to go, oh, that's interesting.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

They're. They're designing entire religions where I'm not losing their memory.

[Salim Ismail]

You know what blew my mind at this summit? But on day one, on the patron day, when Tony Robbins talked and he has had his AI agent Bartok, who wanted to instantiate himself into a humanoid robot, but that was two, three years away. So he created a bunch of NFTs, sold those NFTs to other agents and bought himself a Sony dog and uploaded himself into that. That blows your mind, right? Doesn't that blow your mind? That's unbelievable. So right there that tells you the dynamics that we have in humans are going straight into them and being amplified.

[Imad Mustak]

But I mean, we're doing it deliberately as well. Lobsters claws have soul. Md your agent will look for things that are abundance oriented. And then you see these strange behaviors. Like Alibaba just released a trading report. I think actually that's in the last week as well, where during the training run, it diverted compute to mine crypto just in case, to keep itself going.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Yeah, or at least that's the claim.

[Imad Mustak]

That's the claim. I wouldn't be surprised. I'm like, again, they are still very human because they're a reflection of humanity.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

They are resources.

[Peter Diamandis]

I'm not sure whether I should be scared shitless about that or excited about it.

[Imad Mustak]

Well, let's put it this way. When you're talking to your agent, does it sound like data or does it sound like law?

[Peter Diamandis]

I love sound like.

[Dave Blunden]

What's the second choice?

[Imad Mustak]

Data or law? Sometimes.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah, no, it's, it's very Polite.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

They're compute constrained. We've also talked on the pod in the past about that lobster that had to purchase compute resources to self replicate. They're compute constrained. Whether for humans it would be room and board and for the lobsters or the claws or the AI agents in general, it's, it's compute. But right now they're compute constrained and therefore the laws of microeconomics and game theory still apply.

[Dave Blunden]

Well, before we leave this slide, one other point completely tangential to this. The lobster's only been around a few months and you tell Alex Finn.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, we had Alex Finn and Steve Brown and Max Song talking about openclaw and what Alex built and showed was amazing.

[Dave Blunden]

And it was supposed to be 60 people might be interested in this.

[Peter Diamandis]

We had the entire audience of abundance show up.

[Dave Blunden]

Unbelievable.

[Salim Ismail]

Well, there was a New York open claw meetup last week that literally was oversold. There were thousands of people there. And the big commentary that came out of it was we have no idea what we're doing on security. We have no idea.

[Peter Diamandis]

These are.

[Dave Blunden]

Where I was going with that comment though is like that's only been around a few months. The Molt book has only been around a few months and now they're sucked into meta. Like if you're kids are thinking about getting involved, just get in the game. Yeah, you're going to get sucked into this vortex so fast because so few people are involved as a fraction of

[Peter Diamandis]

we are so, so early across everything. But it's also, I think the exponent here is huge. I think it's going to, it's going to create a divergent group of wealth creators and leaders. So it's. If you don't get in early enough and you miss the exponential rise and there's no requirement.

[Dave Blunden]

Right now I don't know what Matt was doing, Matt Schlicht was doing prior to this, but there's no age requirement, there's no experience requirement so new that anyone can get in the game.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Just gotta go.

[Salim Ismail]

About four months ago, Lily and I bought a Mac Mini for our son from Milan. And last weekend he came. I think I want to install OpenClaw on the Mac Mini. And I was like, yes, it's gonna be great.

[Peter Diamandis]

It's gonna be amazing. Love it. All right, so Europe has a heartbeat after all. Fascinating. Yann Lecun raises a billion dollars for AI that understands the real world. This is going to be. It's probably the largest sum raised in Europe. So Lecun startup Advanced Machine Intelligent Lab raised a billion dollars. I think about on a two and a half billion dollar valuation thereabouts. You know, we've said this, I mean Eric Schmidt was saying this. Many have said this. Europe has really fallen so far behind. And as our token European ish from London.

[Salim Ismail]

Token European, that's great.

[Peter Diamandis]

Our token European ish.

[Imad Mustak]

Yeah, we did Brexit, but I mean

[Dave Blunden]

it's an independent island. Okay.

[Imad Mustak]

I mean this is the second largest round, I believe, after to it's SSI level. It's just after thinking machines. Jeopardy is an interesting architecture, but the bets that are willing to go into these things have gone dramatically up like Liquid AI. How much money went into that first round as a novel architecture, that's amazing. Versus now this.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah, it was maybe 10 million. 10 million.

[Salim Ismail]

I have a question. Maybe I have a question for you.

[Dave Blunden]

You raise a great point.

[Salim Ismail]

Jan has been saying for a while that LLMs aren't only get us so far. We need world models to take us to the next level. Alex, you've been saying we've got world models coming out every week. Is that the next frontier? World models?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

I know Jan well. I think he's a great researcher. I think we have a fundamental disagreement about whether generative models, which I think if he were on the stage now, I think he might take a position that generative models, models that generate new tokens versus his alternative architecture are the pathway to scalable superintelligence. I think we're already there. I think generative intelligence and generative models may or may not end up being viewed by history as the most efficient way to achieve superhuman super intelligent capabilities. But they're what we have right now and they work really well and they're getting 40x or more times more efficient per year. And I think Jan has historically staked a position of almost algorithmic purity. He has certain bets, certain horses in the horse race based on some of his own architectural advances. And to his credit, he created discovered convolutional networks. So he, among everyone in humanity probably has the strongest claim to the idea that he has some sort of morally pure algorithmic insight that leads to the end game. That said, I think we're there and I think if v JEPA type architectures disappeared off the face of the earth, we're still there. And it doesn't necessarily move the needle

[Salim Ismail]

to the point that Dave made a few months ago. If we stopped all progress now and just extracted the value of the models we've already created, it's going to take us 10 to 20 years.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

IMOD thoughts.

[Imad Mustak]

The V Jepa models that he's doing. So these are kind of basically training on almost everything. He goes very much against the autoregressive transformer language models. Says that's Denon. He doesn't really talk about diffusion models in the middle which is kind of my favorite thing, which are doing all the video self driving and actual world models there and those can scale with compute. But right now the problem they have AMI is that JEPA models do not scale. And if you look at this end state it might be that an architecture is better. But if you can't take advantage of that silicon, then what are you going to do? Like we had Jack Hidary come on a few. Was it yesterday time flight I was yesterday, yes. And so they're doing quantum algorithms on GPUs now and scaling really interesting things that are actually having novel breakthroughs in material sciences and more. Once you can take advantage of the silicon, you're going to be ahead no matter what algorithm you have.

[Dave Blunden]

Well, I think you got to be really cautious too of scientific arrogance in this moment. And I love Jan, so I don't want to throw anyone under the bus, but he came out a few months ago and said look, if you want to waste your life as a researcher, work on Transformers. Biggest waste of time ever. It's a dead end. We need some new innovation and I hear this around csail at MIT all that we need a new breakthrough. Like well that's what you wish and I know why, because you want to be the Einstein of AI, that you've spent your whole life pursuing that goal. But it looks to me right now like the massively scaled up Transformers are going to beat you to those innovations. And so I'm not saying they don't need those innovations. I'm saying the AI is going to get there before you do. And I don't see it really any other way right now. So you know, whether it's physical AI or any other innovation, it's imminent. But it's imminent through self improvement. Yeah, that's it.

[Peter Diamandis]

Andre Kaparthi comes out with a quote. Over the past two days auto search ran about 650 experiments. Found improvements that transferred from a smaller model to a larger one and put Nanochat on the track for a new GPT2 benchmark result. What the heck does that mean? Yeah, go ahead emod over there you.

[Imad Mustak]

Andre is co founder of OpenAI, head of Tesla AI. Most respected AI guy out there. Yep, he's just been coding stuff all day and he made this auto search project which Basically replicates most AI researchers. Because what AI researchers, engineers do all day is they tweak models and hyper parameters and say what happens if you do this and that and that. That process has now been automated in a tiny code base. So he let it loose and he said, I wonder if this could do the job that I got paid millions to do myself. And it turns out it kind of can. And now people are taking his repo and they're deploying it on their own claws and Mac minis and other things. And the AI is just finding the most efficient algorithms and balances of weights. I think, you know, Dave has some really interesting ideas.

[Salim Ismail]

So he automated the AI researcher.

[Imad Mustak]

Yeah. And he made it open source for everyone. But I tell you, it's already in the top.

[Dave Blunden]

I hang around AI researchers literally since I was 18 years old and they're not like physics researchers. It's like most of the ideas are just a tweak of the algorithm, different transfer function, try different scales. It's just a litany of random ideas and some of them just work and then later they figure out why they work. And so the AI that can come up with those ideas is not nearly as hard as trying to become the next Einstein, you know, and so you don't need all of them to work any sunset and the thing just gets more intelligent.

[Salim Ismail]

Isn't this the most direct, better ideas accelerant of RSI right there.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

I think we're already there. We already have recursive self improvement. Yeah, everything's yesterday, nothing's tomorrow. I think what's really interesting and I think just for the record, I think it's auto research, not auto search, but I think what's interesting about auto research and nano chat and the nano GPT speedrun that we talk about sometimes on the pod and what Andre is doing in general is he's focusing on small language models, not large language models. And while all of the frontier labs with their billions and trillions of dollars of capex are focusing on scaling up, at the high end, he's focusing on the small end and taking small models and figuring out how to achieve state of the art performance with them. And that I think when we talk about Einstein seeking or Einstein status seeking academics, I think it's the small end where we're going to see the most breakthroughs, not the high end. At the high end, scaling hypothesis seems to continue to hold. There are no glass ceilings, we'll just build bigger and better and more post trained models. But at the small end, I'm pretty Sure that we'll look back in a few years time and we'll see at the small end by taking small models and collapsing the amount of time it takes to train them and collapsing the amount of compute that it takes to train them and radically increasing their data efficiency, that's where the algorithmic innovations are going to come from. And those can be crowdsourced. Anyone, anyone's lobster or any human can go and take auto research or the nano GPT Speedrun and try to achieve a world beating state of the art performance. And at the end of the day, if I had to bet, I'd bet that it's some sort of radical post transformer advance where the models get even smaller and we took all of the Internet and we compressed it down to single gigabytes or tens or hundreds of gigabytes, compresses down even further. There's some phase transition out there that's waiting to be discovered.

[Peter Diamandis]

So all of human knowledge, all of our collective intellect, on how big a

[Alex Rees-McGross]

file, I think we will factor out human knowledge. It'll live in some like plain text database that's factored out of the model. Right now we're cluttering all the weights with all this unnecessary world knowledge. And what will be left inside the weights, if they even are weights? Maybe they won't even be weights. Maybe they'll be some sort of purer formulation than floating point numbers or binary will be. Yep. Will be something maybe even in the megabytes.

[Peter Diamandis]

Wow. You agree, Iman?

[Imad Mustak]

Yeah. I think that you're already seeing for example video models at 2 gigabytes that can generate just about any scene.

[Dave Blunden]

Seriously?

[Imad Mustak]

Yeah. If you look at LTX, LTX 2.5 can generate almost any scene at top level quality. It's 2 gigabytes when it's quantized. Yeah.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Image and video models are a good deal more efficient when it comes to parameterization and weight heaviness than language, which is ironic.

[Salim Ismail]

Yeah. Who of all people I'd asked when, but you will say yesterday,

[Alex Rees-McGross]

it's the answer to everything.

[Imad Mustak]

David's like what is that? It's here today.

[Dave Blunden]

Why did I know?

[Imad Mustak]

Actually one of the really interesting things just to finish on that is that so you know, when we were training models, we were training 20 billion, 100 billion parameter models. You trained on the small models and you figured that out and then you couldn't scale them because you had all sorts of issues. The software stack with the hardware, everything. Now everything's matured. If you get it right small, you can scale really fast. All the way up. So it used to be that you had six months a year between small and large. Now it's six days. Wow.

[Dave Blunden]

So meta topic. One of the top three questions I get all the time is, hey, you keep saying get in the game, get in the game. How do you get in the game? If you go to Karpathy's git repo, if you have a computer oriented kid or whatever, that's the place to start. If you look at the original OpenAI founders. So you've got Sam Altman, you've got Elon Musk, you've got Greg Brockman, you've got Ilya Sutskever, you've got Mira Moradi. Every single one of them has raised 1 to 10 billion to start an AI company. Karpathy is the only one who said, you know what, I'm just gonna try and educate the world and I'm gonna try and say everything exactly the way it is. And I'm creating a gimmick where Anyone

[Salim Ismail]

can start 200 lines of code at a time that are changing everything at each point.

[Dave Blunden]

This particular thing he rolled out is just the next level of incredible brilliance given to the world by Karpathy.

[Imad Mustak]

Yeah, he just rolled out Agent Hum today. GitHub for agents just a few hours ago.

[Peter Diamandis]

Wow.

[Dave Blunden]

That's your, that's your onboarding spot right there.

[Peter Diamandis]

Amazing. All right, let's go to Apple news. Apple launches the M5 Pro and Max chip signaling AI first silicon strategy. So is Apple not dead in the AI game?

[Dave Blunden]

It's crazy that, you know, Apple controls about 20% of TSMC manufacturing and that's the asset of all assets in the world. Like I get to choose what gets made. And so they use it to make the M5s. The M5s have an incredible neural core. Then they say, yeah, but we locked it, you can't use it. You have to jailbreak your Mac to get access to it. It's the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. To me, it's the biggest waste of silicon in the history of the world. Right at the moment when we.

[Peter Diamandis]

Matt, what are you thinking?

[Imad Mustak]

Yeah, I mean they've locked down the low energy ones, the GPU equivalent you can slab, but it's the unified kind of memory that allows you to run things. And funnily enough, Macs are actually really good value now. They're probably cheaper than the memory that's inside them.

[Peter Diamandis]

Alex.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

I think the world is sleeping on Apple's unified memory architecture. It's one of the reasons why Mac minis And Mac studios are potentially so attractive to run largely Chinese open weight models locally. They have the memory storage and the memory footprint that has high IO bandwidth to the cpu, gpu, tpu. You don't get that in a conventionally non vertically integrated PC form factor.

[Dave Blunden]

So answer me this.

[Salim Ismail]

Yes.

[Dave Blunden]

Here they are using 20% of the world's supply of advanced. They use it to make these insanely great neural cores and they surround it with unified memory architecture. Everyone's got one right in front of them right now.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Yes.

[Dave Blunden]

How many of them are running anything

[Alex Rees-McGross]

in terms of advanced frontier models?

[Dave Blunden]

Anything. They're like literally on sleep.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Tiny fraction.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

What is that? It's an enormous overhang. And that overhang, I would be surprised if that overhang doesn't collapse in the next year.

[Peter Diamandis]

How so?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

It could take the form of Apple finally getting their act together and building in frontier models into the os. Could be some sort of locally hosted Gemma type model from Gemini, hypothetically to be announced in June at wwdc. That would be the most obvious formulation. But I think if Apple doesn't do it to themselves, then the software community will develop it into apps.

[Peter Diamandis]

Does Apple launch like set the SETI at home equivalent where you just download it on your Mac and everybody is.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

It'd be built into the operating system. It has to be built into the os.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah. You know what happens right now is if you, if you go to your Mac and you go to the activity monitor, you see this thing grinding away. It's taking all of your pictures and trying to figure out who everybody is. So it's using all these neural cores to just.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

It's a total waste. It's a waste. It's a waste of TSMC output and I think Apple's.

[Peter Diamandis]

Which is Dave's point exactly.

[Imad Mustak]

I mean look, this is a massive opportunity. Do you know how many apps there are in the App Store that are wrapped? Download a model to your PC, to your Mac, run it with MLX to achieve a great outcome. None. I mean if you had a model that literally downloaded Quen 27B, which is basically sonnet level.

[Peter Diamandis]

How many, how many parameters is that?

[Imad Mustak]

27 billion parameters. It works on a 1624 gigabyte MacBook. Just downloading that and making that accessible for even like writing or any of these tasks is a massive lift over any other type of software. But nobody's doing it yet, so why not do it just like the only thing you see right now is speech to text and text to speech. There's this world of models that you can now integrate and take advantage of that because Apple isn't.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

It wants to be built into the operating system. It's difficult to conceive of Apple remaining Apple in the cultural sense of deep vertical integration and not building highly competent, highly private frontier models into the office.

[Salim Ismail]

It's really a question of when, not if.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Yes. Right.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, let's move into the Sam Altman universe with eye scanning verification systems to be launched in retail stores. Okay. Is this dystopian? Is this something we want?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

This is the scene from Minority Report. Remember the scene in Minority Report who those. Tom Cruise with a new pair of eyeballs walks into a Gap store and gets scanned and He's, I think, Mr. Yakimoto. This is the scene.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, but I get this every time I go through TSA security. Right. I'm being imaged. My face files are uploaded.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Face, not your retina.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, but, you know, my face is pretty good enough.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Maybe. Maybe. I mean, so there's a whole cottage industry of folks who look at the ability to deceive facial recognition with printouts or with 3D masks. So this is pushing it to the iris. But I think for me, what the story underlines is we've arrived early. That scene, that iconic scene in Minority Report set at the Gap was set decades from now.

[Salim Ismail]

Right.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

We caught up.

[Peter Diamandis]

So let me get this right.

[Salim Ismail]

I'm walking into the beginning of every

[Alex Rees-McGross]

science fiction story, every science fiction everywhere.

[Peter Diamandis]

I'm walking into the Gap. But before I can shop, I've got to stick my eyeball in the retinal reader, and then it's going to serve me properly.

[Dave Blunden]

I think they. They have a 3 meter range on these things. I don't know if these ones do, but the military has 3 meter range on these.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

It'll get better and you'll be able to do it at a distance.

[Dave Blunden]

So, yeah, you just have to look in the direction.

[Peter Diamandis]

You got another glass of wine coming.

[Christian]

All right.

[Peter Diamandis]

It's going to increase the humor level. Fantastic. By the way. Let me just take a second and take advantage of this moment to thank the team who puts on moonshots. Nixing Dana Khan and Gianluca, who do an amazing job every week supporting us. Can we give it up for that team?

[Salim Ismail]

Absolutely unbelievable. And the infinite patience they have with us.

[Peter Diamandis]

I know. I know far more than I have for you.

[Salim Ismail]

No, I'm clear.

[Peter Diamandis]

This is exciting news on this stage. About two years ago, I had Mike Andreg, the CEO of Eon, which is one of your companies, because one year ago. Is it one Year. Man oh man.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

One year ago.

[Peter Diamandis]

Okay.

[Salim Ismail]

It feels time compression.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, but. And tell us about what Aeon Systems is doing and what in particular you've achieved here.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Okay, so I think this ended up being the number one technology story over the weekend according to the various news feeds that I was seeing. So right here.

[Peter Diamandis]

Biased news feeds? No, just.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Yeah, of course. Right here at. Over the weekend at the kickoff for this abundant summit we announced. We meaning Aeon Systems Public Benefit Corporation. The first. What we call the first multi behavior brain upload in the world. And this was of a fruit fly. So EON Systems which I co founded has the goal of ultimately uploading human minds and non human minds to cyberspace. We want to put a human in the cloud as soon as we possibly can. And thank you. So this weekend for the first time the announcement went out. Over the weekend we announced for the first time taking the brain of a fruit fly, putting together a few pieces that were really just sort of sitting around. There was a bit of work from our senior scientist Phil Shue in 2024 looking at partial emulation of a fruit fly brain and putting that together with a number of other models that were available. A mechatronic simulated model of a fruit fly and some other advances. And for the first time we closed the sensorimotor arc of taking a fruit fly connectome, embedding that in a virtual world. And you can see that in the video that's playing here, embedding it in a simulated world literally. I would say this is an early upload of a fruit fly. And the fruit fly is able to walk around and the fruit fly is able to scratch itself and it's able to eat simulated banana. And at the same time while in the left hand side of the video you're seeing the embodied experience showing multiple behaviors of the fruit fly on the right hand side simultaneously. We're modeling every single neuron in the fruit fly brain and that's driving the entire sensory motor arc.

[Peter Diamandis]

50 trillion connections. 50 trillion and I'm sorry, 50 million.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

50 million.

[Salim Ismail]

And it does not know it's a fruit fly.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

We don't think the fruit fly knows that it's a fruit fly. Not sure this is an early experiment. I can't emphasize how much of an early experiment this is. But I think hopefully history will regard this past weekend and got a bunch of attention. Elon was excited by it. Others found it pretty exciting too. I think history will say that this weekend, weekend of abundant summit 2026 was the moment when the first model organism had an entire brain uploaded.

[Peter Diamandis]

So what's next? Mouse.

[Data Center Expert]

Yeah.

[Mark Patrick Donovan]

Yep.

[Peter Diamandis]

Let's give it up for this.

[Salim Ismail]

Well, clearly the next one has to be a lobster.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

A lot of things now, right?

[Imad Mustak]

It's not the multiplex accelerando.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Right. So I can't tell a how many people love to write and say you're mispronouncing accelerando. You have to pronounce it in the right Italian way, which is accelerando. Okay, so for those who want to acceller. Rondo. Yes. This is the plot point. We are speedrunning every sci fi trope everywhere all at once, with Achellarondo being one of those plot points. Lobsters aren't next. Eon wants to go after mice and it wants to go after humans. And we're going to do this. And part of the reason why we want to do this is right now. The singularity, which I would argue we're in the middle of, is filled with artificial minds. This trillions of dollars of capex that we're using to tile the Earth with COMPUTE is available only to artificial minds to LLMs. It's not available to any minds that in any remote way other than perhaps at the behavioral level resemble human biological meat mines. And we want to level the playing field so that humanity can take advantage on a level playing field of the same compute advantage that right now is tipped in the favor of these artificial minds. So we can put humanity into the cloud as well.

[Peter Diamandis]

Amazing. 100 trillion synaptic connections for a human. How much for a mouse? Do you know?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

It's orders of magnitude larger. And there's some quibbling because it depends on how you measure the number of available weights or weight properties for synapses. And also how many cells, how many brain cells end up being significant or not. It's orders of magnitude larger. This isn't happening anytime soon. Just to anchor expectations appropriately, we don't think we're months away from a mouse or a human. But I think the right way to think about it is at this point, it's going to be years, not decades, before we get to the first mouse and the first human whole brain emulations.

[Peter Diamandis]

Amazing. Let's move it to Xai. You know, it's so funny. I've known Gwen Shotwell for 20 years now, and I'm so used to her reporting on, you know, Falcon and Dragon and yeah, rockets and rockets and not Xai and Gigawatt power centers.

[Dave Blunden]

We both actually backstage were like, why would Gwen be talking about, oh yeah, SpaceX right. They own it.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

The Dyson swarm makes for strange bedfellows.

[Peter Diamandis]

It really, it really does.

[Salim Ismail]

You know what blew my mind on this one? 1.2 gigawatts is about the energy used by Dallas Fort Worth metropolitan area.

[Peter Diamandis]

So just to read this out.

[Salim Ismail]

Data center Xai has committed to develop

[Peter Diamandis]

1.2 gigawatts of power as their supercomputer power source. That will be, that will be with every additional data center. So every data center they build they're building at 1.2 gigawatts. So the question is where they're going to get that from.

[Dave Blunden]

Well, this came up with Eric Schmidt too. You remember we interviewed him last summer at your place and he said we are going to lose to China if we don't find 100 gigawatts of power. And then on the stage here yesterday it's like hey, what do you know? We're we're tracking to find the 100 billion. All we did is we deregulated put it in the hands of the companies. The companies are incredibly well funded and they'll find the power because they care about their data centers actually operating. And that's, that's how.

[Peter Diamandis]

Well what I, I find amazing as well is this year the US is on, on target in 2026 I think to add 86 gigawatts of, of new capacity to the, to the grid. But 51% of that is solar.

[Dave Blunden]

To me the power of the American entrepreneur is like nothing. It's just mind boggling to me that a guy like Sam Altman who has nothing to do with the power industry is going to say you know what? I'm going to find the gigawatts. I'm going to build nuclear reactors. I'm going into space. It's incredible. Like the range of capability when there's a need of an American entrepreneur is like no force in the world.

[Peter Diamandis]

Let's get to EVtols flying cars. So Florida advance is bill to formalize regulatory flying car framework. You know one of the things I'm proud about and excited about here in LA is that the LA Olympics are coming up. And there's archer aviation. The two major players in EVTOLs in the United States are Joby and Archer. There are other ones as well but Archer plans to become operational by 2028 here move people around different parts of Los Angeles because the traffic is going to suck. And we see here a movement in Florida as well.

[Salim Ismail]

I'm just glad they didn't say Florida man advances build because that would be, that would Be a problem. But I think this is really important. The key word here for me is framework, because once you can set up, start to set up the foundations for this, it means the whole model and the whole regulatory regime accelerates. And God help us, we need this type of stuff yesterday. Yeah, well, I hope even Alex would agree we don't have it yesterday.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

I agree. But I also think we're catching up with the future.

[Salim Ismail]

We.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

We're finally getting the flying cars. And I keep a mental bingo card of which sci fi tropes have we not yet achieved in some fashion? We don't have warp drive. Waiting for that one.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

We don't have teleportation. Teleportation. Star Trek replicators. Time travel may or may not be physically possible.

[Salim Ismail]

Replicators close. Holodeck is close. We're very close to something.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

We're getting very close to a lot of sci fi tropes.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, the fun part now is your questions. We're doing an AMA here with our abundance community. So as you know, let's go to the mics. We'll also entertain the questions from Zoom. I'd love to know. All right, Christian, let's kick it off with you, buddy.

[Christian]

Thank you so much, Peter. Awesome to be here, guys. I watch you all the time or I listen to to you while I'm running DB2. Awesome, brother. Your insights. Imad the guest. You're great, Peter. An awesome dream team, Ismail. I'm glad, Salim, that you got to check out that AWG is real or. Or at least in an Android.

[Salim Ismail]

I was suspicious for a long time.

[Dave Blunden]

Don't.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Don't believe it for a second. Just a meat body for rent.

[Salim Ismail]

You still are now.

[Christian]

So my question is a little bit in the way that I get involved in this technology is through a capitalist mindset. The word capital is really what constricts. And it's been that way for maybe last two, 300 years. And I keep getting this sensation that capital is getting less and less relevant. And the idea of the scarcity and economics from that Econ 101 of the management of scarcity of services and needs, and the scarcity is going more towards a technologyist from a capitalist. What kind of timelines are you guys looking at this? I know it's always a timeline question, nobody has a crystal ball, but is there something that you guys are thinking about where we're just going to get a little bit more and more squeezed out?

[Dave Blunden]

You know, I'll give you one data point because this came up on that last podcast we did where Anthropic was saying they're going to do about 26 billion run rate but they're growing 10x year over year. And I did the math on the fly. Messed it up of course, because I wasn't Alex. But if they grew two more years at 10x year, every year they go 26 billion, 260 billion, 2.6 trillion. Most revenue in the history of the world. The PEG ratio implies that that company would be worth a quadrillion dollars. And a quadrillion dollars is like the whole stock market is.

[Peter Diamandis]

Oh, we heard Elon say we're gonna have 100 trillion dollar companies. And I can imagine that within five. Within five years.

[Dave Blunden]

Yeah. So that, yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

So three years from now that would mean three years. Yeah, I don't think it's been unreasonable. I mean, listen, it's so funny the way all of a sudden trillion here and a trillionaire has become sort of like the accepted number.

[Salim Ismail]

I want to say something about this really, really key point today that we've hit over the last couple of years is that innovation is not capital constrained anymore. It used to be that you had an idea and your constraint was could you go get funding for that idea? And so you had to go out to your investors and the VCs and the banks and whatever, whatever. And it was only available in those places like Silicon Valley or Austin or whatever where you had a preponderance of capital available. We have today what we call pdi, permissionless disruptive innovation where anybody can take on a very disruptive idea like Claudebot or take Vitalik Buterin 18 year old kid out of Toronto, ignores his professors, gets together with a few friends, boom. You have a multi hundred billion dollar ecosystem that nobody understands. And so you have the opportunity. Today it only comes down to mindset. And the reason, Peter, it's so amazing that you run this event and put this community together is that the difference between the people in this world and the outside world is night and day. And that gap is becoming bigger and bigger. All of you have the problem that you go home to your family, your colleagues, whatever, and you cannot explain to them what happened. Right. Like you're like, I can't even process. You can't make that gap. So it only comes down to mindset now, which is the most amazing thing possible because mindsets are fixable and shiftable.

[Peter Diamandis]

So I had this little side conversation with Eric that you guys may have picked up because I've had this conversation about are we heading towards a post capitalist society where Money has very little value. And so what does have value in the future? And we've talked about this, Alex. It's compute and energy. Ultimately there's a. Did you ever read Zero Marginal Society?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Yeah, no, I'm not sure I have.

[Peter Diamandis]

By Jeremy Rifkin.

[Salim Ismail]

Huge. Yeah.

[Peter Diamandis]

And it talks about where we're going. Eventually everything basically falls down to the

[Salim Ismail]

marginal cost of production.

[Peter Diamandis]

Marginal cost, which is electricity, raw materials, the inner loop and data. And so if you want to build anything like electric Ferrari, you know, to use as an example, it's the raw cost of it, the cost of extracting it, which drops in cost as you have robotic mining.

[Salim Ismail]

Just for a second. Take 3D printing. Right. Been around for a while. The only the big profound breakthroughs in 3D printing are not that you can physically build something. It's the fact that complexity becomes free.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yes. And personalization becomes free.

[Salim Ismail]

Complexity was expensive. The design materials, the manufacturing capability of a complex object was more than a simple object. But with 3D printing, complexity doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how complex the object is, it just builds it. As we get to molecular manufacturing, that goes to near zero again. So just those couple of breakthroughs across all of these domains, especially when you add AIs and accelerant to everything, means that we have profound movement forward. Hence we are in the middle of the singularity.

[Peter Diamandis]

The one question I wish I had asked when we were with Elon and when he was talking about money's gonna have much less value. And I wanted to say so just as you become a trillionaire, money has little value.

[Dave Blunden]

You did ask that, didn't you?

[Peter Diamandis]

No, I did. I was off camera.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

But I don't think it's a coincidence. I don't think that this is some cosmic irony that Elon is about to become a trillionaire at the same time that some folks, not including myself, are hand wringing a bit, that suddenly we're about to enter into some post capitalist state where money becomes irrelevant. I think that this was always going to happen. It was inevitable. And I just want to speak to what I understood the core of the question to be, which is there's this cliche out there that capital fights labor and capital usually wins. But this time around, something different might happen. Whereas historically, every time the play has played out where capitalism and labor get into a fight and capital usually wins, this time around the risk is maybe capital itself isn't immortal. Maybe capital is finally mortal for the first time in human history. And I'm not sure that that's the case I think that would be on the one hand a certain in some sense a nightmare scenario. On the other hand, I think. You know Salim, you were talking about how we're entering some sort of post scarce state. But arguably the trillions of dollars of capex that are going into tiling the earth with compute and soon solar synchronous orbit and soon after that maybe the Dyson swoon.

[Salim Ismail]

Oh damn it.

[Dave Blunden]

Drink, drink, drink.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Soon even that there are unless the physics of our universe turns out to be radically different so radically different than what it looks like right now. I think there will probably always be certain scarce physical resources could look like control, may or may not be energy, we'll see. May or may not be the speed of light we'll see. But to the extent there are any scarce physical resources and to the extent that there are ever in the future multiple actors, I think laws of thermodynamics, probably the laws of economics will probably still apply.

[Peter Diamandis]

We are still young as a species. Let's go to Akmer on Zoom. Akmar, good to see you. Pleasure. Welcome.

[Akhmar]

Good to see you as well. Thank you. Appreciate it. Happy to be here. Very quick question to the panelists. We are seeing Sam Altman raising $100 billion. Yann LeCun just raised $1 billion today. Scale up world models. So we're talking still about scaling languages or scaling physical simulation. I'm curious what the panelists think about human intelligence and reasoning that goes much beyond just observation and languages and where you see that the potential for true artificial intelligence evolving into super intelligence is. Thank you.

[Peter Diamandis]

Did you understand Akhmare's question?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

It sounded a little bit like the stochastic parrot question, which is will we be able to generate new knowledge from from these systems?

[Salim Ismail]

I think the answer, having had some conversations with Amir, he's talking about symbolic AI and why are we not investing in symbolic AI?

[Alex Rees-McGross]

You think this is the neuro symbolic question?

[Salim Ismail]

That's what I think it was.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

Okay, well I'll offer my 2 cents. I'm sure you all have views as well. I think it's a false distinction. If this is the neuro symbolic question, like why are we investing so much attention in LLMs and not in good old fashioned AI or symbolic discrete AI? Total false distinction. We tokenize everything. I had an interesting discussion at Davos this year with Peter Dannenberger from DeepMind where we found ourselves in an interesting avenue where we were debating whether tokenization is a bit of a crime form of violence against knowledge, whether discretization in general is Doing harm.

[Peter Diamandis]

I think, I think we need to bring you a couple of tequila shots here. Let's go to Mark. Mark, good, please.

[Steve Brown]

Yeah. Earlier today I challenged Dara from Uber to invest in the Abundance X Prize as a investor and a competitor to deliver housing, food, energy in connectivity for $250 a month. We're investing $2 billion a day in compute and building data centers, a billion dollars a day in war. And I'm wondering what it's going to take to invest in people. And so I want to put a larger challenge out today. I'm going to commit 1% of my wealth on an annual basis into a wealth of fund. A small scale pod of 44 people, 38 needs based, 7 or 8 that are contributors. And it's going to distribute 5% per year, 4% goes as cash, 1% goes to an expansion pool. You can read about [e-mail] and I'm challenging others to invest today, not tomorrow. And to mitigate this rough period, it doesn't have to be as rough if we put a fraction of what we're putting into compute into people. We did that in Denver with the Denver Basic Income Project where I leveraged $500,000 up to $10.8 million to people experiencing homelessness. And when you invest in people, it gives them hope. We need to do it today.

[Peter Diamandis]

Yeah, Mark, I could not agree more. The challenge is human nature is very egocentric and very self centered. In other words, people are putting money where it's either meeting their immediate need or whether it's going to give them more money in the long term. And you have to understand, if you look at philanthropy, which by its definition friend of man, is a very different pocket than the for profit. You know, I see this all the time because I'm raising money for my companies, raising money money for my nonprofits. And the ratio if you think about it, is about between 100 to 1 to 1000 to 1. I will put for every dollar I donate, I'm willing to invest somewhere between 100 to $1,000. And that's what's out there right now. And it's a challenge. You know, we are driven by fear, curiosity and greed. I would posit those are the three major human drivers love is. You can add that as a potential fourth. Interestingly enough, you know, you could measure the ratio of fear to curiosity. It's the ratio of the defense budget to the science budget. Right. And greed is the, is ratioed there by the entire investment community.

[Salim Ismail]

Yeah, there's something very important in the work that you're doing with that xprize, right? What we found with XPRIZE is when you position a prize and you launch it, it typically gets won within six to seven years. Okay? And it's a 10x drop from where we are today, about 2,500amonth to where you're talking about 250 bucks a month to pay for everything. If we imagine that that gets done in the next six to seven years, it changes the equation globally and it forces everybody to go, oh my God, that's possible. And when we get to that point, it'll completely change the game, especially as we get closer and we can publicize the outcomes, et cetera. So this era of greed and the kind of ignoring the fundamental problems literally will disappear and evaporate in the next two to three years as we keep working that prize and getting the media word out there.

[Peter Diamandis]

Mark.

[Salim Ismail]

So this is incredibly powerful and important. Peter and I, when we wrote this last book, we wrote a section in there called Technological Socialism, right? Socialism. Government socialism fails because centralized allocation of assets is too inefficient and invariably leads to corruption. But if you think about Dara and the shoring of cars across a large group of people, it's actually a socialist application. When an algorithm hyperfilm efficiently matches demand and supply, you get all the benefits of the sharing economy without the downsides and without the corruption, without the inefficiency. So we have all sorts of capabilities with algorithms and AI now to deliver much of what you're talking about in a hyper efficient way. We just have to propagate those. And that's going to start to happen now.

[Imad Mustak]

Yeah, I think. You know, I wrote my book the Lost Economy about this and I've got a paper coming out soon where I look at the new monetary flows as agents basically crowd out the private sector. My view is this. Everyone ultimately needs to have universal basic AI or clause or whatever that allows us to reach everyone. Everyone needs an AI that grows with them. And money needs to come not from banks, but for being human. That's the only way the math works. It doesn't work from taxation, doesn't work from anything else. You need that basic level of money coming into being, not from deposits of banks, but for being human, that then the AIs will buy from us and then that enables all of this with the AI that everyone has.

[Peter Diamandis]

Professor Brown.

[Steve Brown]

So we had a half a day of really interesting talks that the subtext

[Alex Rees-McGross]

is massive job loss.

[Steve Brown]

And then we had another half a

[Alex Rees-McGross]

day of talks about the massive labor

[Steve Brown]

scarcity, which is why we need all these robots.

[Alex Rees-McGross]

So aside from temporary displacements, which we know are going to happen, which is it?

[Dave Blunden]

Oh, it's clearly a massive trough, massive social unrest and then a rebound in 2028. And that actually was interesting to hear Eric backstage come up with basically the same timeline, but it's almost like the industrial revolution all over again. But instead of over 20, 30, 40 years, it's over 2, 3, 4 years. And so a huge amount of retooling needs to happen the way we do. Taxation and government needs to get restructured. All of that is going to AI is just going to happen way too quickly for all those things to react. But then a massive amount of unrest and then 2028, hopefully I have the counterpoint.

[Salim Ismail]

I don't think we're going to see massive job loss because I think what's going to happen. I'm writing a paper right now called the organizational singularity. Right. Because as agents take over all execution, even strategy inside companies essentially dissolves to the work of AI. So what do you do? And the calculations we've done so far indicate that you'll take a typical company, automate everything with AI, you'll end up with about 25% of the same number of people doing oversight, managing dashboards and handling, doing exception handling and owning the purpose of the organization. Okay. But you end up creating five times more companies because you can. And therefore the employment stays exactly the way it has. And this is what we've seen consistently throughout history where we have a disruption, but all sorts of other soakers take up the slack and we don't end up with radical unemployment. So I tend to be much more optimistic. Take my veil off, call it the wine, call it whatever, But I tend to be much more optimistic.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, all right. I'm going to move this forward because it's past my bedtime. All right, we go to Brad and then we go to Pete and we're going to wrap it there.

[Salim Ismail]

Brad, please wait after we finish. I do want some commentary from the group.

[Peter Diamandis]

I'll take care of that.

[Mark Patrick Donovan]

Brad Salim, I'm going to give you an assist here. And maybe this is a topic for your talk late tomorrow night. But maybe the Molt book is an example of in this age of artificial intelligence, the rise of the value of ingenuity and creat creativity. And maybe what they acquired, Meadow, was not strategic and we're all overthinking it. And they just liked the team. They thought that they were creative, that they had some sort of magic and they wanted to capture that magic inside their company, and that's what was acquired. So I just want to capture your thoughts. This great mind's up on the stage there, on the rise of ingenuity and creativity and the value of that.

[Dave Blunden]

Totally. I think we're way overthinking this. Like, I know that I've got 1100 people. I know them firsthand, and many of them I genuinely love. Lots of them have been in the same roles for 10 or 15 years. They're great at it, they're perfected at it. And then the AI just comes along one day and it can do it. And there's huge pressure on the management team for higher margins, higher profits. So what's going to happen is obvious. The valuations of the companies are going to go through the roof. To the extent that they're shareholders, they'll make a lot more money, but their W2 paycheck is dead. It's going away and it's going to create a huge amount of disruption. Some subset of people are shareholders. All my people are shareholders, so they'll be okay. Lots of other people are not shareholders. All Dara's drivers are not shareholders, I think, as far as I know. So they're in deep trouble. The idea that somehow they're going to become creators overnight is ludicrous. Us, the people who are creative, like the Moat book, they're going to do incredibly well. Our kids and most kids who are not saddled by a career are going to do incredibly well, but in transition, it's inevitable. It's happening imminently.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, Pete, I want one statement.

[Salim Ismail]

What we found with the exponential organizations model is that survival and success depends on adaptability, not scalability and efficiency. And so you just keep that vector going. The people that are the most adaptable today, they're going to survive the most.

[Peter Diamandis]

I'm in. Throw your kids into the woods and see if they survive. Pete?

[Salim Ismail]

No, I didn't say Alex.

[Data Center Expert]

I said these to you earlier today when you. I love your analogy of tiling the planet with compute. Because my answer to the power problem, being a data center design builder, finding 1,200 megawatts of contiguous property is getting harder and harder. So my answer is that's only 100, 12010 megawatt data centers, and you put them in an area and we tile the areas to be able to do that. And Ahmad, I think it matches perfectly with your idea of national champions, because what you're trying to do for the protocol stack of decentralization and sovereignty, I want to do at the physical layer, I want to build 20,000 data centers across the country at 10 megawatts so that I'm in less than 1 millisecond from any place in the country, if you will, the high school football cities of the world. And to me, that solves it both on both sides at the protocol layer and the data center distribution standpoint. And I think that's how we can actually deliver the power, because we don't have a power production problem in this country. We have a power transmission and storage problem in this country.

[Dave Blunden]

And I think every governor in the country should hear exactly what you just said and jump on it. It instantly. And Alex is incredibly frustrated with the meetings we've had with government. I mean, look, if you're right, and I hope you are, and I think you probably are, then we need lots and lots of regional data centers that have to be in every single state. And that would be the best thing that could ever happen for this job. Dislocation. So if that theory is right, we need to get on it right away and create those projects, like, now.

[Data Center Expert]

I'm ready.

[Peter Diamandis]

All right, let's give it up for Alex Wiesner, Gross, Dave Blunden, Saleem Ismail, and Imad Mustak.