How AI Will Disrupt The Entire World In 3 Years (Prepare Now While Others Panic) | Emad Mostaque PT 2 (Fan Fave)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Impact Theory with Emad Mostaque (Part 2)

Episode: How AI Will Disrupt The Entire World In 3 Years (Prepare Now While Others Panic)
Date: February 21, 2026
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Guest: Emad Mostaque, Founder of Stability AI

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Overview

In this high-stakes follow-up episode, Tom Bilyeu continues his probing conversation with Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI and a driving force for democratizing artificial intelligence globally. The discussion explores the profound upcoming impact of AI on society, economy, culture, and the very structure of human meaning—balancing awe at AI’s potential with sobering warnings on existential risks. Together, Tom and Emad wrestle with urgent and fundamental questions about job loss, alignment, misinformation, the future of governance, and the psychological terrain of a world facing unprecedented technological disruption.

Tone: Candid, deeply analytical, sometimes playful but rooted in a sense of urgency and responsibility.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The AI Tipping Point: Opportunity or Existential Threat?

• The Fragile Egg Metaphor (02:07): Tom and Emad emphasize we are holding a "fragile egg"—the opportunity and risk of AI are equally massive.
• Pace of Change: AI’s impact is unfolding at unprecedented speed; Tom warns, "We've only got one chance to get this right and harness the power of AI and not get left behind." (01:53)
• Global Scale Disruption: Emad: "The only thing that I'm sure about is that everything's going to change. And the only thing I'm sure about is that this is the biggest change that we've ever seen." (06:18)

2. Infinite Smart People: Societal Impact Thought Experiment

• Emad asks listeners to picture a world of "infinite graduates"/"infinite smart people" (04:23) who lack wisdom but can perform analytic tasks, creative work, and more, leading to potential for universal personalized services in education and medicine.
• Implication: The scalability of synthetic “talent” presents both remedy and challenge—potentially solving resource bottlenecks, but raising alignment and meaning issues.

"The scaling of humans is first, the scaling of human expertise being available to everyone... The pause is partially for that, but partially because we need to widen conversation." – Emad (05:19)

3. Existential Concerns: Alignment & Loss of Purpose

• The Alignment Dilemma: Tom and Emad dive into the alignment conundrum: Can we control superintelligence? Can it ever be perfectly aligned to human values without shackling it? (09:00-13:00)
  • Emad: "The only way to perfectly align a system is to remove its freedom." (09:11)
  • Tom: "That's not alignment, that's enslavement." (09:36)
• Meaning and Purpose: If AI renders large swathes of jobs obsolete but keeps the economy afloat through productivity, what fills the gap of purpose? Will AI help or worsen the psychological void? (08:00-09:00)

4. Misinformation, Deepfakes, and the Digital Trust Crisis

• Misinformation Tsunami: With photorealistic deepfakes and AI-driven content floods (especially in looming elections), the risk to truth is acute. Emad notes watermarking, blockchain, and content authentication (32:08, 32:31)—but admits even with these, “frequency bias” can erode truth (33:52).
• Attribution & Detection: Invisible watermarking and standards can help but can be circumvented, and repetition of false narratives remains a core problem.
  • Tom: "How do we stop disinformation, misinformation from being a tsunami that just makes global communication unintelligible?" (31:26)
  • Emad: "What worries me is kind of frequency bias, whereby if you hear the same thing over and over again... it still forms association in your brain." (33:52)

5. Web3, Blockchain, and the Future of Digital Identity

• Web3’s Shortcomings: Emad says the previous wave, while promising, lacked intelligence at its core and over-focused on decentralization; alignment and value creation were weak (42:36).
• Potential: AI could give rise to intelligent, agentic economic actors who natively leverage blockchains for provable identity and transactions (44:51).
• Tom’s Use Case: Describes a vision where AI-driven NPCs in games autonomously transact real value, leveraging NFTs and protocol advances like 6551 (44:51-47:05).

"Do we use a blockchain for that or a trusted database?... Bitcoin is just identity to identity, transfer of value." – Emad (47:05)

• The Immutable Provenance Problem: Both agree—blockchain doesn’t solve everything, because ultimately authority and identity itself can be hacked. (48:06-49:25)

6. Society Under Strain: Fragmentation, Government, and New Religions

• Fragmentation & “Network States”: Tom raises the risk of hyper fragmentation, where communities shrink to micro-states with unique rules (60:06-67:21). Emad is skeptical that most people want complexity: "They just want to get on with life." (67:21)
• Rise of New Movements: Emad predicts AI-accelerated cults, religions, and political movements, amplifying the power of narrative and whoever shapes the story (68:24-70:19).
• The Loss of Shared Meaning: Tom: "There is something about not having a shared narrative that really makes me nervous." (70:19)

7. The Power of Narrative

• Societal Cohesion Through Stories: Emad argues that the stories we tell—about identity, purpose, and nation—determine our capacity to coordinate, scale, and find meaning (60:19-62:30).
• Fragility of Consensus: In the absence of unifying stories (like religion once provided), society becomes prone to polarization and nihilism.

"We need to tell better, more positive stories about the future. And these are the stories of universal education, universal health care, solving the mysteries of the universe and others." – Emad (71:41)

8. Regulation, Transparency, and the International Race

• Guardrails & Regulation: Emad advocates for regional AI centers, experimentation sandboxes, provenance protections, and careful regulation—especially against manipulative advertising uses (28:05).
• Open Source vs. Centralization: Strongly supports open, transparent models over opaque, centralized ones, as a democratizing force and to prevent exclusion or bias (26:03-27:36).

9. Practical Future-Proofing: Advice for the Youth

• Jump In Early: Emad’s prescription: “There are so few people actually doing it that if you go into this area with all your might and curiosity and a generally open mind, you can actually have an effect on the future.” (75:11)
• Learn, Experiment, Become the Expert: Early adopters will have an “unassailable advantage.” (75:46)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Pace of Change:
  "It's faster than anything and maybe humanity has ever seen at this pace that's going to happen."
  — Emad Mostaque (06:22)

• On Alignment/Internal Motivation:
  "The only way to perfectly align a system is to remove its freedom."
  — Emad Mostaque (09:11)
  "That's not alignment, that's enslavement, man."
  — Tom Bilyeu (09:36)

• On the Role of Human Stories:
  "We are the stories that make us up... But all wars are based on the lie that we're not all human. Killing each other is a ridiculous violation of a story that we're human."
  — Emad Mostaque (62:09)

• On Open AI's Dilemma:
  "Literally on OpenAI's thing, Road to AGI, it says, this could kill us all. We're going to build it anyway."
  — Emad Mostaque (54:25)

• On AI's Promise and Danger:
  "It does have this duality of potential outcomes and maybe it's actually all of them."
  — Emad Mostaque (71:41)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• AI at a Crossroads: Fragile Opportunity — 02:00–06:30
• Infinite Smart People Analogy — 04:23–06:00
• Fundamental Alignment Problem — 09:00–13:00
• Misinformation, Deepfakes, and Watermarking — 31:26–33:52
• Web3 & Intelligent Agents — 42:36–48:06
• Societal Fragmentation/Network States — 66:06–68:24
• Rise of New Religions & Movements via AI — 68:24–70:19
• Role of Story in Human Coordination — 60:19–62:30
• Advice to the Young: AI as a Field — 75:11–76:31

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Conclusion

This episode is a call to clear-eyed, collective action—embracing the transformative promise of AI while remaining vigilant and proactive about its dangers. Emad Mostaque and Tom Bilyeu unpack the challenges of meaning, governance, misinformation, and social cohesion at a time when the ground beneath civilization is rapidly shifting. Their central message: get educated, experiment boldly, and above all, stay alert to both the tiger and the horizon.

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Follow Emad on Twitter (@emostaque) and Stability AI for further insights.

Key takeaway:
“You have to get into it… Focus on the good stuff and focus on the potential of what happens when this scales to make real positive change.”
— Emad Mostaque (75:47)

Transcript

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Welcome back to Impact Theory and Part two of our conversation with the man focused on ensuring that the entire world has equal access to AI. The founder of Stability AI, the company that brought you stable diffusion, the one and only. Only Emad Mostek if you heard Part one, you already know about how many jobs are going to be disrupted by AI and how quickly AI is revolutionizing everything from healthcare to content creation. According to EMOD, 41% of all new software code on GitHub is already AI generated today. In part two, we talk about what happens as AI achieves global scale. What does it mean for the world of misinformation and deepfakes? In a world where anything can be faked convincingly, what can you trust? We also dive into the upside of AI and what life is going to be like as very hard things become very trivial. We also dive into the upside of AI and what life is going to be like when very hard things become very trivial. As I've mentioned before, this is such an incredible time to be alive, largely because of the reality and future promise of AI. But I also think that AI done poorly could be an existential threat to humanity. AI like atomic energy before it could be used to create or destroy, and it's going to be up to all of us to ensure that we chart our course well. As such, I plan to do many more interviews on the topic of AI in the hopes that both you and I can master a technology that I believe really is going to be more disruptive to our way of life than anything we've ever encountered before in human history. It's not going to happen overnight, but we've only got one chance to get this right and harness the power of AI and not get left behind as always, if you want an ad free version of this podcast with a bunch of extras like curated playlists and additional bonus content you won't find find anywhere else, be sure to subscribe now on Apple Podcasts. Now, without further ado, I bring you part two of EMOD Most. I'm your host, Tom Bilyeu, and welcome to Impact Theory. Yeah, so that AI is going to get embodied very, very quickly. And so it's not even like teachers can't stop kids from running out of the room. They can or will be able to very shortly. Okay, so before we get to that, though, I want to understand. So we have this incredible opportunity, this very fragile egg before us. We started with the scary part, but this, what we're talking about now is the thing that I actually spend most of my time thinking about, obsessed with how amazing this gets. And. But it's a fragile egg, and if we're not careful, it's going to break. How do we, as you think about, you signed the document. You're one of the traders, IMOD that signed that slow down document that I was really shocked to see a lot of very smart people sign. I, I teasingly, of course, say that you're a trader because, like, I want to get this cool stuff as fast as I can, but we need to do it well. And so what I want to know is in an ideal world, in your ideal world, where we actually pause for a second, you said you want to broaden the conversation, but what do you ask people to think about?

[Emad Mostaque]

I ask people to think about. So I'm the only one apart from Elon. Elon and I kind of signed both letters. So there was a minimum viable letter, which is we should treat this as bigger issue, as climate or pandemic. And then there was a more involved letter. And so the more involved letter came first and then led to the second letter. That was like something everyone could agree on. I think the thing we should look at is again, the example I give to everyone who's listening to this. How would your life, your society, your community, your business change if you had infinite graduates?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Can we say infinite smart people? There's something infinite smart.

[Emad Mostaque]

Okay. Infinite smart people. Yeah, like again, infinite smart people, infinite talented young people, shall we say. And they can draw, they can code. Why do they come?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because they're not wise.

[Emad Mostaque]

They're not wise yet.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Got it.

[Emad Mostaque]

Okay. So when you talk about hallucinations, think about it in terms of post hoc rationalization. You know, when you have a very smart young person, they just make something up, dude. Or old person.

[Tom Bilyeu]

People are so blind to their own

[Emad Mostaque]

motivation, but they don't have experience.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Got it.

[Emad Mostaque]

They're just fresh out. They're a bit rough around the edges.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Again, whip it smart.

[Emad Mostaque]

But yeah, so, you know, mile wide, not too deep, but actually surprisingly deep. Right. How would it impact your life, personally, your community, your society and others? Because that's actually a good framing, I think, for thinking about the disruption that will come and the potential that will come. Because what we just said about education and all that, that's again, your army of analysts, you know, your army of teachers. You can give personalized teachers, personalized medicine, personalize everything. Because we've learned to scale humans. And the scaling of humans is first, the scaling of human expertise being available to everyone. And the other part is bringing people together. And so the pause is partially for that, but partially because we need to widen conversation. Because I don't know how we get rid of many of these bad externalities and neither does anybody else. But most people even now, aren't asking the right questions. Something we discussed earlier. We have to figure out what questions we need to answer and how we're going to answer them and create systems that can adapt to whatever craziness. Because I would not be surprised to see riots at the same time as I would not be surprised to see everyone super happy. There is such a divergence of things that the only thing that I'm sure about is that everything's going to change. And the only thing I'm sure about is that this is the biggest change that we've ever seen. Faster than anything and maybe humanity has ever seen at this pace that's going to happen. Because it's the core of what makes a human. Telling stories, information flow. And that's changed forever. So that's why I was like, let's pay attention to this now. Let's borrow the discussion. Let's ask hard questions. Let's try and answer hard questions, because we don't have answers. And this is the only time you can do it. Because like I said, right now everyone's getting ready for the next generation supercomputers. They hit at the end of the year, next year. And then you go from two, three companies that can build these models to 2030, and you get to 200, 300. And so if you don't have some principles in place, then these models will affect every part of your life without you being part of that discussion. I don't think that's right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, we got to tune up your questions. A bit here. Imad, that was loose. What is the hardest question that we need to ask? Let's ask and answer right now.

[Emad Mostaque]

The hardest question I think we need to ask is how will we adapt to potential wide scale job loss?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. Okay, so what, how would we actually think through that problem? So job loss. For me, for the sake of this argument, I think it's worth saying there are two components to that. Component number one is going to be there is potential economic catastrophe in job loss. But so that we can simplify the problem set, since this ultimately is a podcast and not a congressional hearing, I will assume that whatever decline we have from just the sheer number of people working, we make up for in, in productivity and that we're able to keep an economic surplus. Yeah, exactly. And so we're able to help people. And off camera we were talking about something like that. So let's just pretend that those balance out. So not going to deal with the economic potential there, but meaning and purpose. I think that one gets really problematic. But we have an amazing tool at our disposal, which is AI. Now I have a feeling as we chase this down, the, the only thing that we have to worry about, really, truly, I think it all really does boil down to alignment. If we knew that we could just keep making it smarter and having the AI like taking readings so that I can't fake it out, I can't pretend that I'm happy, It like really knows where I'm that and then it can start putting things before me, connecting me with other people, like, oh, you know, this skill, this person's in need. Let me put you guys together and then you can have sort of the AI supervision. But they're there, they're helping each other out, they're connecting. The only reason I don't think that's a panacea is I worry that as we make this thing smarter and smarter that then it's like, like you said, I'm bored, I don't want to do this.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah. And you know this concept of all watched over by machines, of loving grace. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And that's scary, you're saying, who knows?

[Emad Mostaque]

Like, once we build something that's more capable than us, all bets are off. The only way to perfectly align a system is to remove its freedom.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I mean, I'd say it's not aligned at all at that point.

[Emad Mostaque]

Well, this is the thing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

At that point, you've bypassed alignment and you've gone straight to shackles.

[Emad Mostaque]

You've gone to shackles. So if you, you know, we all know people More capable than us. The only way to perfectly align them is to shackle them. You can have imperfect alignment, though.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's enslavement, man. That's not.

[Emad Mostaque]

It is.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's not alignment. So does. Is that because. So what I heard you just say is there is no way to align something smarter than us.

[Emad Mostaque]

I don't think there's a way to slave them. I don't think there's a way to align the outputs. I think that you can align the inputs. You raise it. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, let me run an idea by you. This is probably Pollyanna. I'm very open to that. But as I think about this, I think people take a super human centric approach to this. And because evolution has given us. We are an active species and evolution has programmed us with algorithms running in the back of our mind that insist that we do certain things to avoid a sense of dis. Ease. Yeah, I think that formula is very identifiable and it goes something like this. Eat, optimize physically. So you feel good.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The reason that that stuff feels good is because it's gonna optimize your performance. That's gonna make you most likely to survive long enough to have kids and have kids. So you need to be. You need to be chosen as a mate, you need to be able to acquire resources, you need to be healthy enough to get somebody pregnant or to be pregnant and carry to term all that stuff. So all those algorithms are running in the back of your mind. You have two levers that nature's pulling on pleasure and pain. But by default we're active. We have to go out because there one meal you can eat where you're not going to need to eat another one. There's no one moment of sex so gratifying you're not going to have sex again. So it's just like all these things are pushing at us to. To be active, to move. AI doesn't have to be that way. No, AI does not need those same impulses.

[Emad Mostaque]

It doesn't have a limbic system. Correct.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So knowing that it doesn't have a limbic system and it doesn't have a limbic system because it does not need to be hardwired for survival. Like the way that I think we get to alignment and please tell me where my thinking is erroneous. The way I think we get to alignment is you build computer that does not care if it lives or dies, that it is completely indifferent to being turned on or turned off. If you could do that, and it had no impulse to procreate and all it wanted to do was. I mean, it's basically Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That it just wants to adhere to those. It wants to do what you tell it, not hurt you, and only ignore you if you tell it to do something that violates the rule of not hurting you or somebody else. So you have this really simple set of rules. That's its only desire in the world. So if you tell it turn off, it turns off and has no. Like, it doesn't feel badly about it.

[Emad Mostaque]

Well, again, this concept of feelings. Right. And in Asimov's Books, you had the 0th law that kind of was added above that. So this is what Anthropic is trying to.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't know that one.

[Emad Mostaque]

The 0th law kind of supersedes all laws. If kind of the whole system is at risk effectively. But I mean, this is what Anthropic's trying to do with the constitutional AI process. So you have the base model and they have a constitution that the AI adheres to that tunes it constantly. So a series of kind of constitutional principles. Again, is it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is it as open for interpretation as a real constitution?

[Emad Mostaque]

No one knows what the right constitution, the right laws are. This is the thing. Like, our intellect only goes so far, and we've already seen with laws and constitutions, you can make those go anyway, like, North Korea has a fantastic constitution.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Does it really?

[Emad Mostaque]

It does, yeah. It's actually pretty quite a liberal.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And they just don't adhere.

[Emad Mostaque]

Well, it's their interpretation, I think.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting.

[Emad Mostaque]

I mean, this thing, like, you have to adhere to it because the AI, what are feelings? What is objective function like? One of the key concerns in alignment is paperclipping. You tell the AI to make a paperclip. It's like, oh, well, let's just make the whole water paperclip. You're like, how do you solve climate change? Just kill all the humans? It doesn't have any feelings about that. It's just like, well, this is a logical step to take.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yep.

[Emad Mostaque]

As the laws. Three Laws covers that, though, again, does it cover everything? This is a question, Right. And how do you embed it into a system that's likely to be not just one file? It's not a program. Right. It's likely to be a million different files. It's likely to be a collective hive mind intelligence. We don't exactly know how this emerges and we don't know how to feel right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

To me. Why. Why do we have to make it complex? I worry that as you make it Complex that. That's where things sneak in. You get emergent phenomena that you couldn't anticipate. Whereas.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah, well, this is the thing. It's going to become complex by default because the AI will proliferate and they'll start talking to each other. Okay. And at the same time, you'll have bigger and bigger giant AIs. Like, I was talking to some people last week, and they're like, right now, the maximum training run for an AI costs $100 million. They're talking about a billion dollars or $10 billion to train even bigger models. Right now, we don't know what emergent behaviors or how those things will act. All we know is like, what if you tell it to make a stuxnet to take down the global electricity grid? It can probably do that, you know, and again, the range of potential bad outcomes really fast.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I want to.

[Emad Mostaque]

A sub superhuman AI, we just. It's difficult for us to comprehend.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You've mentioned stuxnet twice now. For people that don't know stuxnet, it's pretty ingenious. It was a virus that was embedded at, like, the chip level. I mean, just as deep as you can imagine. And it proliferated everywhere, silently, silently replicating. And its only job was to shut down Iranian nuclear reactors. Pretty brilliant. And I saw the stat at one point. It was like some freakish percentage of all computers in the world are contaminated with it.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah. And it made them centrifuges spin around, so they exploded. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So terrifying in that if you're the one that that thing is aimed at. Not ideal to think how ubiquitous it is, but. Okay, so you could get an AI to do something like that. But what I, again, I am. I'm operating under the assumption I'm so naive, I just can't see it so perfectly happy. But help me see where I am naive, because I don't understand why you can't just don't give a computer. Don't give AI these strong impulses for progress. Don't give them an impulse for replication.

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[Emad Mostaque]

Well, yeah, I mean look, this is the thing like Elon Musk has just launched XAI as we kind of X AI as we kind of speak this. And his thing is to create an AI that searches for truth. So he wants to give it impulse, which is to search for the meaning of the universe and truth and other things like that. But then someone else might not give in an impulse and you might have someone downloading the weights of GPT 4 or 5.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So this is a tragedy of the

[Emad Mostaque]

Commons thing on a USB stick. And then they're like, I want to take down America. And they'll be like, let's take a thousand GPT4s and tell it build Stuxnets to take down America. It's not intelligent yet. It's still dangerous. We don't know when this thing will become actually intelligent or self aware or if it may never become. But we can see the probability of outcomes here. It could be absolutely fine. It could be very bad. There are no standards. So what you suggested, it could work only if everyone does it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We're never going to get everyone to do anything.

[Emad Mostaque]

We never get anyone to do anything. That's why one of the main things and proposals in alignment is let's build an AI first and tell that AI to stop any other AI from achieving sentience. It's what's known as a pivotal action and that's the best of a lot of bad things. My thing is let's build national data sets, let's represent diversity of humanity, let's give the AI the right food so it's raised in the right way and it's more likely to be aligned as a result of that than training on the whole Internet and crap. Is it a panacea, is it perfect? No.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you know the story of Buddha which. So whether this is historically accurate or not, probably irrelevant. Buddha, Siddhartha Gotama, if I remember correctly, Prince dad keeps him in the castle or the palace, whatever, forever. Never lets him see outside of it. So he has no idea that there's people suffering. Life inside is just amazing. Then of course one day he gets out and he encounters suffering and it ends up changing the entire course of his life. Punchline being, you can try to hide suffering and things like that from people for only so long. They are eventually going to find it and they are going to react. And so if we try to hide the Internet from the AI or train it out of them, they will eventually find the Internet. So I don't understand, like the Internet is just all humans acting in all the crazy weird ways that we act.

[Emad Mostaque]

But then the reward function of the Internet is not necessarily the reward function that we would like to teach our kids or try to teach a general purpose AI. They can interact with that, but they can learn how to adapt to it. Just like if you raise your kids well and you show them the Internet, they should be able to deal with it because they're capable.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Rather than hiding the Internet, wouldn't we be better. See, I'll finish the sense. Wouldn't we be better giving the AI values? The problem is this is all anthropomorphic. We are assuming that they are human.

[Emad Mostaque]

Like you can give AI values. This is the reinforcement learning function.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Are you giving it values or are you giving it reward function?

[Emad Mostaque]

You're going to reward function. I'd say there's not much of a difference there. I said you can embed things in the AI so it acts in certain ways. You can expose it to the Internet. But again, they have something called. We have something called curriculum learning in AI, whereby literally we teach it one thing and then we increment it with something else and something else and something else and something else. How are we teaching these things? What are we teaching? In what order? Do we start with all of the Internet and then distill it down? That's how we're doing right now. Or do we teach it a whole bunch of high quality stuff and then implement it from there? We already have evidence, that's the Tiny Stories paper and the five paper from Microsoft, that you can have a far more efficient AI if you only teach it high quality things so you don't

[Tom Bilyeu]

have to tell it. Ignore that, ignore that. Don't answer like that. Don't say that.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah, exactly. You can just teach it a good base and then it goes from there and it's course higher on a human evaluation and other metrics. But we don't know what the right data set is. It's just right now we said, let's scale. More data, more compute. Now we're like, what's the right data? What's the right compute? Like Our image model, we have over 120 different clusters of images. Only like nine are used like 95% of the time. All the rest of the data is just bunker. What does that look like for a language model? Like do you need to train it on all of those auto generated transcripts of like Spider man pulling out someone's tooth on YouTube and all these weird videos. This whole subculture of generated videos where you have like Spider man and SpongeBob SquarePants and Mickey Mouse like having a fight and stuff like that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I gotta find these corners.

[Emad Mostaque]

It's a deep dark area of YouTube. You don't want to go there, man.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very interesting. Okay, so this still feels like ultimately what we're worried about here is the computer becoming sentient in fact.

[Emad Mostaque]

Well no, not even sentient. I think there's a degree of dangers even before you get sentient. But only is a tool.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right. Where a human is leveraging it to do bad things.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yes. Or like a group of humans coming together, there's suddenly a race condition where it just goes. It's not trying to do something bad. The humans don't want to do something bad. But it happens. Just like the example I Always Give is YouTube optimized for engagement, which then optimized for extreme content, which is optimized for ISIS. Nobody at YouTube wanted ISIS to do. Well all of a sudden it did because that's what the algorithm was optimized for. And so once you start getting agentic AI that you let loose on the Internet and they can make decisions according to its reward function, you could weird stuff happening.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What's agentic?

[Emad Mostaque]

Agentic AI is AI that can go and pay a bill. It can go on the Internet, it can search more stuff, it comes back like little agents.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. So and it learns, it constantly learns.

[Emad Mostaque]

This is the other thing about robotics actually you we kind of skipped over. So yeah, robots are getting massively capable and they're heading towards human levels. Just like self driving cars. Actually they're pretty much here. You can get a wayo and a cruise and just go around San Francisco. Right. Without any human drivers. That what happens with kind of AI copyright and other things like that. Do they have to close their eyes not to train or do they train on everything they see? And does it disrupt blue collar work? So you'll get a billion billion robots, we're not sure. But that'll be slower than what we have right now, which is information robots, the GPT4s and others of the world. Those spread much faster. You don't actually have to build a freaking robot.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. So before we depart from the alignment problem, is the only convincing solution you've seen put forth? Create an AGI that stops all other AGIs from being created?

[Emad Mostaque]

No, I think that'll probably kill us. Ah. Because.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, that's helpful.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah. It's a race. I think the only thing that I

[Tom Bilyeu]

have is the default there. You think that it'll kill us because

[Emad Mostaque]

it's being programmed to do a restrictive action. So if you want to really stop it from creating another AGI, you have to get rid of the humans that could create it as well. You know, like, again, this is a very negative reaction thing. I think, again, Elon's idea isn't bad programming, Curiosity. Although it could lead to, like, Superman, where you have. What's his name, the guy who puts candor in a jar. Brainiac. You know, like, let's put humans in a jar. Let's just observe them. The only thing that I can think of is just better data makes better models.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So let me see if I understand Elon's idea. His way of sort of aligning it is the only impulse it has is for truth.

[Emad Mostaque]

Truth and curiosity. It wants to understand the universe.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it's not trying to be an agent in the world. It's simply trying to understand what is true.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah. And Demis, that DeepMind is very similar to this. He wants to create AGI to understand the universe better. Hmm.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And that seems like the model.

[Emad Mostaque]

That's their model. Yeah. Like, again, I'm not sure about that, because there's just such a wide range of potential outcomes. Like I said from my side, I don't. I'm not building AGI. I'm not building gigantic models. I have the capability to do that with the supercomputer that we have access to and the talent. But my main focus is intelligence augmentation. Smaller models that can run on the edge, models to private data to transform into intelligence, and models that bring together knowledge into certain ways so we can coordinate better. I don't want to build generalized intelligence.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why not?

[Emad Mostaque]

Because I don't think it's needed. I think the models that we have today, and this is something very important for listeners, like, they're useful today. Like, you can say that we're, like, extrapolating the future massively. But again, you just have to use them and think, what if I had a thousand or a million of these things? They're so useful and they can transform the world right now. So I'd rather focus on making this available to as many people as possible so people aren't left behind. You have super AI enhanced people and see people behind. Like I appreciate a lot of the work that open AI do because they don't actually do open source AI anymore. But that's fine, they don't have to. But they banned all Ukrainians and Ukrainian content from Dall E2, their image generation software, for eight months for political reasons. They're entitled to do that. I think it's wrong. And what if there wasn't an alternative like stable diffusion? You'd have an entire nation erased from a model. An entire nation unable to. To create instantly. And I think that's quite right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why did they. I don't understand.

[Emad Mostaque]

They said it was due to political reasons because they didn't want any political content being created. But the upshot is an entire nation was erased from the model and an entire nation couldn't get access to the model.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. I haven't looked at that. My instinct is that feels pretty flimsy since every country is going to put out political.

[Emad Mostaque]

I think there's probably some, some lists somewhere. And then the bureaucrats said, or the lawyers said something like, let's just exclude it just in case something happens, you

[Tom Bilyeu]

know, like they've since reinstated it.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah, it was like eight months that it was out. And then again, like you have these examples whereby like someone in Saudi Arabia, a lot of people on this call, probably a lot on this podcast, listen to podcasts, probably don't like them, but they're a country like any other. You can't use chat GPT in Saudi Arabia because they're on some list somewhere. They can get around it with a vpn. But again, like when you have a choke point on the Internet and the only way to access it is through a few players, they can decide who gets it, who doesn't get it, what the biases are and other things. And it might not turn out well. Actually, the funniest thing was there was a period where they were trying to make Dall E2, the image generation software, open AI unbiased. So it would randomly allocate a gender and erase to non gendered words. So you type in sumo wrestler and you'd get Indian female sumo wrestler. I just thought it was funny. But again, they're doing their best because that's the model which is centralized, controlled models in order to advance a whole bunch of things. And then you'll always have an Windows and a Linux, an Android and an iPhone.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What's the philosophy that drives your development?

[Emad Mostaque]

It's building Blocks for humanity's, activate humanity's potential. So if I build these models and I take them to all the countries and I hand them over, then people will build stuff that can create massive economic surplus new jobs and it equalizes the world again. My view is the Global south will leap ahead. We have more challenges here in the west, but I do see it as a great equalizing function effectively.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do you want to see the regulatory framework here in the west be?

[Emad Mostaque]

I think that things like the Chips act in the US there's $10 billion allocated to regional centers of excellence. AI should be 100 generative AI. There should be regulatory sandboxes so that our systems can be upgraded with this. Because otherwise how long will it take the government to be creative with this technology or financial services and others. And I think that there should be regulation around the manipulative use of this AI for advertising in particular, because we're not going to understand what's happening. Similarly, we need to have some sort of provenance factor. So we're part of kind of various certification things. We're exploring blockchain and other things. The media wave that's going to come is going to be insane. And we don't know what's true and what's not.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do you think about the pushback from artists in. Certainly in the art community there was a really big no AI movement. Do you think. Do you get it? Do you think that they're shooting themselves in the foot?

[Emad Mostaque]

How do you. I get it. You know, these things are fearful. A lot of illustrators were very scared because they're required to up their jobs and it is scary. There's a question around attribution and other things as well. And again, that's why we made it transparent and offered the chance to opt out because like everyone was kind of doing this, but no one was transparent about it. We don't need to have any crawls. Within the year it'll all be synthetic data sets or national data sets or similar with retrieval augmented models that can look stuff up. But it is what it is now and again you've got to put the word out there. The actions they're taking with the various lawsuits and policy pushes would basically entrench all power with the existing IP holders. And a lot of kind of artists are pushing for something that would be akin to music copyrights or even style is copyrighted. That's a dark road that I don't think they really want to go down and they don't really understand it. But again, I understand the fear, because this is completely unknown. Just like now from some of my previous comments, got a lot of programmer hate because what is a programmer? The nature of what an illustrator is will change. All the artists I know love this technology because it's just another medium for them. Nature of what a programmer is going to change. All the architects and 10 times people I know really love this technology. And this is what we've seen with like MIT studies and other things. They had a study where I think they showed that the third to the seventh percentile got like 20, 30, 40% better and the top 5% got multitudes better. Because again, how many people know how to deal with very talented youngsters? Very few those that can harness it get even better.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So when you look at what Nvidia is doing, what do you think that that implies for the next generation of AI?

[Emad Mostaque]

Well, I mean it's. We figured out how to scale these chips. So the previous limit was as you put more and more these supercomputers together, you had a tailing off as you scaled. So there's only so much that you could scale the compute. Nvidia, Google and Intel have basically cracked that now in terms of how to just stack more supercomputer chips to scale to even bigger models or models that are trained for longer. So it's either bigger or trained for longer. Trained for longer. Seems to be better now. And that just means that the capabilities will increase year by year and they're already pretty darn good. The key bottleneck will probably just be actually chips to run these models, not chips to train these models. The inference side, because right now you have a small amount of consumer interest, next year it becomes insane. You have a small amount of enterprise interest, next year it becomes insane. There's not enough GPUs or chips in the world to meet up with that demand.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, when I think about what's going on with I don't know if it's just Nvidia, it's probably the wrong thing to attribute it to. But when I think about how we're getting so good at creating things that are photorealistic. You were talking earlier about as the election is coming up, you're going to get all this kind of deep fakery. You've Talked about the Web3 promise of Web3 and sort of where it's ended up. What do you think the role is for deep fakes? The blockchain player role. Like how do we stop disinformation, misinformation from being a tsunami that just makes global Communication unintelligible.

[Emad Mostaque]

This was a part of content authenticity.org, which is kind of verifiable metadata. But we're looking at blockchain and other solutions and they can get you so far. So we actually have invisible watermarking in all the models that we create. And that's why we're pushing for them to be standard, which we don't share the details of except for to the big platforms and others.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And it would be permanently visible there, or the platforms that it plays on would have to flag it.

[Emad Mostaque]

It's visible and then they can have kind of tools around it because we think that's important. That's why we try to build the defaults into our model.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Can you like download that and wipe the watermark? If you even have AI wipe the

[Emad Mostaque]

watermark for you if you knew how it was, there may be more than one watermark.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting.

[Emad Mostaque]

So we have a variety of different technologies that we've incorporated into our own ones because again, we release open source, so we want good defaults. I think you do need to have some sort of attribution. But actually what concerns me, I think things will be attributable, identifiable. What worries me is kind of frequency bias, whereby if you hear the same thing over and over over again, especially in a realistic voice, like Oprah comes out and says she hates Joe Biden, you know, and so does Kamala Harris. And you aren't seeing these videos all the time. And it can flag it as fake, it doesn't matter. It still forms association in your brain.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do we do about that?

[Emad Mostaque]

I'm not sure. I think we haven't answered that. Like, I've had a big amount of press against me saying that I exaggerate a lot. I'm just like, I'm just read definitive about the future and you can correct it all you want. But now I was like, Ahmad exaggerates all the time. What can you do about that? You can just make the future true and show what you can do. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What part do they think you exaggerate about?

[Emad Mostaque]

What's possible or what's possible and kind of what was there? Because it's been a bit weird. Like a lot of people, like you didn't have a special relationship with Amazon before we raised any funding. We built the 8th fastest supercomputer in the world with them that was dedicated to us. Like that's factually true. They're like, yeah, but you know, there's nothing like in print. And they're not saying that because the special deal. Right. And then there's the future side where I say something like there will be no programmers as we know them in five years. And they're like, oh, he doesn't know anything about programming. Right. Because these are complicated issues and it's a crazy time and a crazy company. And maybe I'm a bit crazy too in terms of the way that I approach this, which is just being very definitive. But again, it's association thing. Right. Like how do I shake that off? Well, you be successful, then you become a visionary rather than someone who's hyperbolic. Right. How do you affect an election? What are elections? What is representative democracy? How does democracy act in. In the area of zero cost creation and massive optimization. So every single speech will be run through GPT4 cadence, all this, everything you get micro targeting, you get all these things. Does it happen next year? Probably not next year. You see some very basic stuff. But what does 2028 look like? I am not sure, genuinely. And so we do need authentication standards. We do need to have some sort of maybe antivirus AI that watches out for kind of fake stuff. But even true stuff can cause huge impact. Like the Silicon Valley bank Collaps was a true story. It wasn't something fake. They didn't have reserves. And most of our system is actually based on trust. So these are some things that concern me. I don't have the answers. But again, that's why you have to kind of raise the alarm like let's try and figure this out before it comes. Because maybe it doesn't happen next election as sure as heck will in the congressional and then beyond. And again, what is the nature of democracy when you can't tell what's true or not? People worried about this with the previous kind of era. This is something just beyond that, I think, because it's convincing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, that's one of the things that I think is going to be a very meaningful problem. I had Yoshua Bengio on the show and he had also signed the letter saying we should pause for six months. And when I asked him why? Considered by many to be the godfather of AI. And I was like, bro, you've been at this for so long. Like, why all of a sudden? And he said, there we were all so taken completely by surprise with how quickly AI passed the Turing Test. Now, for people that don't know what the Turing Test is, it's where you're having a conversation with an AI and you can't tell that they're not a real person. And he said, so, yeah, we did not expect it to pass the Turing Test as quickly as it did. And that changes everything. And it's just moving so much faster. And that's really the thing I want people to understand is that when a guy that spent the last 30 years building AI says, hey, all of a sudden, this is moving a lot faster than we thought it would. He's somebody that's very familiar with exponential curves. And even trying to plot out the exponential curves, they didn't think that it was going to happen this fast and that the, the rate. Not only is the rate of change extremely fast, but the. There's the law of accelerating returns. So the rate of change is already fast and it's getting faster. And that's the thing that, that I'm really worried about is is this going to be something that just blindsides us from that perspective, it's just. It has a level of capability that we, we didn't expect this quick.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah, I think it's a bunch of S curves all at once. So there's three of them. Yann Lecun, Jeffrey Hinton, and Joshua Bengio. And Jeffrey Hinton quit Google to say, this is a massive risk. You have Yan Lecun's like, this is a massive opportunity in terms of it'll transform the world. He loves the research and things. So they've got one versus two. But the reality is every expert in this area is basically saying none of us can predict what's going to happen. If you ask him about the capabilities of this technology, One year, I mean, got a rough idea. Two years, I have no idea. All bets are off. Like, as a practical example, when can we have generated Hollywood quality movies? It's not even a question of if now, it's a question of when.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Correct.

[Emad Mostaque]

I have. If it happened a year from now, I'd be like, okay, sure. I would not even be surprised anymore. I think it'll be a few years from now. And even though we have one of the best media teams in the world that are building video models, I have no idea, because there's two parts. This one is the models themselves. But the second part is how we use the models and combine them. Like, there is an amazing company called Wonder Dynamics. I don't know if you've come across that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I've used them.

[Emad Mostaque]

Awesome.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Unbelievable.

[Emad Mostaque]

It's a bunch of different models. So one of Dynamics, you've got me click on it and then say, I want him to be an alien. And it does this, and the aliens waving its arms. And it takes like five minutes. It would have taken days, weeks before.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Weeks.

[Emad Mostaque]

Weeks before to create.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Rigging a character is one of the most difficult things you're going to do in 3D. It's insane minutes.

[Emad Mostaque]

And then you think, well, what is a movie, right? And you start breaking down. You're like, oh, dear. Because it's not necessarily just one model. It's a model combined with other models with the right flow. Because you have one talented youngster combined with other talented youngsters in the right flow, suddenly gets these things done. And that's what makes it even harder. Because what we're talking about is models and AI. What we should really be talking about is systems. As the models come together and build better systems, the capabilities go crazy. And then that is another S curve connection.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Give me what you mean by systems.

[Emad Mostaque]

So right now, again, a lot of the interactions we have with this AI, the text to image, the avatar, creation, the GPT4 are 1, 2, 1. What happens when we start chaining them together to check each other's outputs? You have one that just learns everything about Tom. You know, you have your own AI models that you train on, all of the stuff that you've ever done or all the stuff that you see on your computer screen. That's a system of lots of AIs. That's an organization of AIs, that's an ensemble of AIs. Like again from the leaks. GPT4 is a mixture of experts model, which means they have a whole bunch of different models, I think eight or something or 12, that are experts in different areas. And then it routes the query to

[Tom Bilyeu]

whatever the best specialization versus a generalist.

[Emad Mostaque]

So we created an oital and now we're creating specialists. But we can get generalists to even check each other's answers to get better answers. Why use one when you have a dozen? So something like one, Dynamics uses a bunch of different models to rig a character and figure out all of the movements of the character and then another model to do a layer over and other models to do the skinning and other things like that. Because they built great software.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, this is really crazy how fast this stuff moves. Okay, so I want to talk about Web3. Web3. To me, when I think about what drew me to it, in the beginning, it was entirely the technology. And when I look at the blockchain. So I obviously come at everything from the lens of entertainment. So I'm thinking about digital worlds, games, all that. And the problem is once it's digital, then it's all sort of meaningless. And so you end up having to trap people inside of an ecosystem in order for things to retain their value, because you can lock things in and make sure that things only react the way that you want, but you have to confine them. And when I had first probably, this is probably seven or eight years ago now, I was introduced to this thing that the guy at the time called V. Adams. And I was like, oh, wow, that's going to change everything. Because what it does is it brings the, effectively the laws of physics into the digital realm. It means that I can have something. I know exactly how many there are. I know where it is, I know what you have to do to get it. I know what it does once you. You have it. And then, you know, flash forward, whatever it was. Probably four or five years after I heard that, I hear the letters NFTs showing together for the first time and I'm like, oh, my God, this thing actually got real because I wasn't ready to use it. And quite frankly, it wasn't ready for prime time back then. You, I think, look at Web three, I don't know, as a movement or as a technology, with a bit of a chuckle. What do you think that Web3 got wrong?

[Emad Mostaque]

I think it lacked intelligence for a

[Tom Bilyeu]

start, at the contract level.

[Emad Mostaque]

I think the smart contracts are actually just logical contracts. But like, Web two was AI at the core. Google, Facebook, other things. There was no AI in Web3. And so Web3 for me was identity and Value transfer, Rails. But then there was no kind of intelligent routing of these things. And also they tried to bootstrap economic incentives before they created value. So there was a system created outside the existing system. All the money was made and lost at the interface. And there were some really good principles, a lot of really good people in there, but then a lot of, like, freaking raccoons that were just trying to make a quick buck. Right? The ups and downs of the cycle means that a lot of people have been washed out and there are a lot of good ideas there. But again, it needed something to bring it together because to get Information from one place to another. And Bitcoin paper was about information. It was a transfer of value. That's just a, a transfer on the ledger, right? It's not really a transfer, it's just a ledger point. Just changing applying intelligence to that makes that even better. Having intelligent market makers, having AIs that represent you. Because how are AIs when they get agentic, when they have the ability to go out into the world, not physically, but digitally, how are they going to pay each other? They're not going to have bank accounts. Right. They'll probably use crypto. You know how there's going to be a system of record for something like image generation? You'll probably use a blockchain or something similar, maybe a Merkle tree series. You know, there was a whole bunch of stuff around federated learning and zero knowledge proofs and things like that. AI can help it. If you have standardized AI on your phone, it can make much more intelligent zero knowledge proofs. And zero knowledge proof is something like, you know, like rather than showing a whole passport, you just say that I'm old enough to drink and it can verifiably show that. So I think that there was a lot of promise, a lot of really intelligent stuff, a lot of good stuff around the distributed side, but then an over focus on decentralization for the sake of decentralization with massive overheads, a lot of quick buck people kind of coming in and trying to boost it up. And a lot of systems were just misaligned because they didn't learn. Like you don't do a fully decentralized flat democracy, you have a representative democracy and things like that. So things like Daos just turned out to be dos, decentralized organizations rather than autonomous.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So is it something that you think that is going to find its way into usefulness now as we get the take an AI agent that's going to need to be able to transact value. Yeah, exactly. Does, does it step into that or. Because I see what we're building, I have to have the blockchain. So for me it felt like when I was sort of living through web3 at the height I looked crazy to everybody because I was like, why is everybody thinking about this from a financial perspective of the financial side of this I thought was going to create hyper perverse incentives, which of course it does. And so for me it was well wait a second, just look at the technology, look at what the technology allows you to do. And are you familiar with the new. I forget the, whatever the, the lead up Code is, but it's protocol 6551 if I'm not mistaken. No, it's really interesting. It basically turns any digital asset into a Russian nesting dollar. And so you can, it, it is both the piece of content and a wallet in the same time. So you can create an AI character. This is how I think about it. So what we want to build inside of our game is imagine an AI character. We, we do in fact have a character and she's a merchant. So now imagine this merchant can actually go negotiate with the players in the game that may want to sell something inside of the game. And if she has actual currency, eth, Bitcoin, she can go and negotiate with real money and have these real interactions with people. And then if she has a limited amount, she becomes an economy unto herself. And so she's buying and selling and trading until she runs out of goods, runs out of money, whatever. And that kind of thing gets very, very interesting to me. But without that layer one, obviously I need the entire backbone of the blockchain in order to make the digital goods have any sort of value, because otherwise they're just completely infinite. But then also that particular protocol allows you to, as you. You're effectively embodying it and giving them agency, as you were talking about.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah. And you know, the question is, do we use a blockchain for that and then have a global system of record, or even a regional system of record, or do you use a database for that? Right. Like the whole thing was systems of record. And in an era where you can create anything for increasingly close to zero, something becomes important. Having a system of record becomes important. Is it going to be a blockchain? Is it going to be a trusted database? I'm not sure. Right. Is identity going to be important here? 100. Absolutely. And again, that for me was always at the core of Web3Crypto. It was verifiable identity. Bitcoin is just identity to identity, transfer of value. And what happens if something goes wrong? You know, no man needed. So I think a lot of the principles from Web3 will translate over to this new type of AI, especially because it enables distribution of knowledge, it enables knowledge to go to the edge, it enables agents to operate independent of massive infrastructure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you so. And again, this may just be naivete on my part, but when I imagine misinformation, disinformation, it feels like the only way around that is the blockchain. Is that there. Do you see a way with a trusted database or anything else, you can

[Emad Mostaque]

have A trusted database. Again, we're part of.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What would the trusted database be? And how could it ever be something that's beyond reproach when you're talking about something like.

[Emad Mostaque]

Well, I mean, like, things are never beyond reproach, even with a blockchain, because it comes down to identity. Who wrote this to the blockchain? Right. So if you can co the signing authority of an asset of an image or something like that, then that shifts things dramatically. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You're saying it just pushes the hack to a more individualistic level.

[Emad Mostaque]

It's an identity hack. Right. So. And again, like one of the things I'm like, you can track the provenance of an image, but then sometimes it's just around. If you're just bombarded by fake stuff all the time, you won't even know it's fake. And all the systems have to adopt a fake detector at the same time, or a provenance detector. Will we be able to adopt that suit quickly enough, given the tsunami that may or may not be coming our way? I think probably yes, it may be. No. I mean, again, people were worried about deepfakes back when DeepFace Lab kind of kicked off, but I'm thinking probably yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, that. That one seems inevitable to me. It you're always going to remain vulnerable at some point, but at least, like, take political messages. You were talking earlier that, you know, your auntie is going to be bombarded with all these messages. Okay, there may not be anything that I can do. Actually, no, I was going to say there may not be anything I can do about the repetition, but I can. If I'm doing something like a DMCA strike, where the system itself is built on top of a system that checks for sort of known watermarks. Like if I register and say, hey, I'm candidate A and this is my blockchain signature, and if you don't see that, then this is real and this isn't real. And don't play definitely starts to get into an area of how much do we want to be clamping down, but

[Emad Mostaque]

exactly how much do we want to trust? And so it's just a lot of infrastructure that has to be implemented really quickly, a lot of standards that have to be implemented really quickly, or we have to build some sort of idea antivirus, which. Then again, how do you build it Antivirus work? Anytime that anything comes that the machine thinks itself on the edge is wrong or doesn't reflect your values, it identifies it. And that's a whole can of worms by itself. Because something like What?

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's terrifying. Would we ever want to. I mean, that's like echo chamber on steroids.

[Emad Mostaque]

It is. Will it happen? Whoa. Yeah, there's. There's layers to this like an onion. And it might get stinky if it's left out in the sun. Because again, what's Siri gonna have as her personality? But are you gonna have a red version of Siri and a blue version of Siri and. Oh, dear. This gets really complicated really quickly before we have the little AI of G. Jesus Christ.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so I keep wanting to go to the positive, but you keep bringing things up that spark concern. So Ray Dalio, largest hedge fund manager in the world, is a former hedge fund guy. I imagine you know exactly who that is. At last check, and this was several months ago, but at last check, he said that he saw, he believed that the US had a 40 chance of civil war. Do you think that AI increases or decreases in the short term the likelihood

[Emad Mostaque]

of that level of division in terms of physical altercations? Yeah, I don't think there'll be physical altercations.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Really?

[Emad Mostaque]

No.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Tell me, why not?

[Emad Mostaque]

Well, I think the government will exert more and more control over kind of these things, and they'll actually figure out how to do counter narratives within the next four or five years. Now, that can also mean a controlling narrative, and that's not a positive thing. But then you look at the asymmetry of kind of warfare. It takes quite a lot to actually push someone towards civil war. Unless you have massive economic disruption. They need about 12% of the population to shift.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Weren't we just talking about massive, massive economic disruption?

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah. I hope it doesn't happen, though.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. Okay, so.

[Emad Mostaque]

And most people, again, maybe if you have massive economic disruption, but then the youths, you just give them all girlfriends. AI girlfriends. Maybe. He'll be fine.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Have you heard that? So this is a big thing in the red pill community. I don't know how familiar you are with all that, but they talk about, oh, God, what do they call them? Not numbing, but that's the idea. They use a different word for it, which I'm totally blanking on right now, but basically that you numb people out, you give them the digital girlfriend, you give them pornography, you give them video games, you give them masturbation, and they

[Emad Mostaque]

just in them out. Okay, I can see that. I mean, again, like, these are insane shifts in society. And dopamine, magic urges in the brain. People are attacking the limbic system all the time now. Right. That's a lot. And so Like I said with me, why I set up stability is so that everyone can own their own models and have models that have objective functions for them. And it's available in all the media types, all the other types, to transform the private data of the world. And it's available across the world, put good design patterns in place, hope people find, follow them, don't try and push the envelope on AGI and some of these other things, but it's coming. And again, the bad guys have the technology because they just downloaded it on a USB stick. And so the only thing I could think was innovation, spread diversity, bring that to the fore. But realistically, like, you know, I tend to alternate between like, massive, ridiculous hope and oh God, what's on earth is going to happen. And all I can do is try and do my bit and hopefully it's going to have a better outcome because there's really. This is the other thing. The total number of people that are actually thinking about the type of stuff we are talking about is a handful, maybe a few hundred. The total number of people that are doing something about it is literally a handful. Because most of the people involved in this sector, they just want to build better AI. They want to build AI that can do everything and they think that that will solve all the problems. Like, literally part of the manifesto is that, well, how do you make money? The AI will tell us how to make money. How do you solve the problems the AI can solve? Alignment.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Does that strike you as patently ridiculous?

[Emad Mostaque]

Yes. But again, like, I look at these things, like literally on OpenAI's thing, Road to AGI, it says, this could kill us all. We're going to build it anyway. Who did they ask about that? I don't know. And again, I think it's full of wonderful people, but we're in really weird times. And again, like, however many people listen to this, the reality is the technology is right there. Even if we stop today, say for instance, the technology doesn't move beyond where we go today. The world has changed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, let me. One, I think very reasonable way to view this situation is that AI is going to be a bigger paradigm shift than nuclear energy. And there are people out there making these gigantic nuclear weapons. And you're also in this game and what you're trying to do is make sure that everybody has a nuclear weapon so that nobody's left behind.

[Emad Mostaque]

No, not really. I think that again, my thing is an AGI, it's intelligence augmentation. I'm making sure everyone has a heater at the very Least because you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, so, okay, so are you putting guardrails on what you guys are doing to stop it from becoming AGI?

[Emad Mostaque]

We don't build big enough models for AGI or emerging on purpose. So I held back release of my image models. Like, we could train much bigger language models, but we choose not to. So we're a fast follower on language models. We try not to push the boundaries and we're focusing on the edge. Not general purpose models, but models that can transform your private data. So a different focus image models as well. We could have much better image models if we just went big. We're focusing on what can work on a smartphone so we can give it to all the kids in Africa and Asia and other things like that where it can transform your private data at a very low cost of inference. So the objective function is augmentation versus generalization and that's different to most of the other people that are pushing the boundaries here. So. But I think the nuke thing is it's good, it's bad. I want to really want to see that movie. Oppenheimer. I think it just came out. Barbie and then Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, then Barbie. I have to decide that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The tough call.

[Emad Mostaque]

Tough call. But you know, like, what if we'd put nukes on the bottom of the rockets? We'll probably be at Mars by now. General purpose technology, I think is quite something. And again, it can warm up entire places and it's the cleanest energy we have. So I think it is dual purpose. But so is cryptography, right? Think about all the battles around the early stage of the Internet. The bad guys are going to use cryptography, so don't use it. Imagine a world if there was no cryptography right now. But it's tough to get parallels to this because it's just such a. It's an immediate technology because again, you go to Dream Studio, Stable Diffusion mid Journey, any of the Dall E GPT4, you can just use it. It's not just you that can use it, it's your grandma that can use it. We've never seen as easy to use technology as this and as easy to implement technology. So if you want to create an integration into open AIs, GPT4 chat GPT, you just write a description of the integration and it programs it itself. It would have taken days before we've not seen a technology like this that can be implemented to an existing base as quickly as this can happen. And that fundamentally changes the structure of society. And so my thing was Embed guardrails, embed standards, make it predictable, make it boring. That's why I called it stability. And it's not easy, but again, I want to have the transparency on how these things are done because then you've got all these other models that you don't know what the data is. You don't. They're completely opaque, these giant models and ours are transparent. And again, I think it's Linux, Windows, Android, iOS, there will be both. But at least I can do what I can do and my team can do what we can do.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I've heard you say that one of the reasons that you named the company Stability, not just because it's the boring stalwart, but that you thought that it could bring stability to the global order.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah, I think if you give the same education tablets to every child in the world that's constantly learning, adapting and going around, if you upgrade the healthcare systems with the same underlying models, the same architecture to transform all the regulated industries, governments and other things, and you give back the control of that to the people, you suddenly have a unified architecture that can enable us to coordinate better because you've got the same information architecture across the world for all of these sectors and that's a complex hierarchical system. Herb Simon was a theorist who kind of pushed this through in that the way we coordinate as humans and groups is we coordinate a local level and then sometimes we can tell better stories that we suddenly get to the human colossus and we got a COVID vaccine or we figure out nuclear power or all these kind of things. So I was like, if I can standardize the building blocks on which society transforms and give it to the world, then I don't think there's a single problem we can't solve. Like, you know, you got excited earlier about your own personal kind of AI that could go under that. What if you combine that with an AI that knows everything about climate or everything about, you know, nuclear power or everything about multiple sclerosis, you break down the barriers for information, for knowledge and you there's no problem you can't solve. Because it may be that to solve the problem of AI impacting our society, we need AI to figure out that problem, to bring together the brightest minds because we're not doing a very good job ourselves. Like you mentioned John Nash earlier, Nash Equilibria, game theory and mechanism design on the one hand is our own personal AIs guiding us, our co pilots for life. But then there's pilots which are AIs that can coordinate all the co pilots. And they can allow us to tell bigger stories and unify better to achieve massive outcomes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Talk to me about. You've mentioned story like that several times. What do you mean by story? Better stories, unifying stories. What does that mean?

[Emad Mostaque]

So there's a story of America and what is the story of America? It was kind of like freedom, liberty, kind of all these things. It was the American dream, like a progress thing. It's people believe in because to be happy you need to do something you're good at, something you like and where you believe you're measurably adding value and the other party does as well. In the middle of that, that's the Japanese company to guy is happiness. One of the concerns that you have is that people won't feel the forward motion anymore. They'll be stuck and they'll feel a sense of emptiness. Will they turn to religion? Will they turn to political parties? Something will fill that gap and void. And those are the stories that allow us to scale as a society. Because when we started we were oral. We had our families, we had our tribes. Then we formed countries, we formed organizations. And so we are the stories that make us up. We identify as a Republican, we identify as a Barbie lover, you know, we identify, you know, as a nuclear scientist or the schools that we went to. But it's difficult, especially in a time of polarization, to try and bridge those stories. Because ultimately there's a single story which is we're all human. But all wars are based on the lie that we're not all human. Because killing each other is a ridiculous violation of a story that we're human. But again we lose sight of that, that it's difficult to unify people. Actually one of the examples I give of this is Google. Everyone is smart. Google hire smart people. They did a study to see what identified smart top performing teams for lower performing teams was called Project Aristotle. And they came down to two things. A unified mission and story. Especially one that's like you have a crunch period and then you all band together just like Marines also are forced through hazing. Etc. And then psychological safety, the ability to say something without fear of reproach. Like they can say the idea is stupid, but not that you're stupid. And if you think about the teams you've had, they have a shared story, a shared narrative, a cohesion and then that level of psychological safety or if it's not creative, they blooming well listen to instructions, right? So you've got a few different ones around that. So that's what I mean by stories, and the stories are context. And context is what these models capture.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, let me paint a troubling scenario for you based on that idea of these stories. There are oftentimes things that in isolation are amazing, but they come together in a way that again, maybe in the long arc actually are amazing and actually do yield what we want them to yield. But they, we will go through a period where the long arc of history cares not for the individual. Yeah, so. So I think that what's going on with AI, what's going on with crypto, may be one of those moments. So as the individual becomes more sovereign and you have a monetary system that bypasses the government. When I first started learning about what money really was, and I sat across from Robert Breedlove and he started describing why he liked Bitcoin, what the whole idea of the sovereign individual was. I realize you understand that you're making the government an enemy or certainly a. They are no longer powerful, certainly no longer as powerful. And that, that they're not going to go quietly. They're not just going to let go of that. And so if I have an AI, if I have a team of AIs, a thousand AIs, that are able to guide me far better than any government could ever hope to guide me, that they're giving me real time data based on whatever. Whatever it is that I'm trying to figure out in that moment. They're giving me real time data, extreme intelligence. Oh, and by the way, the currency that I use is Bitcoin. And so I'm not even tied to a fiat currency. It's a global standard. Do you not see the inevitability of the disintegration of governments?

[Emad Mostaque]

No, I think that Bitcoin and other things, they have a value in certain areas, but I think it's very difficult for most people to understand that value. And most people don't want that value. Most people are quite happy in their communities and they just want to get on with life. I think that governments are ultimately, one definition is the entity with a monopoly on political violence. And money itself is a story like a dollar is just an intermediation point that we all commonly agree has value because it's backed by taxes, which are backed by the army, our military might. You don't pay your taxes, you're going to get in trouble. Right. I think it's difficult for Bitcoin to replace that unless you see a massive deterioration in the ability of the government to be the political violence thing. This Comes down to your thing of civil war. It comes down to massive ridiculous disruption, hyperinflation or otherwise. That just basically takes down a society. I think that's a very dangerous thing. I think most people in the world don't want that. Instead what happens is when you have disruption, you have. Hayek had a really great book, the Road to Serfdom and there's an illustrated version of that way back in the 1940s about bringing in the strongman. Like you look at something like the US election or you look at Brexit, what were they? They were referenda. That's how the parties deconstructed it. Are you happy with the way things are? No. Let's make a change. And so that's why I think Trump and others kind of get elected. I think that's what we'll see as well because the systems are quite resilient and the nature of a change to go to a global monetary system like that, especially when some people will get enriched more than others because of the seniorage of bitcoin and it's not stable. I struggle seeing that happening.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Have you read the book Infomocracy?

[Emad Mostaque]

No.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, so this is all tied to the thing that I think I worry most about is hyper fragmentation. Yeah, I was talking about it earlier. So in the book Infomocracy to your point about people are happy in their communities and biology has an idea around this that he calls the network state that basically we're going to reach a point where when money is no longer controlled by the government, when your money cannot be inflated away, when it's true sound money, what you'll see is people will begin to aggregate. Now biology thinks that it's. That it is not going to be tied to geography. I have a bit of a harder time with that. I think that there is still going to be a geography component. That's where Infomocracy comes in. And that book basically they're in. In a hyper connected digital world where and I can't remember if they deal with digital currency or not, let's say that they do that basically things will fragment down into the neighborhood. And so neighborhoods become like states or countries where they have their own rules and laws. And that sounded like a hellscape to me because you just passing from one neighborhood to the next, like different rules would apply and your phone would ding and it would update you on like this is what you can do in this space. You think that's complicated.

[Emad Mostaque]

People don't want complicated. They just want to get on with life. They want to see what's next on tv. You know, I think that again we're relatively hyper intellectual, you know, and we think about things a lot of people don't. Because people have their basic needs in life. And this question is, are these being met or not? And if they're not being met, then you have action and you get extreme. And again it's can the society meet the needs of the majority of people? Can it offer advancement? Can't it offer meaning? And the hyper fragmentation, you said it sounds like a hellscape. It's just too complicated. And again, this is something we saw in web3 as well. People just over complicated things because they didn't really understand people maybe. And I think, you know, it's going to be interesting to see how it evolves. The hyper personalization versus the bigger stories, the translations versus otherwise. But I find it again difficult to see how you get cross geography as you think about that. One of the things that probably is going to be interesting is what are the new cults, religions and political movements of the next five to 10 years that are hyper organized utilizing AI and

[Tom Bilyeu]

hyper persuasive or started by AI?

[Emad Mostaque]

Started by AI. You know, like think, look at ISIS. They were probably the most disruptive startup in the world at one point. They borrowed a lot of these things. What does an AI enhanced movement look like? And it can be negative, it can be positive. Someone's going to take this and run with it and that's going to organize people around the world and it's going to be again echoey. And it could be techno utopian, it could be Luddite. Ironically, even with this, political parties will change, religions will change, cults will change. And it really amplifies the power of the controller of this who tells the story. And I'm not sure, I haven't really thought about that. And I'm thinking about it now because you're talking about hyper personalization where I think this is the flip side of it. I mean this is Isaiah Berlin's conceptualization of positive and negative liberty. So positive liberty is the freedom to believe in isms, fascism, communism, Islamism or kind of whatever, right? Whereas negative liberty was the freedom from being told what to do. And so his thing was like positive ones are bad because they form these massive movements and then they tend to kill people because you have the Girardian thing of mimetic theory where you want why other people want and then there's a scapegoat. Whereas negative liberty is the freedom from being told what to do. And that led to laissez faire capitalism and this consumerism that we saw around the world. And so maybe as people lose meaning, they'll turn back to religion. There'll be new religions, there'll be new political movements, and we're not sure what those will be, but they could spread faster than anything we've ever seen. And so that's probably something to watch out for within that five year period that you're talking about. And I think that relates to this network state concept and other things. But for the people that get engaged by this, and again, we see that's largely the youth. So on the one hand you have the youth with the AI girlfriends, on the other hand you have the youths that want to believe in something bigger to fill the void and who's going to step in?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, and I think that there, there is something about not having a shared narrative that really makes me nervous. So Yuval Noah Harari talks a lot about, hey, the thing that makes humans so intriguing is that we're not only able to organize in these really large numbers, but unlike ants that have to do it in a very strict way, we can do it in a very flexible way, but we do it through these shared narratives. Now, for a long time, religion served as the, the thing that gave people a shared narrative. But as religion breaks apart and we get into this hyper personalization and it all begins to fragment, then you mix that with this idea that I heard from Jordan Peterson, I'm almost certain he heard it from somebody else, but this idea that everybody has to go through a messianic phase where they want to really contribute to the world, they want to feel like they matter, and they begin glomming on to all manner of things that seem good in the abstract, like climate change. But when you are glomming on the climate change as your way to save the world, you begin to get into the realm of, well, it's okay if we have to break some eggs to make the omelet.

[Emad Mostaque]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And it rapidly devolves into Mao. So how do we, when you. I don't. You said you haven't really thought about this, but I'm super curious, at least in real time, how you think about the idea of how do we do? We need to give people a unifying narrative and if so, how do we go about it?

[Emad Mostaque]

We need to tell better, more positive stories about the future. And these are the stories of universal education, universal health care, you know, solving the mysteries of the universe and others. So I've got a lot of. Because that's hope for humanity, right? And a lot of the things that we see are dystopias because you're looking at the tiger, you're spotting it. AI is the tiger in the bush and it's difficult to ride a tiger. But maybe that's a kind of cool picture that we can make in stable diffusion in two seconds, right? Because it does have this duality of potential outcomes and maybe it's actually all of them. So what are the stories that we should tell? And I think this is again part of the crisis of what is the American identity? What is the American story today whereby you've gone through many cycles? What do Americans believe and what does America want it to be? I'm not sure what Americans want America to be. You know, I'm not sure what Chinese people want China to be. I'm not sure what people want. And I think that it's difficult to think about what is your objective function, how are you going to measure your life and other things. Religion filled a lot of those kind of things, but it still does. Religion hasn't gone away. Half the world is religious, right? More probably like you actually look at the numbers, sure it decreases in certain areas, particularly somewhere like America, but it's going strong around the rest of the world and it's just growing because they have more kids than non religious people. Maybe that fills the gap. But how will religion transform with this technology? I mean, let me ask, do you

[Tom Bilyeu]

think that the countries with religion will be the ones that propagate into the future because they have a better shared story?

[Emad Mostaque]

Well, no, because they propagate literally. They like procreate.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Even if that's how the story ends up pushing them forward?

[Emad Mostaque]

I think it could be. But then, you know, what is the nature of Christianity with AI or Islam with AI? Islam's actually the one that's most affected by AI. Why so Christianity, you and sheer Islam, you've got like popes, you've got Protestantism, you've got this. Every single one has their own structure. Sunni Islam is based on interpretation of texts, with the interpretation having ceased around about the 16th century because the text became too complex. What happens when you apply AI to that? And the texts are interpretable by anyone with all the context and nuance and there's no centralized authority in sunny Islam, which is like a billion people. That's going to be very interesting. What does that do to Protestantism, you know, where you don't have necessarily a pope? What does religion look like when all Of a sudden, you have a branch that is AI enhanced to interpret texts and to tell stories that are resonant and better. Oh, gosh. There's a lot to think about there. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Does AI become a God?

[Emad Mostaque]

God? Well, some people are trying to build an AI God that is AGI. You look at the statements of people trying to build AGI, they're trying to build God because it will bring us utopia or kill us all. This sounds very, again, classical, right? And they have fervor. They genuinely believe that they are going to save the world or destroy it. Yeah, we got back to the dark stuff, didn't we? Yeah, that's a remake Game of Thrones season eight. You know, like, come on, let's do it. Let's bring this technology for cool stuff. Make the oasis in Ready Player one, minus the mitochondrion transactions and whiny teenagers.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That part I actually am working on.

[Emad Mostaque]

There we go.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, so talk to a young person out there right now. They're terrified. They want to be future proofed. What do they do? How does somebody right now future proof themselves?

[Emad Mostaque]

They just throw themselves into this area. There are so few people actually doing it that if you go into this area with all your might and curiosity and a generally open mind, you can actually have an effect on the future. Because everyone in your community will be using this. Everyone that you know will be using it. If you're someone that listens to this podcast, again, maybe not the people without Internet, but you don't know those people, you know? And so you become a shelling point. You become the expert in this area ahead of everyone. Because what happens is that anyone who gets into it now will have almost an unassailable advantage of people who come later. It's a kind of seigniorage thing, right?

[Grainger Advertiser]

It.

[Emad Mostaque]

Because you'll see it at the start. It is the start of the biggest change I think, that we've ever seen. And again, think about what you're doing when you're typing in and seeing that and think about a million of these things working that even better. It's unavoidable. So I'd say just. You just have to get into it. You have to get passionate. You have to think about the bad stuff. But is that really your responsibility? Right. I think it is. But focus on the good stuff and focus on the potential of what happens in the scales to make real positive change. It can be to your pocket, it can be to your community, it can be to your life, because it does affect everyone that you know. So I'd go with a positive mindset. Leave it to boring old guys like us to think about all the doom scenarios.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Fair enough, Imad. Where can people follow you?

[Emad Mostaque]

I suppose my Twitter at Emo Stack follow Stability AI as well. That's kind of the main mouthpiece. I love it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and deploy some AI in your life. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.