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Tom Bilyeu
Today's episode is with one of the most brilliant minds in the world of AI, Imod Mustack. IMOD is the founder of Stability AI, the company that brought you Stable Diffusion, an open source AI model that's already being used by millions of people around the world. As such, he is closer to the realities of how disruptive AI is going to be than anyone I have talked with thus far. Far. EMOD's on a mission to get AI into the hands of everyone around the world, both to take advantage of its incredible power and more distressingly, to ensure that those without AI are not effectively enslaved by those with it. That is how powerful AI is. EMOD believes that only an even playing field will protect us. This is such an incredible time to be alive and I really am very excited about AI. But I also think every one of us needs to face the coming changes head on. AI like atomic energy before it can 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 will be more disruptive to our way of life than anything ever in human history. It won't happen overnight, but we've only got one chance to get this right, to harness the power well 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 anywhere else. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts. Now, without further ado, I bring you Emod Mustack. I'm your host Tom Bilyeu, and welcome to Impact Theory.
Imad Mustaq
How do we make sure it doesn't kill us? Or how does it make sure it doesn't enslave us? Or how does it make sure that it doesn't give us eternal suffering? And I realize this could be the real thing that unlocks humanity. AI is not going to replace humans. Humans with AI will replace humans that don't use AI.
Tom Bilyeu
AI is thrilling, it's very exciting. But there is a non zero chance that it poses a existential threat to the human race. So over the next three to five years, how disruptive do you think it will be? And what are people not prepared for?
Imad Mustaq
I think that's next. Excellent question. So you know, the future is always hard to predict and existential is a big word. Existential means no more humans. So I personally think the AI will be absolutely fine as a base case. It'll be like that movie her if it ever gets this artificial general intelligence like humans are kind of boring. Goodbye and thanks for all the GPUs. But you could be wrong, because what we're doing is creating something that's more capable than us in narrow fields. And the question is, does that generalize and then become viral? We've seen an instance of COVID and that expansion. We've seen programs that can explode nuclear reactors like Stuxnet and others. What happens if you start combining these and you get a misalignment? So it's got a strange objective function. Our organizations already are like slow, dumb AIs, you know, and like Germans are the most sensible people that we probably know. And yet they committed the holocaust. And we see this over and over again where organizations chew up people. What if an AI takes over an organization and then decides to do something disruptive or something terminal, such as creating a virus? We don't know about that, but that's at the extreme when we look at impact we have. The more mundane, the more mundane is what happens to programmers when everyone becomes a programmer. Just like photographers, you know. Now you can take amazing pictures with your thing. What happens when Google's med Palm 2 model now can outperform doctors and medical diagnosis, but also empathy. According to the latest paper in Nature, this is a fundamental reworking of information flows that's going to be massively disruptive and deflationary even with what we have now, with no more advances, as it becomes enterprise ready and we have a continuum from that disruption to the productivity enhances to potential existential threat if we keep doing the models as we do now, which is we're not exactly sure how they work or their capabilities, but we keep building anyway.
Tom Bilyeu
Now I Want to get very specific about what the level of disruption is going to be. So when I look out at this and I think about, okay, we're creating something that is going to be smarter than we are, certainly in a narrow way, but possibly in a more general way. But even if it's just narrow, is there going to be any job function that isn't going to be, at a minimum augmented by AI?
Imad Mustaq
I think if you look at the employment share of industries, something like oil and gas has like 3%. It's mostly like building giant machines. Is that massively affected by this AI at the edges? Yes. Things like programming, where you're talking to computers, massively. I mean now basic programming, the bar is raising fast, fast, fast. And so you've got everything from knowledge work to heavy industry. I think it affects just about everything, but some areas far more than others. The two areas that I think it will affect the most are probably healthcare and education. Neither of those are fit for purpose. We're in America, we know that. But across the world, no one's really happy with their kids schooling again, medical care. If anything goes slightly wrong outside the norm, we all know how frustrating it is. We can finally have personalized education and health care at a fraction of the price. And the two biggest drivers of US inflation over the last decade, education and healthcare, they make up about 80% of the increase. So that will be disruptive. And then like I said, any type of knowledge work will be disruptive.
Tom Bilyeu
And we're not sure how to work because when so my own self, what we do is education, that's a big part of it, but also just content creation. And so when I look at the fact that we can already clone my voice. Yeah, we can already create a tombot that will answer questions I have answered before in a very similar fashion to how I will answer them. In our video game flow, we're already making 3D objects which, so when we looked at, I don't know, two months ago, I thought, okay, this is still 12 to 18 months away. 45 days later, we're using it actively in our pipeline. You've got text to video, which still a little awkward, but it's getting better insanely fast. We do all of our concept art now in, in AI, so we have as a company that doesn't even have like an AI expert on board. We're just learning as we go. We're already deploying it like crazy. And when I look out, not even, you know, three years, when I look out a year, all of this stuff Starts to very rapidly become a centralized point. And so we're already saying I don't need to hire more people, I just need to make my people more efficient.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
And so that an entertainment company didn't even make the list that you just said. So there's a lot of people that I think are going to get disrupted by this. That may not be like the most extreme, but how far down do you see this trickling?
Imad Mustaq
Anything you can do in front of
Tom Bilyeu
a computer basically goes away or just becomes augmented.
Imad Mustaq
The bar lifts, the quality expectations are higher. AI is not going to replace humans. Humans with AI will replace humans that don't use AI because you can see that in your workflows right now. There was a paper by OpenAI where they estimated 15 to 50% of tasks get automated or improved. And so it affects people in different ways. You have a company where you've built a culture and again you're building 3D assets. It becomes amazingly more efficient. We just released, we contributed and collaborated on a 10 million 3D object data set. So by next year you'll be generating 3D, literally live. In a couple of years you'll have HD movies. We can finally remake Game of Thrones season 8 and other such travesties, you know. But the speed of this is something whereby it's happening in every media type at the same time. And it's easy to use. Web3 had some great ideas, but it tried to create a system outside the existing system and all the money was made and lost at the interface. This is just so seamless because there's no friction. Your mom can use this technology, you can use this technology. You don't need to be an expert because it came, was trained from our content and our collective content, as it were, and now it's just easy to implement and use. So I think this is the big differentiator between this and other massive advances because they required infrastructure, the Internet. There was the big lift up. You know, you had the consumption period of web2 when the cost of consumption dropped to zero. Now the cost of creation is dropping to zero. And humans plus AI can massively outperform humans that don't. It's a forcing function which means everyone has to use it. And this again is dual in that it can be disruptive, but it can also create massive value.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So I'll agree with that. I think that. So I guess let me lay out my whole thesis for you and for everybody listening, because I want to take us through what I think is very real doom and Gloom. And I'm not doing it to be a naysayer. I'm doing it because I think these are going to be the things we have to contend with. And if people go into this blindly, which I think they're doing right now, I think most people are burying their head in the sand. They are not paying attention to this, and they're going to wait until something really forces their hand, and by then it's too late.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah. The way that I put that is this is like Covid before Tom Hanks.
Tom Bilyeu
Yes, very well said.
Imad Mustaq
Everyone's talking about this. Your mom's talking about this. But the Tom Hanks and the NBA made it real.
Tom Bilyeu
Very true. And then we had a very poor response, which I have a feeling will be very similar to what we do now.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so here's how I see this going. I think right now, for the next year, let's call it. It's going to be. You need to learn how to use it. This will be your window to get efficient. Companies probably aren't going to start lopping people off yet, but I'll just say within my own company. So when I think about filmmaking, I went to film school, so I'm. I'm very experienced in this flow and Even in a 3D world to create, let's say, a short cinematic. So it's like a mini movie, but done digitally. I mean, you might have 35 people touch that thing from the creation of the assets through the moving of the camera, special effects. You might have 50 people touch that. And if that really does become text to output now 50 people become one.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
And so when you get a 50 to 1 ratio in certain areas, obviously it's not going to be like that everywhere, but when you have certain areas that go from 50 to 1. Take programmers. I've heard you say pro. There will be no programmers. Because writing code is just a way to talk to a computer. And if you have AI that will interface with the computer for you, why would you ever need to write code so that that's going to steamroll through society, that is just going to mow people over. So again, I'll give them 12 months. But even in my own company, if you're not actively trying to find a way to integrate it into your job function, I'm already looking at you sideways. A year from now, if you're not really good at either documenting how it is completely useless in your job function or showing how you're using it, we will find somebody that can do it. I'll Be shocked if a year from now we don't have a head of AI. So three years from now. I think this has created a crisis of meaning for a lot of people. And I don't know if you remember that the whole learn to code thing where it was like, hey, AI is going to put drivers out of work, they're going to be the first to go. And everybody was like, teach them how to code now. The way people responded to that always confused me because that was the right answer at the time. Now, knowing what I know about code replacing, not so much. But you have to go learn a new skill. There is no other option other than going on the dole, right? So you're either going to learn something new or you're just going to forfeit your career, basically. So I. What, what do you think about that? Do you agree that that is a very real thing that's going to sweep through?
Imad Mustaq
I, I do agree. I think that again, we're not sure exactly how this is going to pan out, but probably the best mental model I figured out to think about this technology. It's like really talented grads that occasionally go a bit funny. They can draw, they can code, they can make 3D models. How would your business be affected if you could push a button and infinite grads came out? How would your personal life, your society again? This is why I think it's quite deflationary. The only question is, can we create new jobs to make up for that? And that's difficult because he says we can. I doubt we can, to be honest. I think this is an economic disruption that's far bigger than Covid. And the important thing here is Covid, you had the disruption, then everything bounced back. You're at record employment now and things like that. With this, there's a lot of never the same again. It's like you talk to your kids school teacher, I can't set essays for homework anymore because of chat GPT and there's no way to stop that. So what is never the same again. And it's happening everywhere all at once. So this technology isn't just like, you know, there's a bar of entry where you needed to have a modem, you know, you need the latest smartphone or something like that. It has an embedded base that it's seamlessly going into. Look how fast Microsoft implement on the consumer side. But enterprise is not ready yet. It's like the iPhone 2G stage. You just got copy paste and next year and the year after you suddenly have the iPhone 10, you know, entire app stores get built because of the demand, because it's valuable. What's happening here, again with the comparison to Web3, you had to bootstrap value because it wasn't valuable. And you hope the value would come. This product market fit today, you're using it in your own company. And so this is one of my big concerns. And that's one of the reasons I decided to do open source, so I could stimulate growth, you know, because I think the only thing that can basically fill the gap is if we stimulate entrepreneurs to create brand new businesses, brand new jobs, because I think demand will stay for a while.
Tom Bilyeu
Demand for what?
Imad Mustaq
Demand for good things, good assets, with the way that money flows around the economy. So I was speaking at Cannes a few weeks ago, film festival, and you know, I love movies. My first job, I was a movie reviewer, you know.
Tom Bilyeu
Really?
Imad Mustaq
Yeah. British Independent Film Awards, Raindance Film Festival, other things.
Tom Bilyeu
I knew you were big into video game investing. I did not know that you were a film critic.
Imad Mustaq
I love, I love stories. That's how I kind of understood people, because my Asperger's and other things. And so I said to this, the video game industry has gone from 70 billion to 180 billion over the last decade. And the average Metacritic score has gone from 69% to 74%. The average movie is 6.4 on IMDb for the last decade and the industry's gone from 40 billion to 50 billion. What happens when you can make better movies? I think the market expands because the limiting factor is awful movies, in my opinion.
Tom Bilyeu
All right, let me run something by you. Okay, so I have a really dark view of not the next 12 months. So call it year two to year six. So it'll be a three to four year sort of span where I think there's going to be emotional devastation and probably economic devastation. But even if the economic devastation doesn't happen because of productivity gains, I think the emotional devastation is going to be hard to come back from. And I think that as the emotional devastation sets in, the government is going to try to regulate to protect people's jobs. And there you're going to get like some real weirdness. I also think kids are going to have a junior year existential crisis of what do I do? How do I future proof myself? What is the world going forward look like? I think there could be a massive loss of enthusiasm where a feeling of malaise settles over young people who are just like, why bother? I'm, I'm just going to get destroyed by AI they're going to be able to do it better than me.
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Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so in the movie industry specifically, and this is indicative of a big problem that I think that we have coming, and I think the problems really stack individual and societal.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
So at the individual level, the big problem you're going to have is this massive, massive fractionation of right now. Movies are even less now than they were when I was a kid. Movies were. There's only a few big movies for the year now. They're going to niche down. If anybody can type out a movie in, you know, take them 20 minutes to write the prompt and then maybe a day to render. Who knows how fast that's going to get. So now all of a sudden you can make a Hollywood quality film for an audience of one. And once you start doing that now, it's. What does that do to the industry? I think it's, it erases it. I don't think the industry changes. I think it goes away.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah, I think there's a few kind of components here. Right. So the cost of music consumption went to zero. You saw the Spotify model, yet you still have music stars. You've got even more crap music now kind of coming and hitting Spotify and other things. But people rise to the top, you know, just like you see top podcasters, top other creators. I think that'll continue because people like common stories.
Tom Bilyeu
Yes. Okay, so this is a very interesting idea. So let's stick with music for a second. Music is still hard to make. It's easier to make than it was before. It's also still hard to get people's attention but music now is no longer a shared thing. So music is part of what led me to the conclusion that I'm at now, which is, man, as kids, it used to be you were either into the mainstream pop and there was, you know, seven to 10 hot bands at one time, or you were into the alternate pop and there was seven to 10 hot bands in that arena and you, you fit into one or the other bucket. There wasn't the infinite buckets. Now you can find kids that are 25 and they listen to Frank Sinatra and I'm just, I'm always tripped out by that. So they don't even have their own sort of shared lexicon of what music they're into. It's. It's all spreading really wide. So it's really wide and an inch deep?
Imad Mustaq
Yeah, I think it's really wide. An inch deep. And you see, the primary methods of monetization are towards merchandising community effectively. You know, this is the interesting thing about NFTs, when they took off and then bounced down and things like that, it was the quickest way to join a community, even if it did have bad incentive design. So in an era where you can create anything, something becomes important. What that something is, we have to find out now. Right? Because again, I think it's some common stories, but I could be wrong. I think the deeper thing that you said was this crisis of meaning. Where is my path forward? What is an American dream? We're quite privileged, those probably listening to this and us on here. Most people don't really care about this technology. I think On a survey, 17% of people had heard about ChatGPT last month.
Tom Bilyeu
How is that possible?
Imad Mustaq
Well, a third of the world still doesn't have Internet.
Tom Bilyeu
That's terrifying.
Imad Mustaq
Again, like, it is kind of very bridge. 1.5 million people still use AOL. You know, like, fair enough. So we kind of look at it, but this is something that can reverberate very, very quickly. And then, as you said, there's a sense of malaise because you're not sure what's happening. And again, the future becomes uncertain. And when the future is certain, things are stable, you decide based on risk. You do a probability estimation in your own head. This is the percentage of that, percentage of that. And then you optimize for that. When you do uncertainty, you minimize for regret. Given these options, what am I going to regret least? And suddenly there are no options. Again, I'm at school programming and then programming is disrupted. What's it going to be? I'm not sure. And some people will throw themselves in and they'll tool themselves up and they'll become 10 times programmers. Other people won't and they'll be left behind. And so I think this is a real question that comes at a time when, again, being in America, I'm from Britain, but what is America? What does America stand for? What are the values? These are some things that I don't think America knows. Now. I think you've seen increased polarization from free consumption. And now as you get free creation and you'll be hearing all sorts of stuff, fake news and more, what are people really going to think? And I think, again, this is a real concern, as you said, from an individual to community to a society level, because a lot of people don't have an anchor anymore. And that's really scary.
Tom Bilyeu
So how do you think that we process through all of this?
Imad Mustaq
I'm not sure. I think that's why we needed to broaden the conversation. That's why I'm the only AI CEO that signed both of the letters saying we need to take a pause and broaden this. Because as an example you mentioned broaden
Tom Bilyeu
this, broaden discussion, get more people involved.
Imad Mustaq
We need to get more people involved. We need more points of view because this affects us all. It shouldn't just be a few tech CEOs that control this. And you shouldn't have to trust that we do the right thing because our models, we make them, once, they go everywhere. Right again, what's the R0 of generative AI? It's off the charts, right? We've never seen anything like this. It incubates and then boom, out it comes, for good and for ill. You get the example of regulation. When we first started talking to regulators, they were like, how should we regulate it? Now it's a question of them asking us how are we going to keep up if we regulate it because other jurisdictions won't.
Tom Bilyeu
What do you say to that?
Imad Mustaq
I say you should still regulate it because it has some real dangers and harms and we have to work to mitigate those. You can't just have a laissez faire approach to this because people will take it and they won't be able to help themselves. I'll give you an example. Meta Facebook, right? We all know the classic kind of stuff. They had a study where they had a hypothesis 600. If you see sadder things on your timeline, will it make you post sadder things? So they took 600,000 of their users and tried to make them sadder. And guess what if you see sadder things, you post sadder things. What do you think is going to happen now that they have generative AI on threads and things like that, and they can hyper target you, hyper personalize it and whack Scarlett Johansson's voice to tell you to buy soap? This is a dangerous thing, right? What happens to our kids, again, who are growing up, whereby they won't know what's going on, and they have very malleable minds. And none of that is illegal, but I think it's an undesirable outcome. Right? And then you've got the bad actors and then you've got the politicians using this technology, and then it goes even crazier than that. So the answer is, I'm not sure. Nobody's sure. But I think the only way that we can try and figure this out is to work together to make these issues known again. The existential stuff gets the headlines. We get all died. No one really understands what that means. But it can happen, right? Okay, there's a probability of that, but there's some real harms today and real opportunities today, and we have to focus on accentuating the opportunities and getting the harms out there and dealing with them.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, and I, I definitely want to spend a very extended period of this talk talking about the opportunity and how we capitalize on that. So anybody that's with us now, trust me, we are going to get to that. But I think we're. We're just beginning to scratch the surface of how this goes wrong. And I really want to map out sort of where you think the edges of this are so that then I can hopefully get a sense of what the regulatory framework would be. But let me give you one idea that somebody posted today on Twitter, and it really hit me that people are even thinking about the problem in the wrong way. So there was an artist and he was looking at some post about AI and he replied sort of angrily that, oh, what people don't even understand is, sure, there's going to be a ton of, like, instantly generated crap, but it's all going to be bad because there's still a very small number of people that have good ideas. And my response was, if you think that ideas are safe, you're really going to get caught off guard. So going back to the idea of what are people unprepared for? I think they are unprepared for what you were just talking about, where the AI, so the human mind is a prediction machine. It is constantly trying to figure out what, what does this next movement of my foot equate to, am I going to stay up, stay on balance. That rustling in the bush, is it a tiger? What is it? If I put money in my 401k, am I going to be able to retire? You're constantly predicting the future. Constantly. And whenever that prediction engine breaks down, there's going to be a tremendous amount of anxiety and also I think, a pretty big unknown in terms of how it's going to impact society. So right now we have a. We're building something that is incredibly good at recognizing the patterns that we kick off.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
So we are optimized to identify patterns and move accordingly. And I would say people that are hyper intelligent or people that are. They notice patterns faster, more subtle patterns, and they understand their implications and how to make sense of them. Now we're creating something that's already proven to be so much better at pattern recognition than we are. Just take art. So for people that don't understand how the art is created, it looks at a field of noise. Here are all the possible things that these could be in any of these pixels. And from that field of possibilities, it pulls forth the most likely placement of pixels and colors based on what you type. That's insane. So that level of pattern recognition, as evidenced by the art that it can generate, is truly mind blowing. So this guy's saying, okay, hey, at least ideas will be the last bastion and you'll never be able to get rid of me, the artist, because I'm the one with taste. I'm the one with good ideas. Not realizing, no, no, no. What AI is, is a pattern recognition machine. It will recognize the greatest ideas that have ever been had, what they have in common, and will be able to predict the next great idea along that thing. It doesn't even have to just regurgitate what it's already seen. It can, like, figure out what that sequence is and what that next part of the sequence could be. And on top of that, it's doing that with humans. So AI will get excited. AI is already extraordinarily good. This is why people think their phone's recording them when it serves an ad. Oftentimes, Target using their AI knows that you're pregnant before you do if you're a woman, because they know what to pick up on. So AI is going to get extremely good at understanding us at an individual level, serving us up exactly what we want right in that moment. And that gets dystopian really fast, really fast.
Imad Mustaq
I mean, again, when you combine it with the social credit Score, as you've seen in kind of China and other things, you gamify life and you have a system of complete social control, a panopticon, as it were. The pattern recognition was the missing bit whereby you had a level of pattern recognition. So for taste, what do you have? TikTok, Shine. $100 billion companies based on old school algorithms. Before we even got to generative AI, which as you said, it can take images out of noise. Stable diffusion, you know, the model that we collaborate on now that we lead, we took 100,000 gigabytes of images and the output was a 2 gigabyte file that acts as a filter. Words go in, images come out. Because why?
Tom Bilyeu
Why is that discrepancy in size meaningful?
Imad Mustaq
50,000 to 1. Compression is not WinZip. If you remember Silicon Valley on HBO, it's way beyond that. They manage there in terms of compression, it's unheard of compression.
Tom Bilyeu
Is it compression or is it something completely different?
Imad Mustaq
Something different. It's intelligence. It's Lear learning the principles. How much information do you see? And then you learn the principles and you then spot the tiger in the bush. You learn what's next, literally GPT. And these language models, they predict the next word. That's all they do. They pay attention, they predict the next word. And that was the missing part to intelligence that now is there. We've had the first studies now come out that show that the language models score higher in creativity than people.
Tom Bilyeu
Woof.
Imad Mustaq
And Again, think about TikTok. Think about Shine. Think about how those old school algorithms are already targeting you. Facebook needs 17 data points to know you better than your friend. As he said, target knows you're pregnant before, and that was old school. Now it's even better. And you think about where that leads to as well. It's kind of crazy because it can be more creative than you. But are people creative? One of the things I like to say in my speeches I've just been learning to do is like, are you creative? How many of you in the audience are creative? 3 to 5% put up their hands. Maybe 10 to 20%. If I'm like in a movie studio, movie filmmaker kind of milieu, I say, how many of you believe that every kid is creative? And everyone puts up their hand. And then I ask how many of you were kids once? And 90, 95% put up their hands. So I know who the cyborgs and the audience come from the future to get me are making that for future. Something happens where we're told we're not Creative. And obviously some people are more creative than others, can tell better stories than others. But the reality is that the average level of barrier to this has dropped for every human. But much of what we consider art, or much of which we consider media, shall we say already is by the numbers. I was at a blackpink concert last weekend, you know, took my daughter.
Tom Bilyeu
Don't you dare say something bad about blackpink.
Imad Mustaq
And they are awesome. Yeah, it was an awesome manufactured experience. It was. I. Premium mediocre is how I kind of say these things. Premium mediocre, Premium mediocre.
Tom Bilyeu
That's hilarious, accurate, it's nice.
Imad Mustaq
But again, it's massively manufactured. It's entertaining. Right? And so much of media is already that like true art, true artists, you know, that's something different. Like is it the medium itself and the aestheticness of it? Well, AI can make something more aesthetic than anything can understand the nature of aesthetic. Like how do you make an image more aesthetic? You say make it more aesthetic. Just like if you use a GPT4, you can say make this punchier, make this punchier, make this punchier. You know, you can have a letter and then you say, I'm firing this person and I want to make them feel okay about it. And then it will redraft it in those terms. Or you can say, I want to drive the knife in, but not in an appropriate way. And it'll do that. And we can literally anyone on this call can kind of listen to this, can try that now. So I think this is just as you said, the wrong thing people are thinking about, the wrong model people are thinking about as well. And that's why I always go back to this concept of the really talented grad. Because these models are a couple of gigabytes big again, stable diffusion. The image model is 2 gigabytes and can generate any image of anything. We'll get that out to 200 megabytes. GPT4 is probably 100 to 200 gigabytes and it can pass the bar exam, it can go to freaking Stanford. It can do whatever. That's insane because it's not compression like you said. There isn't a copy of all the data in there. It's figured out the essentialization of these points and it's replicable. This is the thing to clone Google or Meta, you need to have a gigantic data center and then much of the energy is in the processing to target you ads. With these, we take giant supercomputers and we pre process and package the information so the output is this knowledge filter that something goes in and something comes out, a prompt goes in and output comes out. That's something quite different that I don't think people appreciate. And again, this is why I use the grad example. Push a button and those weights the file. The model gets replicated to 10, 100, a dozen, a million. And what happens when rather than dealing with them one to one, you have a thousand of them? So in a year, I want to
Tom Bilyeu
really understand what you're saying about the grad thing. So when you say that, you say it in a way that's kind of funny or cheeky. But what you mean is a really smart person is now present in that role. Hey, it's your ceiling vent. So I'm dripping. Could be the rain, could be the upstairs bathroom. Yikes. You could hire the guy your neighbor recommended, but I'm pretty sure that's just his cousin. Do we know if he's licensed or does he just own a ladder? Listen to your home go with thumbtack. Upload a photo or voice note, and we'll diagnose your project and match you with the right pro for the job.
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Imad Mustaq
We have figured out how to make humans scale.
Tom Bilyeu
That is what fundamentals intelligent humans scale.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah. Who can listen to instructions? So you look at something like Claude 2 by Anthropic, you have something. The input is a prompt. When you type into GPT4 or stable diffusion or midjourney or something like that. Claude Anthropic's model can take ten, a hundred thousand tokens. It can take a prompt that's like 60,000 words, which is a whole book.
Tom Bilyeu
Jesus.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah. You can give it like the whole of Ulysses and the whole of, I don't know, the Odyssey by Homer. And you can say, combine these to make another book and it will do it and it will work. It can follow instructions really well. Occasionally they hallucinate, but even hallucination is a misnomer because when you compress that much knowledge, like GPT4 is probably 10 trillion words. 10 trillion, 10,000 billion words in 100 gigabyte file. It's something else. And so I use the word grad because I want to make it relatable, but it is literally like imagine if you had a grad in the Philippines, you know, and they're doing good work and they're following instructions. Well, that's great. But what if you had 100 of them looking after each other's work and double checking. Meta had a paper called Cicero where they took eight language models and got them to check each other's work. Outperformed humans in the game of diplomacy. The first time ever in a year when we have this before it, you'll just say, I want you to go and look at everything Ahmad said for the last year and figure out the stupidest stuff he said so, you know, if I can avoid it. And the smartest, most interesting stuff, according to what I know and all of my podcasts, to give answers, to give questions that the audience will really like based on my ratings and based on what people look at through the YouTube videos and things like that and what they're most interested. And it will just happen automatically how many graduates that take you to do and then what happens when they stop being graduates and you can actually train them up to be like, you know, experienced members of the team.
Tom Bilyeu
How long will that take?
Imad Mustaq
Couple of years.
Tom Bilyeu
This is why this is terrifying to me. So I, I am a very optimistic person and again, I promise we are getting to how you take advantage of this disruption. But I don't like to face a problem naively. I want to face it as head on as possible so that I know my solutions are real. And when, when I look at this from my own perspective of, okay, I'm trying to, I'm trying to build a media company which right about now is a very terrifying time to do that.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
And I'm thinking about, okay, it's very optimistic. When I look at, oh my gosh, I, as the founder of this company, I get access to all these grads, as you're calling it, this just absolute proliferation of very intelligent sort of people that I can now put to work in my company. The problem is I'm now competing against other people that have the same thing. And you get in this ever escalating arms race where there is a real chance for fatigue. And so I think what ends up happening, and we were talking before we started rolling, it is very important that people understand the following thing. I think this is just a truth, but people certainly need to understand. I believe it. This is a core belief that drives me that you get to a point where you need to know, okay, I matter. I'm doing this thing and that's how I'm contributing to the world. And I need to be in there working hard, accomplishing, getting better, moving towards something. And if I'm not moving towards that thing, then I'm going to have a profound sense of dis. Ease.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
And if I'm not making that progress, then I'm really going to fatigue out on something. And so if people are just treading water because they're trying to build something and they're competing against somebody else that has these 10,000 things and it's just constantly changing and I can't predict the future anymore and I don't feel like I'm making progress. I'm just gonna back off. Like some part of me is just gonna be like, ah, what am I doing all this for?
Imad Mustaq
What am I doing? Yeah, I mean, it's like the outsource revolution, right? Where so many jobs were outsourced and a lot of people felt that way. Like, you know, we'll outsource you to China, we'll outsource you to India, we'll outsource you wherever. And again, it just happens that there's a computer on the other side of that versus an Indian or a Chinese person. And so we've got kind of repetition of that, but at ridiculous scale affecting almost every single industry that's intermediated by computer. And so this will cause, as you said, a crisis of confidence to many. And it impacts white collar workers, not blue collar workers. It flips, I think, the global order to a degree as well, because here in the west we've maxed out our credit cards. We were going to deflation, I think, coming off high inflation. And all of a sudden we can't print our way out because we just printed the last of our money for Covid. Whereas in the global south, what you have is this technology can cause them to leapfrog just like they leapfrog to mobile, missing PC completely, to intelligence augmentation.
Tom Bilyeu
Why can't we print more money?
Imad Mustaq
Well, because kind of we're just coming up to a limit of what's literally mathematically possible given the debt, to GDP ratios and others. We can continue, but it's kind of
Tom Bilyeu
pushing if you're deflating, then, because. So here's my layman's understanding, but this is something I've really looked at, so I'm a pretty educated layperson at this point, inflation is largely, some people will say entirely, but I'll say largely a function of how much money you're printing. For people that are new to the idea of printing money, it's government approved counterfeit. So the government is allowed to print as much money as they want. They're literally just making it out of thin air. They're adding zeros and ones to a database somewhere and money finds its way into the system beyond the scope of this conversation. But they. There is no theoretical limit to how much they can print. Now, what you run into problems is the hyperinflation of the currency. But if you're saying it's a deflating currency, which actually makes sense to me given what we're talking about, then printing seems to make a lot of sense, seems to buy me more room eventually.
Imad Mustaq
So what's going to happen is that you've got a decrease in inflation now because of base effects. So if you're going into a bit of macroeconomics and then you'll probably have a bounce back next year because you've still got a lot of inflationary pressure and then the collapse occurs.
Tom Bilyeu
Why?
Imad Mustaq
Because that's when the job losses start hissing. And the question is, can we create enough on the other side? We've got to have a productivity boom.
Tom Bilyeu
The job losses are coming from AI or some other force.
Imad Mustaq
From AI and from other forces as well. Again, you know, what we've had is a sugar rush post Covid, a good strong economy, as all of the excess savings go back in. Because if you look at XX savings, people saved up a lot and that's almost now depleted. By the end of the year, the excess savings will be depleted. You've got some hangover effects from inflation, then you move into deflation the year after and then it's a political hot potato around printing more because this isn't again like Covid, because what happens to the job losses just start and they just keep going. It's not like you had a 2008 crash or you had a Covid where everyone kind of suddenly going, it's like, it's a bit like boiling a frog, you know, or a lobster. It's just going to start and then it's going to accelerate and then it's going to be like, at what point do you take the big fiscal action? It takes a few quarters of the economy actually shifting. So this is all a lot of hypotheticals, right? But the bottom line I think is this. The nature of U S society, Western society will change. I think the biggest Adopters, and fastest adopters of this will be the Global south, because it allows them to create value, it allows them to financialize, it allows them to take a big leap forward. And so I think that's got some huge implications geopolitically and others, but a lot of upside as well, because I think you can solve a lot of the world's problems with this. But it's so messy because fundamentally, it comes down to what you said. As humans, we're trying to figure out what comes next, and we're suddenly having a computer that can do that even better. As humans, we're storytellers. We're made up of the stories that make us up. You're a filmmaker, you know, I was a film reviewer, all these kinds of things. This can tell better stories. And that has such a big effect on our societies that none of us can really wrap our heads around it. Like, I've got a background in economics, management, a whole bunch of different things. I can't wrap my head around it. And so we're just gonna have to see how it goes and then try to mitigate. But nobody's got answers to this. And in fact, as you said, most of the people aren't asking the right questions.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. You have said that the shit show happens next year. I have a feeling that what you were just talking about is what you mean by the shit show. That we go deflationary towards the end of the year.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
So towards the end of 2024.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah. We've got like a burst of productivity enhancement. And then you start seeing job losses. You start seeing question of meaning. You've got the US election next year. My God, that's going to be awful.
Tom Bilyeu
Yep. Terrible timing.
Imad Mustaq
Well, I mean, you know what you'll have is the week before the election, fake videos appearing everywhere, and they'll say the same things. You know, so and so has a brain infection or something like that, and they'll be identified as false, but it doesn't matter. It still discourages people from polling. But then what do elections look like by 2028 when this technology is in every single pollster's hands?
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that's where we get into the blockchain. We'll save that for a little bit down the road.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. So now I feel like we're. We're getting close to the problem set being on the table. There's one more thing that I. I think it's important to put on the table, which is I don't think that the amorphous thing that is Society as the world turns history, the grand arc history, however you want to think about the, the real long timelines. So even if the long arc of history bends towards improvement, which I think it does and think it still will, I don't think it cares at all for any one period of time. And that unimaginable amounts of human suffering happen routinely throughout our history. And I have deep concerns that if we are not incredibly thoughtful, that this will be one of those moments. And I look at what's going on in France right now, I think it's dying down. I can't tell if it's dying down or the coverage is dying down. Hopefully it's actually dying down. But France was like really having some struggles. And if something like that pops off over, not in any way, shape or form to make light of what happened. But it isn't mass joblessness, which is going to have a far wider impact. What happens when you have that and it's global.
Imad Mustaq
I mean, I think this is the thing. It's every government has, every education minister in the world has to grapple with. Why can't I set my kids essays, homework again? Have we ever seen anything like that before so quickly? I don't think we have. And so you could see this literally parallelized around the world or not. We're not sure what really kicks off some of these things. Like right now we've got the Screen Actors Guild kind of protesting today. We just had a couple of actors leave Oppenheimer. Part of that's monetary. But already you're seeing AI fears like front and center. You wouldn't even have thought it six months ago. What's it going to be like in a year when you can generate or two when you can generate whole movies and then just describe how you want it done. It's Hollywood level. It's really difficult for governments to react to this, to adapt to this when like in the US here we're still reacting to section 230 on Internet. They just get into gaps with the Internet. All of a sudden AI just comes and sideswipes things, right? And I think again, the only way to do this is if you can create brand new jobs quicker than anything. This is one of the reasons again, like I said, we focused on open source. It's why you need to have things like regulatory sandboxes so that you can experiment and try. And you need to stoke innovation because you don't. You'll never get an innovation phase like this either. I think this is a step change and a regime change. In the way that society operates because we were originally an oral species, then we figured out how to write, then we had the Gutenberg press and it took all these words, but it took them down into black and white and made society quite black and white because it couldn't capture context. Whereas these models can capture context, they can capture principles, then capture more. So again, you know, you're writing this down, you won't have to in a year or two. It'll just be automatically added to your memex, to your knowledge base. Right.
Tom Bilyeu
Also, the AI will just be attached to my head. It will read the brainwave patterns and know that that's what I need to remember.
Imad Mustaq
And that sounds crazy, but like we had Mindvis, a paper that we kind of published from our MedArc division, whereby you looked at a picture of a mug, took an FMRI and then it reconstructed it using our image model.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that doesn't sound crazy to me at all. This is what I'm saying, Imad, people do, they're not prepared for what's coming. They are not prepared for this level of change and they really aren't prepared for the rate of change.
Imad Mustaq
And it isn't just like an arc like that. It's lots of S curves all at once all around the world, where every single company is now thinking, what's my generative AI strategy for when it pops off correct? And every government's thinking, how can I stay competitive? And this is why I said, like, it's a race condition where everyone is trying to do the same thing or similar things and you can't be left behind, you can't not participate. And it's been a very long time since we've seen that. And there's a world before this technology and a world after this technology. Like, I don't think again, you know, I've got two kids. What does the world look like in five years, let alone 10 years? I have no idea. And I'm in the middle of this because it's just impossible to see the smartest people that I know, they used to be able to see years in advance. They can't see more than a year or two. This sounds again, very apocalyptic. But then, like I said, we're going to get to the good fit in a second. In every crisis, there is opportunity. Our society is broken as it stands already and I think this is a chance to reshape it for the better and solve a lot of the biggest problems that we've been facing because of our slow, dumb AIs, because of our organizations and institutions that we are all frustrated with. And I think this is a big upgrade from it. The example I had to give is there's an amazing poem by Ginsburg Howell about Moloch, this Carthaginian demon of disorder. I think where that came in was text because we had to centralize everything down and put people into boxes because you couldn't have systems to understand the context. You can't have personalized education or personalized healthcare because you couldn't scale humans. There weren't enough talented humans until now. And so I think that is the incredibly dangerous part, because all of a sudden from economic pressures, you flood the market. It's the incredibly motivating part whereby there's a shortage of talent for everything that's important and there isn't anymore. But then the nature of talent for jobs and things will transform. And I think the economic abundance that's created on that, that's the flip side of this as well as the ability to fix our broken systems.
Tom Bilyeu
All right, I'm going to give you my timeline. I think the next year is going to be a lot of fun for people that embrace it. It'll be a period of time where some people can ignore it and they probably won't really notice. They won't realize how fast things are changing. Although, Follow me on Twitter. I I post routinely like, hey, here's something I didn't think that would happen for 18 months. And we're now 45 days later, we're using it. Things are really, really moving faster. But for the next year, I think people will be able to ignore it and they won't realize that it's growing with such steam and ferocity. Then year two to six, I think it' I think that there's going to be pockets of extreme suffering and I think deaths of despair are going to skyrocket. And I hope it's not a the world is burning riots kind of thing. It'll probably be more quiet and insidious than that. But I really think that we're going to lose people on the upper and lower ends. I think people that are old are going to who just completely check out and say, I can't keep up. I'm too old. I don't want to learn this new stuff. I think people that are young, it's the only thing they know is change so fast that they can't see around the corner. I think that would be absolutely terrifying to them and they're going to retreat into the levels of entertainment sex bots AI friends that are more loving and kind than their other friends. And they. It will be a collapsing inward. Now, as somebody who is prone to collapsing inward, the biggest thing that's held me back as an entrepreneur is that I like being alone with my own thoughts.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
And that if you then layer anxiety on top of that and then you give me an AI that's actually better to me than anybody in my real life has ever been, and then you give me maybe some drugs, I will truly collapse in under my own weight. Not me personally. I have defenses. But yeah, I'm saying like that personality type is really going to struggle. So I think right there you sort of. You're. You're going to lose a generation, if I may be so bold, on the upper and lower ends, then either on the 10 to 20 year time horizon. And I leave it that long because look, we're. Any prediction that you make with a timeline is guaranteed to be wrong. So I'll try to give myself at least a little bit above her. And I know that everything I'm saying probably directionally correct timeline, probably way off.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
But 10 to 20 years, my rough estimate, that's where we're either in Terminator and we're running from radioactive rubble to radioactive rubble, fighting the machines, or it really is a utopia. And I think that there is a real shot that we get to the closest things that humans are going to get to to a utopia where things are so plentiful.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
Everything we want is available. We reorient our human psyche not to acquisition, but rather emotional contribution. And we'll paint that picture more as we go down. But that. That's sort of my rough thing.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah. I think these are crazy timelines. Like, not because I disagree with them, because the fact is that they are crazy. You have a year of incubation, then you have contagion and then you've got a stark thing. I don't think we'll be chased by robots. They would need to chase us. They're far more efficient than that. Right. That's sad.
Tom Bilyeu
But true.
Imad Mustaq
I think the. Basically the two directions we have are utopia and human flourishing and a dystopia. We're all happy.
Tom Bilyeu
A dystopia where we're all happy. Meaning we are manipulating our neurochemistry.
Imad Mustaq
1984. You know, like you always happy. You've got so many. 84 brave new world.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
Imad Mustaq
Not 1984 brave new world. Sorry. Brave new world.
Tom Bilyeu
I mean, so much rip, so much good.
Imad Mustaq
You got so much of. You're feeling good. Like, look, you had Replica. Familiar with that? Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
Tell me about the Valentine's Day Massacre, though. I didn't know about that.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah, exactly, The Valentine's Day massacre. So, you know, that's how I kind of call it. So Replica was a mental health chat bot. Then they realized you could charge 300 a year for erotic role play.
Tom Bilyeu
That had to be internally a rough transition. Hey, guys, I know we founded the company on mental health, but, you know,
Imad Mustaq
you can ask them, 14th of April, 2023, they turn it off.
Tom Bilyeu
Why?
Imad Mustaq
I think Apple just told them, you can't have this on the app store.
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting. So it was either remove the sexbot part or. Or go off the.
Imad Mustaq
And then 68, 000 people joined the Reddit, and they're like, why did you lobotomize my girlfriend?
Tom Bilyeu
That's a lot of people to be using it. I downloaded that at Christmas, not realizing what it was, and I was like, oh, a chatbot. Let me try this thing. I didn't get into the weird stuff.
Imad Mustaq
It.
Tom Bilyeu
I don't know. Didn't do it.
Imad Mustaq
Technology, though. This is the thing now. Like, again, MED. Palm 2, the Google medical model. Palm 2, it's Google's medical model. It scores higher than humans in clinical diagnosis and empathy. That's crazy, right? They just.
Tom Bilyeu
This is one of those statements that you say people need to be shocked that. That a computer makes people feel more comfortable.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah. It's in nature. They just publish the paper that included that. And again, it's only going to get better. What if you have a voice that you add to it that really understands you, and it's, you know, so empathetic and things like that. Do you ever see that Washington Post chart of males under the age of 30 in America who've not had a sexual partner by the age of 30? It was 8% in 2008. Then it went up to 27 in 2018 or something like that a couple years ago.
Tom Bilyeu
That's a straight line.
Imad Mustaq
It's literally a straight line. This is kind of what you're talking about. Like, I was talking.
Tom Bilyeu
I think people need to understand because
Imad Mustaq
I think it's the iPhone and Pornhub. Probably a combination of those two. You.
Tom Bilyeu
You put a computer in the hands of young men and let them see naked females more in a single session than a hundred years ago they would have seen in their entire lives. It. These are not small changes, and they have huge neurological implications, especially in the years of brain development.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah. And this is why it's so important to shield our kids. At this point, because the influences are going to be insane. Like, I was having a discussion with a very prominent technologist and he's like, yeah, I'm pretty sure that my child's first crush is going to be an AI.
Tom Bilyeu
Guaranteed.
Imad Mustaq
Guaranteed.
Tom Bilyeu
For most people it was actors. So we're already prone to. You'll have your own attainable, distant thing now. It's in your pocket.
Imad Mustaq
It's in your pocket. It's always with you. It's always kind of you. Again, as you said, a large part of society likes to draw in on itself as a result of that, and that is a bit dangerous. Do they then go out into the streets? Are you seeing a Bootlarian jihad kind of thing? Like in Dune? I don't know. In Dune there was this concept of the Butlerian jihad where as yet autonomous AIs. Butlerian. Yeah, got it. Yeah. They rose up against them and said, no more AI agents.
Tom Bilyeu
The book opens with that, right?
Imad Mustaq
Yes.
Tom Bilyeu
You can never again make a human like AI, something like that again.
Imad Mustaq
This is kind of a thing, extension of the ludism kind of thing. But most people will be happy with their AIs because their AIs actually listen to them. I use GPT4 as a therapist. I've got a therapist too, because this is hard. Why? Because it never judges me unless I tell it to judge me and tell
Tom Bilyeu
it to judge you.
Imad Mustaq
Sometimes. Sometimes. Sometimes you're like, really? Yeah. I mean, like, come on. Like, come on, give me some positive, constructive feedback and it will listen and give positive, constructive feedback.
Tom Bilyeu
Did you give it a personality? Did you have to, like, imagine you're a therapist that's like, yes.
Imad Mustaq
You give it the instructions and it just adapts. And then you give it the things you opt out with GDPR from it training the model further. Because otherwise the model would be even weirder listening to my complaining. And it will come back to you with whatever. And soon it'll be able to talk and it will have full vocal control. And these models are proliferate at that level because you're not stopping. The models are just going to get better and better and better. So you've got this crisis, but maybe it'll be insulated. But I think again, if you look forward, like after the incubation and the contagion and the spread kind of phase, there are only two paths here. Complete control by existing structures and Star Trek Utopia. You know, I think those are the two options that we have because organizations look at this technology and they're like, this is really cool. We can Optimize our objective functions to sell more ads or to control the people and kind of keep them going. You know, do you really trust politicians with this technology? No. Even if it isn't arms race, because again, you won't know what's going on. Because do you have the defenses to defend against what's coming personally, for your kids, for this, for everything? We've already had the social media age. It wasn't really social, much of the media. Right. This is something new that's coming now where you can't tell this from a human, except for the fact it's better, it's more convincing. And you can use that to create a human colossus and solve all the problems of the world and we all come together. Well, you can use that to get everyone into their basements, you know, and cut off from the world. All right.
Tom Bilyeu
I want to paint a very beautiful story for people and I want them to understand, look, I don't think this is a completely controllable thing, but you said earlier that there's opportunity in any crisis. And I will say that the biggest opportunities come in moments of disruption.
Imad Mustaq
Yep.
Tom Bilyeu
And the reason I want to lay out the problem set is because I really believe that certainly at the individual level, if you're thoughtful enough, you're. You are going to be able to navigate your way through this. So, dear listener or watcher, if you're here on YouTube, I'm telling you right now, if you're thoughtful enough, you will get through this. And you have a chance to get through this better than when you started. But you have to be aware of what the dangers are. People have to. To really lay things out before them. Look at them so they know, okay, this is how I'm going to isolate myself from this potential problem. This is how I'm going to avoid this. This is how I'm going to leverage that. Okay. Your story is one of the most incredible stories of how one uses AI. You have both a personal example and then obviously, as the founder of stability AI, Obviously incredible. But talk to me about your son, because this is. And this was when AI was a lot less useful than it is now. And it was still life changing. Yeah.
Imad Mustaq
So 12 years ago, my son was diagnosed with autism when he was 2 years old. You know, it's very, very severe. Scratching a wall till his fingernails bled. And they said there's no cure, there's no treatment. We don't really know what causes it. Anyone on this call, kind of list on this listening knows that's kind of the case. So I was a hedge fund manager at the time. I was lucky enough to kind of be one quite young. And I was like, well, I gotta do something about it. So I switched to advising hedge funds and then building a little AI team and doing AI with old school AI Natural Language Processing to analyze all the autism literature and what could possibly be a cause. Now is this scientific? No, it's an N of one thing a father does for his son. You know, we'll be publishing some of the results of it soon, but it focused down on gaba. Goose mate. Balance in the brain. When you pop a Valium, your GABA goes up, you chill out. When you got a glutamate spike, that's when you can't focus and your legs tapping all the time. And there are multiple things that cause it, but a lot of kids with ASD seem to have that, and there are some papers around that, etc. Because how could you focus if you're in that condition all the time? So you can't learn to speak, you can't do that. So it was, how do we reduce this? Through drug repurposing. Built a knowledge graph based system to do that and figure out which drugs could potentially help reduce the glutamate, help increase the gaba.
Tom Bilyeu
How are you using AI for this?
Imad Mustaq
So this was kind of the mass Natural language processing, looking at all the literature because the same treatment would make 30 of kids better and 30 of kids worse. And so it's trying to figure out the outcome was the same. A cold is caused by lots of different things, but the thing that caused it could be so different. And so conventional Medicaid medicine and medication kind of failed that. So I worked with neurologists, worked with other psychiatrists and others and tried different medical combinations of off prescription drugs and other things to try and make his brain calmer. So then he could use applied behavioral analysis and others to reconstitute speech. And you know, you ended up going to mainstream school. I think it worked. I told people about it and they're like, you're not a doctor. And I was like, there's a big.
Tom Bilyeu
That was the response.
Imad Mustaq
Well, yeah, I mean, look, with anyone who's listening to this, like, am I saying I have a cure for autism? No, I'm saying I'm a dad who tried my best and I saw results. But in order for something to become medicine, you actually have to go through a proper process. And so for me, that was building language models that was making everything in the right structure. And then we can organize the world's autism literature, making it accessible and useful. Any parent or anyone. You may have someone in your family that has a neurological condition, Alzheimer's, this. So many people around the world have the same problems. Wouldn't it be wonderful if they could just find what the latest knowledge is and also the things that could work and have a holistic approach to this? And until we have this technology, you can never get there. Which is one of the main drives for me to want to build this technology and do it in a transparent order. But you shouldn't have to trust me and what I say about this because again, my journey as a parent is the same as any one who's got a child with asd. It's the same as anyone who has a family member that gets multiple sclerosis or cancer. Our systems are not good enough right now to bring us the information we need unless we find an amazing doctor and an amazing group. But now with Med Palm, with our own models, with other things, we can finally be that point where we're never lost, when we can say what could work. So an example is clonazepam. It's prescribed as a thousand microgram dose for anxiety. At a 5 microgram dose, my son could sing because it potentiated and he was non verbal. It was non verbal. And at 20 micrograms it stops working. It's six dollar a year intervention because this is the way that like neurotransmitters work. So like when you pop a night on antihistamine to go to sleep, right, what it does is it floods a whole bunch of your neurotransmitters, including the H1 neurotransmitter. And that's the one that makes you sleepy. But then other ones give you dry mouth and other things. Something like Remeron in a micro dose just triggers H1. It'll knock you out without any side effects. But it's just incredibly cheap. You know, understanding things like neurotransmitters is not something that most of us understand ever have to do unless you're super hyper focused on it for years, because I was like, I need to figure out my son's neurotransmitters. I'm talking to all the top doctors and I'm lucky because I have access to them. What do I do now? So that's when I realized that, you know, this AI was a big thing. And actually one of the really interesting things is why couldn't he talk? It's because he had too much noise in his brain. So you've got cup. A cup can mean a cup, or it can mean cup your hands or cup your ears or world cup. He couldn't form those connections because his noise was too brain was too noisy. He did applied behavioral analysis, which is teaching you, this is a cup. This is a cup. This is a cup with gamification to reconstruct those after his brain calmed down. It's actually very similar to this generation of AI we described earlier, how it learned principles. It's called a latent space of meaning. So that point and dot, that pixel becomes a cup because it understands the principle of cuppiness. So when you type in world cup or cup your ears, it gives you dramatically different images. Similarly, the language models do the same. Again, it pays attention to what's important. Attention is all you need was the original paper. And again forms this latent space of the meaning of cup within the sentence. So when it says cup, it's like, well, this is going to be a world cup, or this is going to be that, but not actively. Again, it's just a bunch of ones and zeros, a single file. And so I think that's why all this new generative AI really resonated with me. And I realized this could be the real thing that unlocks humanity or controls them forever. One of the two. Yeah. So that's kind of some of the personal story behind this, because, again, like, I don't have a cure for autism. I worked as well as I can with my son with the technology at hand. However, I think that with the building blocks we're building now, us and others, there's the potential to have personalized care and knowledge for everyone who's dealing with asd, for everyone who's dealing with multiple sclerosis or any of these other conditions where they say there's no cure, because our medical system is treats people as a gurdyk. And what does ergodic and a good mean? It means a thousand tosses of the coin, the same as a thousand coins tossed at once. That's why everyone gets 500 milligrams of paracetamol. It's why a lot of people have a cytochrome P450 abnormality kind of mutation in their liver. It means you process codeine into morphine quicker or fentanyl into death. Yet we don't do a basic genetic test on that because our system has to treat us as numbers because we could never scale intelligence, we could never scale expertise. So, yeah, like I said, that's on the story behind that.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. See, this is where this starts to get interesting because I think about this a lot in myself. So I can paint the nightmare scenario of somebody collapsing inside of themselves, having AI friends instead of real friends, and how quickly that can get distorted and become a real problem. And yet at the same time, I'm building exactly that. And the reason that I'm building that is because of the promise of AI and the incredible things that we can do as we begin to recognize more patterns and figure out, okay, where does this really go? So my wife had a tremendous health bout. It's been a while now, thankfully, but at one point, I was afraid she was going to die. Her fingernails were breaking, her hair was falling out, she couldn't eat. It was just really, really, really bad. And it ends up being her microbiome. But of course, it took forever to diagnose that that was a problem. She was about to get immunotrans, globulin, transfusions.
Imad Mustaq
Yep.
Tom Bilyeu
And I was just like, this is. I was like, something's wrong. I don't think this is the right answer. I don't want to do that. Let's stop. Let's try to figure this thing out. And so we pumped the brakes, we start researching the microbiome, looking into that, testing things, and the thought of having AI to be able to say, okay, let's take genetic data and read the genetic database that's ever been collected, all of that. Let's look at all the different foods, responses match all that together. And if you can get that level of pattern recognition and now you can engage AI, I think she. Because part of the problem is your microbiome is changing daily, it's probably changing hourly. And if you were able to track all of that and say, okay, with your genetics, with your current state of your microbiome, here's exactly what you should be eating, maybe even with nutrients from food grown in that area, like, it really may be that specific. And when you can find patterns in that sort of insane level of data, now you've really got something. And that's but one of the many areas where I think that this could be utterly transformational.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah, I mean, like right now, the AI is the know it alls. They can know it all graduates. But you have specialists, you'll have a nutritionist AI, you will have a microbiome AI, you will have a personal trainer AI. Like, why was Peloton successful? You know, attractive people shouting at you, you know, we could generate that. Now everyone suddenly gets that personalized to them. But more than that, it's not just the information being in this tiny model. You have retrieval, augmented models and other things, which means these models now interact with existing data sets and knowledge sets. So use something like perplexity AI. It doesn't only answer your questions with GPT4, it gives you reference. It's so you can say what about M ad? And it'll link to all of the things as it gives individual stuff. And this will only advance from here, so you can dig into as much depth as possible that you want with a whole team of people around you, even if you're by yourself. So you should never be alone again in terms of you can be connected to people like you in the same problem as you. We can build better teams. And all the information of the world is at your fingertips in a way that it was never before, including your own private information. So like one of my favorite apps it does use some battery is Rewind AI. It takes a screenshot of your MacBook screen every time it changes and OCRs it and then it gives a timeline so I can type in Impact Theory and it will look through everything that's ever been on my MacBook screen. It's all stored locally and find where Impact theory is on YouTube or there's a picture of this mug and it shows it in a timeline. So I can go back and I can see what I looked at before or after that. What?
Tom Bilyeu
Wow. So you can map your own sort of connective trees with whatever.
Imad Mustaq
And what happens when you combine that with a language model? Everything you see on your screen stored locally with an open source language model. It creates the memex and it sees what you've paid more attention to versus less attention. And the dystopian versions of this, I'm talking about the utopian version which is Add me can finally remember what I was doing, what I was looking at the context, the search tree as I was searching, all these different things, clicking from place to place. And then you can set agents to go and recreate that journey and search all the other stuff that you didn't search. This is really positive because again, how much of our life is done searching for knowledge, searching for information that's relevant to us.
Tom Bilyeu
Talk to me about the paper. Attention is all you need. I've heard you and other people bring this up multiple times. I haven't read it, but this is like the big breakthrough.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah. This was the 2017 paper by the Google team, all of whom now left Google. And basically what it was is that classical big data took big data and then Facebook extrapolated it so that when it found 17 pieces of information about you, it could target you with ads. That was a classical big data thing. They even create shadow profiles of you. So when you go on Facebook, they actually got a shadow profile that they connect to your real profile. What's the shadow profile like? It's like, what if there was a Tom on YouTube on Facebook, because there's all these connections to this unknown person and then it just fills you in automatically. That's why it figures out your preferences so quickly without listening to you. So attention is all you need. Said that not all data is important. You need to pay attention to what is important in the sentence, what's important in this time series. Because that's the nature of being able to spot the tiger in the kind of thing that was the missing part. And so the transformer architecture that came from that, and you have different architectures now is what led to GPT3 and
Tom Bilyeu
others general purpose transformer architecture. If what it's doing is pinpointing what's important, why not important architecture or.
Imad Mustaq
Well, kind of, again, attention is the mechanism that it does to kind of transform the information, tokenize it and then figure out these latent spaces of meaning.
Tom Bilyeu
So are the tokens the important pieces?
Imad Mustaq
The tokens are important. That's how you take a word and then you split it up into its constituent parts and then you try and figure out what the most important part of it by doing pattern analysis at ridiculous scale. So something like a GPT4 would use probably from the kind of things on semi analysis that have been leaked if they're correct. It uses a supercomputer 50 times faster than NASA's fastest supercomputer for like three months, uses like 20, 30 megawatts of electricity and 10 trillion words go into that and it figures out all the connections between them and what generally comes next. So what it does is just literally figures out what word comes next. And so this was a big breakthrough because what it meant is that you didn't have to have hugely complicated big data algorithms. You just needed to have very large compute to scale. And so compute went exponential and then you just threw more and more GPUs at it and it figured out more and more things. And as you scaled it had more and more emergent properties which surprised everyone.
Tom Bilyeu
Do you know who John Nash is? Yeah, it sounds like that. So John Nash, he unfortunately was schizophrenic, but he's the guy from a beautiful Mind. For people that don't know, watch the movie, Russell Crowe, fantastic movie. And at one, he obviously doesn't know he's schizophrenic and he starts seeing patterns in everything.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
And it sounds like that, that this thing is, you know, whatever the human brain, whatever algorithms we have running that allows us to very quickly suss out what's important that it's doing that, but at an extraordinary high level.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah. You have to remember, like there's a saying, all intelligence is compression. You take everything. You've listened to this, you only remember a few things. And the whole of computer science is based on information theory from Claude Shannon. And if I want to summarize it, information is valuable only if it changes a state or as much as it changes a state. So if listeners are listening to this and they don't take away anything, this is a useless thing, you know, or maybe they just put it on the radio because they like hearing your voice or something like that. Right. But if they take something away from it, then it's valuable. You've had a good use of your time, so you start seeing patterns and everything. But one of the things that, again, people, I think, misunderstand this technology is GPT4 is not a program. Stable diffusion is not a program. It's a large amount of text, images, etc. Where the output is a single file of ones and zeros. It's like a filter. You can recursively kind of put something through it, but it's just guessing the next word when you type a prompt, even if the prompt is the whole of the Great Gatsby and the whole of Ulysses by James Joyce, and you're telling it to combine them together and then pushes it through that sieve, that filter, and the output is something that combines them both together, single files. We've never seen anything like this. But probably the closest thing, probably listeners would have heard this is a codec which, with music and things like that, we had these audio codecs that you had one file type and another file type and you had this single file that translated between them.
Tom Bilyeu
Was that. Is that compression or is that recognizing this thing in that format would look like this.
Imad Mustaq
So again, this is compression of intelligence is what it is. So again, it's like a translator function. These are universal translators for context. And so you push it through the sieve and then stuff comes out where it's predicting the next word or it's denoising kind of a pixel to achieve that, because you're just passing it through this Sieve again and again and again. Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
I unfortunately don't understand it by first principles, but I get it by analogy. You're feeding it so much data. It's recognizing the patterns, interconnectedness.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
And it's able to say, okay, this is the like, all right, this is written in the style of Stephen King. This is written in the style of Hemingway. So even though they're using the same language, they're vast majority of the words are going to overlap. But there's different patterns, rhythms, even different subject matter presented in a different way, tone.
Imad Mustaq
Except for the fact that it's not actively doing that. It's like a mega sieve. And depending on the words that you put in, the words that come out are different. So it's literally.
Tom Bilyeu
Is the sieve the prompt of write it in the style of Stephen King?
Imad Mustaq
That's what goes into the sieve, that goes into the filter.
Tom Bilyeu
So what is the filter?
Imad Mustaq
The filter is this compressed knowledge.
Tom Bilyeu
The principles.
Imad Mustaq
The principles.
Tom Bilyeu
Because it's not actually compressed knowledge, Right?
Imad Mustaq
Yes, Principles. Yes, it's principles. So it would be like a really good book of principles, except for it's compressed way beyond a book ever was. Because a book is a compression of information. And that's why it can kind of do this, because it looks at books, it looks at articles, and they're all compressions of information. To write an article is a huge endeavor that then comes out with something where they're trying to convey a few things. A book is an even larger endeavor. And so again, it's very difficult to wrap your head around, even for me. Like you have a file and it can do all these things versus these gigantic computer server farms with programs and logic of ones and zeros. There's no program here. Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
And it's important for people to understand that. Even so, first of all, the AI scientists that are building these things do not understand how this all works. And even if you ask ChatGPT, chat GPT4 to explain how it works, it doesn't know.
Imad Mustaq
It doesn't. No one's quite sure exactly how we're getting all these emergent properties. And it's constantly surprising, like, oh, now it can add, you know, and then you start tying it together. So it goes through this file multiple times. It becomes. It shows more and more kind of agent to gap activity. In fact, the next step of this, and this is what OpenAI and Google are both doing, is there was this thing called AlphaGo. There's an amazing documentary where Google's DeepMind division created an AI to beat humans in the game of AlphaGo or Go. So Go is like chess, except for there's almost a myriad infinite number of potential moves. So you can't calculate them like you can't brute force it, like Deep Blue do with Kasparov. So instead it learned to play against itself. It's something called Monte Carlo tree simulation where it learns different, different principles, dreams. Again, an amazing documentary on YouTube about this and it beat Lisa Doll, who was a 9th dan player, one of the best in the world, far beyond everyone else. The Magnus Carlsen of Go7 1. What they're doing now is they're combining those models with these language models to make them agentic. So models that can plot and plan and other things with language models that can predict what's next to create things that really understand context even better.
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so I understand enough about how the AlphaGo system works. I want to understand this. So AlphaGo is going to play against itself. So you give it the rules of Go, you give it the objective and then you set it loose and it just plays and plays and plays and plays and plays and it plays against itself. And then I know at one point they, because they. Lee Sedal, if I remember correctly, was the number two player and people thought, well, first of all, you're never going to beat him. And they did. But they couldn't beat the number one player. And then they created another variation and it played against AlphaGo and then it ended up smashing.
Imad Mustaq
It was MU0, I think came after AlphaGo.
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so how do you get a language model where there is no objectively right answer unless you're doing trivia? How do you, how do you get it to know what the reward is? How do you get the quote unquote right answer?
Imad Mustaq
Much of this now is about reward functions. So GPT4, when it comes out of, of the box, maybe we're getting a bit too into the weeds. Is a pre trained model and the giant supercomputer.
Tom Bilyeu
Yep.
Imad Mustaq
Then we use reinforced.
Tom Bilyeu
Just so everybody knows. Pre trained modeling means principles.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah, principles. Take all this knowledge, all these words, squish it down into a file and
Tom Bilyeu
then run it on a computer that's literally set up like a brain where there's like a bunch of neurons and they're interconnected.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah. These are the tensile cores on the Nvidia GPUs.
Tom Bilyeu
Yep.
Imad Mustaq
And so mimicking the brain on your little, literally 4090s, it has AI chips right.
Tom Bilyeu
Baked in there for anybody that wants to know. They kick off so much Heat. You can see it from space. Yeah.
Imad Mustaq
I mean, like, I think our Supercomputers are like 10 megawatts of electricity. Each one of these cards uses 700 watts. Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
Utterly fascinating.
Imad Mustaq
All clean energy, by the way, for our ones. For anyone who asks. So what you've got is when it came out, they took six months to make it human because they trained it on, like, I don't know, all of YouTube and the whole Internet, obviously, would turn out a bit weird. And so you have a reward function through something called rla, Reinforcement learning with human feedback, where you give an objective function to say, don't answer questions about how to make napalm.
Tom Bilyeu
So the objective function technically is please your human overlord.
Imad Mustaq
Please your human overlord.
Tom Bilyeu
Got it.
Imad Mustaq
And so much of this alignment question is focused on taking these big models and trying to make them so they won't kill us some way. Or say bad things. For a given definition of bad things. Like my. One of my takes on alignment and you know, is like, we should have better data sets. We should move away from web crawls.
Tom Bilyeu
Can you. Yeah, that's fair. I want to ask you about that. But explain to people exactly what alignment is aligned with.
Imad Mustaq
What aligned alignment. You know, this is a core thing of Anthropic. There was a great New York Times piece on them recently and others is if we build an AI that outperforms humans and is more capable than us, because it might not just be a single file, it might be a thousand different AIs all working in different ways. So you've got your AlphaGo type AI and this. Yeah, a swarm. Because, you know, humans are swarms. Our organizations are swarms that are highly specialized. Right. Might be a million AIs. How do we make sure it doesn't kill us? Or how does it make sure it doesn't enslave us? Or how does it make sure that it doesn't give us eternal suffering?
Tom Bilyeu
Also lame.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah, this will be kind of sucky. How do you make sure it's aligned with human interests? And so this is an unsolved problem. OpenAI have announced they're putting 20% of their compute to try and solve this. Anthropic was set up to do this, although I believe that the only answer they've come up with is let's build an AGI first and artificial general intelligence that will then stop all other AGIs from coming, which is kind of scary to say the least.
Tom Bilyeu
Why do they think that that would work like that? Seems so. Elon Musk has likened AI to a demon summoning circle. And we're all just hoping that the demon that comes forth is going to be kind. But we don't know.
Imad Mustaq
We don't know. In OpenAI's own words in their Road to AGI post, they say this could be an existential threat and wipe out humanity and democracy and capitalism. But if we don't do it, someone else will. This is part of the unpleasant race condition. Again, against the headlines, I think it'll probably be okay, but with the way we're going right now, you're going to go from two companies being able to build this technology or maybe three, including Anthropic, to 20 or 30 in a year or two. And what's the odds that they all do it properly and align this technology proper? I think it's pretty low. What's the odds that if we train it on the whole Internet, including the whole of YouTube, because we don't have enough tokens, not enough words to feed into it, that it'll turn out a bit weird? Very high. So it took six months to tune it to being a human GPT4. And then Kevin Ruse of the New York Times is like, hey, how you doing? It's like, leave your wife and come and join me. Whoa. You know, I was like, oh, what? Bing. Came out a bit weird when it first kind of had GPT4 in it because again, we feed it crap, we're going to get slightly weirdness now. It's got a lot better, but it's lost a lot of its personality because you've been tuning it back to human preferences. You've been doing this reinforcement learning with the objective function of don't offend anyone. It's quite hard to get GPT4 to be offensive now. But there are these two phases of this technology. I think with better data we can have more aligned models. I think with better data and national data, we can have more representative models. Because you'll never have technology that's not biased.
Tom Bilyeu
Biased.
Imad Mustaq
So the only question is who's bias? Well, because you have to build it in a certain way. Like even though it understands all the contexts. Like right now these models are trained on the whole Internet, which is largely a western artifact, largely trained in English.
Tom Bilyeu
How much do you worry about bias? Are you more worried about bias or alignment?
Imad Mustaq
More worried about alignment. I think. I think this is one of the reasons that we release open models, so you can see how the cookie is made. Like we're the only company that offers opt out of data sets. Literally the only AI company in the world.
Tom Bilyeu
So if I'm an artist and I don't want you training on my art, I can back out.
Imad Mustaq
Had 167 million images opted out of our data set. Yeah. We're the only company in the world that does that, which I find kind of insane. So my thing is open, auditable, which means that you can tune your own culture into these models. We're helping multiple nations build national models with their broadcaster data that then can represent that and, you know, try to address some of this inherent bias within the data sets. Algorithmic bias has been an issue that affects real world, and it'll affect more and more of the real world as you get into these models, because we will outsource more and more of our minds to them. Because, again, like, when you go, a
Tom Bilyeu
small subset of people will outsource their mind to it. So in the near term, I'm way more worried about bias. In the long term, I. Bias is not going to lead to an existential threat. Yes, but alignment can. But let's talk about bias for a second. So I. I am very uneasy about how rapidly bias finds its way into this stuff and that becomes another. So if. Let's say that we all get our individual AI, and it's. You get yours young, and it's your primary education tool and it's biased as the day is long. Now you run into real issues because at a time of optimal malleability, you're programming a kid's mind with something that's super biased.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah. I mean, like, what do you have? The little AI of Xi. Right. Which is a little tiny Xi Jinping that grows up and tells you how great Xi Jinping is.
Tom Bilyeu
Lovely.
Imad Mustaq
That's biased, but that's inevitable. They already have it as an app that actually tracks your eyes. Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
What?
Imad Mustaq
It's not an AI, but they have the little app of Ji. It's his little book where it actually tracks your eyes for attention. Like, are you actually looking at this?
Tom Bilyeu
Does this feed into the credit score?
Imad Mustaq
I'm not sure if it's been hooked up, but of course it will be. Why wouldn't you?
Tom Bilyeu
This is so scary. So, look, I thought, you know, we. We were on the happy part, now we're back to. To that. But that's really terrifying. And when you have a state that is not interested in any individual, you've got the collective. Yeah. So I don't know if this is true, but I saw a headline that said, and in China now the phone will alert you. If somebody with a lower social credit score than you is calling you and it warns you if you answer this call, it will lower your credit score.
Imad Mustaq
It's effective, isn't it?
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
Imad Mustaq
I mean, if it isn't true, again, it fits the objective function of perpetuating that particular system, which is not necessarily our system, but systems around the world shift. So this is why you have an inherent bias. Whose bias is it? Who's the one who creates the AI nanny?
Tom Bilyeu
That's why you're doing things regionally.
Imad Mustaq
This is why I'm doing things regionally. But also allowing people to own their own models. So the objective function of the model can be that like in web 3 there was the saying, not your keys, not your crypto. So my saying is not your model's, not your mind. Because I do think we'll outsource more and more of our cognitive capability to this. It will be our co pilot for life. If someone else is making that model and deciding on things, what's going to happen? Like the UAE had this model Falcon. It was a big open source model and they were like, wow. It was actually light on from France who were behind it. But let's leave that to one side. You ask about the UAE and human rights. It's like this is a wonderful place full of fantastic things. You ask it about Qatar or Saudi, it's not so nice. Who's embedding these inherent biases in these models? Right. Whose model are you using? And these can be very insidious to the biases. Right. It you won't pick up on them, but you hear it again and again and again. Because is your nanny a conservative Republican or is she a libertarian or things like that. You will be influenced by that if you grow up with them or even if you're using it day to day, just the way it's speaking, the way it's thinking, the way it's recommending stuff which goes far beyond a Google Maps or something like that.
Tom Bilyeu
Crazy. All right, so that we don't get lost back down the dark rabbit hole. What is the coolest thing that what you see AI doing? I know you're building a lot of different companies leveraging this technology to do amazing things. What. What are some of the coolest?
Imad Mustaq
So we're doing one company at the moment which is just. Let's go. The mission is to create the building blocks to activate humanity's potential.
Tom Bilyeu
So the building block, what?
Imad Mustaq
Our mission is to create the building blocks to activate humanity's potential.
Tom Bilyeu
Stack. Okay.
Imad Mustaq
So every single modality, image, audio, video, 3D language, sectoral variants and national variants. So you've got like this grid that you can pick and you're like, like I'm an Hindi investment banker. I transfer my private data into a chat GPT type thing that's just training my private data. Or I'm a Vietnamese illustrator, I want a Vietnamese cultural kind of image model or something like that and then you can bring your own stuff to it. That's kind of my goal which is to enable other people to build on top of what we're building like a layer one for AI effectively but open models for private data. Whereas the other side is proprietary models where you only be able to send a certain amount of data. Data like government's not going to run on black boxes. Education, healthcare, you'll need to own your own AI. So the coolest thing I've seen is just the promise of personalized education. There is nothing that's been proven to work in education except for probably the Bloom effect two sigma improvement which is one on one tuition. But even here in you know, the affluent America, education system's not good. What does education optimized for? It's like a social status game mixed with a petri dish mixed with childcare. Realistically like very few people are happy with their schooling because what are we trying to optimize for? You give a one to one tutor that can find out if you're dyslexic, an audio learner, a video learner, visual learner or otherwise. And they're just constantly adapting to you and bringing you information at your level.
Tom Bilyeu
Dude, I want to get that is
Imad Mustaq
most transforming thing ever.
Tom Bilyeu
Is anybody doing this already?
Imad Mustaq
So you know with kind of charity that would support Imagine World Ride one of my co founder, he's been deploying adaptive learning tablets into refugee camps around the world. With the Global X prize for learning winner 1 billion on them teaching kids literacy and numeracy. 76% of them in refugee camps in 13 months and one hour a day. Now the goal is to bring language models to all these kids and you have an AI that teaches a kid and learns from it and then that data can feed a better AI. You create a lovely system that's just learning and adapting and a kid in Mogadishu is like a kid in Manhattan. It's like a kid in, you know, London. Once you have a generalized learning AI you can really proliferate that around the
Tom Bilyeu
world to customize does to education because this is very interesting. Like okay now I'm just spitballing here but let's say that I, I want to homeschool my kid. I would never do that in a million years because I don't want to turn into a teacher.
Imad Mustaq
So.
Tom Bilyeu
But, but if I could perform just the sort of babysitting function and I give my kid a tablet that has an AI that knows exactly what I'm trying to optimize for, either for this year or for the next 12 years or whatever. And it then calibrates to my kid knows what they're good at, how they learn, and then knows how long they're engaged when they're distracted. You know, now I want the little Gigi thing just like reading their eyes. Where are they looking, what are they doing? And I know that there are like certain frequency things you can do where it's like, oh, if I hit them with this piece of knowledge, they're not sharp at this yet, so I need to hit them with it every 27 minute increment or whatever.
Imad Mustaq
Or variable reward schedule or whatever.
Tom Bilyeu
Exactly.
Imad Mustaq
You will transform education, but you can also make from that a couple of years. Again, what happens if you have a thousand GPT4s? You'll get there. No one's just, again, we're just, right now we've got the building blocks, but we haven't got the design patterns. The stuff right now is literally iPhone 2G. We're just going to the app store stage copy paste. And so that's the biggest transformative change because how much would you pay for your kid to have an optimal education?
Tom Bilyeu
How much would I pay for that? I would pay for that right now.
Imad Mustaq
Right now. So do we have the technology to do it? Yes. Does it take time to build it properly? Yes. How long does it take? A year or two. And so this is the biggest transformation we've ever seen for education. Again, human flourishing. Flourishing. Because I can also bring you the information about autism and multiple sclerosis or the best filmmaking techniques. Again, everyone's thinking one on one, you should think one to a thousand and then you optimize the thousand. You get rid of all the general knowledge, you make them specific.
Tom Bilyeu
What do you mean by that? Say that in a different way.
Imad Mustaq
So GPT4 knows everything. You can ask it about like the most obscure things. Does it need all that knowledge? No, you've bulked now you have to cut. And then you have a specialist model for calculus that knows.
Tom Bilyeu
I actually have different teachers.
Imad Mustaq
Different teachers. And then a teacher that basically brings these teachers together and tells them, yeah, this is what Tom's like, you know, he's a bit cranky in the mornings, but then he wakes up in the afternoon. Because even in the best schools, a teacher has 1 to 20 attention for all the kids. You'll have a whole bunch of AIs for you and for your kids. And again, are you a visual learner or are you an auditory learner? Do you have dyslexia? Can our system at the moment adapt to that? No way. Can the system that I described adapt to that instantly. Do we have the technology for that?
Tom Bilyeu
Yes.
Imad Mustaq
Is it going to happen?
Tom Bilyeu
Yes.
Imad Mustaq
This is the thing.
Tom Bilyeu
It's a call and answer show. Now, I love this.
Imad Mustaq
But then if you're homeschooling your kid, do you want the kid to be by himself? What if you had 10 kids together and their AIs were encouraging them to interact with each other in a positive way and build stuff together and share knowledge? Older kids teaching younger kids, leveraging the technology, adapting the technology, understanding technology that's super powerful. It's not necessarily everyone in their own little worlds. Right. Because we can use this AI to bring people together in an efficient manner. We can. Because there's nothing like human connection. Right. That's always a concern about homeschooling, things like that. That's why school has a pro social component. But then the nature of a teacher changes, the nature of a doctor changes. That's why I think education and healthcare are the biggest disruptions, because you have something brand new. Especially when the AI is more empathetic than a normal doctor. Doesn't tell me the AI is super empathetic. It tells me doctors should probably be more empathetic. But most of the doctors I know kind of hate their patients.
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting.
Imad Mustaq
Well, because how many teachers are happy? How many doctors are happy?
Tom Bilyeu
Right? Oh, I get why teachers would hate their patience. That is very interesting, man. So, okay, there's two things that I want to talk about here. One, as we get embodied, I want to know what that does. So actual robots for people that think that's off in the distance. You were not watching enough YouTube videos.
Imad Mustaq
No, no.
Tom Bilyeu
Because between Boston Dynamics and Elon Musk's, what's it called? Primus.
Imad Mustaq
Yeah. Optimus.
Tom Bilyeu
Optimus. Thank you. It is very close. You have. Boston Dynamics has robots that can do parkour. It's insane.
Imad Mustaq
There's hello. And there's a whole bunch of others as well. They're catching up fast.
Tom Bilyeu
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Episode Date: February 14, 2026
Guest: Emad Mostaque, Founder of Stability AI
Host: Tom Bilyeu
In this riveting episode of Impact Theory, Tom Bilyeu sits down with Emad Mostaque, the visionary founder of Stability AI, for a raw and forward-looking discussion on artificial intelligence and its impending impact. Together, they peel back the headlines and memes to explore the realities behind AI’s meteoric ascent, how it’s already transforming society, and the existential questions we’ll collectively face in education, industry, the economy, and even our sense of meaning. The episode is an urgent call to action: AI disruption is imminent, and those who do not adapt will be left behind.
| Timestamp | Segment / Topic | |-----------|-----------------| | 02:44 | Emad’s opening thesis: AI as human unlock vs. threat | | 03:14 | Existential risk and AI’s misalignment potential | | 05:34 | Jobs at risk; sectors most impacted (education, healthcare) | | 08:09 | The bar for human work is raised—only those using AI survive professionally | | 10:12 | “Like Covid before Tom Hanks”—the denial phase before rapid change | | 12:50 | Infinite “smart grads” from AI—implications for businesses everywhere | | 15:45 | Meaning crisis, student anxiety, emotional fallout prediction | | 17:55 | Movie/music industry and loss of shared cultural experiences | | 22:28 | Why regulation is failing to keep up—global race condition | | 26:17 | AI as the world’s greatest pattern recognizer—creativity and ideation | | 29:34 | Studies showing AI surpassing average humans in creativity | | 34:24 | “Humans have been scaled”—the grad metaphor and emergence of swarm AIs | | 39:32 | Economic impacts—why job loss/deflation is inevitable | | 45:23 | Likelihood of unrest and silent suffering (social consequences) | | 51:34 | AI companions—blurring lines between real and digital relationships | | 60:31 | Emad’s personal story using AI for his autistic son (inspiring use case) | | 67:13 | Tom’s own story—AI discovering complex health patterns (microbiome) | | 91:32 | Personalized AI tutors—the future of education and equity | | 96:31 | Coming era of embodied AI (robots, physical world integration) |
This first part of Tom Bilyeu’s interview with Emad Mostaque is required listening for anyone eager to understand the AI tidal wave about to sweep the globe. Their conversation doesn’t just map threats; it lays out clear imperatives and real opportunities for individuals and institutions to adapt, upskill, and use AI for flourishing rather than merely surviving—or collapsing inward. The message: The future will not wait while you hesitate. Prepare now, thoughtfully and bravely, or risk getting left behind.
Stay tuned for part two, where solutions and blueprints for AI-driven empowerment take center stage.
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