Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - AI Insiders Reveal Elon Musk's Master Plan to Win AI w/ Dave Blundin & Alex Wissner-Gross | EP #192
Episode Date: September 3, 2025Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist ...and founder of Reified, focused on AI and complex systems. – My companies: Reverse the age of my skin using the same cream at https://qr.diamandis.com/oneskinpod Apply to Dave's and my new fund:https://qr.diamandis.com/linkventureslanding –- Connect with Peter: X Instagram Connect with Dave: X LinkedIn Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube – *Recorded on September 2nd, 2025 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. -------- Chapters 02:50 - The Importance of Positive News in Tech 05:49 - Education and the Future of Learning 09:02 - AI Wars: Colossus II and Hardware Scaling 12:02 - Training vs. Inference in AI Models 18:02 - Elon Musk's XAI and Recruitment Strategies 20:47 - The Rise of NanoBanana and AI in Media 26:38 - Google's AI-Powered Live Translation 29:03 - The Future of Language and Cultural Diversity 48:07 - AI Disruption in Language Learning 51:56 - The Future of SaaS Companies 57:28 - NVIDIA's Market Position and AI Chips 59:51 - China's AI Chip Landscape 01:03:13 - India's AI Infrastructure Revolution 01:11:11 - The Concept of AI Governance 01:15:16 - Economic Implications of AI Investment 01:19:54 - AI in Healthcare Innovations 01:36:32 - The Future of Urban Planning with AI 01:40:39 - Electricity Costs and AI's Impact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
X-AI launches Rock Code Fast 1.
I had to double-check the numbers on this because they were pretty epic.
It's insane.
Elon went from zero to building Colossus 1 in 122 days.
Everyone said it couldn't be done.
This guy will not slow down.
He wants to be number one and we're seeing these data centers leapfrogging each other.
Elon, you know, the entrepreneur of all entrepreneurs knows that it's all or nothing.
You don't build the second biggest data center.
you either win the race so you don't win the race.
This is the bitter lesson as applied to hardware scaling.
It's sort of a case study in brute force hardware scaling,
where we're seeing the power, the chips, the data centers,
all being brute force scales.
These incredible tools are demonetizing and democratizing
and extraordinary rate.
All the students struggling with their largely irrelevant curriculum,
this is what you should be doing.
Now that's the moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome everybody to Moonshots in our weekly episode of WTF just happened in tech.
I'm here with my Moonshot mates, Alex Wiesner Gross, Dave Blundon.
Salimus Mal is in India right now.
We'll talk about that in a minute.
But this is the news we hope that you watch that makes you optimistic about the future.
That raises your IQ points 20 and gives you a chance to see the future.
So Dave and Alex, good morning, guys.
Good morning.
So how was Labor Day for you?
I got a lot of grief, actually, for being distracted and antisocial.
I was talking to my AI agents.
They were pestering me with progress all weekend.
They have an IQ of 148 now, so it's pretty hard to deny them.
They're getting needy for the first time.
You know, I've been waiting for this moment since I was 14 years old, so it's pretty
hard for me to tune it out.
I missed you, Dave.
They are getting needy.
Alex, did you labor over Labor Day?
Absolutely.
dull moment. Yeah, me too. I'm in port towns in Washington near the San Juan's. I have been here
for a week with the family, which means I'm getting up super early, like at 5 a.m. just to actually
get my email done and work and do my writing and then spend time with my 14-year-olds on the
beach in the woods fishing. Went fishing and I caught like a massive fish, which was about six
inches high compared to Alaska. Anyway. Did you eat it? Just just just.
eat it raw right out catch and release catch and release okay uh well so listen i just want to take a second
and just appreciate the fans that we've had on this podcast um it's been pretty amazing to get the
feedback and you should all know we love doing this we spend a lot of time working on this really
to deliver the news that we think is the the news worth learning about that gives you a positive
view of the future i want to take a second to read you guys uh
some of the comments and just say thank you for the awesome comments to everybody. So why not Jack
says moonshots is the best thing I've ever found. High praise. The Crypto Canvas says best
podcast and technology right now. Thank you guys for doing this consistently. And we do love doing
it consistently. Steve Darz, one two, three, four says an exciting future. Thank you for providing
an optimistic long view amidst the constant doom and gloom of the new cycle. And I think that's one of the
principles here is if you are constantly watching all the negative news, it's going to shape your
mindset in a really dystopian fashion. Carl Rankin, 5385, says quite simply the very best and most
relevant AI and digital technology podcast available today. Thank you, Peter, for allowing us to hear
Saleem, Dave, and Alex and their collective brilliance. You're welcome, Carl. Renice IB 6532. I absolutely
love this podcast. You guys are doing a great job keeping up with everything. And yes,
Alex is brilliant. Okay. Let's follow up on that note from Polly Murp Earl, who says,
Polymerple. Polymerple, thank you. I was a little iffy on Alex at first. Then I realized I was
just jealous of his intelligence. Now he's my favorite to see in the line. That is exactly my
experience with Alex when I first met him years ago. Oh, that's great. The sweetheart of a guy.
And we'll wrap it up with Bill Jacobs, 30, 386, who says the fab for our back.
Fab three.
Well, today it's the Fab three.
Yeah.
Before we jump on to where Saleem is, I just want to say thank you to our production team who've been amazing.
Nick Singh, Dan Akon, and Jin Luca Mangione.
Thank you guys for all the hard work you do, making this easy and fun.
And we do have fun, right?
I mean, it's pretty, pretty amazing.
So, Saleem right now is in India about to get on stage with his singularity mates at an
SU summit there.
And before we hung up with him a few minutes ago, our edict to him was bring back a box of iPhone
17s and please fix the U.S. Indian trade issues.
So he's taking that on.
We'll see how he reports out.
And this is, Peter, this is back to school week.
I don't know if you're in phase, but everyone is back on campuses now, grinding way on the
soon-to-be irrelevant curriculums that are falling by the wayside.
I got lots of questions from my kids, nieces, and nephews over the weekend about what they
should be doing, what they should be studying, how do you, and it's so great that we have Alex
here to help add to that guidance, because it's changing so quickly, very, very hard to keep up.
I know that what they're learning is irrelevant and becoming more relevant by the minute.
So if we've got that much figured out, but then what is relevant?
how are we going to keep up with it?
So class starts on Thursday morning
at MIT Foundations of AI Ventures.
My boys as well, but not quite MIT curriculum.
They're eighth grade, but hey, that's good.
Well, I don't know if you know,
but MIT added a new thing this semester, 6E.
Remember, you know, course 6, which is computer science
and double E, had always had 6A
where you go to companies for a semester or two
and learn how the real world works?
They added 6E now.
now, which is incredible. E is for entrepreneurship. So you basically take a couple
semesters and go either work at a startup or a venture fund and see how the startup world
works. And it's incredibly popular. So this semester, I'll be teaching advanced algorithms
in that curriculum a couple times this semester and then full time the following semester.
I do believe the career of the future is entrepreneurship, period. And we should have that
conversation and we should talk about education on the next pod we do go a little bit deep on
there's some news developing there um Alex I want to just not miss this point right now if
you're an incoming freshman to college what's your recommendation skip it skip college or what do you
do it's a tricky time I I think it depends entirely on the freshmen's goals if your goal is
to build a startup I think there's a strong macroeconomic incentive
to just do it now, consider dropping out, moving to Silicon Valley or doing it in Boston or
elsewhere. But I think timelines, AI, AGI, ASI timelines are so short that almost any
conventional career plan, if we had had this conversation 20, 30 years ago, I think it would
have been far easier to project out a sort of a conventional life plan or career plan.
I think now that the singular bit of advice, no pun intended, I'd have for any college freshman
is assume that AI timelines are incredibly short.
Assume that we're going to have superintelligence to the extent it doesn't exist somewhere
already and just isn't evenly distributed.
Assume that we're going to have super intelligence in the next two to three years and
guide your career plans accordingly.
Yeah.
I'll add my opinion there, which is, as I've said over and over again, find a problem you're
passion about right the technology is going to constantly change but the problems are going to be
fundamental for some time and then apply intelligence to that problem you know apply AI to problems
that you care deeply about so you know if you don't know your massive transformative purpose
wherever you are if you're in high school if you're in college if you're in graduate school
you know pause what you're doing and really focus on what's your driver you know mark twain's
favorite, my favorite quote of Mark Twain, two important days in your life, the day you were born,
the day you found out why. So why are you here? And then apply AI and digital superintelligence
to that why. All right, shall we die? The other Peter, of course, the other Mark Twain quote,
that's apropos to the college experiences, the classics are books that everyone wants read,
but no one wants to read. So maybe those two end up colliding in this case. We have Google,
Elm, you know, summaries now for us to be able to listen to those books in brief in a
podcast. Every week, my team and I study the top 10 technology metatrends that will transform
industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robotics, AGI, and
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All right, now back to this episode.
All right, shall we dive in the AI Wars?
Let's do it.
All right, let's do it.
You guys ready?
Absolutely.
Let's see what we're first.
All right, first up is our friend Elon and his rollout of Colossil 2 coming online.
Colossus.
Colossus 2 and coming online in a couple of weeks, one gigawatt data center in Memphis.
And I love the fact that we're beginning to talk about these as energy, not number of GPUs.
Again, and this is the mythical one gigawatt center is finally coming online, fitted for 500,000
Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, and then doubling it again next year in 2026, and this is where
GROC 5 will be born.
Let's talk about it.
I mean, this guy will not slow down.
He wants to be number one, and we're seeing these data centers leapfrogging each other.
Alex, what are your thoughts here?
This is the bitter lesson as applied to hardware scale.
It's brute force.
It's sort of a case study in brute force hardware scaling.
We're seeing the power, as you mentioned, the chips, the data centers, all being in the
style of the bitter lesson, brute force scaled.
What we haven't seen yet will, I think, be very interesting to see, is that the same
level of brute force efforts being applied to the software side of the stack.
And I wouldn't be surprised to see that kick in as well.
But for now, in the style of the bitter lesson, it's just absolutely incredible to watch with such vigor and such brute force the hardware scaling side of the equation taking place.
So the bitter lesson is from a guy named Richard Sutton who made this, I think, incredibly important observation that is permeated now the AI community.
Alex would be great if you give us a quick summary of it.
Yeah, the core, I'll caricature it, but the core thesis.
behind Sutton's bitter lesson is that all of these decades by AI researchers spent
developing artisanal solutions to problems, to speech recognition, to language understanding,
to computer vision, were all basically wasted.
And that in the end, all that really mattered was taking large data sets and lots of compute
and off-the-shelf algorithms and just scaling them up to very large sizes.
So this is the bitter lesson.
and this is why it's bitter, that all of this effort by humans, by human researchers,
getting their PhDs over the decades, coming up with artisanal new algorithms that they could
publish to identify.
You remember, like, several years ago even, it was breaking news when researchers were
able to build a cat detector.
Like, that was news.
That was just five years ago, right?
Yeah.
And that's just been steamrolled by completely general algorithms.
with very little human injected prior knowledge combined with huge amounts of data,
huge amounts of compute.
So the bitter lesson has been, I think, one of the core themes of the AI revolution
we've seen over the past few years.
And going back to Colossus II, the bitter lesson applies not just at the software layer,
but also at the hardware layer.
So some reads brute force.
Yes.
Yeah.
You know, and what I want to talk about here is, again, just this leapfarm.
of on data centers and on the hyperscalers, you know, Elon went from zero to building
Colossus 1 in 122 days. Everyone said it couldn't be done, right? Now he is up against
others and he's built the largest data center and is going to maintain that lead. We're going to
see, you know, we're going to see OpenAI coming out with their Stargate centers. So how will
Stargate compared to Colossus?
To toe to toe, actually, isn't it? Right? They're exactly right in line. This is a, you know,
this foot race is very, very much winner take all. I know we had that debate last time we
podcasted, you know, it looks like there will be five, seven big AI labs. But I think Elon, you know,
the entrepreneur of all entrepreneurs, knows that it's, it's all or nothing. You don't
build the second biggest data center. You either win the race or you don't win the race.
And, you know, because these things, once they're trained, they compile down to something crazy
fast and very easy to tailor into specific use cases, but nobody wants to start with the number
two model or the number three model. And so you either win the race or you don't. And so Elon's all in,
Stargate is all in, you know, Sam Maltman's all in. But, yeah, Alex, do you know the exact numbers?
I think they're pretty much right in a line. Yeah, also that the numbers are a little bit tricky
because I would distinguish between data centers for training new models and data centers that are
going to be used primarily for inference. So the world, it would appear that we're moving toward is
We're just tiling the Earth's surface with inference-time compute models that are-
I think it's important just for a second for our viewers and listeners, Alex, talk about
what's the difference between training and inference?
If you haven't heard the terminology before, it's fundamental.
Sure.
So conventionally, the way one would think about this is an AI model like Chad GPT is trained.
It's created basically from large datasets at one time, sort of a fixed cost up front.
And then later on, there's so-called inference time when the model is actually used.
If we were to sort of analogize this to software engineering, there's sort of compile time or development time when a computer program is created, and then execution time when a computer program is actually run.
Same idea here.
So inference time when an AI model, like the GPT series, for example, is actually deployed and being run in practice, those inference time use cases,
based on the headlines that we're seeing, those are going to be run in data centers around
the world.
And I think we'll get to this later.
We're standing up data centers as a human civilization all around the world in the Middle
East, in India, in Norway, elsewhere.
But the training time when the models are actually the frontier models, the strongest
models that we have, are being created, those appear to be more geographically localized in
the U.S. at the moment.
So it's sort of going back to Dave's question and sort of,
It's a tricky distinction to distinguish between data centers that are going to be primarily intended for training and creating new strong AI models versus data centers that will be primarily intended for running models that already exist.
I think another analogy here is if you go to school, learn a language, you'll spend a few years learning that language, but once you've learned it, actually speaking it, you know, is a lot quicker.
And obviously inference is just that having the language uploaded into your neocortex and being able to speak it.
I think one other thing worth mentioning here is Elon's got basically access to infinite capital.
Every time he goes to raise capital is oversubscribed, right?
There is a massive amount of family office money, sovereign wealth money, that's just prepared to fund his continued growth.
It's never been that way.
And I think, you know, what we're going to see here is the differentiator for the United States on building these companies, building these frontier models, is access to this risk capital, which doesn't exist.
exist at this level anywhere else. And I think that's pretty awesome. Yeah, just to put some numbers on
that. This is a million, a million blackwells. There are $30,000 each. Remember, a GB200 has two
blackwells on it. So I'm pretty sure he's talking about a million blackwells, not a million
GB200s. But Alex, you probably know the answer. But anyway, a million blackwells at $30,000 each.
So that's a $30 billion investment in the chips alone, then, you know, whatever on top of that for the
for the, you know, the racks and the power supply and all that.
Yeah, amazing.
It's also probably worth just briefly mentioning that the electricity side supply of this.
So Colossus, one sort of famously is, has a self-contained electricity source.
It's using natural gas cogeneration facilities on-prem.
It's not, my understanding is not drawing electric power materially from the grid.
It's generating on-site its own electric power.
And one can sort of extrapolate.
all sorts of interesting questions. Does this mean that there's going to be sort of a pocket
economy of data centers that are being forced to co-locate with nuclear power plants,
with natural gas cogen, simply because the rest of the grid and the sort of the outside
economy is too slow to catch up? Yeah, I think that's going to be the case, right? Where do you
have cheap electricity? Just move your data centers there. All right, let's go on to the next one.
Yeah, go ahead. Oh, so Danielle Roost and I took a tour of the Markley Data Center here.
It's the first quantum deploy, but Jeff Markley, great guy who built the data center.
He bought all the three megawatt generators in the country.
What do you mean all of them?
He said, well, all the five megawatts were already sold out, and I panicked.
I'm like, you know, because we need to generate a gigawatt.
There are only so many of these generators.
So that's now the issue.
Like even if you get access to a power supply, you need the generators to turn it into electricity
and those things are completely sold out.
One of the things I want to talk about on the pod here is where would you make your next investments, right?
So we missed the Intel, you know, option call we talked about last time with Leopold.
I'm thinking, and this is not investment advice, this is me advice, that, you know, investing on the cutting edge of energy production, I mean, just the drawdown right now.
You know, as Eric Schmidt said to us, Dave, when we were having our podcast with him, you know, AI is energy limited, not chip limited, not intelligence limited.
It's energy limited.
Well, I'll tell you what, guys, why don't we go down on some podcast, maybe next time, go down Leopold's holdings from his 13F filing and look at everything?
Because he didn't just, his biggest positions Intel, but there's a whole list of things there that are all direct implications of what you just said.
And so, well, let's just analyze them one at a time.
You want to turn this into a financial investment podcast.
Okay.
We can label it, so people want to skip that one, you know, they can't.
All right.
All right.
The next topic for discussion is keeping on the Elon theme here.
XAI launches GROC code fast one.
So I had to double check the numbers on this because they were pretty epic.
So this is optimized for agenda coding, right?
You see here on this a graph of model performance per $1 million.
tokens and groc code fast one i'm not sure that rolls off the tongue as a name just trounce is
everything i put the numbers down at the bottom here so input tokens are 20 cents per million tokens
output a buck 50 per million compared to gpt five right input is one dollar in the quarter compared to
point two uh and claude son at four input is three dollars so we're talking about 15 times cheaper on
input tokens. And we're talking about 10 times cheaper and output tokens. How do you compete against
that? I mean, this is a race to the bottom. Thoughts, Dave? It definitely not a race to the bottom,
even though it appears to be. This is a get the market share, don't lose no matter what. People get
addicted to this stuff so quickly and then they want an infinite supply of it. So this is much more like
a crack dealer giving out the first hit for free than it is like a race to the bottom. And I think
people are completely misinterpreting whether AI is a race to the bottom and also whether
the chips will commoditize. Neither is going to happen because the demand is infinite.
Yeah. Alex, your thoughts here, buddy. Yeah. What's worth, I think, noting is if you try to
interact with GropCodeFest 1 via browser, you will not find it. And we've talked on the pot in the
past about the browser wars, about browsers, web browsers as distribution channels for AI. I think
it's quite notable, but sort of under the category of burying the lead that you can only access
as a consumer, you can only access Croc CodeFest 1 via one of several different coding environments
like cursor or windsurf. So to the extent that we talk about distribution channels for super
intelligence, I think it's actually quite notable that those coding environments are becoming
almost competitors for the browser for accessing superintelligence.
fascinating, fascinating,
entry points.
So I'm looking at cursor right now
on my screen. I don't see it
there. Is there something I need to do to get it?
With Windsor, so it's a bit of a hassle to get to.
With Windsor, you have to search specifically
for Grock CodeFast 1 in order
to get it. It's not even
one of the recommended ones.
No, no, no, it's here. Sorry, it's way down at the bottom.
I don't know why they...
Well, it's just out. It's just out.
And it'll gain popularity.
But I think the point here, I mean, for everybody is these incredible tools are demonetizing and democratizing at an extraordinary rate, right?
And we're going to see literally billions of coders.
Everybody will learn to code.
The language of coding is going to be basically your mind, your English or your Hindu or whatever it might be.
All right.
Before the next podcast, I'll test it and see how it fairs just on quality.
I'm obviously on price.
It's incredible, but just on quality.
But I don't understand how this price point is possible.
Just counting up the flops and working it back to the chip costs.
Alex, I don't know if you have any insights on that.
There was an article that was said that a lot of this is being basically carried by Silicon Valley investment.
Yeah, but I mean, you can't do a little bit of that, but you can't just burn money by the billion.
I mean, you can't for a little while, but you can't sustainably.
Do you think that's what's going on here?
Alex? I don't know. It's not clear. I see different accounting schemes without having direct
access to the chart of accounts for the Frontier Labs. Difficult to know whether inference time,
as we were discussing, is profitable or not. I've seen claims either way. But I do think more broadly
Jevin's paradox, broadly speaking, that the cheaper given commodity goes that there's
sort of a paradoxical net increase in demand, resulting in potentially greater expenditures in
this case. I think we're going to see that with code generation as well. As the cost of
intelligent code generation trends towards zero as it has been for the past few years, I think we will
see, to Peter's point, we'll just, we're just going to see just in time code demand for
everything and will be a wash in new code that otherwise never would have existed.
Well, one thing that came up when we were talking to Kevin Wheel two weeks ago at OpenAI,
the chief product officer at OpenAI, is that there's a huge amount of routing optimization
going on. And when I use these things, I'll bounce back and forth between a trivial question
and then, you know, can you solve cold fusion, you know, back to back? And then, you know,
the models are very intelligent now about routing it to the minimal model that will actually
answer the question correctly. So a huge amount of
savings from those types of optimizations and there are many many different layers of that so
i think you're going to see the the innovation at this ridiculous pace and then the price point
continues to come down but again the demand is infinite so it won't let us know when you solve
zero point energy i'd like okay okay um this is another fun article again Elon verse
musk poachs 14 meta-a-i engineers with a different offer so we'll talk about you know
what's going on in a meta in a second, but I think this is fundamentally what Elon does extraordinarily
well. He has a massive transformative purpose, you know, open up Mars for humanity, make humanity
multi-planetary species. And he has that as a pure signal. And entrepreneurs who are willing to work hard,
who are builders, want that. They want to work on something epic. It isn't about the money since
eventually we're heading towards a post-capital society anyway.
So Elon's offering purpose and equity over cash.
And his equity's done incredibly well.
I don't think he's ever started a company that's lost money.
It's increased, you know, all the companies from Starlink to X-AI to X have basically
just skyrocketed in value.
And we're going to see a startup intensity here.
Alex, what are your thoughts on this?
I remember back to the early days of, call it the post-2012 ImageNet revolution in AI when there was a lot of concern, including, as I recall, from Elon, that AI would end up being a monoculture that one lab, maybe called Google DeepMind, would sort of completely capture the future light cone with AI.
And I think I view this and other related headlines is a very healthful sign that we're not ending up in that future of a monoculture of a singleton where just a single culture from a single frontier lab has complete dominance, complete hegemony over over AI.
We're going to see and we are seeing multiple competing AI frontier labs with different cultures and this should and is, you know,
It should be one of those cultures, the manic focus and intensity of just delivering state-of-the-art
results.
And we'll see lots of other cultures as well and we'll have them compete.
And that's the world that we humans, I would argue, want to live in.
Yeah.
And I think purpose, a purpose-driven life is going to be far more important in the future than anything else.
And being clear about why you're doing what you do and waking up in the morning and having an epic mission and being excited about building is a future that I'm,
I want, you know, it's always been part of my life and I want for my kids.
And that's what's going to win over just cash, especially working someplace if you don't like
the culture, as you said.
I want to play a short video.
This comes as part of Elon's master plan, part four, on sustainable abundance.
And let's chat about it afterwards.
Humans are toolmakers.
And at Tesla, we are builders of physical products at scale that make.
life better for all. We are building the products and services that bring AI into the physical
world. We are combining our manufacturing capabilities with our autonomous prowess to accelerate
global prosperity. We are building a safer, cleaner, and more enjoyable world for all. We call
this sustainable abundance.
what's the happiest future you can imagine one which there's sustainable abundance world
so i love that term sustainable abundance um you know it's amazing to see abundance
becoming an underlying theme for you know the hypers and for the tech world and it's
part of the optimistic vision of the future right you're not going to see this on the six o'clock
or 7 o'clock news, you're not going to see it on the Washington Post, the New York Times.
It's important to realize that technologies that we're talking about on this pod are going to shape every aspect of our lives.
And there is so much positive use.
It's so easy to focus on the negative.
But, you know, understanding.
And this is, you know, Elon's been on this mission since I met him back in 2000 when he'd sold, you know, sold to PayPal, sold PayPal to, what's you call?
eBay, sold to eBay.
And he's been on the mission of autonomous vehicles, electric cars, solar, you know, making
humanity, multi-planetary.
And people love those epic grand challenges, right?
These moonshots, which is podcast it all about.
And they gravitate towards that.
Dave?
So, Peter, you invented X-Prize and used X about 10 years before Elon stole it from you.
And then Abundance was the name of one of your books.
my first book yes so what's what's next in the uh Elon takes all Peter ideas and
oh god it was very funny because the X Prize logo looked identical to yes to SpaceX's and then
to X's logo uh I didn't have the heart to call him out on it but hey it's fine well as you get
he's been he's been generous supporting the X Prize and supporting our work over the years he's
given you know probably 150 million dollars of capital to support some of the X prizes we've done
But sustainable abundance is a real thing, all right?
It's about digitizing, dematerializing, demonetizing, and democratizing everything.
The way I like to describe this is, if you think about it, when Google came out, Google was a for-profit company that had the biggest non-profit impact.
In the words, it uplifted all of humanity.
And the poorest child on the planet using Google and the wealthiest child, you know, Larry Pays.
ages kids, Sergey Brin's kids. Google was identical for those. It was a leveling and democratizing
capability. And we're going to see that here for food, water, energy, health care education, and
that's extraordinary. Alex, you've been on this journey with me. Oh, yes. Yeah, no, I love this
term. And I think it's sort of an implicit recognition that another important part of the
equation, which is autonomy, a.k.a. superintelligence or post-abundant intelligence is sort of the
missing factor here. So when I look at the video and I hear the term and I see its usage in
practice, immediately this screams to me the intersection of abundant energy and materials on the one
hand and abundant intelligence and autonomy on the other hand. And I think it's a rare and precious
time in human history when we can have near total clarity as to what the technology tree
looks like. Every time, every time we talk about having scarcity of something like lithium.
Oh my God, we're running into lithium. It's like we discover these massive supplies off the coast
of California. There is nothing that's truly scarce, period. And I think the sooner people get that.
Technology is a scarcity, you know, destroying force. Dave, you were going to say something.
Well, yeah, the other thing on that slide that is kind of sandwiched in the middle in bullet, too, is the seven-day work week.
You have a bunch of companies at Link Studio working 997, and they just declare, you know, we're doing 997.
What's 997?
It's this China thing where you work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week while you're sprinting towards some massively transformative purpose.
So those two things go hand in hand.
No one's going to work 997 on something irrelevant, right?
It has to be something world-changing and imminent.
997 is no way to live your life.
You do it in a sprint to get to a very specific destination,
but that is by far the winning strategy.
If you do this massive million GPU data center
and you do it a year late, it's worth zero.
It's absolutely worthless.
There's no point in doing it on a four-day Europe work week.
You just either do it or don't do it.
If you do it, you sprint, it's like an Olympic gold medal.
You've got to sprint.
I think it's also interesting. I think it's 9-96. Yeah, China was 9-96, but I think Dave was saying.
Well, the slides had seven, sorry.
With the reaction to 996, you know, popularly lying flat, people who are opting out of the 996 culture,
it's sort of interesting to think about whether sustainable abundance actually obviates that entire discussion altogether,
rather than lying flat under the implicit assumption that 996 and that the need for enormous amounts of human labor are going to continue in perpetuity,
what if we actually, a few years from now, find ourselves in a sustainably abundant future
where the need for 996 human labor is actually only a short-term need.
A few years from now, we hand over that workload to autonomous systems.
Then we go to the stars.
Then we go to the stars.
All right, on the flip side of this conversation is people are beginning to bolt from
Mehta's new superintelligence lab.
So two months after the launch, at least three top researchers have resigned, two
returned to Open AI while Metta's long-term product director also joined Altman's ranks.
Departures are raising questions despite recruits being offered nine figure pay packages.
And to be clear, we don't actually know what's going inside.
This is just reporting what came out and wired.
But I do think when you're capturing an employee by offering them a lot of money,
that's not going to capture their time and attention and their heart.
It's mission and purpose that captures them.
Dave, you agree?
Well, absolutely.
And I think also, you know, Elon has a reputation for everything always working.
You know, so having an MTP has to be married with a mission that will succeed to develop that reputation of not only is it massive in implications, but it's going to happen.
It's real.
Because it's very easy to go out there and say, I'm going to build, you know, electric cars.
Like, come on.
And then if it doesn't work out, no one will join you the second time.
So you have to have a track record of succeeding.
Now, Mark Zuckerberg is probably of the young CEOs in the country, the most successful
with the most cash flow, every opportunity to win.
Elon has done it repeatedly, though.
So I think a lot of people are flocking to the, he's always been right before.
Why would he be wrong this time?
Yeah, hashtag.
That really helps.
Never doubt, Elon, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right, I want to spend too much time on this.
But it's been a big week for Google.
We're on the verge of the release of Gemini 3, which will be coming out.
any day now. But I mean, top news and extraordinary conversation around nanobanana powered by
Gemini 2.5 Flash image. Let's take a look at this video. A few days ago, image editing changed
forever. Google released Gemini Flash 2.5 image, Nano Banana. That has everyone buying puts on
Adobe because Photoshop is officially dead. Instead of learning how to use all these antique tools,
you can now just prompt Nanobanana for changes and it's able to deliver any photo alteration.
you can imagine. And most importantly, while maintaining the consistency of the original image,
not only is nanobanana an exceptional image model that's already at the top of the Ellam Arena
leaderboard, but it's also extremely fast and affordable, costing only 3.9 cents per image via the
API. The upgrade that most people are talking about, though, is character consistency. If you start
with an image of a person or pet, for example, the model can blend it with a different image
or make minor changes to it without noticeably altering the original character, or multiple
characters and objects like this guy did by blending 13 different images together. What's kind of
crazy about this model, though, is that it also has an understanding of the real world. Like if you
point to a spot on Google Maps and ask what a person would see there, it can generate a realistic
photo. Just epic. Just epic is right. And very few people, basically nobody under the age of 40
remembers life before the GUI, the GUI on your computer. But we do. And when the Apple II first came
out, you know, you would boot it up, or, you know, T.R. Sadie or whatever, you'd boot it up,
and this little flashing prompt would be there. What can I do with this thing? Yeah, hello,
what do I do? And all you can do is just start writing code. That's basically all you've got,
just start writing code. And then, you know, what, 1984, 85, you know, Steve Jobs comes out with
the Mac and now everybody's lived in this kind of world of stasis of the GUI for 30, 40 years now.
So everybody's like, yeah, nothing ever changes. This is all going to.
to change imminently. It'll be the biggest step function. It'll be much bigger than going from
no computer to computer or computer to, you know, command line to GUI. But it's been so long that
nothing has changed that people are completely underestimating how different the world will be a
year from today when everything has a, I just asked the computer to do this for me, just like on
Star Trek. And it just did it. But that's happening literally right now. The implications for
startups are incredible. Like if, if Adobe gets destroyed by this, you know, I think our friend
Greg Bellas is still over there, so it'd be kind of sad if that happens. But it'll be very
important as a wake-up call that if you've been camping on your software installed base for the last
20 plus years, milking it for money, your days are numbered. Yeah, I mean, because everything's
going to change. If you were Adobe Photoshop or a Canva, you know, specialist making your living
that way, right? I mean, you understood how to do layers and math.
masks and manual adjustments. But nanobanana is just, you know, edit through language, not layers.
It's like, you know, do this. You know, it's literally, you know, how do you describe what you want
in a way that AI will understand it? That's going to be the skill base.
Yeah, exactly. And if you're a graphic artist or you're a writer or whatever, you get so used
to these tools and all their proprietary interface components. And then you're just afraid to shift to
something else because it's so, you get so invested.
in knowing where the menus are
and knowing where the buttons are
and knowing how it responds.
And so then you're locked in
and you end up paying
for that product for 10, 20 years.
Now everything's wide open again.
The interface is trivial.
My mom, who's in our 80s,
has no problem creating images.
She could never use Adobe Photoshop,
never figured it out.
Now she can just talk to it.
I would argue, actually,
so I've been using Nano Banana quite a bit.
It's actually a much bigger deal
than just some of the headlines
that would say, this is a Photoshop killer.
So in using Nanobanana, some of the most striking new capabilities that I've seen
are you can feed it an image and then ask to view the same scene from a different perspective.
That's way more than just pixel-level Photoshop style editing.
It smells to me like this is just a sliver or a distillation of a larger world model.
We've spoken about Genie 3 in the past.
It feels to me like this is some sort of like tendril from a much more monstrous model.
And if that is indeed the case, and to the extent that Nanobanana has basically become merged into mainline Gemini model releases by Google DeepMind, I think this sort of portends a future where world models, like in the class of Gen E3, the videos that we've discussed previously, those just merge into GPT or Gemini type.
models as the ultimate modality of interactive, simulated, maybe even streaming realities.
I'll tell you what else, Alex, you know, all media competes with all other media.
There's no swim lanes.
Everything competes for time from users.
Time is a great.
Scarcity.
At least while we have, while we're stuck with finite attention, maybe we can make attention
post scarce as well.
Okay, well, for the next couple of years.
But, you know, this time of year, normally by now I would have, you know, done a fantasy
football league, signed up for my players, know who, you know, the first football games will
I haven't even paid attention.
I don't even know what's going on because the stuff that you post on our link chat is so much
more entertaining and engaging than mainstream media.
The stuff that you as a single-handed person can create is so much more interesting and
relevant.
It's just a capability that never would have existed a year ago.
Well, look, a singularity probably only comes about approximately once per planet.
So it's a special time.
It is a special time.
We're going to celebrate that.
I'm going to have a singularity party when it happens.
I hope you guys will join me.
We made this point last time.
AI won't take your job.
It'll let you do any job.
And I think this is a perfect example, right?
I mean, literally designers who have made their career based on understanding how to use a specific tool really well.
Now, anybody can do that.
But here's a question for you, right?
If I go and I say to nanobanana, hey, place me on the moon in a,
in a space suit, getting into a starship for return flight to Earth, and it generates that.
You know, who's the author of that? Is it the software? Is it the human who prompted it?
You know, we're going to start to have some interesting conversations around ownership,
you know, blurring the lines of authorship and human-to-loop creativity. So that's going to be an important
conversation. But let's talk about the, you know, the real issue here, which is,
is the ability for this to drive accelerated misinformation and the erosion of visual trust, right?
The old saying, seeing as believing is out the window, period.
Thoughts?
Yeah, my comment on that would be we're in a post-V-O3, post-sora, post-natural language generation era.
I think there's a future to the extent that one wants to have faith in the accuracy of any visual inputs
images or videos. I can see a future maybe where there's some sort of cryptographic chain
of trust between cameras, video, and still cameras and browsers. It's sort of like the way
there's a cryptographic guarantee that when you put in your credit card information to pay
for something on a website, that the credit card information is handled in a cryptographically safe
way between you and the ultimate counterparty. One can imagine some sort of
cryptographic guarantee that the image that, uh, that you see in social media was actually
unaltered in some sense from the original capture without any AI involved. That said my my baseline
expectation is that that's not going to be very popular and blockchain to the rescue. But this is,
this is deep fakes on an industrial scale. Right. I mean, just to to put it where it is, you know,
This is what people also said, though, right before GPT2 and GPT3, and this will empower all sorts of misinformation, disinformation. And yes, there is a lot of probably false information that's being generated by these models. But I have to look at it as sort of a risk-reward trade-off. There's so much new scientific information that's being unlocked by these models. Very difficult to get too bothered by the potential downsides.
I'm not worried about that, but I'm just saying, you know, for the majority of 8 billion people on the planet, if they keep on seeing, I mean, you're going to get to a point where when I'm there now, when I see a video, my first reaction is it real, right? And my second reaction is going to be, no, it's not real. Yeah, no, there's no doubt. You know, you've read all the Neil Stevenson books, I'm sure, Peter. Of course. Of course. It's not enough course, but of course. So, yeah, like the Diamond Age to me was everything he's ever predicted in those books.
has happened. And he invented the word avatar in the first book, Snow Crash, just foresaw
cyberspace. That word was invented there. But in the Diamond Age, you know, everybody moves into
these communities that have different rules around technology and how you manifest it, because it gets
too weird, too fast. And so the big, big step function change for society is cameras everywhere,
right? And that started years ago. And so now we're living in the cameras every world. There's
concept of, you know, privacy. You know, anytime you're outside, you're being filmed at a minimum
by a satellite. I've said this before. You can know anything you want, anytime you want,
anywhere you want. The data is there. Layers of drones, layers of satellites, layer of autonomous
car cameras everywhere. Everything's being imaged. There is no privacy. That's another conversation
we can have. Well, those 10 megapixel cameras now are 50 cents each. Yeah. So they're going to be
everywhere. And so then now, you know, so that already happened to society. And also social
media happened to society just totally changed the whole election process and everything's you know everything's
been disrupted tremendously in the last 10 years so now you layer the deepfakes on top of that it's just the
third act in this massive turbulent societal change that's only going to accelerate and you know of course
governments do nothing they just sit there and assume you know people are talking about the next election
like it's going to be anything like the last election it's going to be a different world by the time we get
to the next election yeah i would just maybe add i i would speculate that this
maybe call it a moral panic that we're engaging in right now is going to look very quaint
in a few years. It's difficult to imagine people with smart glasses doing real-time augmented reality
overlays of everything that they're seeing on the one hand, which by the way means basically
everything becomes photo edited, everything that you see becomes doctored by default. On the one
hand, on the other hand, oh, but clutch whatever it is, the moral panic that you're worrying
about, like, what about the photo editing? No, I think it's far more likely that this will look
quaint and nonsensical in a few years ago. I love that. Moral panic is becoming quaint.
It's worth noting that there is a digital invisible watermark that Google's putting on these
images, Synth ID, and we're going to start to have sort of a arms race between gen AI and detection
tools as well. That's going to be part of it. It's always the, you know, the virus, anti-virus
or everybody there's not a week that goes by when I don't get the strangest of compliments someone will
stop me and say peter you've got such nice skin honestly i never thought especially at age 64
i'd be hearing anyone say that i have great skin and honestly i can't take any credit i use an
amazing product called one skin os o one twice a day every day the company was built by four
brilliant phd women who have identified a 10 amino acid peptide that effectively reverses the
age of your skin. I love it and like I say, I use it every day twice a day. There you have it.
That's my secret. You go to OneSkin.com and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same
product I use. Okay, now back to the episode. Let's go to Google's next big announcement of this
past week, which is Google Translate and another incredible product coming out right now. So Google's
AI-powered live translation. Historically, Google is translated about a trillion words per month.
for 600 million users supporting 246, 243 languages,
which by the way is 58,806 language pairs.
Amazing.
But we're now being driven by Gemini 2.5
with a live translate.
Let's take a look at this video.
Hi there, my friend told me there's a sandwich here
that's really good, but I'm not sure which one it is.
It's spicy, it's really tasty cheese on it,
and avocados, I think.
I think my
my friend me
said that there's a
good, but I don't
I'm sure of
what is.
It's picante.
It has queso
very
and avocatoes,
I think
I know what is.
It's more
the time.
In fact,
we're
we've got to
let me see
if we're
we can't
do it's delicious.
I think I know
what it is.
It's seasonal.
In fact,
we've already
taken it off the
menu, but let me
see if we can
still prepare it for you.
Pretty amazing.
The question is
what's this
going to do
to the industry of language translation.
What's it going to do to people learning languages?
You know, I used to want my kids to learn multiple languages.
Now the question is, do they invest their time in doing that?
Gentlemen.
What was that company that all the kids used to cheat on their homework?
They got a public company, got obliterated.
Alex, which one is that?
Not sure, but what I would say.
I mean, just historic reminder, remember,
the transformer architecture that sort of helped to kick start a lot of the generative AI revolution.
It was originally developed for language translation, for machine translation.
It was an encoder plus decoder architecture.
Right now, we mostly use the decoder part, but nonetheless,
it's sort of ironic that the original targeted application for transformers was statistical machine translation or machine translation.
And it's sort of only now that we're starting to see pervasive machine translation
finally tackling the real-world use cases of real-time conversational embeddings.
That's first thought.
Second thought is it's sort of interesting to speculate, I think, what does this do to
language diversity in general?
Do we, does this, it's just sort of a net promoter of languages.
There's been a lot of hand-wringing over the palace.
20 years about low resource languages dying out in favor of usually English, but sometimes
other languages. Or is this sort of a net promoter of diversity where once all languages,
thanks to AI, become fully interoperable, as it were, there's suddenly no reason to collapse down
to sort of one modal English language. Do you know the joke here? What do you call someone who
speaks three languages is trilingual, someone who speaks two languages bilingual? If they speak one
language, they're American.
So, I love that.
Well, that's going to turn out to be the winning strategy.
What do you know?
The company was Chegg.
Check out its stock ticker, or we'll splice it into the podcast here, but it went down
from 90 bucks to a buck 40.
Wow.
You know, just because, you know, chat GPT is a better way to cheat on your homework or
whatever.
That's not really what they do, but it's that's what can happen.
The point here is, the point here is that Google is also.
providing a language practice mode that allows you to personalize speaking and listening exercises, right? And so the impact on that on Duolingo was a 10% stock drop. So Duolingo is a $13 billion company. It's done incredibly well, 130 million active users. Only 10% of the users pay. But nonetheless, it's generating real revenues. And you can see this drop that occurred last on August 29th when, when the
this Google Live AI Translate capability was announced.
So this is another example where these large frontier models sort of in their wake,
whether or not they know it, are going to be disrupting existing companies who are going
to have to constantly be pivoting.
Yeah, and that looks duolingo is absolutely doomed unless it becomes an AI company.
And if it becomes an AI company, it can go through the roof.
But, you know, a lot of these companies don't have the AI talent to get started.
So you've got to turn the battleship somehow.
But if you do succeed in turning the battleship, your valuation can go through the roof.
You've seen that a single incredibly talented AI researcher can be worth a billion dollars.
So you know the value is there.
I mean, in general, in the short term, I want to generalize from just this one instance.
So in some sense, I think the sort of the cliche here is every software as a service company is under existential threat from generative AI models that will simply
cannibalize them from below, whether, you know, you're doing software for some enterprise purpose
or whether you're just like software subscriptions to help people learn new language. That frontier
model is just that chatbot is going to devour you because you've become just one special
case among countless numerous cases that a generalist model can handle. I think that's critically
important, right? Every CEO out there, every board of directors needs to understand that if they're not
building on an AI base that's accelerating alongside with everybody else, if they're depending on
their old business model, software as a service, they will be marginalized. But here's, here's the
twist. And remember what we said before, too. If you're in a regulated industry, you have a little
bit of time. You can actually get ahead of it. You've got to get the AI talent now, but you can get
ahead of it. If you're not in a regulated industry like, you know, Chegg or Duolingo and you're just
user installed base, then you're really vulnerable. I mean, you have an advantage of a user
install base and a brand, use that to your advantage to actually leapfrog forward.
Like yesterday.
I don't remain idle.
Yeah.
Just to dwell for a minute on what that leapfrogging looks like, I think I agree in the short
to medium term, differentiated user experiences are a bit of a moat, if you will.
But in the medium to long term, what I'd like to see from every single SaaS that feels existential
risk from being devoured by a generalist model is step up your ambition by.
100x, a thousand X. If you're a dual lingo and you happen to feel existentially threatened by
generalist models, maybe consider becoming a brain computer interface company. Wouldn't it be
wonderful if we could sideload new languages in the style of the movie The Matrix into the
human brain? And rather than spending days or weeks or years learning a new language, why can't
you enable your clients or users to learn it in a mix? Pick a moonshot. I mean, that's the whole
purpose of this podcast, get people and to go 10x, 100x bigger, pick your moonshot.
Or hire Alex as a consultant for two weeks and you'll have a moonshot at the end of it.
No, there's no time for that. Okay. All right. So let's take a look here. We've got
OpenEI, real-time API, bringing smarter voice AI. So let's look at this quick video here.
I love this one. Are there any homes in my budget need a water with a view of the skyline and
Mount Rainier?
Sure. Let me look. With your viability of 824K, Wallingford would be a great fit. I think you'll love 404 North 33rd Street. It has those skyline and rainier views you're after. With this week's market, I book a tour with an agent soon. Want me to set that up?
So this, you know, this capability, this is an example of using this on Zillow to find your home, describing exactly what you want and having it actually scrape and generate.
a efficient answer, but just the ability to do all of this and actually get you to the point.
I mean, what you want next is find the house, buy it for me, arrange the mortgage, and
arrange the moving trucks, and let me know when to show up in my new place.
Yeah, no, I think AI as a management tool, a general purpose management tool, hugely underrated
because, you know, everybody loves the graphical stuff, you know, the image creation and
the self-driving car, the stuff you can feel.
But just as a general way to manage large-scale projects with hundreds of people and moving
parts and logistics, it's unbelievably good at doing that.
So I think we can expect far more efficient construction, management, manufacturing,
supply chains than we've ever seen before.
Because, you know, the sensor data with all the cameras everywhere, has been available for a few years now.
But it's all kind of dumped into big databases.
You throw it into snowflake or something like that.
And then very hard to make sense of it.
The missing ingredient was this AI overlay that can just take the unstructured freeform data
and turn it into conclusions, actions, schedules, buying things, scheduling things, managing things.
You know, we had our condo in Vermont built many years ago, 20 years ago.
They put the Tyvec on upside down, so it's overlapping the wrong way.
So it grabs rainwater and funnels it into the wood.
So, you know, years later, everything's rotting.
the whole thing's falling apart. Like, why would you put the Tyvec on upside down? Now, very, very easy
for the AI to say, hey, dude, stop. It's just as easy to put it on right. You're putting it on
overlapping the wrong way. Just a trivially easy AI problem all of a sudden. So thousands of
things like that can suddenly be converted. Yeah. So I mean, I've played, oh, sorry, Peter. I was
going to say the point here, though, is the real-time API. Alex, let's chat about that. Yeah.
So I've played with this. So the underlying model is,
is called GPT real-time.
And if you've played with AVM, advanced voice mode of OpenAI,
that's the mode where you can chat in real-time with very low-latency responses with
chat-G-PT, it's a lot like that, but in API form so that it can serve as a back-end
for third-party applications.
And I really do think this is transformative, in part because imagine taking sort of low-latency
voice to voice, but generally capable intelligence and now embedding it everywhere. I think it
probably ends up being transformative for customer service type applications, probably many
other sectors as well. But even bigger picture, I think this is a preview, albeit a tiny preview
of a future where every single audio segment, every single pixel on screen is generated in
real time, streamed interactively on demand. And just our user, our user, our user,
user experiences or user interfaces are just completely just in time generated.
It's going to be a very, very interesting future.
And there's a single interface.
There's a single interface to the world, right?
Yes.
Your Jarvis will go and interface with everything out there, whether you know it exists or not,
and give you the answer you finally want.
We don't have a good catchphrase for this.
Our voice customer service company, Volkara, doubled in ARR during the past week.
and is planning to 10x between here and the end of the year,
just using this exact capability for complex customer service and sales conversations.
But so far, the consumers dramatically prefer it to a human call center agent.
Is Vokera in the Link Studio?
Yeah, yeah.
It's an MIT team.
To my knowledge, we're missing a term for this.
I've definitely come around to the view that it's important to coin new terms whenever there's sort of this
important new concept, I think we're missing a term for this. It's not conversational user
interface because it isn't always conversational. The best term, if I had to coin a term for
what I think we're seeing the beginnings of, would be something like streaming interactive
models. It's not necessarily just voice. Could be like Genie 3, where if there's a visual
component, could ultimately be like a brain computer interface type component. So try it on for size,
streaming interactive models or sims. And because everything becomes a
the TLA streaming interactive
models or
Sims, right? Okay, Alex
you pointed here. I think this silo example is really
important for people to look at, you know, rewind the
pod and watch it again.
Because customer service is typically a phone
call today. It's very hard to explain complicated
things on a phone call. So this
is very quickly going to move to multimodal
where it's talking to you while creating images
in real time. And people
haven't experienced that before because no
human call center operator can create an image
or pull up, you know, thousands of pictures.
in real time, but the AI can do it very easily.
All right, let's move on.
Let's move on if we can.
A lot to cover still.
We're still in AI.
We're going to be covering a lot more in energy, health, and Starship.
NVIDIA beats revenues predictions, defying fears of an AI bubble.
I think that's great news, you know, up 56% year-on-year from 2024.
Companies at $4 trillion.
Stock is up 700% since chat GPT.
these 2022 release. How awesome is that? Yet we still have a bunch of U.S. China turbulence.
Invita gave 15% of China sales to the U.S. to keep exporting. You know, just, you know,
reporting this news, Nvidia continues to be, you know, leading the pack. There's another piece of
news I want to hit on regarding this, Alex, I'd like you to chat about, which is out today.
And it's investors bet on Cambricon as China's next AI chip champion.
Would you chat about this?
Yeah, maybe looking at these two stories together through the lens of where value is accumulating in the stack.
So I think there are sort of two competing worldviews.
One is call it the pyramid model where the broadest part of the pyramid is at the base.
In this case, under this worldview, most of the profits.
in the AI revolution that we're living through will accumulate at the lower infrastructure
levels like the chip designers or the fabs or data centers, the lower levels.
There's also competing worldview that we ultimately move to or maybe are living in but just
don't realize it yet an inverted pyramid model where most of the profits and most of the value
accrue at the upper layers, the application layers, all the startups that are being built on
on top of these frontier models and the frontier models themselves just become profitless
or profit-sucking commodities.
I think if you sort of look at these two stories through a common lens, at the moment,
these would seem to bias me, at least in the direction of thinking that for the moment,
most of the profit is accumulating at the bottom of the stack, at the chip design level,
at the data center level, regardless of geography.
But let's talk a little bit about this new company, about CamberCon, if you would.
Yeah, no, it's difficult to know what precisely is going on inside any given company,
regardless of whether it's U.S.-based or China-based.
I do think, again, just generalizing over Huawei, CamberCon,
and then obviously a whole cohort of American AI chip designers.
I think we're seeing the beginnings of a non-monoculture where there are diverse chip
architectures, diverse chip architectures for AI acceleration from the US, and seemingly the
beginnings of a diverse set of non-invidia-based AI accelerator or accelerated compute
architectures coming out of China.
And where all of this goes, I think Gitter, your bet is as good, if not better than mine.
But I think that the headline here is that there may be the beginnings of a post-invidia, post-Qaeda monoculture coming out of China.
I think that's the point I want to make.
Whenever you restrict China on ability to sell them products, they will develop products there, right?
We have a lead.
That lead is getting shorter and shorter on chips and AI.
We saw this as well in the satellite world, right?
When the U.S. Defense State Department started limiting the ability to export satellites from the U.S.
us to different parts of the world. The industry finally materialized and competed back against
the United States. And so, you know, this is this strategy of scarcity doesn't work in a culture of
a global culture of innovation. Well, I'll also tell you, you know, David Sacks talking to you
right now, but if you look at that seven nanometer capability and we're operating at two
nanometers, you're like, oh, we're miles ahead of China. But the algorithmic improvements can be
massive like 10,000 X kind of improvements that are way more important than the 7 versus 2 nanometer
gap. And that, we're not used to that in government because we're used to like the nuclear
arms race or the space race where you're not going to get a 10x advantage by magic. You know,
there's no, there's no rocket fuel that you can throw in there that's one-tenth the weight of the
competing. It just doesn't exist. It's a great example. Software it does exist. In fact, it's
common. It's everywhere. And so it's very easy to get complacent about where you stand.
In fact, when you restrict, you cause innovation in different areas here. And you're right
algorithmic. We're going to see 100x, 200x, 100x, 1,000x improvements there over the next few years.
And just to remember, you know, China has won the, you know, the Math Olympic, Olympiad now,
year after year after year. They have incredible talent. And 50% of men, you know, the math. And 50% of
as AI staff is Chinese, let's not fool ourselves. The intelligence is there to innovate as well
as here. Though it's different here, of course, we mentioned earlier, is sort of the risk capital,
the entrepreneurial drive that has people working around the clock. I would just make this
note again as we talk about Nvidia. This is not going to be solely in a Nvidia world. We're
going to see China step up and compete.
love this article. Again, we've talked about the idea that that AI is no longer US-centric. We're
seeing the world step up and get involved. So this is billionaire Embani taps Google and meta to
build India's AI backbone. Mukesh Mbani launches Reliance Intelligence Ventures to build India's
AI infrastructure. And, you know, Mukesh, I've been to his home and over times in India. I was
at his epic wedding, what was a year and a half ago or so.
And the guy is an incredible entrepreneur.
I mean, just for people to understand this.
So he enters India's telecom market in 2016.
He's the 10th mobile provider, right?
You've got Vodafone, Airtel, all the players there.
But he comes in with a completely different business model.
And that's his brilliant.
So Reliance Geo launched a radically different model,
free voice calls for life, ultra cheap data, and months of free service trial.
The other thing he did was it used to take you like two days to get a mobile phone.
He basically said, show up in the store, sign a few papers, and it's instantly up and operating.
And then he uses his capital to leapfrog over 2G and 3G and build out a 4G nationwide network.
And so he literally destroyed the competition.
And they are the major cell phone provider, mobile phone telephony provider.
And, you know, Salim's in India right now when I was there.
It's, you know, five bars, service 5G across the nation everywhere.
So it's pretty extraordinary.
And I expect he's going to do the same thing here in AI.
Well, something big is going to happen in India because you saw Kevin, Kevin Weill saying they're making a huge push at OpenAI into India.
I'm like, oh, that's kind of odd. Why are you doing that? Well, if you look at the demographics of the country, it has by far the most untapped talent in the world. I mean, by far. China's in a terrible spot because of the aging demographic problem. The one child per family thing caught up to them in a big way. And now they've got a massive aging demographic problem. U.S. is in great shape because immigration is strong. Always has been, hopefully always will be. But India has the best latent, you know, right in the sweet spot, you know, 20 to 4.
year old talent pool in the world. And so, you know, the reason that per capita GDP has been so
bad in India for so long is that it's incredibly corrupt. All the, all the structures are
terrible. But I think AI might have a way to cut through that and just go direct to the people.
And also poor transportation between, you know, the road being flooded out. We're going to
see aerial deliver in India as well. All right, let's keep moving on. Time. Top 100 AI for
So this was their issue. I sent Mark Benioff. Congratulations. I said, Mark, you're not listed
here, but you need to be on this list as well. But check this out. If these are in order,
Matthew Prince is number one, Elon's number two, Sam Altman's number three. And it's fascinating
that Matthew Prince is number one. Any idea why? I mean, I would be remiss if I didn't note that
Sometime in the media cycle over the past week is a lot of interest in the future of Cloudflare, which Matt leads and agentic AI.
There's a lot of interest in almost what does a web where AI agents that are independently surfing the web on the same level with the same rights as human web surfers look like?
or should there be sort of a separate entrance to the web and to the economy for AI agents?
So if I had to speculate, I would say the intersection of Cloudflare and special handling of
AI agents could be one possible reason.
I did a little digging.
Let me tell you what I found out.
So Matthew Prince stands atop this list for one reason.
He's been focused on safeguarding the value of Internet content.
So he's all about making sure that there's proper attribution and that you basically are not stealing from the publishers.
And of course, Time magazine is a publisher.
And so I think they're flexing their muscle here to say attribution is critically important.
I think it's going to be, I mean, maybe even worthy of much more dedicated time, actually doing a deep dive on the issue of should AI surfing the web on
its own, be treated the same as a human web surfer, or should they be treated differently?
I think there are so many nuances there.
The other thing we see on this list is a huge amount of global diversity, and it picks up
leaders in different countries.
This is no longer just a Silicon Valley play.
This is a global play where countries are beginning to invest heavily and really double
down on this.
Next topic here, I love this one.
So Airbnb's co-founder, Joe Gebbie.
who's been on my stage at abundance, he's amazing,
is named the U.S. chief design officer.
So appointed by Trump,
his goal is redesign government sites and services
to be simple, modern, and friendly.
I love his quote,
I want to make government services
as satisfying to use as the Apple store.
That would be awesome.
I think it's perhaps not obvious,
but there is actually an open source library
hosted on GitHub. I think it offers Joe enormous amounts of leverage for the task that he's taking on.
It's called the U.S. Web Design System, USWDS, and it is in principle common set of user interface components underlying most, not all perhaps, but most U.S. government websites.
And that's sort of a seminal place. I think Joe has the opportunity, such high leverage, to start if the goal is to radically improve.
the user experience of interacting at least digitally.
I think the key point of the story here is the Trump administration tapping entrepreneurs
to come in and help move the government forward.
You know, despite, you know, if you're a Trump lover or hater, it doesn't matter.
This is about bringing in the smartest people because historically, going to work for the government
was not what, where an intelligent entrepreneur would go.
And there's been an incredible shift in that regard.
Dave?
Yeah, no, you phrased it exactly right.
I think when the U.S. government said we're going to have a chief technology officer back under Obama originally.
The first two CTOs, the United States, had law degrees, and there were just buddies of the president.
And then, you know, then we created that health care.gov site.
It was a billion dollars to build a website, and then it never launched.
It failed.
So, like, okay, why don't we get some real technologists into D.C.?
I can't believe it's actually happening, though.
It's amazing.
Well, these people are post-capital, you know, post-abundance themselves, right?
They've made their money.
They could be working on their next moonshot, or they could be, you know, building a moonshot
that will hopefully write the battleship or, I don't want to use that term, right, you know,
the ocean liner of the United States.
I think during COVID, a lot of people who normally didn't care about government suddenly
started carrying a lot.
They realized how much government can change your day-to-day life, you know, forcing you to stay inside.
That's pretty extreme in terms of government intervention in day-to-day life.
So, you know, whether it was right or wrong, they felt like, wow, this really matters.
I need to get involved.
Yeah.
Well, good luck to Joe.
I'm sure.
I mean, this will have a huge impact.
I mean, making something actually usable.
This is like when we had ARPANET, you know, usable by a few individuals at MIT and Harvard and Stanford and, you know, defense.
industry and then mark andresen comes and and builds a layer on top of that with mosaic so if joe can do
that make it easy to use and functional that would be amazing all right here's our debate and
discussion for today i'm going to read this out and i want to hear your thoughts here so here it is
will people vote ai to power so this is a tweet from uh v razor x because they've tired of corruption and
broken promises. AI will provide laws without loopholes and policies based on measurable outcomes.
Election by election, trust will shift. Eventually, the ballot will include a new option,
governance by AI. Citizens will choose it, not out of fear, but hope for fairness. Power won't
be inherited or bought. It will be optimized and accountable. Democracy's paradox, people will
freely vote to be governed by something beyond human flaws. So here's the question. Do you believe this?
Do you believe that we will be voting AI into power? Dave, what's your position here?
Well, I think there's a long history of laws having people's names on them, like, you know, the Obamacare or Glass Deagle Act or Graham Dodd or, you know, I think that the fact that AI is coming up with the idea and writing the law,
won't change the fact that someone will put their name on it and say this is this is my act
but it'll still be AI creating the law under the covers I think it's inevitable it's going to happen
it's going to happen very very quickly because the number of things that need some kind of a framework
is explosively growing exponentially growing and so the traditional process of pass it through congress
pass it through your local legislature it's way too slow to keep up with the rate of change so
this is definitely going to happen but not quite the way you're not going to vote in AI to be your
politician it'll still look and sound like a person so I'm going to take the well let me be clear
I wish this would happen I'd love to see this happen I don't think there's any way in the world
short of a revolution or starting a new country off world that we're going to see this happen
and there's lots of reasons I mean for me the most important thing is the entrenched
bureaucracies right politicians bureaucracies and
trench interest will fiercely resist bringing this on. Courts will strike this down and talk about
getting rid of corruption. Corruption doesn't vanish. It just shifts. Right. So corruption will
shift from the politicians to the engineers or corporations or states that are manipulating the AI.
So as much as I'd love to see this happen, I don't think it will. Alex, how about you?
I'll take a third position in this debate. Of course you will.
is nonsensical. This is a very old trope in fiction. So just two examples. If you remember the
original version of the day the Earth stood still based on the sci-fi novella, farewell to the master,
the entire premise was that alien civilizations had decided that they themselves, the biologicals,
couldn't be trusted to maintain peace. So they ceded all authority to race of robots that
police them. One can look back even further. Remember famously, Henry the 6th, let's kill all the
lawyers. This is a very old trope in fiction. I think it's completely nonsensical. What I expect to
happen is humans will merge with the AIs. And so the question then degenerates to, will people vote
people to power? And the answer is yes, but it's sort of vacuous in my mind to ask whether
people will be separately from that voting AI of power.
We will couple and we will, yeah, we'll merge, we'll speciate.
All right.
So next article on our economy, Jensen announces that he expects $600 billion a year on AI
loan.
We're seeing a massive continuation of investment.
This is a good thing.
We're also seeing the AI spend frenzy is propping up the U.S. real economy.
And we've seen the impact surging our GDP 1%.
I think this is interesting that AI infrastructure will reach 375 billion by the end of this year
and is expected to be at a half a trillion in 2026.
So the money is flowing out of Silicon Valley, out of sovereigns, out of family offices,
into the U.S. economy through the piping of AI.
I want to pause on this conversation here.
this is NASDAQ bubble soaring past dot com records so i'll read this is a chart here looking at the
nasdaq market over the last 25 years so nasdaq's market value has surged to unprecedented levels
now equal to 176 percent of the entire u.s money supply 129 percent of the GDP both ratios are
far above the dot com bubble peak signaling stock prices are racing far ahead of the real economy
economy. Let's talk about this for a second. I think it's important. Is this different than the
dot-com bubble? Alex, any thoughts? I want to pose a thought experiment. So if we were on the verge
of artificial super intelligence, what would you, Peter, Dave, expect the ratio of the NASDAQ market
cap to the M2 to look like? Approaching infinity. Ripping upward. Yeah, exactly. So this has all the
hallmarks of the signature that one might expect, at least in the short term, one might
reasonably expect there to be a concentration of rents around key publicly traded on the
NASDAQ providers of AI infrastructure.
And then maybe at some point, again, you know, this is not investment advice.
This is an idle thought experiment.
One might expect perhaps at some point all of these rents become more evenly and profits
become diffused throughout the economy and then maybe we see a plateau at that point. But this is
exactly the signature that I would expect to see this ratio to M2 ripping upwards in the
context of the eve of superintelligence. Yeah, I completely agree, Alex. It is exactly what you
would expect to see. I also don't think, you know, the dot-com bubble was really a bubble
in the sense that at the peak there, like Amazon was probably a bargain. And then it went
down 90 plus percent in the trough. And then we had 9-11 right after that, which turned out to be a
great, great buying opportunity in the market. But the Internet was real. It was always real.
And the valuations, you know, they got very high, but some great companies were in there. And
then, you know, Google got started right at the bottom and then went public in 04 on this chart.
And so, you know, I think there's a possibility of the market coming down through, you know,
through panic, but it's all, it's not rational because what's going on.
should drive this to the moon. We also have companies that are real, that are profitable, that have
real products and real services that are very different from the dot com world, from, you know, petfood.com
days and errors. So, well, a lot of these charts are meant to, meant to scare you, too, because
here you're looking at the NASDAQ. Well, the NASDAQ is a bigger fraction of the market now,
because tech has become so big. And the PDE is a little high of the market as a whole right now,
but it's not nearly as, you know, outlandish as this chart makes it look.
I like Alex's explanation the most.
This is a signal that digital superintelligence is arriving.
Okay, let's move on to a conversation around health, one of my favorite subjects.
So we just saw an announcement out of the UK of an AI stethoscope detecting major heart disease in 15 seconds.
And this is a perfect use of technology, right?
You put the AI layer right there at the stethoscope because, you know,
In medical school, you are listening carefully to all of these heart sounds and trying to hear a murmur and trying to hear, you know, love-dub and variations thereof.
AI can pick it up far, far better than this can.
You know, we had a $10 million Qualcomm tricorder XPRIZ prize.
Of course, everything comes back to Star Trek, Alex, doesn't it, you know, reinventing or making the Star Trek universe real?
Such a strange universe, Peter. Again, biotech without longevity, very strange universe.
Yeah, well, we'll get to that in a minute. But we had this $10 million competition that Paul Jacobs, who's CEO of Qualcomm, funded at the time.
And to win this competition, you basically had to diagnose 13 different conditions from, you know, anemia, diabetes, pneumonia, sleep apnea.
the device had to weigh under five pounds, which is huge.
Eventually, these things will become embedded.
And you have to record five vital signs.
So this is a step in the right direction.
But, you know, this is great.
It's still the beginning, but it portends what's coming next.
And one of the things I love, one of the companies I venture back through Bold is called Echo, EXO.
And they build an ultrasound platform.
But what was great about this ultrasound machine, think about the kind of device.
It's a handheld ultrasound that you can look at your baby or look at your carotid artery and so forth.
But the key was it had an AI layer that would direct you on where to move the probe.
So it would say, can you move it upwards?
Can you rotate it inwards?
Can you hold it there longer?
And so if you had this ultrasound probe, you became the physician.
the AI guided you to do what you needed to do,
and then it analyzed the imagery and gave you a diagnostic.
I think that's pretty amazing stuff.
Totally.
And I would also maybe invoke the statistical folklore that everything is correlated.
So I think this is just scratching the tip of what's possible in principle,
going back to the Star Trek tricorder.
The key scenario I would like to see and would hope to see unlocked is mostly using the power of
of AI using relatively de minimis hardware, can we simply infer the physiological state of an
entire person at a distance from a few key at a distance biomarkers with AI?
Well, I mean, this is, you know, AI is going to drive health care out of the doctor's office,
out of the hospital, into the home, right, where you're being sensed all the time and your
AI agents are just watching and listening. And it's going to transform health. And all of this
will be cheap and free. It's going to be free because your company or your insurance company is
going to pay for you to have those sensors in your home, on your body, in your toilet, because it just
saves all the cost, right? It's like health care insurance is about keeping you healthy, not paying
you after you've been sick. So anyway, all right, here's another fun article. I first saw this from
David Sinclair, who posted it. Cilocybin shows striking anti-aging effects in old mice. And I
added this because, you know, we have a community of folks out there who are interested in the
psychoactive molecules. And so check this out. This is a 2025 study that extends cell lifespan
by up to 57 percent. And so in this study, they took aging mice, and you can see on this chart
here that about, you know, 20 weeks in, and this is sort of like late middle age, they started
dosing them with psilocybin and at the end of the experiment which is 28 weeks long and mice
really just live two years typically two two and a half years the survival rate of those on
psilocybin was 80% versus 50% for those who are not on psilocybin so um you know i'm trying to find
out what the dose equivalent in uh for humans are but just this kind of continuous discovery of
different molecules impact longevity.
So those you just, yeah, go ahead, and maybe just to comment Peter on this way.
I mean, sorry, I read the paper, very interesting paper.
I think it's potentially promising the authors do, I think, a great job of extracting downstream
impacts.
So not just, I think they were dosing with psilacin, which is a metabolite that normally in humans,
other large mammals merges from metabolizing psilocybin.
But they look at the downstream impacts.
So there's a certain one expression.
There are changes to the way telomeres in chromosomes are managed and regulated.
That's a template, I think, where ideally one wants all of the anti-aging effects without
all of the central nervous system psychedelic effects.
And I think ideally, and so I think that in an ideal world, we find that we were able to
extract that template, you know, CNS effects not withstand.
We subtract those out, and we're able to distill out a template for a non-CNS version of this.
I think that will be enormously impactful.
Yeah.
I wanted to share something I did on my summer vacation with our viewers and readers.
It was something, you know, I'm always experimenting, always hopefully doing intelligent experimentation.
But when I see technology come along that I believe has a pro-laugivity, high-reward, lower-risk approach.
I'm open to trying it and researching it and then sharing the results.
So a couple of weeks ago, I posted this on X.
I went and did something called stem cell reeducation.
This was the work under Dr. Zal.
I just want to share it because for a certain group of people, this will be transformational.
So stem cell reeducation for about six hours or so, I was my blood supply, which is typically
four liters, I mean sort of, I'm sorry, five liters was put through a machine two and a half
time. So it was a total of 12 liters of blood were cycled. And my immune cells, right, my T cells,
macrophage, lymphocytes, and so forth, were extracted out of that. And I filled up a bag
of about 300 cc's, a third of a liter of my white cells. Those cells were then co-incubated
overnight with cord blood stem cells. These are stem cells from a newborn. And those effectively
my immune cells went to school. They were put to a factory reset. And that would happen for
about a 24-hour period. And the next day, I had about 1.27 billion reeducated immune cells
flowed back into my body. And my goal is to bring my immune levels, my immune system levels back
to a much more youthful state, reduce inflammation, rebalance my immune system, actually pump up my
stem cell functionality and increase my immune function. That's my goal for myself. And we're going to
be flowing this technology in through fountain life as well. Our goal is to set this up at our Florida
Florida centers. But I want to share, so it was amazing kudos to Dr. Zau, who has pioneered this work
at Throne Bio. But I want to show two remarkable videos. If someone in your life is dealing with
type 1 diabetes, with alopecia, with Parkinson's, with ALS, this technology is life-saving.
And what we're doing here, a lot of these diseases turn out to be your immune system attacking.
your own body, right? Alopecia, the loss of hair, it's attacking the hair follicles throughout
your body and you lose your hair supply. This process basically cures that. You regrow all of your
hair. Let's take a look at two videos. I'm going to show you first a 17-year-old teenager
who has type 1 diabetes, right? This is where immune system is attacking your eyelid cells and
your pancreas and you're no longer producing insulin.
And this young man has developed a neuropathy.
And you can see him here prior to treatment.
He cannot get out of his bed to get into a wheelchair.
That's his normal state of function.
Now, let's take a look at two months later after the treatment.
I mean, it's a resurrection.
He has been able to regain his function.
His type 1 diabetes has been eliminated.
It's extraordinary.
equally extraordinary this is a fountain life patient who has als a ls a ls is a death sentence for most
individuals and so i want to show you the pre and post so this is the pre video his inability to raise
his hands above above his uh above his shoulder right this is massively difficult now let's look at a
couple of days later and his ability to basically regain his function
for someone with ALS, I wish we had this for Stephen Hawking while he was still alive.
So I don't know if you want to comment on this, but I just wanted to share because I think
it's, you know, this is the kind of regenerative medicine that our health span revolution
is undergoing right now.
Well, the only comment I'll make is that when you talk about allergies and autoimmune disorders,
there are so many interactions going on.
It's immensely complex.
And it's a perfect fit for, you know, AI that is just specific to your body and your results.
And so it's so promising that you can actually do something with this immense amount of data we can gather now.
I think, Peter, you're courageous.
And now we know what you did last summer.
I'll report on the results.
A huge list of markers were collected prior to my treatment.
and then I'll report out at one month, three, six, and 12 months.
And I'm excited for it.
And we'll see where this goes.
All right, let's dive into robots, energy, and transport.
I love this.
We've seen Nvidia with, I love their name of this.
It's the Jetson, AGX, Thor generation of robot brains, right?
Enabling real-time, intelligent interaction at the edge.
The Jetsons are here.
So this delivers 10x more than their previous chipset Oren.
It runs generative and reasoning AI models at the edge.
I love this.
I double-checked these numbers.
Two million developers are using the Jets and Thor development kit right now.
Alex.
And two petaflops of floating point four FP4 compute.
So for reference, that's approximately a tenth of a Blackwell or maybe
about 30 iPhone 16 pros. So when we talk about what's going on with all the CAPX that's
flowing into AI data centers, I don't think that's going to be bottled up in data centers
for very long. We're going to see these AI chips, the AI compute literally start to walk out
of the data centers onto the streets of the rest of the economy, the so-called real economy.
And I think Thor is such an interesting case study in how these
this AI compute is going to be embodied in humanoid robots in an ergonomic, both
energetically and physically ergonomic form factor and literally walk out onto the streets of
the real economy.
Yeah, and I really think this is important for all the students struggling with their
largely irrelevant curriculum.
This is what you should be doing.
Your phone or your laptop will do about 30 taraflops now.
So it's, you know, it's about a hundredth of what you can get from a probably
$4,000, $5,000 invidia chip.
So get yourself an accelerator on the side or just run.
If you go to Andre Carpeth, these libraries on GitHub, you can get a really fast start.
And a lot of things that were daunting six months ago, you can just voice code, vibe code them to existence on your laptop in under an hour.
And so you really can get your hands dirty with these tool kits.
And then all of a sudden, you're one of these people that's getting the $100 million signing offer.
Like, how did I get from here to there?
Well, I just jumped in and got my hands dirty.
I played.
It's fun.
It really is fun.
We got an image here of Jensen with Brett Adcock, CEO of Figer.
We had Brett on stage at the Abundance Summit last year.
We're going to have at least four, maybe five of the robot CEOs on stage with us at the
Abundance Summit this coming March.
And by the way, you're going to have the moonshot mates, all four of us.
We'll have Salim, and Dave, and Alex and myself on stage at the Abundance Summit as well.
We'll be doing a moonshot sort of recap.
But WTF just happened in tech in the last three days of the Abundance Summit in March.
If you want more information, you can go to Abundance360.com to learn more about the summit.
It is, for me, you know, an epic part of my year and my life getting ready for that.
China, China's humanoid robot sales expected to exceed 10,000 units in 2025, year-on-year growth of 125%.
I love this image of robots marching down the street.
What could possibly go wrong?
But this is just the beginning, right?
We're going to see, we heard when we interviewed the CEO of one-X technologies,
Berndt Borneck, you know, he expects to see flowing out of his factories hundreds of thousands.
And, of course, we'll see that from figure.
We'll see that from Tesla.
You know, the prediction of 10 billion humanoid robots by 2040, it's come.
All right, here's another article.
I think this is pretty much Elon classic.
Tesla is shifting optimist training strategy to vision only.
So we saw this with self-driving.
He said, no LiDAR.
You know, I introduced the CEO of Luminar to Elon at a party.
And Luminar makes a LiDAR.
And Elon just went, nope, no LiDar.
We're vision only.
If a driver, if a human driver can drive with like one eye, we should be able to have
AI do the same. And so the switch here is no longer a motion capture suits. It's just going to be
training robots based upon video recordings of workers doing the work. Alex, do you buy this?
Yeah. I mean, obviously, this does rhyme with the LiDAR versus non-LIDAR episode with autonomous
vehicles. But I think that the real story here is to the extent that you believe that we're
about to all be wearing smart glasses, that that's the next major form factor.
after smartphones, I can only imagine what fleet learning is going to look like when you have
billions of people basically doing visual-based motion capture for humanoid robots.
Going back to the beginning of this pod, where we're talking about the bitter lesson,
the bitterest lesson of all, arguably, for humanoid robotics is going to be when we have
billions of people wearing smart glasses doing fleet learning to power every single trade,
every single manual trade just off of passively watching through the smart glasses.
And recording all of human history in detail at the micro level, right?
That's right.
That did come up when we were at OneX Robotics, you know, Burr-Barnick in his first 10,000-odd units.
You have to use the fleet learning.
There's no option to turn it off.
So all the data, telemetry and everything from your household is getting transmitted to the central learning engine.
So, you know, there's no human analog for that.
Like, every job is training the centralized version.
So if it knocks over a coffee cup in somebody's house, then the other 9,999 houses, the robot doesn't knock over the coffee cup.
Can you feel, here's my question to everybody listening and watching, can you feel the acceleration?
Can you feel the singularity coming?
Oh, my God.
I can for sure.
This is just in today.
Apple is mandating all of its manufacturers, all of it.
it's tier one suppliers, automate, automate, automate. Use robotics instead of humans
everywhere possible to increase reliability of the product and reduce costs. Alex, a quick comment
on this one? Yeah, I think if you think the world finds its way towards a completely redomesticated
supply chains, I think robotics is probably the missing X factor for how just as we were
discussing earlier, tiling the world's surface, tiling the Earth's surface with inference compute,
one can imagine a not too distant future where robotics enables essentially every sovereign
country to in some sense re-domesticate its entire supply chain if it has inference time robotic
capabilities to onshore every last bit of manufacturing.
Amazing. We'll see this at Amazon. We'll see this at FedEx. We'll see this at all the companies
that survive. The companies that don't do this aren't going to survive. I think it's going to be
that pretty cut and dry. I'll want to hit one more robot story here, which is the competition
between Waymo and Uber. It isn't really competition right now because, you know, we see Uber
delivering 30 million trips per day while Waymo is at 700,000 trips per month, right? But here's
here's the point of this one waymo robot taxi outperforms 99% of uber drivers on a daily basis
in terms of daily trips right these these waymos are efficient and they're running 24-7 except for their
charge time of course and so imagine as these roll out more and more they will displace uber uber is
trying their own autonomous play uh they're doubling down in san francisco they'll be increasing the fleet by
50% there. They're trying to get into New York. They'll have a lot of resistance there, but we'll
see these technologies. And of course, cyber taxi and cyber cab are coming. Alex, Dave,
remember, Peter, at least in America and some other countries, the post-World War II consumer
automobile arguably created suburbia, created the suburb. What happens to urban planning
when the cost of mobility is driven to zero? Do we see suburbs expand? What happens to roads?
happens to parking lots. What are we going to do with all the parking lots? It turns the
curtains. I've been great. I mean, but again, the elephant in the room on top of all of the
hand-wringing that I want to have. Yeah, exactly. The hand-wringing over urban planning is
there are so many other changes that are going to happen probably in a much faster time scale
than we can replan cities and suburbs that maybe it's all meaningless anyway. My plan for the
parking lots are you turn them into vertical farms, right? Each layer of the parking lot.
is growing a different which is great if we need to be densely clustered together but if we don't need to
be densely clustered together maybe it's something else entirely and by the way you know i talk about
the demonization of everything right so driving will be four times cheaper than owning a car so the poorest
people will be chauffured around first and foremost and then how do you change the cost of living well if
you can live an hour from downtown l.a where the real estate is cheap and you fly you know a
a midnight, an archer midnight, EV tall, back and forth to work. Or you don't go to work. You're
using Starlink to telecommute. Or we move to other planets or we upload to the cloud. There are so many
different options. I'll take all of the above, please. All right. So I'm going to close on this
particular piece, which is the U.S. electricity spike begins. So this is a chart.
of the U.S. Consumer Price Index for Electricity, and we're beginning to see a spike that started
in 2021 and is continuing. Thoughts on this, Alex?
I mean, superficially, price signals convey demand. That's why we have a price-based system.
But I think the elephant in the room here is what happens if and when we get to recursive self-improvement?
We've already seen at least one demand shock, if you will. That was the deep sea.
Dek-Sputnik moment, if you will. What happens if and when there is some new algorithmic
breakthrough that suddenly radically reduces the compute intensivity of frontier models?
Could we actually, could the law of straight lines be violated and this burning upward, tearing
upward of electricity costs reverse? Yeah, remember. The electricity is so easy to predict because
we know recursive self-improvement is here right now. I know it anyway. I think the world will
know it very soon. I tweeted this last week, right? The human brain operates on 20 watts of energy.
And, you know, I was playing in GPT5 and asking what the equivalent compute cost in terms of
energy for, you know, one of the frontier models. And it's somewhere between 100,000, a million
times more energy than the human brain. So this is a massive potential for improvement here. We'll get
new chip designs, new strategies and approaches to make
it more efficient. So we'll build out all of this, you know, energy data centers. And then
if we, you know, 10 to the 5th, 10 to the 6th, improvement in energy efficiency, that means we get
that level of improvement on our total AI capabilities. We can do better than that, Peter.
At the land hour limit, we can blow past it with reversible computing. Human brain is by no means
an optimal computer. There are lots of other better ways we could build computronium.
Amazing. Guys, listen, as always, I love.
love spending my time with you. I feel smarter afterwards. I hope everybody listening enjoyed this
episode. A lot more coming. We're going to see the release of Gemini 3. We'll be back on to discuss
that. We're going to be coming on with a lot more of WTF just happen in tech. Hopefully this is
your dose of optimism to counter all of the moaning pessimism coming off of the media channels
that people normally consume. I've stopped watching the news. For me, this
is the news, the news that really matters that transforms our planet, that is giving us increased
longevity. It can increase, you know, sustainable abundance is the word. Alex, some closing
thoughts from you. Then we'll go to Dave. Black hole supercomputers. Okay. Okay, that's a closing
thought. Which assumes we're not living in the black hole right now. We'll follow up on the
short-term implications of the Leopold list and a bunch of other things. I think we'll be back
online again very quickly within a week with Salim back. There's so much happening now. A bunch of
things we couldn't even get to today and then more will happen within the week. So yeah,
just a lot, a lot to keep up with. But this is a place to do it. Yeah. I was wearing my Occupy
Mars shirt in expectation that we'll discuss Starship 10 launch, which was a huge success. So
congratulations to Elon and the team at SpaceX for that launch. It was awesome. If you haven't
seen the video, please, it is a proof that we're living in the year 2025. Humanity is
building fusion, going to Mars, heading towards longevity, escape velocity. The only time more
exciting than today to be alive is tomorrow. On that note, gentlemen, have a beautiful week.
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